#dnaEdit: Supreme Court’s curious directive

The Congress has been making the allegation time and again that people who believed in the ideology of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) killed Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace. It is a sweeping statement at the best of times, and it would not survive close scrutiny. General statements, whether they are eulogies or denunciations, are rarely factual. There is more than a bit of exaggeration in them. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi had unthinkingly repeated what the Congress had been saying over the decades. But the court’s directive, despite its delightful ambiguity, seems to imply that accuracy cannot be sacrificed for the sake of rhetoric. But the truth is indeed penumbral. It’s neither this nor that in strict logical terms. Of course Aristotle would have said that a proposition is either true or false, and it cannot be both. But in Indian logic, especially the Jain version of syad-vada, which has 21 ways of predication, the truth of a proposition is not a clear issue. But in this case we are in the realm of legal liabilities and not in the realm of logic.

The facts of the case as they exist are these. Government of India banned the RSS in the wake of Gandhi’s killing, and the man responsible for the decision was none other than BJP’s favoured icon, Sardar Patel. But it is also true that the ban was lifted when it became clear that there was no evidence for RSS’s direct involvement in the assassination of Gandhi. But it was also more than a legal technicality. The RSS was espousing a certain ideology and its opposition to Gandhi was quite explicit. But it did not mean that it had publicly endorsed the assassination of Gandhi. The RSS has co-opted Gandhi in its pantheon, which complicates the issue of how much the right-wing Hindu organization agrees or disagrees with the views, especially with regard to Muslims and other minorities, of the Mahatma.

The group that was involved in the plot to kill Gandhi included Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Gopal Godse. Nathuram Godse, who was the man who shot Gandhi dead had admitted to the crime. He wrote a defence where he argued his case for killing Gandhi, which had no legal validity, but it remains a curious document reflecting the working of the mind of Nathuram and his complex and confused motivation. Rule of law required that the assassination had to be established on forensic principles. That is how the Gandhi assassination trial case was played out. Savarkar was acquitted because there was no evidence against him. Gopal Godse served prison term. Savarkar belonged to Pune-based Hindu Mahasabha. It did not mean that Hindu Mahasabha was involved in the killing of Gandhi. Of course, Hindu Mahasabha did not disown Gandhi’s killers, which raises its own set of troubling questions. The Hindu Mahasabha is not alone in this. We know how some of the Sikh groups offer ardas to Bhindranwale and Indira Gandhi’s killers. But it will be difficult to accuse either the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) or the Akali Dal for the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

What is curious about the Supreme Court’s directive is this. It said that if Rahul Gandhi refuses to apologise, then he would have to stand trial, and that the case would be issued on merits. It means, the court’s directive is not an indictment of Rahul Gandhi. It is a preliminary stage of a legal tussle. It means that Rahul Gandhi cannot be presumed to be guilty of libellous speech. It remains to be proved according to strict legal norms pertaining to free speech. What is to be expected is an interesting legal drama. There is no verdict at this stage.