Raghunath Venkatesh Gosavi, a young member of Abhinav Bharat, also testified against Vinayak. He said that prior to 1906 the organization strove to achieve independence through lawful means, but after that, making war and collecting arms became its primary motive. He said that Abhinav Bharat had three categories of people: the revolutionaries (Vinayak, Babarao, Sakharam Dadaji Gorhe, Aabaa Darekar and Vishnu Mahadev Bhat), those who joined for physical training, wrestling and swordplay (Vishnu Mahadev Kelkar, Dhanappa, Purdeshi and Gadgil), and those who prepared others’ minds through inflammatory speeches (Narayanrao Savarkar, Damodar Mahadev Chandratre and Bapu Joshi). A new recruit usually started in the third category and then graduated to the second class after being thoroughly tested. Finally, with the taking of the oath they were considered to be in the first category, i.e., revolutionaries. 51 He also mentioned that outsiders who visited Abhinav Bharat regularly included S.M. Paranjpe, Syed Haidar Raza and Aurobindo Ghose from Bengal. 52
Other testimonies unravelled the physical training imparted to members, the process of initiation, the acquisition, supply and distribution of arms, manufacture of explosives, revolutionary literature and their dissemination and other vital details. One Bapu Joshi revealed that after being arrested, Babarao had instructed Narayanrao in a cryptic manner that he had mistakenly kept a five-rupee note under the roof, and also some cough medicine outside the window. If they did not take these away the cats would eat them up. The allusion was to explosive literature and pamphlets that would fall into police hands. The police found this instruction suspicious and raided the house to find under the eaves a bundle of letters from Vinayak wrapped in a cloth bag and the ‘Bomb Manual’. 53
One of the key witnesses in the trial was the twenty-five-year-old cook of India House—Chaturbhuj Jhaveribhai Amin Patidar 54 who was there for a year and a half since 1907. He was a ‘key witness’ because it was essential for the prosecution to establish, beyond circumstantial evidence, that the pistol used by Kanhere to kill Jackson was from among the lot sent by Vinayak from London. The crux of the case rested on this and this was where Chaturbhuj was to act as the important link for the prosecution. He gave crucial evidence about the meetings at India House presided over by Vinayak and the tenor and content of his speeches. On one evening, Vinayak had taken Chaturbhuj inside his room, fastened it from inside, and made him sit on a chair near a fireplace beside a photograph of Shivaji Maharaj and a lamp with its wick dipped in ghee. He poured some water in the hollow of Chaturbhuj’s right palm and chanted hymns in Sanskrit for about ten minutes, following which, Chaturbhuj took the Abhinav Bharat oath in Hindustani. Chaturbhuj testified that he had to do a lot of clerical work, such as sending pamphlet bundles in boxes with false bottoms and posting them to different people within and outside London. He also printed the ‘O! Martyrs!’ pamphlet in a room next to Vinayak’s at India House after 10 p.m., with Vinayak and Aiyar assisting and supervising. On another occasion, one of the India House boarders, Bhattacharya, had an altercation with Lee Warner and the revolutionaries apprehended a raid on their premises. Vinayak asked Chaturbhuj to destroy several bottles with the word ‘Acid’ written on it. He thereby gave credence to the fact that India House was an explosives laboratory of sorts.
