The man who killed Gandhi w/ Dhirendra K. Jha

Dhirendra K. Jha joins PTO to talk about his book, Gandhi's
Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India. We
talked about Godse's childhood and how is belonging to the elite
Brahmin class facilitated his shift from an anti-imperialist
position in the decades before independence, to a visceral hatred
of Muslims and of Gandhi, who the Hindu nationalists blamed for
partition and the creation of Pakistan. We also discussed Godse's
relationship with Vinayak Sawarkar - the ideological founder of
Hindu nationalism and the chief early propagator of the idea of
Hindu Rashtra - the concept of India as a fundamentally Hindu
nation - as opposed to a secular state of all its people. We went
on to talk about how Italian fascism and German Nazism inspired the
RSS, and finally we discussed the increasing rehabilitation of the
reputation of Godse amongst Hindu nationalists, including BJP
members of the Indian parliament.