Nathuram tried on the burqa. It was a perfect fit but he got entangled in the folds of the loose fitting apparel and could not find the revolver in his pocket. When he tried to walk, he almost tripped and fell. This idea was also a non-starter. Nathuram discarded the burqa, and Apte uncharacteristically grumbled about the waste of money.
With no plan for the evening's attempt, they took a cab to Birla Mandir, a temple built by the Birla family, very close to the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan. They walked into the woods behind the temple, and almost at the same spot where they had tried out their guns ten days ago, set up a target on a tree trunk. Nathuram measured twenty-odd paces from the tree and, taking up position, he squeezed off two shots. Both of them hit the tree in the close vicinity of the target. According to Karkare, Nathuram practiced shooting from various distances. This could not have been true. They had been given only seven extra rounds of ammunition in Gwalior. Also, the noise of repeated gunfire would have definitely attracted the attention of forest guards. On the way back, Nathuram told the others that the idea of disguising himself was not working. Instead he would wear something loosely resembling a uniform. On the way back they bought a blue-grey shirt with large pockets and shoulder flaps. They also bought a khaki cap, which resembled an army uniform.
They were back at the retiring room by 1 pm. Nathuram tried on the shirt, which fitted well. It was already time for them to vacate their room. He requested Sundarilal to extend the booking for another twenty-four hours, but the clerk said he could do that only on the orders of the station superintendent. An argument ensued between the two. An infuriated Sundarilal insisted that Nathuram, whom he knew as 'N. Vinayakrau', immediately vacate the room. He stood around till the three walked out with their baggage. Sundarilal then ordered Hari Kishen to lock the room.
This incident stayed with Sundarilal. Hari Kishen, Jannu and the waiter at the non-vegetarian restaurant had all also had a good look at them. Nathuram's amateurish attempt to create an alibi for his accomplices had already been blown away by their own actions. Right from 9 January they had left a mile-wide trail, which would eventually lead the police to all the gang members and their accomplices.
The three then went to the third class waiting room where all passengers were allowed to stay. This was a bare hall with a few benches and tables and was crowded with families and their baggage. Luckily they found a vacant bench. Nathuram decided to stretch out, while the other two sat on the floor next to him. Apte suggested that they should go to Birla House once and see if there were any familiar faces amongst the policeman patrolling there. Apte and Karkare took a cab to the intersection of Akbar Road and Albuquerque Road and walked down the entire length of the road twice, keeping a close watch on the gate. They were relieved that nobody recognised them.
They took a taxi from near the Edward Road Officer's Mess and headed towards Old Delhi railway station, reaching at about 3 pm, where they found Nathuram reading a novel. They sat talking about inane things. The trio was gripped by the emotions of those embarking on a momentous mission. They knew that their actions would change the history of the world; they also knew that Nathuram would be a condemned man. At a quarter past four, Nathuram got up and said, Ata nighayala pahije', 'Must leave now'. He patted his pocket to reassure himself that the gun was there. 'Should we come along?' Apte asked. After coming all the way from Bombay, it was indeed a very surprising question. If they were not going to act as Nathuram's wingmen while he took his position to kill Gandhi, why had they accompanied him?
'Why not?' Nathuram replied. 'Ata ith paryant allat tar shevat paryant raha', 'After you have come so far, you might as well accompany me'. Saying this Nathuram walked off.
After half an hour, Apte and Karkare took a tonga to Connaught Place. They left their bedding and bags in the waiting room. After walking a few paces they got into another tonga and got off a couple of hundred yards away from the gate of Birla House. The two then mixed with the crowd and walked into Birla House. When they reached the prayer grounds they found that the lawns were packed to capacity. Some people were sitting, some were standing while many others were pacing around. Everybody was looking towards the door through which Gandhi emerged every evening to attend the prayer meeting. It was 5 pm. Gandhi was late. There was a murmur in the crowd; he was never late for his prayers. Had something happened? Would he not attend the prayers this evening?
