Meanwhile, the roads leading to Birla House on Albuquerque Road were getting choked. VIPs, Cabinet ministers, Congress leaders, diplomats, senior bureaucrats and others vied for space with the common people for a last glimpse of Gandhi. The police were finding it difficult to control the crowds as well as carry out investigations. Senior officers requested Devdas and Pyarelal to shift the body to a place where people could see it from the road. The Birla family was consulted and it was decided that the body would be kept on an elevated platform, on the first floor terrace, facing the road. The makeshift platform was slightly tilted so that the body would be seen by all. When Gandhi's body was moved, a hush fell over the crowd. The sight of Gandhi had calmed them down. That night Nehru addressed the nation from the studios of All India Radio. In a voice choking with grief and overwhelming sadness, he said, 'Friends ... the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere and I do not quite know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation is no more .... We will not see him again as we have for these many years. We will not run to him for advice and seek solace from him. The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illuminated this country for these many years will illuminate this country for many more years and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented the living truth, and the eternal man was with us with his eternal truth reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.'
At midnight, the body was brought down from the terrace; it was bathed and anointed with sandalwood paste and then placed in the centre of the room covered with flowers. Next morning, at 11.30 am the bier, with Gandhi's body wrapped in the tricolour, was placed on a weapon-carrier. Dr. Sushila Nayyar arrived just as the funeral procession was about to start. She bid a tearful adieu to him, whose medical wellbeing had been her responsibility during the past few years. The cortege started with Devdas and his elder brother Ramdas, who had rushed from Nagpur in Central India. Nehru, Patel and other Cabinet ministers stood around the body on the gun carriage. Others walked alongside.
The weapon-carrier was drawn by two hundred soldiers from the three wings of the armed forces. Three aircraft of the Indian Air Force passed over the cortege and showered flowers. If the people passing by Birla House had resembled a river in spate, the people lining the route resembled an ocean of humanity. By a rough estimate the number of people accompanying the funeral was more than a million. People lined the route, stood on balconies and terraces of buildings. Others climbed onto trees and some daredevils took refuge on top of light and telephone poles. Many climbed on to the War Memorial, others clung to the pillars of the canopy of King George V's statue. Passing through the roads of New Delhi the procession reached the cremation ground on the banks of the river Yamuna at 4.20 pm. People had started gathering there since morning. Somewhere in that crowd, Gandhi's eldest son Harilal*, a derelict, tried to get close to his father's body. Being the eldest son it was his duty to perform the last rites, but dressed as he was in rags, no one was going to allow him to come anywhere near the funeral pyre. That privilege was for the elite. In death, Gandhi had been put beyond the reach of the common people with whom he had been one throughout his life.
At 4.30 pm the body was placed on a funeral pyre made of 600 kilos of sandalwood, 160 kilos of ghee, 80 kilos of incense, 40 kilos of coconuts and 15 kilos of camphor. It was ironic that the voluntarily impoverished Gandhi was being accorded a funeral befitting a king. Finally, the tricolour was removed; Devdas sprinkled water from the Ganges on the body, a final act of purification, and then placed sandalwood logs on it. The pyre was lit by his elder brother Ramdas, while the eldest son Harilal watched from afar. Gandhi's second son Manilal lived in South Africa and was unable to attend the funeral.
The flames grew in intensity and so did the chant 'Mahatma Gandhi amar ho gaye', 'Mahatma Gandhi has become immortal'. Some people sat down on an all-night vigil, while the entourage returned to Birla House. At last Harilal got a chance to approach his father's funeral pyre. He had fought with Gandhi throughout his adult life and yet he felt compelled to grieve at his funeral pyre.
It was after twenty-four hours of Gandhi's murder that people began to ask questions. How could this happen? Who could have done such a heinous deed? Why Gandhi? Could this not have been prevented? What were the police doing? But the events that led to Gandhi's murder had been set in motion long back. The first documented attempt on his life, in India, had occurred as far back as in 1934, in Poona, and then there were four more, all of which had some connection with Poona. In three of them, the involvement of the Apte-Godse gang, his eventual killers, had been clearly established. The last unsuccessful attempt had taken place at Birla House just ten days before, on 20 January 1948.
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* Harilal had been very close to his father in South Africa. During the Satyagraha for civil rights in that country, he had come to be known as 'Chota Gandhi', 'Gandhi Junior'. He was the first to use fasting as a form of protest there when he forced his jailors to treat him in a humanitarian way. But then he fought with his father and left him. One of the issues between them was Harilal's desire to study further while Gandhi preferred for him to become an activist like him. Another issue was Harilal's marriage to Gulab; Gandhi felt both were too young to get married. Harilal's several attempts to establish a business failed. He lost his wife Gulab in the influenza epidemic and was forced to send his children to live in his parents' home. Soon after, he turned destitute. He was patronised by some Muslims who intended to use him to place Gandhi in an embarassing situation. They endeared themselves to Harilal by encouraging and financing his drinking habits and other vices and, after gaining his confidence, they induced him to convert to Islam. After a much-publicised conversion, Abdullah Gandhi's, Harilal's Muslim name, patrons publicly invited Gandhi to accept his son's adopted religion. Throughout his life Gandhi had always expressed very strong views against conversions. He criticised his son's conversion and termed it inconsequential and something that would not bring glory to Islam. Realising that they had failed to humiliate Gandhi, the vested interests abandoned Harilal. In a fit of depression, Harilal went on a drinking binge and was arrested by the Madras police for committing public nuisance. When his identity was established, Gandhi was informed about it. Gandhi publicly disowned Harilal; in private he expressed his defeat in not being able to save his firstborn from ruin.
