After the war, the Labour Party came into power in Britain and one of the first concerns of the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was to grant India independence. But it would come at a deadly price: Partition – which made no geographic, economic or sociological sense. Nothing moved Jinnah from his demand for Pakistan for Muslims. He called for “Direct Action” in August 1946. Within days, communal riots claimed 5,000 lives.

Now an old man of 75, Gandhi toured riot-hit villages, one day staying in a Muslim’s home and the next at a Hindu’s. By 1947, the subcontinent had resigned itself to Partition and the great exodus began for 12 million refugees consisting of Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi, now on the fringe of political activity, set off for Calcutta as he sensed trouble brewing there. After calming Calcutta, he quietly left for Delhi and began another fast for national peace.

By now Gandhi was increasingly being seen by Hindu fanatics as responsible for Partition. On 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse, a protégé of a militant Hindu ideologist, bent to touch Gandhi’s feet at a prayer meeting and straightened with a revolver in his hand. He pumped three bullets into the frail old man. Before Gandhi fell down lifeless, he uttered the name of God. 

“The light is no more,” India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared on national radio. Yet, a thousand years later, that light will still be seen and felt. Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the venerable Dalai Lama accepted it as “a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of non-violent action for change, Mahatma Gandhi, whose life taught and inspired me”.