'Before I fired the shots I actually wished him well and bowed to him in reverence...'

Nathuram Godse was arrested moments after shooting Gandhi, and was taken to the nearby Tughlaq Road police station. A reporter who managed to see him briefly in a cell at the police station asked him whether he had anything to say. 'For the present I only want to say that I am not at all sorry for what I have done', he replied. 'The rest I will explain in court. 'Preliminary investigations revealed that he was the editor of a Marathi newspaper - Hindu Rashtra and a well-known member of the HIndu Mahasabha. Clean-cut, sober, intelligent, the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor hardly seemed a candidate for the role of assassin. From time to time he had written scathing editorials denouncing Gandhi and the Congress party, though acquaintances could not recall an occassion when he had spoken bitterly against the Mahatma. He had no personal hatred of Gandhi. Godse even stated in his trial, 'Before I fired the shots I actually wished him well and bowed to him in reverence'.

On 8 November 1948, he was allowed his day in the sun when he rose to make his statement. Reading quietly from a typed manuscript, he sought to explain why he had killed Gandhi. His thesis covered ninety-pages, and he was on his feet for five hours. Godse's statement should be quoted extensively, for it provides an insight into his personality. " Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to rever Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession. I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and Bhangis participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other. I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India amd some prominent countries like England, France, America and Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely what Veer (brave) Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other factor has done.