The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  The truth was that Gandhi’s non-violence had lost out to violence; no one else believed in his ‘ahimsa’ any longer, inside or outside the Congress. Whatever its force in normal times, these were not normal times; and to censure the refugees for having fled from Pakistan and to exhort them to go back was to many a form of perversity if not madness; or the action of a saint bent on martyring his flock in a grand gesture of idealism.

  ‘There was a time when India listened to me; today I am a back number,’ Gandhi had complained a few weeks earlier. Now, by going on a fast, he was testing out the strength of his enfeebled arm. His fast was non-violence’s last-ditch stand.

  It was a heroic gesture. Gandhi was in his seventy-ninth year. How could he hope to survive? And would not his death introduce a new and explosive element into a situation that was already clearly out of hand?

  Anyone else might have preferred to stay put in Delhi and see the crisis through; but not Mountbatten. True to his reputation for coolness under fire, he did not cancel a visit to the princely state of Bikaner which had been planned many weeks earlier. He went off on schedule, to shoot sandgrouse with the maharaja and to talk about the future of his state. The only concession to the crisis – or to the mood of fasting – was that the state banquet arranged by the Maharaja in the Governor-General’s honour was cancelled.

  The news that Gandhi had decided to go on a fast to force India to transfer Rs 55 crores to Pakistan, was being broadcast over the news media in all languages. Pandit Nathuram Vinayak Godse and Narayan Dattatray Apte – the editor and manager of the Marathi daily, the Hindu Rashtra, were sitting in their office and reading it on their teleprinter, when they suddenly made their ‘great decision’ – Gandhi had to be killed.

  TW0

  There was no legal machinery by which

  [Gandhi] could be brought to book...

  I felt that [he] should not be allowed

  to meet a natural death.

  — NATHURAM GODSE

  Even as Gandhi was talking to Mountbatten, the news that he had decided to go on a fast was being broadcast over the news media in all of India’s fourteen languages. In Poona, two men sitting in a shoddy newspaper office read it over their teleprinter. Read it and suddenly made their great decision: Gandhi had to be killed.

  Their names were Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte; they were the editor and manager respectively of a Marathi-language daily newspaper, the Hindu Rashtra. No one knows which one first thought of murdering Gandhi because to the end they maintained that only one of them, Nathuram, was responsible for the killing, it is more than likely that they both thought of it at the same moment for, in matters such as this, their thoughts were strangely in accord. More than a year later, and only days before he was hanged, Apte was to tell Nathuram Godse’s brother Gopal:

  In the four and a half years that Nathuram and I worked together, we found that we often thought of the same things at the same time. Nathuram would send a leading article from wherever he had gone to, and it would turn out that I had already written on the same subject and on the same lines. And as to our devotion to the cause, we were like one mind in two bodies.

  ‘The cause’ was Hindu Sanghatan, which envisaged the unification and revitalization of the Hindus so that they should stand up and fight for their political rights instead of giving in to the Muslims as they had done in the past. And the supreme, almost sacred, goal of the Sanghatan movement was to prevent the dismemberment of India.

  It was thus a cause already lost, for India had been divided and there was nothing they could do to put it together again. They were bitter, angry, frustrated. The British had perpetrated a fraud, and the Congress had betrayed the nation. The Independence of India to them was a mockery, an insult, because had not a limb from Mother India’s body been torn away in the process? August 15, the day of Independence, they had observed as a day of mourning.

  For weeks, months, they and their few companions had sat and brooded and racked their brains to think of doing something spectacular that would rock the nation. They had talked of destroying an ammunition train on its way to Pakistan, of killing Jinnah and his Assembly in one fell swoop, of blowing up bridges, of carrying out commando-type raids into the Hyderabad state (which, until then, had not been absorbed into India), and they had even begun, at considerable expense and risk, to stock up the explosives and weapons that would enable them to undertake these tasks.

  Now, suddenly, their target was revealed to them as in a flash.

  ‘I thought it to be my duty to put an end to the life of the so-called father of the Nation,’ Nathuram Godse was to testify with visible pride.

  By carrying out this duty, Nathuram has qualified himself for a sort of odious immortality.

  Nathuram Godse was born into an orthodox Brahmin family which came from a small village called Uksan, which is ten miles from the wayside railway station of Kamshet, on the Bombay-Poona line. Nathuram’s father, Vinayak Godse, was a minor official in the Postal Department. In 1892, when he was seventeen, he was married to a girl who was barely ten years old. Vinayak’s first child was a boy, and the second a girl. This first son died before he was two years old. After that there were two more sons, both of whom died in their infancy.

  At the turn of the century, to families such as Vinayak Godse’s, the fact that three sons had died one after the other while a daughter had survived held a clear warning: their male children bore a curse. One remedy, which had often proved effective, lay in offering to bring up the next boy as though he were a girl. That might appease the Fates.

  So Vinayak and his wife offered prayers. The next child, if it were a boy, would be brought up as though he were a girl. His left nostril would be pierced to take a nath or nose-ring.