In February 1909, when he was leaving for India, Chaturbhuj asked Vinayak for a loan of £5 to which the latter replied that he was willing to give it provided Chaturbhuj carried a parcel containing pistols back to India. A harried and petrified Chaturbhuj was reassured by Vinayak, who advised him to take an Italian liner where checking was not as stringent. Vinayak and Aiyar personally packed the parcels with false bottoms containing pistols and 149 cartridges. A letter addressed to Hari Anant Thatte, No. 320, Mint Road, Fort, Bombay, was also given to him. On the other side of the envelope was the name and address of Vishnu Mahadev Bhat, 3rd Floor, Madhavashram, Girgaum, Bombay. Thatte was supposed to be the first point of delivery and if he was not available, the package had to be left with Bhat. En route to India, he had stopped at Paris and met Sardar Singh Rana. Chaturbhuj managed to successfully smuggle the pistols to Bombay, via Genoa, without being detected by customs. Being unable to find Thatte, he went to Bhat’s house as advised by Vinayak. He was asked to come back in the evening, when he was introduced to Gopal Krishna Patankar to whom the parcel was handed over in Bhat’s presence. Patankar had managed to shift the pistols to a convenient place near Bombay and he selected Vithoba Marathe of Abhinav Bharat in Pen as the depository. Babarao Savarkar did not want the pistols brought to Nashik given the surveillance there. But Chaturbhuj said that defying Babarao’s wishes, the pistols managed to enter Nashik, through Karve, who got them from Patankar ‘naturally, as they used to talk on national subjects’. 55
At this point, there was quite a debate because of Edward Parker’s (of Scotland Yard) conflicting testimony. He had stayed back in India to testify. 56 He admitted during cross-examination that he kept a close watch on the members of India House and knew that the Browning pistols were bought in Paris by someone other than Vinayak. Baptista cross-examined him on this matter and wanted to prove that Chaturbhuj had possibly bought the pistols in Paris at the insistence of someone else or on his own and that Vinayak was not party to it. The judges however disregarded this completely. Parker’s testimony clearly stated that based on investigations conducted by the Metropolitan Police in London, it was not possible to establish with certainty that it was Vinayak who had ordered the purchase of the pistols. On the one hand, the tribunal accepted Chaturbhuj’s testimony that Vinayak had dispatched twenty Browning pistols, but on the other, it refused to accept the same man’s testimony that Babarao did not want those same pistols in Nashik. The reason for sending the pistols to India, the tribunal decreed, was ‘for only one purpose, a purpose which, the literature disseminated by Vinayak Savarkar shows, was in his opinion, calculated to conduce to the attainment of the ultimate object of the conspirators—the overthrow of the British Government in India’. 57
Meanwhile, Chaturbhuj claimed that after delivering the parcel he returned to Bombay from his native place Virsad a month and a half later. He was then met by Bhat, Thatte and Narayanrao Savarkar. They wanted him to return to London and pass on a message to Vinayak not to return to India lest he be arrested. But Chaturbhuj refused. He was then asked to help them shop for acid at Crawford Market in Bombay. By end December 1909, Chaturbhuj was arrested at his house. It was he who identified Patankar to the police when he saw him at Victoria Terminus.
Baptista cornered Chaturbhuj about the completely contradictory testimonies he had given on 31 December 1909 and 7 January 1910. To these he merely replied that at the time he did not remember the details so minutely, and on careful introspection he managed to revive his memory. Baptista questioned him about why he could not have procured the weapons in Paris itself when it was seemingly such a tough task to smuggle them from London to Paris and then Genoa to Bombay. When he knew he was meeting Madame Cama or Sardar Singh Rana in Paris, would it not have been simpler to get the pistols from them directly? Chaturbhuj had no answer. Several other witnesses opposed Chaturbhuj’s testimonies as being fabricated and exaggerated, but the tribunal summarily dismissed all of them and ruled that ‘since all the established facts point to Vinayak as the source from which the pistols came we accept the story of Chaturbhuj as substantially true’. 58
Gopal Krishna Patankar refused to give any testimony because in his opinion ‘the case against Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is brought by the prosecution with a vindictive attitude’ and his ‘conscience does not tell’ him to take an oath or say anything against ‘his countryman’. 59
Balwant Ramachandra Barve, Vinayak’s childhood friend, who had earlier testified to being a member of the secret society, upset the prosecution case considerably. He said that the police had extracted his earlier testimony under coercion and torture:
