Under Savarkar's leadership, the Hindu Sangathana changed into the Hindu Mahasabha. Their aim was a Hindu nation, with the Muslims, if they remained, as second-class citizens. Nathuram now worked twenty-four hours a day as a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. The training he had received in Ratnagiri came in handy. He became a passionate preacher of the Hindu supremacist cause. In 1938, the Mahasabha launched a march on the princely state of Hyderabad, which was ruled by the Nizam and his razakars, a vicious group of thugs who terrorised Hindus living in the state. Nathuram was entrusted the leadership of the first batch of marchers; he was arrested and was imprisoned for a year. By the time he was released, the Second World War had broken out. As the principal British colony, India was also affected by the tides of war.
The Congress refused to co-operate with the British war effort; the Muslim League led by Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha led by Savarkar decided to work for the British. Both had selfish motives: Jinnah thought he would be able to get a special deal for himself and his party after the war; Savarkar felt this was his opportunity to get close to the British. Everyone knew that Indian independence was a certainty. Gandhi and the people of India had done their bit, now the race was on to grab the biggest piece of the freedom pie for themselves; the Congress had already ensured its share.
After his release from prison Nathuram returned to Poona. His activities in the Hindu Mahasabha had increased, now that Savarkar was trying to create a national party from one that had only regional standing and support within the Maharashtrian Brahmin community. In 1940, Nathuram again met someone with whom he was going to develop a life-long bond. Narayan D. Apte had just returned from Ahmednagar, where he had been working for the Mahasabha. The two young men were as different as chalk and cheese, but as it usually happens, they instantly formed a bond which was to last them for the rest of their years. In 1942, to fill the vacuum created by the mass arrests of Congress leaders and workers, Savarkar mooted the idea of forming a Hindu Rashtra Dal, members of which would be the storm troopers of the Hindu Mahasabha. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte joined the Dal. For all of Savarkar's grandiose plans, the Dal became a truncated version of the Hindu Mahasabha. At its peak the Dal had a membership of not more than 150 members, confined to Poona. Its members were given martial training and were indoctrinated in the Savarkar philosophy of intolerance and bigotry. Its only visible activity was disrupting Congress meetings, heckling Congress leaders and hounding Gandhi. Nathuram and Apte were at the forefront of these activities.
In 1944 Nathuram broached, to Apte, the idea of starting a newspaper espousing the ideals of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Dal. On the Hindu new year day, Gudi Padva, in Maharashtra, the first issue of the Agranee was published. The front page, like all the subsequent issues, carried a portrait of Savarkar. Nathuram was the editor and Apte the publisher. The paper was launched with the blessings of Nathuram's godfather Savarkar, who had gifted Rs. 15,000 to the two friends for their venture.
India was in turmoil: freedom was at last within its grasp, but storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. The Muslim League had taken an adamant stand by insisting on an independent Muslim homeland. Gandhi and the Congress were vehemently opposed to any vivisection of India. But the British were keen to reward their wartime allies. It served the purpose of dividing the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent and exploiting the resulting disturbances to prolong their rule over the colony. The Hindu Mahasabha decided to exploit the situation. With the Muslims shifting to their own homeland, their dream of a pure Hindu nation would be fulfilled. In the event of a partition, they would 'encourage' Indian Muslims to immigrate en masse to Pakistan.
Nathuram and Apte, now inseparable, were in the forefront of these activities. Nathuram had accepted the more dynamic and extroverted Apte's leadership. Their joint venture Agranee was barely managing to survive. Savarkar, however, kept them afloat with gifts of cash. Agranee faced continuous prosecution for infringements of the Press Act from the Bombay provincial government. The language and content of the paper was extremely rabid, right from its inception to its death in 1947. It was served notices and fined and only allowed to continue on furnishing cash deposits which were increased from time to time. This continuous prosecution increased the" anger Nathuram felt for the Congress and its leaders. Finally, just before the government issued orders to close it down, Apte and Godse renamed the newspaper as Hindu Rashtra.