  The next child was a boy, born on 19 May 1910. Even though he was named Ramchandra, which name is customarily shortened to Ram; because his nose was pierced to take a nath, the pretence that he was a girl was taken a step further by his parents, who began to call him Nathuram, or ‘Ram who wears a nose-ring.’ The name stuck.

  As far as placating the evil spirits was concerned, the artifice was wholly successful. Nathuram lived through infancy and grew up to be a strong child, and so did three other brothers who followed him, among whom only Gopal, who was born in 1920, figured in the assassination of Gandhi. Psychologists may find some explanation for his warped mental processes in the fact that Nathuram was brought up as a girl.

  The family was large – four sons and two daughters – and poor. The father was constantly transferred to be Postmaster in small, out-of-the-way townships all over the Bombay Presidency. After Nathuram had finished primary schooling in his mother-tongue, Marathi, he was sent to Poona to study for the matriculation examination. As a child, his parents and brothers believed that he possessed oracular powers. He would sit before the family goddess, staring fixedly at a spot of soot smeared in the exact centre of a copper tray, and soon fall into a trance. While in the trance, he would see some figures or writing in the black spot before him, much as a crystal-gazer is supposed to see in his glass ball. Then one or other member of the family would ask him questions. His answers were believed to be those of the goddess, who spoke through his mouth.

  His brother Gopal, who saw several of these performances, writes: ‘He would recite parts of scriptures or Sanskrit hymns which he never remembered to have memorized... and nor, when the trance was over, could he repeat them, or indeed remember what he had recited.’

  It was not till he was nearly sixteen that Nathuram gave up the practice of serving as a medium between the family deity and the family. He had become more worldly and less devout, his brother Gopal laments, and his powers of concentration must have been diminished.

  There were other interests. Despite his early upbringing as a girl, he had grown into a strapping youth who was fond of physical exercise and who took special pride in his prowess as a swimmer. His instincts were almost abnormally wholesome. He revelled in being the neighbourhood
do-gooder, devoting himself to such chores as might have been taken on by an eager boy scout. He was always being called upon to fish out lost vessels from village wells, rescue cats, run errands for the sick, serve at temple functions and in the marriage festivities of the poorer neighbours. While the family lived in Lonavla, he rescued an Untouchable child that had fallen into a well. When later in the day he told his parents about it, he was scolded for having come into the house without first taking a purifying bath – he had been polluted by the touch of the child!

  At the time, such sentiments in a Brahmin family were quite normal, but Nathuram himself was not bothered by them. Later, much to the distress of his parents, he was to come out as a fierce protagonist for the removal of Untouchability.

  He read voraciously, but only in subjects which interested him, such as mythology, scriptures and history, and only in the Marathi language. He neglected his normal schoolwork and found the English language difficult to learn. The consequence was that he failed to pass the matric.

  The matriculation examination was, in those days, an essential qualification for the lowest grades of clerical jobs in government offices, and Nathuram’s father, who was now close to retirement himself, was anxious to get his son employed in his own department. He implored Nathuram to sit for the examination again, but Nathuram, who by this time had already come under the influence of Gandhi’s movement for non-cooperation with the British Raj, shrank at the thought of taking a government job. He was fed up with schoolwork anyway and wanted to start earning his own living. He left Poona and came to live with his father, who was then in Karjat. There, for a year or two, he tried his hand at learning to be a carpenter, but just as he was getting to be proficient his father was transferred, and the family had to move again.

  The year was 1929, and Nathuram was nineteen years old. This time they were going to Ratnagiri, a sleepy town on the west coast, so obscure that it was not even listed in Murray’s exhaustive Guide to India. Ratnagiri’s principal claim to a place in history was that the British had exiled the last ruler of Burma, King, Thibaw, there. Thibaw had died thirteen years earlier, and Ratnagiri had lapsed into what it had always been – a backward place where minor government officials were sent to mark time for their pensions.

  Nathuram had rejoiced. He had heard that Ratnagiri now housed another political prisoner, an Indian brought back from the penal station in Andamans to serve out the remaining years of his sentence of fifty years’ imprisonment. Here the British had given him a bungalow and the freedom to move about within the confines of the district; he was required to abstain from all political activities, but was permitted visitors.

  He was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the man who had burst suddenly on to the Indian political scene and had been despatched by the British to the penal colony in the Andamans; scholar, historian, poet, religious reformer, a trained barrister, but, above all, a firebrand patriot who had galvanized the youth of his generation by his open advocacy of an armed uprising against the British.

  Within three days of his arrival in Ratnagiri, Nathuram went to see Savarkar.

  Once he had come under Savarkar’s influence, Nathuram was never the same man again. The high school dropout who would have been willing to live out his days as a village carpenter was transformed into a fiery champion of all the causes that Savarkar stood for, political, social, religious; freedom from British rule, the inviolability of the motherland, the purification of the Marathi language, the abolition of the caste system, the emancipation of the depressed classes and, a hitherto unheard of thing, the reconversion of Hindus who had been enticed into Islam or Christianity. Nathuram venerated Savarkar as a guru, as someone who bore a touch of divinity. And it was his blind devotion to the potent preachings of the master, and his shattering disillusionment at the way everything in Savarkar’s scenario had gone wrong, that ultimately led Nathuram to the insane expedient of murder and self-immolation.

