Elections to the central assembly, precursor to today’s parliament, were scheduled for December 1945. Forty-eight seats were for ‘NonMohammadan’ voters and candidates and thirty for ‘Mohammadan’. 1 In the elections to provincial assemblies (such as Bombay Presidency and the United Provinces) to be held a month later, seats were reserved for Muslims, non-Muslims as well as for Scheduled Castes. As these elections came near, every party knew that the results would determine which of their ‘ideas of India’ the departing British would leave behind. The Congress had by then conceded to some of the Muslim League’s demands. These included near parity between India’s 75 per cent Hindus and 25 per cent Muslims, and an exceedingly federal structure with all-powerful states and a crippled Centre. 2 This was as far as the Congress was willing to go; they refused to countenance a partitioned subcontinent. But for the British to agree to this, the Congress needed to demonstrate that it spoke for all sections of the country. And for this, it needed to win not just an overall majority, but a lion’s share of the general (i.e., non-Mohammedan) constituencies, the Scheduled Caste seats and among Muslims. In each of these segments, the Congress faced challenger parties, each with their own ideas of Independence. It was battling for Muslim seats with the League, which had a single-point agenda of Pakistan. It was competing with B.R. Ambedkar’s party for Scheduled Caste seats. And for the caste-Hindu seats, the Congress was pitted against the Hindu Mahasabha. The face of the Mahasabha campaign was V.D. Savarkar, now sixty-two years old. His writings and lengthy incarceration had made him, as we read

earlier, the ideologue of Hindu nationalism. Joining him was a younger Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the son of a knight and high court judge. At the age of thirty-three, Mookerjee had become the youngest vice-chancellor in the history of Calcutta University. The Congress should have been the natural home for such a Macaulayputra. But Mookerjee had left the Congress, joined the Hindu Mahasabha and, by 1945, was one its most prominent politicians along with Savarkar. The urbane Bengali and unbending Maharashtrian may have come from unalike social worlds, but their views on the Muslim question echoed the party line. Their Hindu Mahasabha was opposed to Pakistan of course, but also to any Congress concessions that ‘deprive[d] the Hindus as Hindus of their due representation to such an extent as to compel three Hindus to have but one vote, while they offered one Muslim three votes’. 3 Realizing the importance of these elections, the Mahasabha requested help from the RSS network of volunteers. The RSS refused.4 An insider says: ‘This was Golwalkar’s biggest mistake. He continued to dislike Savarkar . . . He wanted nothing to do with politics.’ Golwalkar ensured that the eighteenyear-old Advani and the twenty-one-year-old Vajpayee—who were yet to meet each other—were kept away from campaigning. It is not clear if either of these two even voted. What is known is that many in the RSS voted for the Congress as the party of Hindus. The Mahasabha was ignored. When the results were announced, the Congress had swept the ‘general’ seats, winning 923 of 1585 seats in the provincial legislatures and fifty-nine out of 102 of the central seats. This latter figure included victories in all forty-nine caste-Hindu constituencies. 5 The Hindu Mahasabha did not win a single seat for the central assembly or the provincial assemblies. 6 Even B.R. Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation was thoroughly defeated by the Congress. 7 Gandhi’s Congress could reasonably claim that they, not Savarkar and Ambedkar, were the sole spokesmen for Hindus high and low. Where this claim could not extend was to Muslims. Of the thirty seats reserved for them in the central assembly, the League had won every single one. 8 Of the roughly 500 Muslim seats in the provincial assemblies, the

League had gained 425.9 Since the franchise was limited to those with property, money, or education, over 86 per cent of adult Muslims did not have the right to vote. 10 But the Muslim League interpreted the results conveniently. All Muslims, it declared, were behind its demand for Pakistan. * * * Vajpayee had continued studying law in Kanpur through this tumult. But soon after these elections in 1946, Vajpayee was asked by the RSS to leave his education and set up a Hindi newspaper in the United Provinces. 11 It meant leaving his father for the new paternal authority in his life. That same year, Advani completed his third Officer’s Training Camp in Nagpur; he was now a full-grown functionary. 12 He returned to Karachi and was appointed city secretary of the RSS. 13 Meanwhile, a national government had formed in New Delhi. But squabbles between the Congress and the League paralysed any chance of governance. The British prime minister declared that they would leave India no later than June 1948.14 Realizing that time was not on his side, Jinnah called on ‘Direct Action’ by Muslims on 16 August 1946 to force partition. He proclaimed that we shall have ‘either a divided India or a destroyed India’. 15 He almost got both. Hindu–Muslim violence flowed across India, especially Calcutta, where more than 7000 died in just a few blood-splattered days. 16 The RSS analysis of the violence was predictable. Golwalkar told Hindu merchants: ‘The disunity of the Hindus in Punjab was the cause of the present calamity. The Sangh should unite the Hindus and the capitalists should help by funds.’17 As the violence peaked in June 1947, delegates of the five Muslim-majority provinces left the constituent assembly. The British, desperate to leave, saw how Jinnah had proved his theorem on the ground: Hindus and Muslims were nations unto themselves, incapable of living in peace. A new viceroy had been appointed in March of that year. Louis Mountbatten, the foppish nephew of the King of England, decided, in June

