On January 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse elbowed his way through the crowd, joined his hands as if in supplication and then fired three bullets from a Beretta pistol. Gandhi collapsed in a pool of blood that seeped into the earth. He began chanting “Ram! Ram! Ram…”. The chanting faded as his life ebbed away.
A saga came to an end. But did it?
Isn’t Gandhi more relevant today than ever? Isn’t his life so powerful that even those who subscribe to the ideology that killed him want to claim him as their own? Everything that Gandhi warned us about – inequality, our downward slide if communalism held sway, the pivot away from villages and its pitfalls – has come true.
In the final episode of Gandhi – The Final Years, we attempt to step into the Mahatma’s mind to explore its complex vastness. We are in conversation with Tushar Gandhi, great grandson of the Mahatma, a great chronicler of the Mahatma’s life and a peace activist.