Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated
On this day · 30 January 1948
Walking to an evening prayer meeting in New Delhi, India's apostle of nonviolence was shot dead at point-blank range.
On 30 January 1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader the world knew as the Mahatma, was assassinated in New Delhi. As he walked through the garden of Birla House toward an evening prayer meeting, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse stepped forward and fired three shots into his chest at close range.
Gandhi was 78 and had spent decades leading India’s nonviolent struggle for independence, achieved only months earlier in August 1947. Godse opposed Gandhi’s commitment to religious tolerance and his conciliatory stance toward Pakistan after the bloody partition of the subcontinent.
The man who preached against violence was felled by it within sight of a prayer ground.
The killing stunned a nation still raw from partition’s communal bloodshed. Godse and a co-conspirator were tried, convicted, and hanged in 1949. Gandhi’s death turned him into an enduring global symbol of peaceful resistance, an influence later cited by figures from Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela.
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