1947, to advance Independence by almost a year—from June 1948 to August 1947. Just two months remained.18 He also announced the final plan for Independence. The British would leave behind two sovereign states. The Muslim-majority provinces in the west would be part of Pakistan, while the religiously mixed states of Bengal and Punjab would be divided. The princely states would have the freedom to decide which country to join. 19 The plan pleased no one. Congress had fought against partition its whole life, while Jinnah was enraged at the ‘mutilated, moth-eaten’ 20 Pakistan he would inherit. But such was the hurry produced by the baffling British decision to flee in two months that the Muslim League formally acquiesced to the partition plan on 9 June 1947,21 and the Congress six days later. 22 Wobbled by a turn of events they could not influence, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS seethed on the sidelines. Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote in the RSS journal: ‘We have virtually given up a portion of our sacred territory without a fight . . . The Anglo-Muslim League conspiracy outmanoeuvred the Congress and the latter surrendered almost without a protest.’23 On 5 August, partition less than two weeks away, Golwalkar travelled to Karachi. 24 Advani received him at the railway station, and was part of the assembly of 100,000 jittery Hindus listening to the RSS chief speak. Advani was in charge of the 10,000 uniformed RSS men who marched to patriotic songs to calm the crowd. Advani’s loyalty to Hindu nationalism would forever be bought by this show of support. Nine days later, Pakistan was created as a Muslim-majority country, with Karachi as its capital. Advani remembers sweets being distributed; Hindu children refused to eat them. 25 India became independent the next day. ‘What an accursed fate mine is,’ the nineteen-year-old thought. He had looked forward to this day for the past five years, 26 only for his Sindhi soul to be partitioned into two. Through the next seven decades, through grassroots work, party-building, journalism and government service, Advani would remain haunted by the ghosts of partition. His life would be a quest to bandage himself back together.

That very day, 15 August 1947, the RSS launched a Hindi monthly called Rashtradharma in Lucknow. The twenty-two-year-old Atal Bihari Vajpayee was appointed its first joint-editor. 27 A few months later, he joined the weekly Panchajanya as editor. 28 He had finished his third Officer’s Training Camp by then, and had even worked as a pracharak in Sitapur in the United Provinces. 29 But Vajpayee was unused to the hardships of this life. And his talent for Hindi ensured that he was soon moved to desk work. Though he did not know it then, he was already being marked as a communicator, a role he would play for the next six decades. The Panchajanya of these months railed against partition, the culpability of the Muslim League and the connivance of the Congress. As editor, Vajpayee was well aware of the arguments. But sitting 800 kilometres from the international border, partition was a headline rather than a horror. Meanwhile, an estimated 14.5 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were being forced out of their homes to migrate to a new country. 30 More than ten million were rendered homeless. 31 As much as 2.7 million hectares of land were abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, with 1.9 million hectares abandoned by Muslims in East Punjab.32 The other macabre statistic was on sexual violence: 50,000 Muslim women were abducted as they attempted to flee, while for Hindu and Sikh women the number was 33,000.33 The dead alone crossed a million. 34 Advani recalls motorcycling around Karachi soon after partition. ‘I saw the body of a man who had been stabbed to death. A small distance ahead, I saw another corpse, and then a third . . . This was unusual and disturbing for me as it was the first time in my life that I had seen corpses lying on the street.’35 The emblems of this violence were trains—motifs of modern India— carrying refugees to the other side of Punjab. These trains would be stopped before the border, and the passengers methodically murdered. The trains would then chug along to the other side, delivering their silent cargo. The Hindus of Karachi were sheltered from much of this initial violence. The family of Kamla Jagtiani—who would marry Advani in 1965—remained

