How the man who beat an empire was killed for refusing to hate
For thirty years, Mahatma Gandhi had faced down the largest empire the world had ever known.
The British had jailed him, beaten his followers, and tried again and again to break him. And in the end, without ever once raising his hand in violence, he had beaten them. In August 1947 he watched the country he had fought for become free at last.
Five months later, he was shot dead.
Not by the empire he had defied for a lifetime. Not by any foreign enemy. He was killed by one of his own countrymen, a fellow Hindu, who murdered him for the very thing that made Gandhi greatest of all: his refusal to hate, and his insistence, even in the middle of the fires of Partition, that Hindus and Muslims were brothers. This is the story of that death, and of why the bullet that took the man could never touch the idea he died for.
A frail man in a burning country
By January 1948, Gandhi was old, thin and exhausted, worn down by the horrors he had spent the year trying to stop.
India was free, but it was still bleeding. The killings of Partition had not fully ended, and Delhi was crowded with terrified refugees, Hindu and Sikh, arriving with unspeakable stories from across the new border. In that poisoned air, hatred between communities burned hot, and cries for revenge were everywhere.
And Gandhi, to the very end, stood against the tide. He held daily prayer meetings open to people of every faith. And at the age of seventy-eight, he undertook one last fast, close to death, for two purposes that were really one. He fasted to shame the people of Delhi into stopping the communal killing, and to press his own new government to hand over to Pakistan the large sum of money India had promised it and was now holding back.
His final great act was an act of fairness and love reaching across the very divide that was tearing the country apart. And it made him powerful enemies.
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The men from Pune
Among those enemies was a small group of men who had come to see Gandhi not as the father of the nation but as its betrayer.
They were led by a man named Nathuram Godse. In their eyes, Gandhi’s lifelong insistence on non-violence had left Hindus weak and defenceless; his acceptance of Partition had been a surrender; and now his fast, to force India to pay money to a Pakistan they were at war with over Kashmir, was the final treason. Godse was a Hindu nationalist, and he had decided that Gandhi had to die.
Their first attempt failed. Ten days before the end, a bomb went off at one of Gandhi’s prayer meetings, but the plot fell apart in the panic and one of the conspirators was caught. Gandhi, urged to accept police protection and to have those who came to see him searched, refused. He would not, he said, live his life in fear of his own people, or greet those who came to pray with suspicion.
The final walk
On the evening of 30 January 1948, Gandhi was running late for his prayer meeting.
He walked out into the garden of Birla House toward the small raised platform where he would sit, leaning as he often did on the shoulders of his two grandnieces, Manu and Abha, the young women he fondly called his walking sticks. A crowd had gathered, as it did every evening, to be near him.
A man stepped out of that crowd and bowed before him, in the traditional gesture of respect. Then he raised a pistol and fired three times.
Struck by the bullets, the old man sank to the ground, and by many accounts his hands rose and folded, even then, into the gesture of blessing and peace that he had offered the world all his life.
It is widely believed that his final breath carried the name of God, Hey Ram, though some who stood closest say he died too quickly to speak at all. It was seventeen minutes past five in the evening. The most famous man in the world was gone.
The assassin did not run
Nathuram Godse made no attempt to escape. He stood where he was and was seized by the horrified crowd.
At his trial he was unrepentant, and he tried to use the courtroom to justify what he had done. He and the chief planner of the plot were sentenced to death and hanged the following year. Godse never expressed a word of regret.
But the truest response to the murder came not from any court. It came from Gandhi’s own family. His sons pleaded with the government to spare the life of the man who had killed their father, arguing that to answer his death with an execution would betray everything Gandhi had lived and died for.
The murdered man’s own sons asked that his murderer be allowed to live. In the middle of all that darkness, it was the one act that was purely, unmistakably, his.
The state did not listen. But the plea remains the truest thing anyone said in those terrible days.
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The idea that would not die
Godse had killed Gandhi in order to destroy what Gandhi stood for: a tolerant, non-violent, shared India in which no one was a stranger because of their faith. He achieved the exact opposite of what he intended.
The murder did not discredit Gandhi’s message. It consecrated it. A grieving nation, at its most fragile and dangerous hour, with communal fury still smouldering, was made to look squarely at what hatred had just done, at the body of the gentlest man among them, and it recoiled in horror. The killing shamed the voices of communal violence and strengthened the hands of those who wanted India to be a country where every faith belonged. Two years later, that vision of tolerance was written into the foundation of the Indian Constitution.
It would be dishonest to pretend the argument ended forever. Godse’s ideas never entirely disappeared, and they still find a small band of admirers even now. But in the hour that mattered most, with the wound of Partition still open and the choice laid bare, the answer India gave was Gandhi’s, and not his killer’s.
Godse silenced Gandhi’s voice in a single afternoon. In the very same stroke, he made Gandhi’s message immortal.
The measure of a life
There is a strange and terrible completeness to the way Gandhi died.
The man who had renounced all violence was killed by violence. The man who had insisted all his life that Hindus and Muslims were one family was killed by a Hindu for protecting Muslims. And yet, in his final moment, he did not cry out in anger or lift a hand against his killer. His palms came together in peace, and his lips, we believe, shaped the name of God. He died precisely as he had spent his whole life teaching the world to live: without hatred, even for the man who was killing him.
That is the last and unanswerable argument against everything his assassin believed. You can shoot a man who refuses to hate you. You cannot force him to hate you back, and you cannot, it turns out, kill what he stands for simply by killing him.
More than seventy-five years later, the assassin is a small and squalid footnote, and the frail old man he shot is remembered across the whole world as one of the very few human beings who ever showed us, in his own flesh and blood, what courage and love without violence can really do. When the news of his death reached him, Albert Einstein said that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a man had ever, in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth.
But he did walk it. And the manner of his death, meeting a bullet with folded hands, only proved how rare he was, and how badly the world still needs what he was trying to teach it.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. On which date was Mahatma Gandhi assassinated at Birla House, New Delhi?
#2. Who was the assassin that shot Mahatma Gandhi three times at point-blank range?
#3. Which specific government decision, pushed by Gandhi, was cited by Godse as the “final straw” for the assassination?
#4. What was the make and model of the weapon used to assassinate Gandhi?
#5. Who was the co-conspirator executed alongside Nathuram Godse in 1949?
#6. A failed attempt on Gandhi’s life involving a bomb explosion occurred just days earlier on which date?
#7. Gandhi was walking to the prayer meeting leaning on the shoulders of his two grandnieces. What were their names?
#8. In which jail were Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte hanged on November 15, 1949?
Who killed Mahatma Gandhi?
Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist from Pune, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.
When and where was Gandhi assassinated?
He was assassinated on January 30, 1948, at Birla House (New Delhi) at 5:17 PM.
Why did Godse kill Gandhi?
Godse blamed Gandhi for the Partition of India and believed that Gandhi was appeasing Muslims at the expense of Hindus, specifically citing the payment of ₹55 Crore to Pakistan.
What gun was used to kill Gandhi?
A semi-automatic Beretta M1934 pistol (serial number 606824).
Who was the other person hanged with Godse?
Narayan Apte, the mastermind behind the logistics of the assassination plot, was hanged alongside Godse.
Sources & References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Mahatma Gandhi”) — his final months, the assassination of 30 January 1948, and its context.
- Gandhi Smriti (Birla House), Government of India — the site of the assassination and Gandhi’s last days there.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Nathuram Godse”) — the assassin, the conspiracy, and the trial.
- National Gandhi Museum — Gandhi’s last fast and his message of communal harmony.