Apte and Karkare found Nathuram waiting on the lawns between the dais and the steps that led up to the terraced garden where the prayers took place. Gandhi would climb up these steps; he would have to go past them on his way to the dais. Apte and Karkare positioned themselves on both sides of Nathuram, just a few paces behind him. None of them showed any signs of recognition.
The time was now fifteen minutes past five. Suddenly there was a murmur; Gandhi had emerged from his room and was slowly making his way towards the prayer lawns.
Nathuram, flanked by Apte and Karkare, now very close behind him, moved to a spot from where it would be easy for them to move directly in Gandhi's path.
Gandhi had reached the steps; the crowd surged towards him. It was threatening to engulf him. It was lucky for the murderers that Gandhi wasn't accompanied by the burly Sikh who normally always preceded him and cleared a path for him. The crowd was disciplined and a path opened up for Gandhi to walk through.
Gandhi had taken his hands off the shoulders of Abha and Manu and was returning the greetings of the crowd with folded hands, while making his way towards the dais.
Nathuram made his move. He moved in from the right and stepped into the path directly in front of Gandhi. Gandhi was a few paces away when Manu saw the young man blocking their path. Nathuram stood with folded hands and said, 'Namaste, Bapu'. Manu requested the young man to move away saying 'Brother, Bapu is late for the prayers ....' Even before she could finish her sentence, the young man had pushed her aside. The spittoon and rosary she was carrying fell down; Manu too tumbled to the ground. As she fell, she recognised Nathuram. She had seen him that afternoon. The next instant Godse whipped out a gun, pointed it at the Mahatma and squeezed off one shot after the other.
Three gunshots rang out. Manu heard Gandhi utter 'He Ram' and then he fell.
It was seventeen minutes past five on the evening of 30 January 1948.
The history of India had changed. The world would no longer be the same.
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* Jamnalal Bajaj, the patriarch of the Bajaj family, whom Gandhi considered his fifth son.
* The Congress, long ago, had declared 26 January as Independence Day. Bapu held to that significance still, though 15 August had supplanted it in reality.
4
* * *
BUNGLING THE INVESTIGATION
'My faith does not allow me to put myself under any human protection at prayer time, when I have put myself under the sole protection of God.'
– MAHATMA GANDHI
21 January 1948
It is difficult to protect someone who refuses to be protected by mere mortals. Gandhi was one such person.
After the failed murder attempt on the 20th, Union Home minister Patel had suggested that more police be deployed to protect Gandhi; the number was increased from five to twenty-five plainclothes policemen. His suggestion of frisking every person who attended the prayer meetings was, however, rejected by Gandhi. He refused to have police present during the prayer meetings, and also did not agree to curtail the number of people who would attend. 'My faith does not allow me to put myself under any human protection at prayer time, when I have put myself under the sole protection of God.'
After Madanlal's arrest, it was initially believed that he had acted on his own; an act of an emotionally distressed refugee. But from Choturam and Sulochana Devi's statements, the police realised that there was more than one person involved in the conspiracy. During his interrogation, Madanlal kept repeating: 'Woh phir ayega', 'He will come back'. The Delhi police came under immense pressure to arrest Ma
danlal's accomplices.
Inspector-General of Police and Director of the Intelligence Bureau T.G. Senjevi was entrusted with the case. When he heard about the involvement of more than one person in the attack and Madanlal's one chilling statement, he assigned his best interrogators to get more information from him. Within two to three hours, hints about the identities of the accomplices and the conspiracy were available to the police. Madanlal had talked about 'Karkare Seth' of Aurangabad, and the editor and publisher of Hindu Rashtra and Agranee and other details. Within a couple of hours he led them to the Marina Hotel where the police found some evidence. The names of the occupants of Room 40 in the hotel register were given as 'M. Deshpande' and 'S. Deshpande', but the laundry given in by the residents bore the initials 'N.V.G.'. Within twenty-four hours the Delhi police had a detailed statement from Madanlal. He spoke Hindustani and Punjabi so the question of using interpreters did not arise. The senior policemen realised that the origin of the gang was in the Marathi-speaking areas of Bombay province and the investigations had to be carried out with the cooperation of the Bombay police.
