Misinterpretation of Hadith of Geeta?

At the end of his trial, Godse said: “In fact, honour, duty and love of one’s own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence. [In the Mahabharata], Arjun had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations, including the revered Bhishma, because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Ram, Krishna and Arjun as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.”

One of the Mahatma’s sons, Ramdas Gandhi, sought an encounter (which would never take place) with Godse in a letter where he cited a sloka from the Bhagavad Gita and pleaded with him to “introspect a little so that at the end of our proposed meeting you will be able to recite this couplet from the Gita along with us”. Godse was delighted with the proposal, for he knew the Gita by heart and would recite entire chapters in prison. In reply, he wrote: “I thank you for having reminded me of the verses, ‘My ignorance has disappeared, I have regained normalcy’ from the Bhagavad Gita… After Arjun had said, ‘I will do as you say’, he directly translated into practice the words of Lord Krishna, ‘Remember me and fight.’” Obviously, Ramdas Gandhi’s conception of the Gita was very different from his own.

Before his execution, Godse wrote to his parents: “You are the students of the Gita and have also learnt the Puranas. Lord Krishna had recited this Gita to enlighten Arjun and the very same Lord Krishna had, with his Sudarshan wheel, chopped off the head of an Aryan king, Shishupal, not on a battlefield but on a sacrificial ground. My mind is pure and my feelings are absolutely righteous; millions of people might speak in a million different ways, but my mind has not become uneasy or shaken with repentance even for the moment. If there is any heaven, I shall certainly have my place reserved there for me.”

confuzzled dude wrote:

At the end of his trial, Godse said: “In fact, honour, duty and love of one’s own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence. [In the Mahabharata], Arjun had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations, including the revered Bhishma, because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Ram, Krishna and Arjun as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.”

One of the Mahatma’s sons, Ramdas Gandhi, sought an encounter (which would never take place) with Godse in a letter where he cited a sloka from the Bhagavad Gita and pleaded with him to “introspect a little so that at the end of our proposed meeting you will be able to recite this couplet from the Gita along with us”. Godse was delighted with the proposal, for he knew the Gita by heart and would recite entire chapters in prison. In reply, he wrote: “I thank you for having reminded me of the verses, ‘My ignorance has disappeared, I have regained normalcy’ from the Bhagavad Gita… After Arjun had said, ‘I will do as you say’, he directly translated into practice the words of Lord Krishna, ‘Remember me and fight.’” Obviously, Ramdas Gandhi’s conception of the Gita was very different from his own.

Before his execution, Godse wrote to his parents: “You are the students of the Gita and have also learnt the Puranas. Lord Krishna had recited this Gita to enlighten Arjun and the very same Lord Krishna had, with his Sudarshan wheel, chopped off the head of an Aryan king, Shishupal, not on a battlefield but on a sacrificial ground. My mind is pure and my feelings are absolutely righteous; millions of people might speak in a million different ways, but my mind has not become uneasy or shaken with repentance even for the moment. If there is any heaven, I shall certainly have my place reserved there for me.”

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mahatma-gandhis-assassin-seems-to-have-a-political-audience-once-more/

Many individuals and organisations advocate and indulge in violence today, and justify it on the basis of religious texts. January 30, the day Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi, is the starkest reminder in the history of humankind of how the same text can be read differently. Both read the Bhagavad Gita. One became Gandhi. The other became Godse. One became a martyr. The other became a murderer. Jawaharlal Nehru, for whom the Gita was “a poem of crisis, of political and social crisis and, even more so, of crisis in the spirit of man,” wrote in the Discovery of India: “... the leaders of thought and action of the present day — Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose, Gandhi — have written on it, each giving his own interpretation. Gandhiji bases his firm belief in non-violence on it; others justify violence and warfare for a righteous cause ...”

What is curious is the fact that the two opposite interpretations of the Gita that Nehru refers to were responses to the same shared reality that their respective proponents encountered —  colonialism and Christianity. Two strikingly different responses emerge to the same situation. The divergence is evident from the debate between Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. In 1920, Tilak wrote to Gandhi: “Politics is the game of worldly people and not of Sadhus, and instead of the maxim, ‘overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good,’ as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krishna, ‘In whatsoever way any come to me, in that same way I grant them favour.’ That explains the whole difference.” Gandhi replied: “For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the eternal principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth can and must be applied.”

For Tilak, the Gita was a call for action, political and religious. He declared that the Gita sanctioned violence for unselfish and benevolent reasons. While Tilak’s interpretation of the Gita that he wrote while in prison inspired a generation of warriors against British colonialism, it also informed Hindutva politics. Godse used similar arguments to justify the killing of the Mahatma, and quoted from the book during his trial. For Gandhi, the Gita and all religious texts were not excuses for exclusion and bigotry, but inspiration for compassion and confluence.