On the personal front, Nathuram was still rejecting every proposal of marriage brought by his parents. The only habit he cultivated was an addiction to coffee. Apte and he would frequent the tea-rooms of Poona, one of their favourite haunts being the restaurant at the station. Throughout his life Nathuram was able to form relationships and close bonds only with men. He was instantly attracted to men with dynamic and extroverted personalities; thus he bonded in a hero-disciple relationship with Savarkar in his formative years and then formed a bond of subordination to the extroverted and flamboyant Narayan Apte, who was actually a year younger than him. He hated with equal passion, and the target of his pathological hatred was another very strong and dynamic man, Mahatma Gandhi.
The fear of rejection and failure haunted Nathuram continuously. Having failed to kill Gandhi several times, and especially after 20 January 1948, Nathuram, in a fit of desperation to prove their detractors wrong and succeed at least once, took the lead in the final attempt on Gandhi's life. When he finally pumped bullets into Gandhi on 30 January 1948, the eldest son of Vinayak Godse succeeded at something for the first time.
The second accused in the Gandhi murder case was Narayan Dattatreya Apte, a Brahmin from Poona. Apte, born in 1911, belonged to a family of scholars. He was extroverted, flamboyant and an incorrigible womaniser. Wine, women and all the luxuries of life were his weaknesses. He smoked and drank, and unlike a Brahmin, even relished meat; he loved to wear western clothes, like a pucca gentleman of the Raj. Apte was blessed with looks women were charmed by. He had a way with them and exploited this to move from one relationship to another. Where Nathuram was repulsed by the mere shadow of a woman, Narayan was attracted to them like a moth to the glow of a lamp.
Narayan's parents lived in Poona. His father, Dattatreya Apte, was a Sanskrit scholar and a well-known historian. Like Nathuram, Narayan was the first born of his parents; like Nathuram he also headed a large brood of siblings, three sisters and four brothers; but unlike the uneducated Nathuram, Narayan did his matriculation from Poona and then graduated from Bombay University in 1932 with a Bachelor's degree in science.
As was customary in Indian families, Apte's parents arranged his marriage immediately after his graduation, to a girl from a family of Brahmins of the same caste. Champa Fadtare was from an old and influential Brahmin family of Poona, and were far more affluent than the Aptes. To Narayan's parents, Champa was a perfect match for their son: her family with their influence and wealth would be able to arrange an appropriate job for their unemployed son. After three years of unemployment, Apte secured a job as a tutor in the American Mission High School in Ahmednagar run by an American missionary.
Apte worked hard at his job. He had decided to make a career in teaching, and to be eligible as a teacher for higher classes he had appeared for, and passed, the Bachelor of Education exam. He was also politically inclined, and like many other Maharashtrian Brahmin youth of that time, was attracted to Savarkar. While in Ahmednagar Narayan established a rifle club with a shooting gallery that could only use .22 calibre guns firing slugs instead of bullets, due to restriction on the use of firearms by Indians, imposed by the British rulers after the first battle for freedom in 1857. The Congress government of Bombay province issued a license for the first Civilian Shooting Club. Narayan's club became very popular and was soon replicated in Poona and many towns of Maharashtra.
In 1939 Narayan Apte joined the Ahmednagar branch of the Hindu Mahasabha headed by its founder Vishnu R. Karkare, a hotelier. Apte did not have much respect for Karkare, who despite being semi-illiterate was
a self-made man. The cool vibes were reciprocated by Karkare, a Hindu zealot, who could not bring himself to trust a person working for a Christian missionary institution. It was during this time that Apte came in touch with Nathuram.
While Apte was in Ahmednagar, Champa bore him a son. Narayan was overjoyed, he adored his first-born male child and affectionately called him Pappan. However, tragedy was round the corner for the Aptes. They soon discovered that things were not quite right with their son as he did not show intellectual development. It was initially dismissed as the anxiety of the young parents, then brushed off with the explanation that some babies were slow. But by the time Pappan was two, it was painfully apparent that he suffered from a very debilitating mental disorder. Narayan was shattered; he wanted to give up Ahmednagar and also his fledgling career. The grief of fathering a severely intellectually impaired child drove him away from Champa and very soon into the arms of other women.