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THE MURDERERS
'Bachche hain, abhi yeh samajhte nahin hai. Maroonga to yaad karenge ke boodha theek kehta tha.'
'They are children. They do not understand the situation now. When I am dead, then they will remember that what the old man had said was right.'
–MAHATMA GANDHI
on 20 January 1948
All the members of the gang who murdered Gandhi, although very diverse in nature, shared a common characteristic—they were all fanatics. A pathological misogynist; a debonair womaniser; and an orphaned street urchin who had made it big and become a bigot; a revolutionary turned collaborator; a rogue arms merchant and his servant; a homeless refugee seeking revenge; a hero-worshipping kid brother; a doctor who believed in killing rather than saving lives. The weapon was a gun, which travelled across three continents, before finally reaching the hands of Gandhi's assassin.
The members of the gang of murderers were Narayan Dattatreya Apte, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Digambar Ramchandra Badge, Shankar Kistayya, Madanlal Kashmirilal Pahwa, Gopal Vinayak Godse, and Dr Dattatreya Sadashiv Parchure.
For fourteen years, the Hindu Mahasabha had been plotting to kill Gandhi, and the participation of Poona-based Narayan Apte and Nathuram Godse has been reported in a majority of t
hese attempts. For the major part of these years, Narayan Apte was the leader of the gang. Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's eventual murderer, was a committed member of the gang; an idealistic underling, he had forged a very close bond with Apte.
Godse was born into a middle class Chitpavan Brahmin family. The term Chitpavan literally means 'purified by the holy fire'; the Chitpavans are believed to be of pure Aryan lineage. Another opinion is that they are Jewish descendants of one of the lost tribes of Egypt. Among the many illustrious Chitpavan Brahmins were Gandhi's 'political guru' Gopal Krishna Gokhale and the firebrand leader of the hawks in Congress, 'Lokmanya' Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
The Godses originated from a small village called Uksan in western Maharashtra. Uksan is about ten kilometres from Kamshet, a railway station on the Bombay-Poona line. Vinayak Godse, Nathuram's father, worked as a minor official in the government-run Indian Postal Services. Vinayak was married in 1892 to a ten-year-old girl from the Chitpavan Brahmin community. Their first three sons, born in rapid succession, died in infancy. Only a daughter, their second born, survived. The elders of the family consulted a soothsayer who said that, as the family was suffering the ill effects of a curse, no male child would survive. The only way to negate this curse was by cheating fate: they would have to bring up their next male offspring as a girl. Vinayak and his wife performed rituals to appease the gods and seek protection for their unborn sons. They swore that, at birth, they would get the baby boy's left nostril pierced and make him wear a nose ring, a common practice for newborn girls. A boy was born to the couple on 19 May 1910. At birth he was named Ramchandra, later shortened to 'Ram'. As promised, the boy's left nostril was immediately pierced and he was made to wear a nose ring (called nath in Marathi). Thus the boy came to be called Nathuram, 'Ram who wears a nose ring'. Although the nose ring was later discarded, after all the subsequent male children survived, the name stuck. Ramchandra was for the rest of his life called Nathuram. Nathuram was followed by Dattatreya, Gopal and Govind, and another daughter.
A lowly postal worker, Vinayak could not adequately provide for a family of four sons and two daughters, and the family was always short on rations and other necessities. Employees of postal departments were frequently transferred, and thus Vinayak spent many years away from the family during the formative years of his children's life. Nathuram grew up largely without the protective presence of his father. The child was mercilessly teased and traumatised for having to live as a girl. Young Nathuram soon turned into a brooding loner, who would sit, lost in a world of dreams. Soon he was branded 'different'. As was prevalent in those days, people with personality traits other than normal, were either branded as 'idiots' or, if lucky, said to possess divine powers; Nathuram belonged to the latter. The Godse family believed that Nathuram was blessed with paranormal powers. They believed that he would go into a trance when made to look at a black spot painted on a copper plate using lantern soot; they believed he saw figures and heard divine messages. They also claimed that, during the trance, Nathuram spoke to them in the voice of the family deity and that the deity answered their questions through him. Nathuram, of course, could never recall what he said during these trances. He was known to suffer from migraine and was prescribed medication for it. Finally, at the age of sixteen, the trances stopped. Gopal Godse writes that Nathuram gave up being a medium for his family voluntarily.
