Gandhi’s Life in Photos, 75 Years After His Assassination
Known as the father of Indian independence, his concept of nonviolent resistance to fight injustice has inspired political movements around the world.
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Seventy-five years ago, Mohandas K. Gandhi was shot dead by an assassin while on his way to deliver a regular evening prayer. Gandhi, by then largely known as the mahatma, or “great soul,” had helped lead India into its independent future less than a year before, with millions of Indian nationalists by his side. He died as one of the most celebrated men on earth.
“The light has gone out of our lives,” Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, told the weeping masses by radio on Jan. 30, 1948, the day of the assassination.
In his famous, impromptu elegy, Nehru promised that the light brought by Gandhi would “illumine this country for many more years. And a thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.”
Gandhi is still revered far and wide, his name a byword for a certain kind of virtue and action. Nearly every town in India’s countryside has a main street named “M.G. Road” in his honor, and some of the biggest government programs of the 21st century bear his name, too. But India has changed in innumerable ways since 1948, when his life was snuffed out by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu ideologue with a Beretta pistol.
Mr. Godse had murdered Gandhi as a political enemy, accusing him of being a traitor to Hindus. Mr. Godse was a Hindu nationalist, who loathed what he saw as Gandhi’s deference to minorities and resented the division of colonial India between an explicitly Muslim Pakistan and a multireligious, secular (though Hindu-majority) republic of India. Narendra Modi, the popular and increasingly powerful prime minister of the past eight years, has roots in the same Hindu nationalist movement. Members of his party have been caught celebrating Mr. Godse — and rebuked for it — but have then been allowed to stay in Parliament.
Mr. Modi praises Gandhi at ritually appropriate occasions, but there is relatively less veneration for Gandhi in India’s public spaces now.
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