No less remarkable was the way a section of writers sympathetic to the RSS quietly went about sanitising the organisation’s past soon after Godse was hanged on November 15, 1949. In a manner which scarcely aroused any suspicion, they sought to push a false notion to dissociate the RSS from Gandhi’s assassin. In time, the fabrication of history they resorted to became a commonly accepted fact, subsuming the voices questioning the veracity of Godse’s court statement and obfuscating his real life even more.
Among the many lies the assassin had told in court, the one that endured the most — and virtually overshadowed all other aspects of the story of his life — was his claim that he had left the RSS and joined the Hindu Mahasabha, the political party of Hindu supremacists, long before he killed Gandhi. Though Godse’s court statement was fundamentally directed at establishing that he alone was responsible for the murder, in later years his claim regarding the RSS was picked up and trumpeted as the biggest fact of his life. For out of this claim arose a line of argument that willy-nilly served the RSS’s desperate desire to cover its tracks.
When Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948, the RSS had asserted that the assassin had never been its member; an assertion that no one took seriously. After Godse delivered his court statement, the RSS totally revised its line. It now argued that the assassin did indeed join the RSS, but that he quit the organisation a few years later as soon as he
— source thewire.in | Dhirendra K. Jha | 06/Jan/2022