in Karachi for almost a year. She would tell a friend: ‘I remember leaving Karachi only in 1948, and that too when we saw the gurudwara in front of our house burning.’ On Advani’s side, some relatives migrated to Mumbai, while his father moved to Kutch, across the border from Sindh. The cosmopolitan trader, owner of a palace, game room and horse carriage in Karachi was now reduced to working with the Sindhu resettlement corporation. 36 Advani himself left Karachi for Delhi in September 1947, one of the few refugees who came by a propeller aircraft of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. 37 The loss of home and dispersal of family had traumatized Advani. But his RSS work had given him an extended family in India. He was taken care of by his new clan. Two months on, he paid a visit to V.D. Savarkar in Bombay. Advani had been shaped by Savarkar’s Great War of Independence as well as his essay on Hindutva. And in the aftermath of partition, Advani perhaps saw Savarkar as a clairvoyant whose decades-long warnings against Congress policies had turned out true. Advani remembers: ‘As I sat in awe of his magnetic presence at his Shivaji park residence he asked me about the situation in Sindh and the conditions of Hindus after partition.’38 This awe did not extend to joining Savarkar’s party. It says something about Advani’s personality that faced with the suffering that turned others to street violence or hard-hitting politics, Advani chose quietism. He remained loyal to the RSS, to its anti-political ethic and to its emphasis on social change. This trait would remain with Advani through his life. The emotions that people ordinarily suffer—jealousy, anger, exuberance—would, in Advani, remain bottled up as silent stoicism. Advani was soon sent to work as a pracharak in Rajasthan. His job was to supervise existing shakhas as well as standardize new ones. Given that shakhas bloom organically, have autonomy and even control their own bank account, Advani’s role was that of a quality inspector ensuring a homogenous product. He would spend his day travelling from village to village, sometimes by bus, sometimes by cycle, sometimes by camel. 39 It was his way of making the subcontinent whole again.

Meanwhile, a national unity government had been formed in India. Gandhi had overruled the Congress cadre to anoint the ‘foreign-educated’ Jawaharlal Nehru, son of a Congress president, to be India’s first prime minister. The cadre’s preferred choice, ‘Sardar’ Vallabhbhai Patel, was made home minister and India’s first deputy prime minister. Gandhi had also insisted that the first cabinet represent all parties, not just the dominant Congress. B.R. Ambedkar was made law minister, Syama Prasad Mookerjee industry minister. For those Muslims who remained, partition had proved a cataclysm. From a confident minority being able to demand concessions, they were now evermore outnumbered, evermore fearful and wholly dependent on the Congress for protection. The RSS saw this as yet another ploy. In December 1947, Golwalkar told a meeting of 200 RSS full-timers that the remaining Muslims should quit India, whereas ‘Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit by their votes at the time of elections . . .’40 But with this Muslim percentage halved and waves of Hindu refugees flooding into India, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS were witnessing a boost in their popularity. The former BJP member of parliament Prafull Goradia says: ‘Many of us thought that with partition, we had a clear Hindu majority, and with partition violence, there would be a lot of sympathy for Hindu grievance. The moment seemed ripe for Indian people accepting Hindutva.’41 All that changed at 5:17 p.m. on 30 January 1948 when a Hindu Mahasabha member who had worked in the RSS pumped three bullets into Mohandas Gandhi’s ches

Nathuram was born Ramachandra Godse in 1910 in Pune district. Three male children before him had died, and to ward of this curse, his parents brought him up as a girl for the first few years, even piercing his nose with a ‘nath’, the Marathi word for nose-ring. The teenage Nathuram Godse had been enamoured of the Mahatma, wore a Gandhi cap and shouted satyagrah