  But conversely it is also true that, while his meeting with Nathuram Godse could not have made much difference to Savarkar’s life at the time, nineteen years later Nathuram’s continuing attachment to him was to provide the excuse to the police (and possibly to his political enemies) for dragging him into the Gandhi murder case. The strain of the trial, and the year spent in prison while it lasted, wrecked Savarkar’s health and finished him as a force in India’s politics.

  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was born in 1883 in a small village near the town of Nasik; in 1910, he was shut up for life in the penal colony in the Andamans. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has crammed so much activity into the twenty-seven years that he had lived as a free man, or of anyone who had lived them more dangerously.

  He was only twelve when he organized a gang of his schoolmates to fight off the village bullies. At sixteen, while he was kept in Nasik for his higher schooling, he formed a revolutionary society to overthrow the British Raj. He barely made the grades at school but knew far more than his teachers about Indian history and the Sanskrit classics, and gave regular talks on these subjects at local functions. In 1903, when after passing his matriculation examination he left Nasik to join a college in Poona, the leading men of the town joined together to give him a hearty send-off.

  As a college student in Poona, he became ‘a notable figure in political gatherings’, and thus inevitably came under police surveillance. In his final year, he flung himself with gusto into the Swadeshi movement which, among other things, required the burning of British-made articles of clothing in public bonfires. For these activities he was rusticated from his college and thus became the first Indian student to be sent down from a college for political reasons.

  When, however, the time for the BA examination came, the authorities relented and let him sit for it. He managed to pass and immediately set out to try to bring his various organizations together and to win converts to his movement for an armed revolt against the Raj. He went from village to village, giving rousing talks, composed and sang patriotic ballads, and published a stack of pamphlets propounding his views on the problems facing the Indian people. These publications were summarily proscribed and their possession made an offence.

  Thus, at the age of twenty-two, Savarkar had made himself one of the most intrepid opponents of British rule in India. At this stage, realizing that he did not possess a broad enough base of knowledge for the role he had taken on, and anxious to equip himself more adequately for it by a few more years of study and travel, he decided to leave India and go to England to qualify as a barrister.

  The Indian Government, which was on the point of arresting him on a charge of sedition, must have breathed a sigh of relief at this turn of events. Savarkar could now be written off as a troublemaker. It was almost certain that England would transform him into a ‘wog’, a Westernized Oriental Gentleman.

  That was the general pattern of the times. Indian boys went to study at the great colleges of England, goggled at the wonders of the western world and were tamed by the civilizing influences of their environment. They invariably returned as brown sahibs. Many fell in love with English girls, and some brought back white wives.

  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, popularly known as Veer Savarkar, was a great influence on people who believed in the ideology of the Hindu Sangathan. Nathuram Godse came in contact with Savarkar while his father was posted in Ratnagiri and was completely transformed by him whom he venerated as his guru. Savarkar, during this period was working to bring about social and religious reforms among the Hindus, and under his leadership the sangathan movement blossomed as a political party, the Hindu Mahasabha. Sitting in the centre is Veer Savarkar with Nathuram Godse (sitting second from left) and other Hindu Mahasabha members.

  ‘India should be essentially a secular state in which (all citizens) should have equal rights and duties irrespective of religion, caste or creed. (But we) refuse to tolerate that Hindus should be robbed to enable the Muslims to get more than their due simply because they were Muslims and would not otherwise b
ehave as loyal citizens.’

  —Veer Savarkar

  The credo of Hindu Mahasabha was to keep India as one undivided nation and a Hindu land, had a number of faithful followers especially in cities like Poona and Nagpur. Veer Savarkar was their undisputed leader who wanted them to learn to be proficient in the use of arms. It was this Hindu cause that brought these people from different walks of life together.

  Nathuram Godse, who started as a tailor in a small town called Sangli, shifted to Poona and started a Marathi daily, Agrani; Narayan Apte left the Royal Indian Air Force and joined Godse as the manager of Agrani; Gopal Godse, younger brother of Nathuram, though not directly involved in the Party work, was effected by his brother’s fervent zeal; and Vishnu Karkare an orphan who had always toiled to survive in this world, worked tirelessly to provide food and shelter for the refugees in Ahmednagar.

  Savarkar conformed to the pattern only by falling in love with an English girl, whose name was Margaret Lawrence. Otherwise he remained defiantly Indian. He joined Gray’s Inn and four years later qualified to practise at the Bar. Throughout his time in England, he pressed on with his political activities at the same relentless tempo. He started what was called the Free India Society, whose weekly meetings were conducted quite openly. But, from among the members of the society he formed an inner circle of young men who, like himself, believed in revolutionary methods. Between them they raised a fund to learn the secret of making bombs, and despatched three volunteers to Paris to find ‘some Russian revolutionist who might initiate them into the mysteries’. In Paris, they were ‘duped and deceived by a bogus professor’, and their search seemed destined to end in failure. But, ‘At last a man was found, a Russian exile. He taught them the art of making explosives and the best way of utilizing them in revolutionary work, handed over an authoritative booklet describing and illustrating all sorts of bombs and their uses — and did not take a pie.’