On the evening of the 21st, after reading the news reports about the bomb attack on Gandhi and the arrest of a Punjabi refugee Madanlal Pahwa, Dr. Jain of Bombay realised that what Madanlal had told him a few days back about his involvement with a gang which was going to 'overpower' Gandhi was true. He then went and met Home minister Morarji Desai, gave him all the details and requested that his identity be kept secret. Desai's behaviour was very surprising. He was known as a staunch Congressman and was famed as a meticulous and disciplined person. However, he did not call any senior police officer to his chamber, nor did he make any notes of Jain's information. Desai could have even ordered Jain's arrest and interrogation. He did none of this.
What he did do was call Deputy Commissioner Nagarvala after Jain left. When Nagarvala expressed his inability to come immediately, Desai requested him to meet him at the Bombay Central railway station later that evening, behaving as if there was no urgency. Before boarding the train to Ahmedabad, Desai asked him to investigate the matter and arrest the person known as 'Karkare Seth'. Desai also mentioned Madanlal's connection with Savarkar, and asked him to watch the latter's house. Desai added that he was meeting Patel in Ahmedabad and would pass on the information he had to the minister.
Nagarvala did not bother to enquire about Desai's source of information. With the information he had, Nagarvala decided that his best bet was to order a round-the-clock surveillance of Savarkar's home. He ordered his officers to get information about any conspiracy by the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha fanatics in general, and the involvement of refugees, in particular. As we already know, two policemen from Delhi, Jaswant Singh and Inspector Balkishen, were rushed to Bombay by plane, with a copy of Madanlal's statement. They were also told to go to Poona to meet Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Police Raosaheb Gurtu and brief him about Madanlal's statement.
As from the colonial times, it is mandatory in India to register newspapers and periodicals under the Press Act. One visit to the department of the registrar of newspapers would have revealed the identity of the editor and publisher of Agranee and Hindu Rashtra. Neither Senjevi nor Nagarvala did this. Due to its rabid editorial content the two periodicals had been fined on many occasions. Since 1946, Agranee had been under observation by the Bombay provincial government. Thus, a detailed report containing its editorial record with their office details, name and address of its editor and publisher were prepared by the local intelligence department of Poona. A copy was sent to the provincial Home department, another to the Union Home department and a third to the Intelligence Bureau, the department headed by Senjevi, the chief of investigation in the bomb attack case. This came to light only twenty years after Gandhi's murder, when the hearings of the Kapur Commission were going on and the commission's officers dug up the document.
In the days after the 20th the gang leaders freely moved about Bombay, visiting their regular haunts, trying to source funds and weapons. Yet the police could not activate their network of informants and get any information about the killers. Nagarvala had evolved his own theory about the conspiracy. He believed that there was a core group of twenty to twenty-five people actively conspiring to attack and kidnap Gandhi. This core group, he believed, was assisted by a team of twenty people for each of the members of the core group who had access to a huge cache of arms and explosives. Nagarvala was confident that, given time, he would expose the entire plot and arrest all the members of this sinister organisation. Nagarvala had ordered a twenty-four hour surveillance on the Hindu Mahasabha office in Parel, but the accused again outfoxed him—they used the office in Dadar as their rendezvous.
The surprising bit was that, although he had heard about Karkare's involvement from two different sources, Morarji Desai and the Delhi police, Nagarvala did not attach any importance to it. He merely brushed it away as a planted attempt to throw him off the scent from the real plot. Instead of establishing contact with the Ahmednagar police to get information on Karkare's whereabouts, Nagarvala contacted his brother, an honorary magistrate. The next day Nagarvala's brother informed him that Karkare was not in Ahmednagar.