Though Narayan was still working in Ahmednagar, Godse and he kept in touch. Ahmednagar was then the hotbed of the Hindu Mahasabha's activities; it was the launching point for raids on the Muslim princely state of Hyderabad ruled by the Nizam. Karkare was one of the foremost organisers of these raids. Apte planned to launch a mortar and stengun fire attack on the Nizam's court. None of these daredevil raids ever materialised in reality, but they were attractive enough to induce wealthy and gullible supporters to finance them.
The most frequent method used by the Karkare-Apte gang to harass Muslims, was attacking families travelling by road at night and some times waylaying buses carrying Muslims. Hijacking goods transported by road by Muslim traders and damaging or destroying them was another method often employed by the gang. The razakars were also equally efficient and sometimes more brutal in dealing with Hindus in Muslim-dominated areas.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Savarkar ordered his followers to co-operate with the British and to join the army in large numbers. Apte took a job as a wartime recruiter in the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF). He was given a wartime commission; his stint with the RIAF would last the duration of the war. He was posted in Poona with a temporary rank of flight lieutenant. This entitled him to wear a uniform with the insignia and all the accoutrements, a handy tool for seducing young women. At last Apte could leave Ahmednagar and a job he was getting bored of. His only consolation was that he taught a lot of young women and had charmed many of his female students. There were many tearful farewells when he quit his job at the mission school. One of the grieving girls was Manorama Salvi, a seventeen-year-old shy Christian girl from Bombay. Apte gave his female students his Poona address and told them that they were always welcome to visit him. One of the students who carefully preserved and later used the address to re-establish contact with Narayan was Manorama.
Due to the paucity of officers during wartime, Narayan was offered a permanent commission by the RIAF. Apte was overjoyed, a career as a commissioned officer was respectable and secure. It brought along with it many perks, a home, subsidised goods, high quality education for children and a life-long pension. But Apte decided not to take it. The official reason he gave was that his father had died and as the head of a Hindu joint family he was now responsible for the upkeep and welfare of his widowed mother and siblings. He could not hold down a job, which would bring with it transfers at short notice, and during wartime, a possible transfer to the front lines. The other reason was that the condition of his son Pappan had worsened. Champa too had begun showing signs of breaking down. She considered Pappan to be her sole responsibility and her life revolved around him. Narayan had been advised to put Pappan in an asylum, but he knew that Champa would not be able to bear the loss of her son. So, Apte chose to keep his temporary wartime commission as long as he was based in Poona.
He had a lot of spare time because there was hardly any recruiting taking place in Poona. The Congress' call for non-cooperation had put a stop to the recruitment drive. With time to spare Apte and Nathuram devoted an increasing amount of time to Mahasabha work. It was at this juncture that Savarkar launched the Hindu Rashtra Dal. Both Apte and Godse were soon given responsibilities and were rewarded with official positions. When Godse broached the idea of starting a newspaper, Apte agreed and so the two of them became partners in Agranee.
This was the time when the Apte-Godse gang began its systematic hounding of Gandhi. After his release from imprisonment in the Aga Khan Palace, Gandhi spent a few months at the cool mountain resort of Panchgani, very close to Poona. Narayan Apte and Nathuram Godse led a gang of Dal members to Panchgani and for a week took out processions, shouting slogans abusing Gandhi and the Congress. Apte was detained and was later interrogated by Deputy Superintendent N.Y. Deulkar, who was to later play a key role in the investigation into Gandhi's murder. The Times of India, in its edition dated 23 July 1944, reported the incident at Panchgani, stating that Gandhi was heckled by a group of young men lead by a journalist from Poona, N.D. Apte. According to an eyewitness account of this incident, Nathuram was caught hold of by volunteers as he rushed towards Gandhi brandishing a knife. Gandhi then asked that Nathuram be allowed to go. He invited Apte and his group of protestors to come and live with him and talk to him. Apte and Nathuram rejected the offer and returned to Poona.
