The light has gone out... A self-proclaimed Ram devotee shot student Shadab Farooq during a Jamia march on a Delhi street only to be coddled by many and sundry

A student of the Jamia Millia Islamia university, injured after an unidentified person allegedly opened firing during an anti-CAA protest PTI

Upala Sen, TT,  2.02.20: That day is clearly not far when someone in some position of authority will make new chronology and claim it was Gandhi who killed Godse, and all to score a ruthless electoral point. We saw a trailer to it this Tees Janvari when a self-proclaimed Ram devotee shot student Shadab Farooq during a Jamia march on a Delhi street only to be coddled by many and sundry.

The CAArus

Before he opened fire, Rambhakt Gopal had hollered: “Aao tumhe azadi deta hoon,” as if azadi was something on clearance sale and not the hard-earned hard-fought thing we have been reared to cherish. Delhi Police watched it all unravel, transfixed. Later, of course, an explanation that sounded much like a critical appreciation was proffered — “By the time police could react, the person had already fired the shot. Everything happened in seconds.” BJP’s Manoj Tiwari said, “I am pretty confident he was one among the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protesters.” The Karnataka unit of the BJP posted a tweet comparing the IIT-JNU scholar booked for sedition, Sharjeel Imam, to Rambhakt Gopal, and captioned it ‘action’ and ‘reaction’. The tweet was later taken down.

Gandhiji is finished

In 1948, moments after the shooting, Gandhi’s assassin had been reportedly seized by Herbert Reiner Jr, a vice-consul at the American embassy in Delhi. Later, Reiner described those moments after the fatal shots thus: “It was more than a half hour before any statement reached those outside and then it was only the terse statement in English by one of the ashram as he emerged through the porch door— ‘Gandhiji is finished’. The simple prayer ceremony which was to have been conducted that afternoon with its recitations from the Bhagavada Gita, the Koran, and Christian hymns never took place.” On January 30, 2020, before the Jamia jeopardy, PM Narendra Modi bowed low before the Mahatma’s samadhi sthal at Rajghat. That day after the shoot, home minister Amit Shah continued to talk about the forthcoming Delhi elections and extolled the PM as one “who conducted airstrikes and surgical strikes on Pakistan’s soil to kill terrorists”. Rambhakt Gopal reportedly told police he had attended “awareness programmes”.