To the Delhi police officers, his orders were that they should not advertise their presence in Bombay. He ordered them not to wear their uniforms and asked them to check out of their hotel. The officers claim that they had more than three interviews with Nagarvala during their two-day stay in Bombay, but at every meeting he was extremely rude and abrupt with them, insisting that they leave the Bombay police alone and go back to their home base. Surprisingly, the two officers did not try and get in touch with their superiors in Delhi to report their predicament or receive fresh orders. On the afternoon of 23 January the officers met Nagarvala again, who told them to leave immediately for Delhi.
The officers had been ordered to go to Poona and hand over a copy of Madanlal's confession to the police. If the Poona police had been informed about Agranee and Hindu Rashtra, they would have immediately revealed the identity of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte. But after the reception they got in Bombay, Jaswant Singh and Balkishen did not want to go to Poona and they returned to Delhi.
It was now three days since the attack on Gandhi and Madanlal's arrest and the police had made no progress. Truly shocking was the complete lack of co-ordination between the Delhi and Bombay police departments was truly shocking. Nagarvala was not informed about the recovery of unclaimed laundry carrying the initials N.V.G., and Senjevi was not informed of Jain's revelations. This information, when tallied with Madanlal's confession, would have proved invaluable.
Jaswant Singh and Balkishen returned to Delhi on the afternoon of the 24th and rushed to their headquarters where they filed a very critical report about the treatment they received at the hands of the Bombay police. 'We were virtually placed under house arrest throughout our stay in Bombay', was their bitter lament. Senjevi read their report the next day. He did not confront Nagarvala, deciding that he could not afford to antagonise him at this stage of the investigation. Senjevi rightly believed that the conspirators belonged to Bombay province. U.H. Rana, deputy inspector-general of Poona CID, was in Delhi for some work. When Rana came to his office Senjevi briefed, him about the conspiracy and the information gleaned from Madanlal till then. Senjevi gave him a copy of Madanlal's confession, this time along with its English translation, and asked him to take it personally to Bombay. There was an afternoon flight to Bombay which Rana should have taken, but to compound the errors already committed by the police, he decided to take a train to Bombay via Allahabad, adding sixteen hours to his travel time. To add to all this, when in Allahabad, he decided to take a break to perform some religious rituals. It was as if he was on a personal pilgrimage and not rushing with documents of vital importance, which could have saved Gandhi's life. He finally arrived in Bombay late on the evening of the 27th.
That evening Nagarvala and Rana spoke to Senjevi from the former's residence. Nagarvala
told Senjevi he was not going to act on the confession as he was very close to exposing the real conspiracy and promised to send a detailed report. Senjevi did not reprimand Nagarvala, his junior, for pursuing an uncorroborated line of investigation and ignoring a confession backed by the statements of three eye witnesses. Surprisingly, he agreed to wait for Nagarvala's report. The promised report was on Senjevi's desk on the morning of 31 January 1948, more then twelve hours after Gandhi was murdered.
On the 29th Rana talked about the clues given by Madanlal to Raosaheb Gurtu. Gurtu immediately recited from memory the names of Nathuram V. Godse, and Narayan D. Apte as the editor and proprietor of Agranee and Hindu Rashtra and Badge as the proprietor of Shastra Bhandar. Gurtu even furnished photographs of Apte and Karkare and gave them to Rana. Rana, however, did not divulge this information to Nagarvala or Senjevi. He told the Kapur Commission that he did not trust the telephone system as the operators had habit of listening in.
When questioned later about his slow journey to Bombay, Rana said that Senjevi had asked him to travel discreetly and so he decided to travel via Allahabad. His irrational explanation was accepted. Why Senjevi asked Rana, the head of the CID, to act as a messenger boy and not carry out independent investigations based on the confession, is also a mystery. Nagarvala never revealed the reason for his obstinate belief that the real conspiracy was of kidnapping and not murder. He was never asked to explain himself. Surprisingly, Patel appointed him overall in-charge of the murder investigation after Gandhi was shot; the man who had completely bungled the investigation between 20th and 30th January, was rewarded by being put in charge of the investigation and arrest of the accused in the Gandhi murder case.
Lets Kill Gandhi Page 16