Godse wanted India to be a Hindu country and objected to Gandhi's vision of India as a secular, pluralistic democracy. The man who assassinated Gandhi, Nathuram Godse, was a follower of Hindutva - Hindu nationalism. The garden and the house on its premises, now another Gandhi museum, get about 200,000 visitors a year.ДЄ worker cleans a statue of Gandhi in Mumbai on Tuesday, the day before the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Indian philosopher and anti-colonial activist. Some of them have tears in their eyes and go back with a heavy heart,' says researcher Sailaja Gullapalli, giving NPR a tour. 'When people come here, they get highly emotional. At the garden in New Delhi where he was assassinated in 1948, just months after India's independence from Britain, tourists can stroll the stone walkway where Gandhi took his final steps. Practically every major city in the country has at least one Gandhi memorial. His portrait hangs in government offices. In India, Gandhi is nevertheless treated as a saint - the father of the nation. Nehru famously replied that Gandhi was 'a great man, but he had his weaknesses, his moods and his failings.' He begged Attenborough not to turn Gandhi into a saint. In 1962, when British filmmaker Richard Attenborough began researching what would become his 1982 Gandhi film, he asked Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, how he should portray his late colleague. Some question whether the young female was capable of giving consent as a minor to a man who was so revered and so much more powerful than she. Nowadays, most people would call that abuse. He said he wanted to test his willpower to abstain from sex. In his late 70s, before he died at 78, he slept naked with his grandniece when she was in her late teens. But he was also obsessed with his own celibacy. Afterward, Martin Luther King told All India Radio that he'd decided to adopt Gandhi's method of civil disobedience as his own. So curators hauled in two cots, and the American civil rights leader and his wife, Coretta Scott King, spent the night next to Gandhi's vacant mattress. I am going to stay here, because I am getting vibrations of Gandhi,' ' recalls curator Usha Thakkar.

But he said, 'I am not going anywhere else. In an austere top-floor room where Gandhi's mattress and shoes still lay, King said he could feel 'vibrations' of the Mahatma, or great soul. The house, called Mani Bhavan, where the Indian leader taught followers to spin their own fabric and where he launched satyagraha - his movement for truth and nonviolent resistance - had been converted into a museum. It was 1959, 11 years after Gandhi's death. visited the villa in Mumbai, India, where Mohandas Gandhi stayed in the 1920s, he had a special request: He wanted to spend the night in Gandhi's bedroom. Indian spiritual and political leader Mohandas Gandhi circa 1935.

Ghandi and the sugar story