slogans. But when his postmaster father was transferred to Ratnagiri in 1930, he came into contact with V.D. Savarkar. 42 Godse’s bearing—chin shaven, eyes intense—began to mimic Savarkar’s, as did his world view: the belief that Muslims were dividing Hindus, and that the Congress along with the British was assisting them. Godse, like Savarkar, was jealous of Gandhi’s political skills in attracting Hindus to the Congress over the Mahasabha. It was envy mixed with the rage that Gandhi was blinding Hindus to their own interests. Godse coupled this with a critique of caste divisions. In his own words: ‘I openly joined [the] RSS wing of anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus were of equal status as to rights, social and religious and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession.’43 Where Godse differed was in his penchant for violence. The RSS’s preoccupation was Hindu unity. Its support for violence was, conceptually at least, only as a defence mechanism to protect Hindus during riots. But for Godse, pre-emptive violence was sometimes necessary. For the RSS, the lesson of Shivaji was that he had consolidated power by uniting Hindus. For Godse: ‘It was absolutely correct tactics for Shivaji to kill Afzal Khan as the latter would otherwise have surely killed him.’44 Gandhi was not just another politician leading Hindu voters astray, his non-violence mirrored the historic weakness of Hindu society. In 1943, Godse started a Marathi paper, Agrani. The paper had a photograph of Savarkar on its masthead (in return, perhaps, for Savarkar’s 15,000-rupee seed money). 45 The Agrani was critical of Gandhi’s concessions to the Muslim League. It also had another, more unexpected, target. ‘Godse used to abuse us,’ the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s M.G. Vaidya says, ‘he saw us as too slow and gradual.’46 L.K. Advani later claimed that Godse’s criticisms in these pages ‘show how bitter he was to the RSS’. Godse felt that ‘. . . the RSS had sublimated the “militant spirit” among the Hindus making them incapable of aggressive action’. 47 The partition of India’s religious territory radicalized Godse further. On 12 January 1948, Gandhi announced another fast, to prod India to pay

Pakistan its share of British India’s finances. 48 This was the last straw for Godse: ‘The accumulating provocation of 32 years culminating in his last pro Muslim fast at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately.’49 Soon after, Nathuram Godse, along with his Agrani co-editor Narayan Apte and a Punjabi refugee called Madanlal Pahwa, decided to act. On 20 January 1948, Pahwa ignited an explosive at Birla House in Delhi where Gandhi was staying. 50 The explosion did no damage and Pahwa was let off. Ten days later, Godse and Apte went to Birla House. Godse was carrying a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic 

51 that had belonged to an employee of the Maharaja of Gwalior.

 52 The judge who heard Godse’s crime describes what happened next: ‘The prayer meeting had not yet started, but a crowd of about 200 persons was awaiting the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi. Godse was moving among the people apparently unconcerned. Suddenly, there was a stirring in the crowd, and everyone stood up to form a passage for Mahatma Gandhi, who was seen coming up slowly with his hands resting on the shoulders of two girls who were walking by his side. As he raised his hands to join them in the customary greeting, Godse took a quick step forward, pushed aside the girl on Gandhiji’s right and, standing in front of him, fired three shots in quick succession at point-blank range.

’53 Gandhi’s last words were ‘Hey Ram, Hey Ram’.

 54 Godse was arrested along with nine others. 

55 These included Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge—the latter helped the government’s case against the others. It also included the pioneer of Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar. The trial was conducted at the Red Fort in Delhi. The seat of Mughal power was chosen to signal continuity with the past as well as new India’s secular credentials.

 56 One hundred and forty-nine prosecution witnesses testified over a ten-month period. The judge convicted Godse and Apte and sentenced them to death. The others were sentenced to life in prison. Savarkar alone was let off for lack of evidence. 

57 Godse was hung from Ambala jail on 15 November 1949. He walked to the gallows clutching a copy of the Bhagavadgita.

 There is no mystery about why Godse killed Gandhi. He provided a ninety-three-page explanation in court. 

59 Apart from criticizing Gandhi’s nonviolence, Godse advocated his own vision of a Hindu state. It is an elected state based on what he termed ‘joint electorates’, i.e., one-person-one-vote. He was even willing to agree to ‘the temporary introduction of separate electorates since the Muslims were keen on them’. He however ‘insisted that representation should be granted in strict proportion to the number of every community and no more’. 

60 His fury with the Mahatma was that he had bowed before the Muslim League’s demands, in effect reducing the voting power of India’s 75 per cent Hindus. Godse was only mouthing the demographic anxieties born out of electoral competition that had plagued Savarkar, the Mahasabha and the RSS. There is no mystery about Godse’s motives; they are the motives of Hindu nationalism. More debatable, however, is the identity of all those who helped Godse kill Gandhi. Did it include the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar? Investigations revealed no link between the RSS leadership and Godse. A 1966 commission re-examined the conspiracy by scrutinizing 101 witnesses and 407 documents; it cleared the organization of any connection with the crime.

