So Nehru killed Gandhi!!!

The return of the RSS and, more importantly, its former Sarsanghchalak K S Sudarshan to the headlines gives me just the right excuse to recount the untold story of my one-on-one dinner with him at Nagpur, my Sudarshan moment. This was the evening before I recorded a long, tell-all interview with him for NDTV's Walk the Talk (April 2005) which set off tremors in the BJP that never really settled. He cursed Vajpayee and all those who mattered to him, politically and personally, ascribed Uma Bharti's unpred-ictability to her social (caste) status and early upbringing, and generally held forth in the manner of the great, couldn't-care-less headline hunters. But the fact is, I missed the much bigger story, maybe because I had poor news judgment, certainly by the screaming standards of some of today's news TV. Maybe I was just being a fuddy-duddy old print journalist. Or maybe, just maybe, because I was wise not to make myself look like a fool as well in the desperate hunger for headlines. And some headlines it would have been.As we were being wired for the recording he asked me if I wanted to talk in detail about the points he had mentioned "last night". No, Sudarshanji, I said with some alarm. Having learnt my journalism in more conservative times, I did not particularly want to "ruin" an entire interview listening to him hold forth on Sonia's rise in India as a "Roman Catholic" conspiracy "controlled from Italy" (whose province he thought the Vatican was), or his incredible take on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. But now that he has already gone "public" with his conspiracy theories on Sonia, it is better for me to share with you his even more imaginative take on who killed Gandhi and how, which he shared with me over a very spartan subzi-dal-sukhi-roti meal sitting on the floor at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. Better for me to write about this now before he decides to say it all in public the next time he appears in front of an audience.

... contd.

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