On Jan. 30, 1948, shots rang out in New Delhi that plunged the entire Indian subcontinent into silence. Mahatma Gandhi, architect of India's freedom struggle and rigorous practitioner of nonviolent civil resistance, was shot dead at point-blank range by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse.

Ever since, historians have contemplated a vexing question: Was it just a single man who killed Gandhi, or was the assassination the goal of an entire ideology? At the time, the Hindu nationalist movement washed its hands of the murder. But in 2015, nothing demonstrates the loss of contemporary Hindu nationalism's moral compass so much as its new campaign to anoint Godse a national hero.

What was the chief attribute of Godse's so-called heroism? Perhaps his persistence. It would be hard to find a more determined stalker in history. Godse had, with a band of co-conspirators, been shadowing and confronting Gandhi since the early 1930s and had been part of two previous attempts to assassinate him. A member first of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (India's most powerful Hindu nationalist group then, as now) and then a more radical outfit called the Hindu Mahasabha, Godse was one with the Hindu nationalists of his time in their hostility toward Gandhi, a committed but resolutely independent-minded Hindu.