 61 The most incisive critic of the RSS’s role is the legal scholar A.G. Noorani. Even he says that the claim that the organization killed Gandhi is a straw man. The valid accusation, he says, is that Godse ‘was a member of the RSS and shared its ideas’.

 62 That Godse had at one time been an RSS member is undisputed. It is less clear whether he was a member when he killed Gandhi. He himself denied it, as did Golwalkar. 

63 The most detailed biographer of Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha, says that Godse had left the RSS by the time. 

64 In 1992, L.K. Advani claimed that ‘we have had nothing to do with Godse’.

 65 In response, Gopal Godse said that his brother had never formally quit the RSS. 

66 The status of Godse’s link to the RSS at the time he killed Gandhi will forever be debated. What is undebatable is that Godse did not share all of the ideas of the RSS. Far from supporting political violence, the RSS had wanted nothing to do with politics during this period. This is why Savarkar

and Godse had publicly criticized the RSS through the mid-1940s. It is fair to conclude that the RSS played no institutional role in Gandhi’s death. The relationship of the Mahasabha to the killing is more convoluted. Gandhi’s great-grandson, who has written a book on the assassination, says: ‘Of the seven attempts on Gandhi’s life, five involve the Pune unit of the Hindu Mahasabha.’67 Immediately after the murder, Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Syama Prasad Mookerjee: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in this conspiracy.’68 Godse and Apte were party members, and Savarkar was a former president. The current president spoke of a ‘feeling of shame and humiliation, as the alleged assassin belonged to the Mahasabha’. 69 Yet, the Mahasabha was not banned after the killing. Nehru and Patel had realized that those involved were a splinter group unconnected with a Mahasabha leadership that included their own cabinet colleague. What to make, however, of the role of Savarkar? Unlike the RSS and the Mahasabha, Savarkar was ‘charge-sheeted’ for the murder, i.e., the police and magistrate thought there was a strong enough case against him. Through the trial in the Red Fort, 70 he sat in the dock in the back row, avoiding Godse’s eyes. The prosecution tried to establish that Godse and Apte had met Savarkar while planning the murder. But what was discussed remains unknown. When the judge asked Godse whether he was acting under the advice of Savarkar, Godse rejected this ‘unjust and untrue charge’. 71 The prosecution case tying Savarkar to the conspiracy hinged on a single incident. Digambar Badge, who had turned ‘approver’ for the prosecution, told the court that after a meeting with Apte and Godse three days before the attempt on Gandhi’s life on 20 January, Savarkar saw them off at the entrance with the Marathi words: ‘Yashasvi hovun ya.’72 Come back victorious. But no witnesses could corroborate this. Savarkar was declared not guilty and spent the next eighteen years in Bombay. His family remained close to the Godses; his niece married Godse’s nephew. After Savarkar’s death in 1966, a government-appointed commission reinvestigated Gandhi’s murder. Savarkar’s secretary and bodyguard testified that he had met Godse and Apte just before Gandhi was killed. This

testimony had not been produced in the original trial. The commission concluded: ‘All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.’73 This was only a commission finding, not a court judgment; Savarkar remains legally innocent. When the Supreme Court was asked to reinvestigate the murder fifty years later, the court-appointed lawyer examined the evidence and concluded: ‘Since the late Vinayak D. Savarkar had been acquitted, at this stage, it would neither be advisable/desirable nor possible to come to a definitive finding with respect to Vinayak D. Savarkar’s role in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.’74 In the immediate aftermath of the murder in January 1948, however, these fine distinctions were yet unknown. Apart from arresting Savarkar and eight others, the government turned its attention on the shadowy group that Godse had once been a member of. This organization had so far avoided politics, refusing to develop a theory on the state. But now, after the murder of Mohandas, it was the state that was developing a theory on the RSS. * * * M.S. Golwalkar was organizing in Madras when news reached him of Gandhi’s death. 75 He immediately sent a wire to Nehru and Patel in Hindi. Golwalkar called Gandhi a ‘great personality’ and an ‘unparalleled organiser’. He asked all RSS shakhas to observe a thirteen-day grieving period.76 The next day he wrote to Nehru and Patel: ‘My heart is filled with worries thinking of the future.’77 He was prescient. On 3 February 1948, the RSS leadership in Nagpur sent a terse message to shakhas across India: ‘Guruji interned. Be calm at all costs.’78 The next day, the government banned the RSS and arrested 20,00079 of its five million members, 80 including almost every pracharak. 81 The RSS remembers this ban—which would last for the next seventeen months—as its most traumatic period. M.G. Vaidya, who was a member then, recalls: ‘Everyone was against the RSS—janata, sarkar, akhbar [the people, government, press].