Balwant Ramachandra Barve, Vinayak’s childhood friend, who had earlier testified to being a member of the secret society,
upset the prosecution case considerably. He said that the police had extracted his earlier testimony under coercion and torture:
My object in describing V.D. Savarkar as a leader was that he was an excellent poet, an excellent writer, and an excellent speaker. As I know him from boyhood, when we were students, I used to notice these good qualifications of his and as I have heard several lectures by him on swadeshi at Nasik. Among the young people of our age, as he was very smart, I naturally looked upon him as one of the principal leaders . . . It is absolutely false, My Lords, that the Mitra Mela was a political secret society. It was merely a religious mela for singing songs at Ganapati festivals. There was nobody in either a political or secret association called by the name Abhinav Bharat. A body called Abhinav Bharat has been created out of the imagination, from the fact that there is a series of books called Abhinava Bharat Mala and attempting to make it synonymous with Mitra Mela , to suit the purpose of the police theory that there is a large Brahmanical conspiracy to subvert the British Government in the Deccan. 60
A similar volte-face by Sakharam Raghunath Kashikar on 1 December 1910 put the prosecution in a bind. There were clear indications of police intimidation to extract testimonies from many of the accused. 61 In his testimony, Narayanrao Savarkar stated:
I have joined no secret society. I do not know anything of that kind. All my education was given in Nasik—Marathi as well as English. In the year 1906 I was prosecuted in the ‘Vande Mataram case’ with my eldest brother Ganesh but was acquitted afterwards. After the completion of my study in Nasik, I joined the Baroda College in 1908. During the whole of that year, except the vacation, I was at Baroda. In the beginning of 1909 my eldest brother Ganesh was arrested and so I was compelled to leave the College, as there was nobody except myself to attend to my brother’s food, clothing, and defence. When my brother was in lock up, I used to provide him with food etc. As regards the bundle I never saw it, nor did I know what its contents were . . . During the whole of 1909 I was busily engaged in connection with the defence of my brother. After his conviction in Nasik in June, I came to Bombay in July to prefer an appeal on his behalf. I was in Bombay till the decision of the appeal. It is not true that I saw Chaturbhuj in the months of April and May or in any other month I had never seen him. After the decision of the appeal I was considering about my future course when on the 8th of December 1909, I was arrested by the police on suspicion of throwing a bomb at Ahmedabad. I was taken to Ahmedabad, Bombay, Baroda, and Poona and was eventually released on the 18th of December. I had no time even to breathe when on the 23rd of December I was arrested on suspicion about the murder of Mr Jackson . . . my house was searched and nothing was found. 62
Despite these dissonant testimonies to their narrative, the prosecution’s case rested heavily on the various secret and political activities of the erstwhile Mitra Mela and Abhinav Bharat, the literature—books and pamphlets written by Vinayak—found with several members, the details of the oaths, speeches and activities of Abhinav Bharat. The judgment of the case also referred to how successfully they had managed to keep all their activities unknown and secret from the police till the murder of Jackson on 21 December 1909. They managed to establish that these various branches in different cities and towns might not have been formally organized, but they acted in cohort. For instance, the judgment cites that when Babarao was arrested, the paper about explosives that was sent to Patankar by Vithoba Marathe was immediately destroyed; the materials for the manufacture of picric acid were concealed in Nashik after the Jackson murder by Ganu and Deshpande. All of this pointed to a close nexus between members of an association that was formed for seditious purposes. 63
On 23 December 1910, after marathon testimonies and witness depositions, the court delivered its verdict. The outcome was a foregone conclusion, yet tension gripped the courtroom. Knowing well what the verdict would be, Vinayak penned a message, which he titled ‘Pahila Hapta’ (‘First Instalment’). This was to be the first instalment of the repayment of his debt to his motherland:
Pleased be thou, Mother! To acknowledge this little service of thy children.
Boundless is our indebtedness to thee: Thou chose us to bless and suckle at thy breast!
Behold! We enter the flames of this consecrated Fire today.
The First Instalment of that debt of Love we pay.
And totally a new birth, there and then will we immolate ourselves
And over and over again till the hungry God of Sacrifice
Be full and crown thee with glory!
With Shri Krishna for thy redoubtable Charioteer,
And Shri Rama to lead,
And thirty crores of soldiers to fight under thy banner,
Thy army stops not, though we fall!
