Mahatma Gandhi (1948)

Nathuram Godse's assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi on 30 January 1948 removed the one figure capable of restraining the communal violence that had accompanied Partition. Gandhi's death shocked the world and briefly created a political environment in which Hindu nationalist extremism was suppressed in India — though the forces that produced his killer have returned to political dominance in 21st-century India.