’82 Ordinary Indians began to attack RSS men, burning their houses, vandalizing their offices. Irate crowds surrounded the RSS office in Delhi. Among those participating was the Congressman Jayaprakash Narayan, 83 who would ally with the RSS three decades later. The police even had to declare a curfew in Poona 84 to protect the RSS from an outraged mob. The Brahmins, who were seen as associated with the RSS and Godse, were specifically targeted. In Nagpur, a horde swarmed the office of an RSS weekly newspaper and smashed furniture. The Hindu Mahasabha office was also ‘rifled’ through. Another thousand-strong mob marched on the RSS headquarters and house of Golwalkar. Local Congress leaders had to intervene to protect them from physical harm. 85 Its workers went into hiding. M.G. Vaidya remembers doing underground work—printing pamphlets, cyclostyling material—during the ban. ‘I used to wear a necktie. The police did not think anyone with a necktie will be doing sangh work. So I was not suspected.’86 Another RSS worker can still remember the ordeal. ‘I was pracharak in what is today Washim zilla [district]. I was harassed. I found it hard to get food and drink as pracharaks depend on local people for that. So I ate sev-chiwda for four months. I did not even have a cycle. People were afraid to call me home for food since I was a sangh ka aadmi.’ L.K. Advani was in Alwar at the time. He was among the ‘tens of thousands of RSS swayamsevaks, including most pracharaks [who] were put behind bars’. 87 Like the rest of his tribe, Advani had opposed Gandhi’s negotiations with the Muslim League. But Gandhi’s ‘absolute honesty and the purity of his personality’ 88 resonated with Advani. He spent the next three months in Alwar jail. Advani was only allowed three thick rotis and tasteless dal, served just twice a day. 89 On release in August 1948, he spent the next several months moving from house to house to avoid detection. Advani’s ordeal during this ban would mirror his tribulations the second time the RSS was banned, during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977. Vajpayee’s whereabouts during this ban would similarly echo his experience of the Emergency. The young editor was not arrested. It was just

as well; unlike Advani, the epicurean would probably not have been able to survive the chunky rotis and insipid dal. By February 1949, it was clear to the government that the RSS had no role in the killing of Gandhi. The ban was lifted in July 1949.90 As barter, the government required the RSS to write a Constitution where it pledged loyalty to the Indian Constitution and flag, and vowed to remain apolitical. 91 The RSS adopted a Constitution two months later. It reiterated its original aim: ‘unification of diverse groups within Hindu samaj’, based on ‘dharma’ [religion] and ‘sanskriti’ [culture]. 92 The RSS Constitution also stressed its aversion to politics. But privately the RSS was rethinking this disavowal. Its leadership had noticed that few politicians had defended the RSS after Gandhi’s death. Ravindra Bhagwat comes from an RSS family; his brother is the current head. He says: ‘What I have heard is that after the illegal 1948 ban, there was not a single person in parliament talking against the ban.’93 Another RSS member points to another lesson learnt. ‘We noticed that the Mahasabha was not banned.’ This was despite Savarkar, Godse and Apte having been more active in the Mahasabha compared to the RSS. The reason for this, the RSS concluded, was that the Hindu Mahasabha had a footprint in parliament and the union cabinet. Political presence had protected the Mahasabha, while political absence had made the RSS vulnerable. The RSS’s turn towards politics was also being aided by changes in the Congress. Gandhi’s death had left his party in the hands of his two lieutenants. Though sharing many dreams for a new India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel had contrasting instincts towards Hindu nationalism. The RSS watched. Whose impulse triumphed would dictate whether the RSS would be content with being a social organization, or whether it would need a party of its own. * * * Born into a landowning family in Gujarat in 1875, Vallabhbhai Patel rose up as a lawyer in the judicial bureaucracy. He worked as a district pleader in