Nathuram was initially educated in the village school in Marathi, his mother tongue. After completing primary school, he was sent to Poona for his matriculation. Nathuram was not academically inclined, but loved to read mythologies and the scriptures in Marathi. However, as he was unable to master the English language, he could not complete his matriculation. He was a healthy youth who was known as the best swimmer in his village. A matric pass was the minimum requirement to get a job as a junior clerk, the bottom-most rung in the government service. Vinayak was now nearing retirement age and was keen that his eldest son get a job in his department so that he could provide for the family. But Nathuram could never cross the matriculation hurdle. He tried to take up carpentry but gave up after learning the rudiments. When he was nineteen, his father was transferred to the scenic but sleepy seaside hamlet of Ratnagiri on the west coast of Maharashtra.
Ratnagiri had become the place of confinement of Vinayak D. Savarkar and before him, the exiled king of Burma. Savarkar had begged for clemency from the King Emperor after spending fourteen years in the Cellular Jail, at Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. In return of a promise of obedience and loyalty to the British and good conduct, Savarkar was shifted to Ratnagiri where his movements were restricted to within the district limits.
Nathuram had heard about Savarkar being around, and one day he visited the Savarkar residence. His life was never the same again.
Nathuram soon became a regular visitor to the Savarkar home. His political indoctrination had begun; Nathuram had finally found a guru. In Savarkar he saw the father who had never been there for him. Savarkar's desire for Hindu resurgence and a militant version of Hinduism appealed to the youngster and he soon became an ardent devotee. As a consequence of the agreement with the British, Savarkar had pledged not to indulge in political activities, not to deliver political speeches in public, even his books could be published only if the publishers certified that they were devoid of any political message. But Savarkar gave vent to his feelings in private; there were no restrictions on what he said within the four walls of his home provided by the British, and visitors were free to come and go. Most of what was said in the Savarkar home was not anti-British, but anti-Congress and anti-Muslim. For Nathuram, who had failed at everything else, this was an opportunity to make a mark.
Impressed by Nathuram's devotion, Savarkar appointed him as his secretary. Nathuram picked up the rudiments of English by listening to Savarkar and started mimicking his style of speaking. He soon became proficient in writing and speaking English.
In 1931, Vinayak Godse finally retired from the postal department. He decided that they would have to shift to a small town where his meagre pension would be sufficient to meet the needs of his large family. The Godse family settled down in the small town of Sangli in south-west Maharashtra. To supplement his father's pension, Nathuram learnt tailoring and set up a shop. This too was insufficient, so to add to the family income he started selling fruits. During this time, some upper caste Hindus got together in Nagpur, in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, the geographical centre of British India, to establish a Hindu Sangathana. This was the precursor to the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. The idea was to forge a militant Hindu organisation, which would espouse, under the guise of Hindu supremacy, upper caste Hindu supremacy. The founders were all Maharashtrian Brahmins. They opposed the Gandhian policy of uniting all Indians, equal partnership for the Muslims and the absolutely abhorrent policy, to the Brahmins, of equality for the untouchables, to bring them to the same level as the rest of Hindu society. Gandhi was their main enemy; the Congress, then under his sway, was also hated by this group. Their call to the Hindu upper castes was to forsake Gandhi's non-violence and take up arms. The founders of the Hindu Sangathana were very influenced by Savarkar and before forming the organisation had confabulated with him in Ratnagiri. In fact, the idea of such an organisation was first mooted by Savarkar.
Nathuram had served his master in Ratnagiri while the idea of the sangathana was being discussed; he knew that Savarkar had blessed the birth of the militant Hindu Right wing organisation. So, when a branch of the sangathana was opened in Sangli, Nathuram was first to join up and was soon appointed secretary. He was now in his twenties and his parents wanted him to marry a girl from their caste. However, Nathuram was still not over the trauma of having spent his childhood as a girl. He had now developed a severe aversion to the opposite sex and he vehemently refused marriage.
In 1937, the British allowed partial participation to Indians in the governance of their country. Elections were held for some of the provinces a
nd Congress-led provincial governments were sworn in with limited powers. The Bombay province elected its first Congress government, and their first act was to lift the restrictions imposed by the British on Savarkar. Finally a free man, he decided to move to Bombay. The Hindu Sangathana and other Savarkarites got together and took him on a tour of Maharashtra. He delivered lectures in various towns and cities; one of the places he visited was Sangli. Nathuram, as the secretary of the local branch, was in charge of all the arrangements for Savarkar's stay in Sangli. Savarkar also trusted him due to his close acquaintance with him in Ratnagiri. Nathuram joined Savarkar's staff and accompanied him on the rest of the tour. Nathuram decided that living in Sangli was stifling his growth. He had to shift to a more centrally located place close to Bombay and Savarkar; he closed down his shop in Sangli and moved to Poona. Although he did open a tailoring shop there, most of his time was spent in the activities of the Hindu Sangathana. After Savarkar's release, the Hindu Sangathana had launched its political programmes in earnest. Not surprisingly, none of the programmes were for India's freedom, not even against the British colonialists. The Hindu Sangathana had only two enemies in India: The first was Gandhi, and the second, Indian Muslims.
Lets Kill Gandhi Page 3