India does not celebrate Gandhi's death, but his birth, on October 2. But this Monday was different, because it was the 75th anniversary of his murder in New Delhi, shot by a Hindu supremacist.
The occasion has served to signal that the icon still stands – in the form of a statue, ticket or school syllabus – while its message is becoming irrelevant in a fiercely materialistic and nationalistic India.
The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, dedicated the mandatory two minutes of silence to him yesterday at the place of his cremation, next to the Yamuna River. But neither his referents, nor his language, nor his acts have anything Gandhian.
The forgetfulness of the apostle of pacifism and anti-colonialism is also progressing outside of India. But in the land that he claims as a father he takes on a more alarming tone. “Here it is not revisionism, it is parricide”, has written the reference historian, Ramachandra Guha.
One of his great-grandsons, Tushar Gandhi, who watches over his legacy, says Modi's success is based on the antithesis of the mahatma's values: "On hatred, polarization and division."
The fact is that the extremist who killed him, Nathuram Godse, had been a member of the same Hindu chauvinist organization, RSS, to which Narendra Modi would promise decades later full dedication and celibacy. This movement blamed Gandhi for appeasing Muslims and allowing Pakistan to split.
With Modi already in power, a Brahmin from the same party as Godse broke a taboo by building a temple in his honour. There he worships with garlands in the effigy of Gandhi's assassin. In Meerut, a town north of Delhi, 40% of the residents are Muslims, so the exaltation of Godse also acts as a threat.
Although Hindu supremacism never raised a finger against the British, Modi has preferred to vindicate Subhas Chandra Bose – who led the armed struggle – rather than Gandhi and his passive resistance. Thus, in the great avenue of power in New Delhi – under the stone canopy occupied by George V and which had been vacant for sixty years – he placed a statue of Bose last year.
Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi – grandson of Indira Gandhi and great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, but not related to the mahatma – yesterday coincided with the end of his 3,500-kilometer march across India – which began at the place where his father was assassinated, Rajiv– with the anniversary of this other martyrdom.
However, the fixation to keep the Kashmir valley – 95% Muslim – in India was not Gandhi's, but Nehru's, whose family origins were in the other 5%.
Modi, in any case, does not miss the opportunity to take foreign dignitaries to the asram of his countryman Gandhi in Gujarat, where an interreligious prayer marked the anniversary yesterday.
Less ecumenical is the image of Modi broadcast by the BBC in its latest documentary, in which it once again accuses him of passivity during the pogrom that killed two thousand Muslims in his state in 2002. Its broadcast has been banned in India.
His right-hand man, Interior Minister Amit Shah, likes to claim that Muslims in Gujarat have not protested since then.
That Modi uses religion to mobilize politically actually brings him closer to Gandhi. With the difference that he appealed to all of them and then handed over the baton to Nehru, who hated all superstition.
The situation in India presents some similarities with that of Turkey, where the father of the country, the secularist Mustafa Kemal, remains untouched in his mausoleum. Recep Tayyip Erdogan – like Modi in India – complies with all the due formalities, but inaugurating another statue is not even on the horizon.
Although he died ten years later than Atatürk, Gandhi, unlike the general, has no one to write to him.