Godhra, where a hundred years later, a burning train would end Vajpayee and Advani’s careers and bring to life Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s. Older than Nehru and less anglicized, the balding Patel rarely smiled and only spoke after weighing his words. He enjoyed organizational work and had the devotion of the cadre. 94 As India’s first home minister, Patel integrated the 500-plus princely states into India, earning him the praise of Hindu nationalists still scarred by the partition of their sacred land.95 Most of these states were ones where the ruler and the ruled were of the same religion, making it easy to integrate them into independent India. Three states, however, posed problems. Hindumajority Hyderabad and Junagadh were ruled by Muslim kings. Kashmir on the other hand was a Muslim-majority province ruled by a Hindu king. Unlike the other two, Kashmir was also contiguous with West Pakistan. The logic of the two-nation theory dictated that it go to Pakistan. That the Congress had reconciled itself to this can be seen from Patel’s ‘firm assurances’ to Mountbatten, just before partition, that ‘if [the Maharaja of Kashmir] acceded to Pakistan, India would not take it amiss’. 96 In a speech after independence, Patel said: ‘Pakistan attempted to set off Kashmir against Junagadh. When we raised the question of settlement in a democratic way, they (Pakistan) at once told us that they would consider it if we applied that policy to Kashmir. Our reply was that we would agree to Kashmir if they agreed to Hyderabad.’97 Had Pakistan given up Junagadh and Hyderabad state, the new Indian government would likely have accepted Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir. What surprised both Nehru and Patel was that on 15 August 1947, the Nawab of Junagadh, an eccentric devoted to his 400 dogs, announced that he was joining Pakistan. More infuriating for them, Pakistan accepted, even though Junagadh was a Hindu-majority province with no land connections to Pakistan. Meanwhile in Kashmir, worried that the Hindu king would accede to India, Jinnah sent irregular troops to take over the state. A terrified Maharaja signed the accession treaty with India on 26 October 1947, and Indian troops pushed back the Pakistani irregulars. They soon seized Junagadh, as well as

Hyderabad state. Jinnah’s craving for all three princely states meant that he ended up having none. What gave credence to the Indian claim on Kashmir was of course the agreed-upon partition principle that gave princes the power to decide for their state. But what lent legitimacy to the annexation was that Kashmir’s most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah, was in favour of India. The matter could have ended there, but for two decisions whose consequences play out to this day. The most important of these was the government’s choice, prodded by Mountbatten, 98 to agree to a ceasefire (Indian troops stopped at what is now referred to as the line of control) and ask the United Nations to mediate. UN Security Council Resolution 47, adopted in April 1948, provided a threestep process to solve the dispute, culminating in a plebiscite. 99 Both India and Pakistan rejected the UN resolution, 100 which has never been implemented. India argues that the conditions for a plebiscite have changed, and Pakistan never followed the first step, i.e., the withdrawal of its armed nationals from its part of Kashmir. Pakistan continues to insist that a plebiscite take place. The other decision that has kept Kashmir unresolved was once again a choice by India’s first prime minister. A scholar who has examined the original instrument of accession signed by the Kashmir king says: ‘Every one of the 140 princely states that signed IoAs with the Dominion of India agreed to the same terms and conditions as J&K’. 101 These legal terms under which Kashmir acceded to India was under the Indian Independence Act and were not unique. What was singular was that the Nehru government thought that Muslim-majority Kashmir required constitutional provisions to protect its status. Nehru discussed the matter at length with his cabinet, and then the constituent assembly. The result: Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. 102 The import of this article was to hold that Indian laws applied to Kashmir only with regard to defence, foreign affairs and communication. Like with some select parts of the country, Indians from other states required a special permit to enter Kashmir in the early years, and were banned from buying