But pressing on shall utterly rout the forces of Evil
And thy right hand, Oh! Mother! Shall plant the golden banner of Righteousness
On the triumphant tops of the Himalayas! 64
Expectedly, the harshest judgment among all the accused of the Nasik Conspiracy Case was given to Vinayak:
We find the accused guilty of the abetment of waging war by instigation by the circulation of printed matter inciting to war, the providing of arms and the distribution of instructions for the manufacture of explosives. He is therefore guilty of an offence punishable under Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code. We also find him guilty of conspiring with others of the accused to overawe by criminal force or show of criminal force the Government of India and the Local Government and is therefore guilty of an offence punishable under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code . . . Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the sentence of the Court upon you is transportation for life 65 and forfeiture of all your property. 66
A pall of gloom fell over the court. Babarao had already been transported for life to the Andamans. It was now Vinayak’s turn to join him. Narayanrao was given a sentence of six months’ rigorous imprisonment.
But this was not all. The trial regarding the charge of abetment to murder was still pending. This charge was on Vinayak alone. On 23 January 1911, the same special tribunal continued the hearings. While delivering the judgment for this case, the tribunal noted right at the beginning that as per the previous case it had already been well established that Vinayak had sent twenty Browning pistols to India and it ‘was incidentally proved that one of the pistols was used in the murder of Mr Jackson at Nasik’. 67 The tribunal referenced the work done by Babarao and Vinayak right from the time of the Mitra Mela to Abhinav Bharat, where lives of patriots were eulogized, inflammatory speeches delivered and publications prepared—all of which had the sole objective of inciting a rebellion. It was ruled that Vinayak’s speeches of 1906 in Poona in February and in Nashik on 22 April clearly alluded to his motive behind going to England. The entire gamut of Vinayak’s activities in London at India House was also referenced.
A photograph titled ‘Rashtrapurush’ (Patriots)—sourced from one of the Abhinav Bharat’s members, Kashikar—consisted of a collage of revolutionaries such as Khudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki and the Chapekar brothers. The tribunal ruled that Dhingra’s friendship with Vinayak was also proof of his association and inspiration to revolutionary elements. That Vinayak did not know Anant Kanhere or Karve was inconsequential to the case as it were his activities and writings that spurred this very thought among the young men. Despite the fact that the pamphlet ‘Bande Mataram’, allegedly written by Vinayak and calling for terrorizing the British and shedding blood, arrived in India with Chanjeri Rama Rao on 28 January 1910 (a full one month after Jackson’s murder), it was construed as evidence of Vinayak’s hand in the murder.
Based on all these ‘evidences’ the tribunal finally ruled on 30 January 1911 that it found Vinayak guilty of abetment to murder and he was liable to be punished for the same with another transportation for life. 68 On the pronouncement of a double transportation for life, amounting to fifty years of incarceration in the Andaman jails, Vinayak stood up and said: ‘I am prepared to face un
grudgingly the extreme penalty of your laws, in the belief that it is through the sufferings and sacrifice alone that our beloved Motherland can march on to an assured, if not a speedy, triumph.’ 69
The judges were left dumbstruck at the equanimity with which a convict had faced the severest punishment of two life transportations, while anyone else might have broken down and grovelled.
The Hague, February 1911
The last act in this farcical play was enacted at The Hague immediately after Vinayak’s multiple convictions in India. The Quote of Arbitration met, as stipulated, on 14 February 1911. The arbitrators asked the agents of the respective countries to make brief summaries of the arguments contained in the documents that they had submitted to the tribunal. The British agent, Eyre Crowe, mentioned that ‘this request naturally came upon me as a complete surprise, and I had some hesitation whether I should not raise an objection, as it appeared to me that this procedure was not contemplated by the provisions of the compromise’. 70 However, since it was France’s turn to make its arguments first, he got some time to rummage through the voluminous documentation and come up with a summary of Britain’s case.
In the second meeting on 16 February 1911, the French agent, Monsieur André Weiss, made a powerful representation of France’s case. He was the assistant legal adviser of the department of foreign affairs and a professor of law at the University of Paris. Crowe found ‘nothing new was brought forward’ and that the tribunal gave him a patient hearing. The following day Crowe made his submissions.
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