On a day when the nation was paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi, Hindu Mahasabha had organised a ‘havan‘ (ritualistic prayers around the fire) in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut on January 30, to cleanse the Indian soil of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s memory.
Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse. Since then, every year, January 30 is observed as Martyr’s day by Hindu far-right groups.
In Meerut, some ‘devotees’ from the Hindu Mahasabha gathered under a banyan tree to recite Sanskrit mantras and call upon the spirit of Lord Hanuman.
‘Hey, son of the wind,’ Ashok Sharma, the leader of the Meerut chapter of the Hindu Mahasabha called toward the fire, ‘remove Gandhi’s filthy soul from this pure land.’
Ashok Sharma runs the Meerut branch of the century-old Hindu Mahasabha with PhD holder Pooja Shakun Pandey – the woman who rose to fame after she re-enacted the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by shooting his effigy that splurted out blood on being shot.
Together, their group garlanded the statue of Gandhi’s assassinator, Nathuram Godse, and showered flower petals and rice grains on the subject of worship.
On the wall behind the statue are red-painted words that read, ‘Long live the spirit of Nathuram Godse, may he be immortal in our memories’.
The vehement desecration of Mahatma Gandhi’s memory – who is hailed as the Father of the Nation (India) and looked upon as a symbol of non-violent resistance, is openly allowed and hardly condemned as even the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, had proposed to rename Meerut as ‘Godse City’ in December 2019.
Pooja Shakun Pandey, an accomplice of the Hindu Mahasabha, told The New York Times that if she had been born before Godse, she would have killed Gandhi herself as he deserved to be shot in the head. She also added that she would have drunk the water used to clean his (Godse) feet.
‘Our hero stopped Gandhi’s poison from spreading in this pure land,’ she had said while the prayers for honouring the assassinator were ongoing.
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