property in the state. 103 And unlike anywhere else, the state was allowed its own Constitution, prime minister, laws and flag. These compromises were distasteful for a man who had effectively integrated all the other princely states into India. As Patel said in a speech in 1948: ‘We have seen what price we have paid in Kashmir by going to that [United Nations] organisation.’104 His biographer Rajmohan Gandhi says: ‘Patel was unhappy with many of India’s steps over Kashmir, including the offer of a plebiscite, the reference to the UN, the ceasefire that left a fair part of the State in Pakistani hands and the removal of the Maharaja. But though occasionally dropping a remark or a hint, he never spelt out his own solution.’105 The Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, spelt out their solution then, did so in manifesto after manifesto for the next seventy years, and finally got it written down in 2019. That was the year the Narendra Modi government used its parliamentary majority to pass legislation ending this special status for Kashmir. * * * If Kashmir showcases one disagreement between Nehru and Patel, their reactions to rebuilding the Somnath temple demonstrate another. The temple was located in the princely state of Junagadh and had been ravaged by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. How critical this wound was to Hindu consciousness is contested.106 What is clear is that K.M. Munshi’s book on the ruin of Somnath, written in the early twentieth century, provided a rising Hindu nationalism with a parable to hold on to.107 With Junagadh annexed by November 1947, Somnath was now under Indian sovereignty. Patel travelled there three days later and declared that the Somnath temple would be rebuilt. 108 Nehru was uncomfortable with a secular state participating in a religious project. Funds for the reconstruction were collected privately and with help from the RSS. Yet another ‘Hindu’ issue on which Nehru and Patel argued was the Babri mosque, built in 1528 by a courtier to the Mughal emperor who named it

after his master. It was located in Ayodhya, which is revered in Hindu tradition as the birthplace of the god Ram. 109 Since at least the nineteenth century, there are records of violence between local Hindus and Muslims, with Hindus claiming the mosque stood atop a Hindu temple that marked the birthplace of Ram. Now in 1949, a Hindu group placed idols inside the mosque. 110 A ‘disturbed’ Nehru demanded, via telegram, that the state chief minister ‘undo the wrong’. 111 Patel saw the telegram and wrote his own letter to the chief minister. Though he deplored any use of force, Patel wrote: ‘I realise there is a great deal of sentiment behind the move which has taken place.’112 Fifty years later, Advani would depose before a judicial commission on the charge of obliterating the Babri mosque. He would stress this phrase in Patel’s letter, adding: ‘I would endorse every word of what he had said.’113 A final issue on which Nehru and Patel adopted opposing approaches was the question of Hindu refugees from East Bengal. Unlike Punjab where the ethnic cleansing of minorities on both sides was near total, there continued to be eleven million Hindus in East Pakistan (around 28 per cent of the population), while the five million Muslims in West Bengal constituted 24 per cent of the population. 114 Violence eventually flared up. In just the month of February 1950, anti-Hindu riots in East Pakistan killed 10,000. An estimated 860,000 Hindus crossed over, 115 while 650,000 Muslims left West Bengal for the other side. 116 Patel warned Pakistan: ‘If you are determined to turn out Hindus, you must part with sufficient land to enable us to settle down.’117 Nehru on the other hand advocated a ‘long distance dispassionate view . . . Any claim for territory is completely unreal.’118 In the end, it was Nehru who won, avoiding war and signing an agreement with Pakistan’s prime minister that listed mechanisms for both sides to protect minorities and stem the flow of refugees. 119 Industry Minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee saw this as a sell-out. He had resigned from the Hindu Mahasabha over his party’s reluctance to admit nonHindus soon after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Now, in April 1950, he resigned from Nehru’s cabinet. The Mahasabha congratulated its prodigal

son, as did the RSS. But even they realized that with Mookerjee’s exit, their influence over the government was diminished. This fear was amplified eight months later, when the seventy-five-year-old Vallabhbhai Patel died of a heart attack in Bombay. Patel had always been more sympathetic to the RSS than Nehru. He saw them as ‘patriots who love their country. Only their trend of thought is diverted.’120 Months before his death, he had ensured that the Congress passed a resolution allowing RSS workers to join. It took Nehru’s personal intervention to scuttle the plan. 121 The historian Ramachandra Guha writes: ‘Nehru and Patel were colleagues not rivals, co-workers not adversaries. Working individually, and together, they united India and gave it a democratic template.’122 But these differences on the RSS, Pakistan, Kashmir, Somnath and Ayodhya have led Hindu nationalists to see Patel as the first prime minister India never had. Advani, who would eventually occupy Patel’s office, would imitate India’s first home minister. Vajpayee, on the other hand, would model himself after India’s first premier. As we shall see through this book, he would maintain a distance from the RSS, and would follow his idol in making the most concessions any prime minister has made to Pakistan and Kashmir. All that would come later. For now, with his deputy gone in December 1950, the prime minister was unfettered to shape his party, his government and his country. And he wanted that shape to be in opposition to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha. Faced with an unconstrained Jawaharlal Nehru, the RSS needed a new insurance policy.