Hindu radical, 83,unrepentent about Gandhi's death

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PUNE, India - In a dingy two-room apartment, where cardboard boxes spill over with a lifetime of angry writings, an elderly man keeps watch over the memory of his long-dead brother - and the story of the murder that thrust them into worldwide attention more than 50 years ago.

"I want to explain how I was connected to this Gandhi assassination," Gopal Godse says, beginning his story.

His voice is calm, sunken gray-green eyes fixed on his listener. But his words convey the cold, unrepentant fury that drove a tiny band of conspirators to plot the killing of Mohandas Gandhi , the pacifist who led India to independence, fought for equality in a nation sharply divided by caste and became one of the most revered men in modern history.

"We did not want this man to live," said Godse, a thin, bookish man who spent 16 years in prison for his role in Gandhi 's 1948 murder. "We did not want this man to die a natural death, even if 10 lives were to be lost for that purpose."

"He was a very cruel person for the Hindus," said Godse, a fervent Hindu whose brother led the plot.

In Godse's upside-down world, Gandhi 's calls for nonviolence were part of a plot to allow Hindus to be slaughtered by Muslims. His urging for peace with overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan was seen as a betrayal of Hinduism, which Godse believes should rule over much of South Asia.

At 83, Godse is the last of the conspirators alive. Frail and largely forgotten, he and his wife live an isolated life with little money and few visitors. He survives off the royalties of his books: obscure, cheaply printed works on Gandhi and the life and eventual execution of Godse's brother Nathuram.

But Godse has lived long enough to see his beliefs move from the fringes of Hindu militancy into the Indian mainstream - albeit in a milder version.

Today India is governed by a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the BJP, a Hindu party whose roots lie in a militant Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS.

Both Godse and his brother belonged to the RSS, which was influenced by German fascists of the 1930s. The RSS, which now distances itself from the Godses, has hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of followers, including Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and other top officials.

Godse, however, despises the current government, which India's secularists see as hard-line while he considers it too moderate. But his beliefs are common among the government's more militant supporters.

In a nation of more than a billion people - some 840 million of them Hindus - Godse and like-minded Indians see Hindus as deeply oppressed.

It may seem incongruous that an overwhelming majority would see itself as threatened, but it's a commonly heard fear among believers in Hindutva, or "Hindu-ness," the doctrine that India should be governed by Hindu beliefs.

Self-defense training with bamboo staffs, swords and rifles is common among hard-line Hindutva believers, and Hindu suicide squads have vowed to defend their motherland.

The doctrine reaches from military training grounds to classrooms. Government textbooks distributed since the rise of the BJP government have been criticized for omitting mention of Gandhi 's assassination, discussing Nazism without mentioning its racist ideology and saying a Hindu swami "established the superiority of Indian thought and culture over the Western mind."

Such matters have sparked criticism from India's secular intelligentsia, to whom Godse is an extreme example of the dangers of the militant movement.

The killing of Gandhi "was actually an assault on secularism by the Hindu right, and what Gopal Godse is doing is continuing that assault," said Kamal Mitra Chenoy, an international studies professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a prominent liberal crusader.

"For someone to be proud of his role in murdering the father of the nation is an insult to the entire nation," Chenoy said.

Godse sees things far differently.

"If the people knew the reasons (for the assassination), Gandhi would be exposed," he said.

Godse's life has been shaped by the belief that India is inherently Hindu and should be governed by its principles. He lives in a haze of relentless conspiracies, a high-caste Hindu who sees Hindus as victims of Muslim plotting. This is not bigotry, but self-preservation, he insists.

Godse believes Gandhi turned his back on the Hindus, allowing British India to be divided in 1947 into today's states of India and Pakistan. He insists Muslims want to convert, or kill, all nonbelievers, and says peace between the two religions is impossible.

"When they say we have good relations with Muslims, it's all humbug, it's all bogus," he said, his voice momentarily angry. "You can't expect the Muslim to give up his religion."

The final insult came when Gandhi , a Hindu himself, launched a hunger strike seeking to pressure India's government into paying money it owed Pakistan.

The conspirators were ideologues, not trained terrorists, and their plotting was often amateurish. Gopal Godse was a clerk in a military store, his brother a newspaper editor. A few told outsiders of the plot.

Yet they succeeded on Jan. 30, 1948. That evening, Gandhi , a weak 78-year-old, was walking toward the prayer ground in the garden of a New Delhi home when Nathuram Godse stepped in front of him and fired three shots.

Gandhi died within moments.

Nathuram was tackled by bystanders and arrested. The other conspirators, including Gopal, who had returned to Pune after an earlier failed attempt to kill Gandhi , were arrested within days.

Nathuram and one other conspirator were hanged in 1949. The rest were sentenced to prison terms.

Nearly 40 years after his 1965 release, Godse's beliefs remain unchanged.