While holding down two jobs, one as a commissioned recruitment officer for the RIAF and the other as the manager of Agranee, along with his activities in the Hindu Mahasabha, Narayan still found time to start an illicit liaison with his former student Manorama Salvi. She was now studying in Wilson College in Bombay, and stayed in the Ramabai Hostel for Girls which was attached to the college. She wrote to Apte, and a few days later, resplendent in an Air Force officer's uniform, he presented himself at the hostel matron's office. The usually very strict Mrs. Hewat was charmed by the dashing young officer, and when he asked to meet Manorama and a couple of other girls, who were his ex-students, permission was granted immediately. Apte took the three young women out for a film. Soon Narayan became a regular visitor to the hostel, but now asked only for Manorama. He used to write to her using a girl's name 'Nirmala'; and very soon the two became lovers. Manorama would fabricate stories and get permission from the hostel warden to stay out all night. The two would check in as husband and wife in many hotels in south Bombay. Narayan had bought a motorbike and thought nothing of covering the distance of almost a hundred and thirty miles between Bombay and Poona to meet Manorama, while he pretended to be a devoted husband to Champa, his legally wedded wife.
At the end of the war, Narayan's commission in the RIAF ended. Now both Nathuram and Narayan were solely dependent on Agranee for their livelihood.
Meanwhile, the rift between the Hindus and Muslims was widening. The hard-headed stance taken by Jinnah and the Muslim League in demanding an independent Muslim homeland, and the obstinate refusal by the Congress to reach an understanding with the Muslim League, was polarising the Hindus and Muslims. The till-then floundering Right wing Hindu political front was finding new converts. This helped the duo to resuscitate the dying Agranee. As circulation increased, revenues began to flow in, and they able to get funding for many of their schemes to attack Muslims from moneyed and gullible Hindus. For some time, in pre-Independence India, it became easy for both Muslim and Hindu fanatics to get funds and converts to their campaigns.
Nathuram and Narayan soon started looking to expand their publication. They acquired a plot of land to build an office, which would house their newly acquired printing press. A shed was built at 495 Shanwar Peth, an old locality of Poona, from where Agranee and the Shivaji Printing Press started operating.
It was 1946; India was to be torn asunder by the massacres of Hindus in the riots following the Muslim League-backed Direct Action Day. The League was hell-bent on terrorising the administration and the Congress in particular, to get them to agree to their demand for a separate Muslim homeland. If innocent Hindus had to be sacrificed, so be it. And if there was a Hindu backlash against the Muslims it would further th
eir demand for a separate Pakistan. It did.
Elections to the provincial assemblies and the Central Constituent Assembly were held and in most provinces of India, the Congress formed governments. The viceroy ruled as a caretaker with the help of an All India Cabinet. Bombay province was once again under the Congress government, and this time they had much more power. The Agranee soon started feeling the heat of the government's persecution. The paper had, during this period of unrest in India, become a very rabid journal; it gave horrific, many a times grossly exaggerated and even fictitious, accounts of the massacres of Hindus. At the same time, Nathuram, in his editorials, egged on Hindus to exact revenge on Muslims everywhere and bitterly attacked the Congress and Gandhi, in particular. The Agranee was slapped with many fines by the provincial government for infringement of the Press Act and for fomenting trouble between Hindus and Muslims. The monitory fines threatened to cripple the venture, which had just started to break even and earn notoriety and some revenues for the partners. To Nathuram and Narayan, this was a case of vindictive harassment by a political opponent. They became progressively bitter towards the Congress, and the focus of their rage was Gandhi.
It was during this time that Narayan Apte again came in contact with Karkare. Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare was born of Brahmin parents. His father died while Vishnu was very young, leaving the child with no memories of his father and childhood. He did not know his date of birth, not unusual in India even today. The fatherless Vishnu initially grew up at the Northcote Orphanage in Bombay. The records of the orphanage show that Vishnu was born in 1910.
Vishnu received only very rudimentary primary education. By the time he was ten, he had escaped from the orphanage and started working as a 'tea boy' at a small tea-room. He did not last too long, but he did learn the trade. One day he ran away to Poona. Very little is known about Vishnu's life in Poona, but he learned to read and write Marathi and learnt to speak Hindi, or 'Hindustani' as it was known then. For the next fifteen years, Vishnu managed to survive in Poona by doing odd jobs. Judging from how he lived as a young man, Vishnu learnt much more than how to survive in Poona. As a young man he was a very ardent supporter of the Hindu extremist ideology.
Lets Kill Gandhi Page 4