The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  It was already noon, with zero hour barely five hours away. Apte bundled his men and their hand luggage into two taxis and took them to the Marina. He then told Badge and Shankar to go down to the restaurant and eat their lunch and, while they were away carried out an experiment to discover how long the blasting fuse they had brought with them took to burn. They shut the door and ignited a length of the fuse. According to Karkare:

  There was a blinding flash and a hissing sound. When we opened our eyes, the room was thick with black smoke which made us cough. We picked up a mattress from one of the beds and stamped out the still smouldering bits and pieces. A hotel servant had come rushing to the door to find out what was happening, but Apte managed to fob him off with a story about a mattress having caught fire while he was lighting a cigarette.

  When, after their leisurely lunch, Badge and Shankar returned to the room upstairs, they found everyone in a jubilant mood, Gopal had succeeded in repairing his revolver. At least, he had managed to put its moving parts in working order. Whether it would actually fire could not be tested since it was now too late for more target practice.

  They locked themselves in and during the next half-hour carefully primed the hand grenades and fitted firing charges and fuses into the gun-cotton slabs. After that, they sat down to a council of war.

  Their armoury now consisted of Gopal’s .38 revolver, which they hoped had become serviceable; Badge’s .32 revolver, which they knew to be useless; five 36 hand grenades fitted with seven-second fuses; and two one-pound slabs of gun-cotton with ninety-second fuses. They had, or at least Madanlal had, handled explosives before, but none of them had fired a revolver or thrown a 36 grenade, and they had very little idea of the capabilities or limitations of either weapon. For instance, Badge (according to an altered plan) confidently hoped to shoot Gandhi with his revolver at a range of some thirty feet, when, at that sort of distance, it would take a practised shot to make certain of hitting a man. And, as to the hand grenades, their idea was to get close to Gandhi and hurl them into the crowd at random from all sides, little realizing that they risked committing hara-kiri along with their gruesome mass murder. Nathuram, a little trembly after a bout of migraine, opened the proceedings with an exhortation that all of them must work with the absolute conviction of the rightness of their cause and the fullest faith in victory, since ‘this was their last effort’. Apte then took over and got down to practicalities. The first thing to do, he told them, was to ‘create a commotion’, and then finish off Gandhi and whoever happened to be in his vicinity with revolver shots and grenades. The commotion was to be created by exploding their two charges of gun-cotton. Madanlal would set off one. Who would fire the other one?

  He was met with a stony silence. The fact was that none of the others had ever set off a charge of explosive and had no idea how to do it. Badge, despite the fact that he ran a business selling explosives and firearms, was later to confess, ‘I had taken no lessons as to how to use hand grenades, gun-cotton slabs, revolvers, pistols, etc... I have myself thrown no hand grenades or exploded gun-cotton slabs.’

  ‘Why not’, Badge now suggested to Apte, ‘do with just one blast? We don’t really need two.’

  And so it was decided. Only one of the gun-cotton slabs would be exploded by Madanlal, who, after lighting the ninety-second fuse, would go and join the others around Gandhi, ready to throw a grenade at him.

  When the report of the blast was heard, Badge would fire Gopal’s service revolver at Gandhi through the ventilation-grille that he had been shown in the morning and Shankar, who would have managed to worm his way close to Gandhi, would, at point-blank range, pump into him the remaining three bullets in the chamber of Badge’s .32. Immediately after emptying his revolver, Badge would push a hand grenade through the ventilation-grille with the barrel of his revolver. The revolver shots would be the signal for the other grenade-throwers to hurl their grenades in the general direction of Gandhi. For this purpose, the five grenades that they had brought with them would be distributed one each to Badge, Shankar, Karkare, Madanlal and Gopal. Neither Apte himself nor Nathuram would carry any arms, but it would be their business to guide the operation by ‘giving signals’.

  Any questions?

  There were no questions. The plan was perfect. Nothing could conceivably go wrong. The gun-cotton charge would explode and create panic; Badge would be able to make his way into the room that overlooked Gandhi’s seat; Gopal’s revolver would go off; the bullets of the smaller revolver which had performed so miserably earlier in the morning would miraculously achieve velocity. All of them would then hurl hand grenades from all sides like boys throwing stones into a pool and, after it was all over, walk away from the scene of carnage, undetected and unhurt. They would saunter back to their respective rooms and lie low for a day or two and then catch their trains and planes back to wherever they were headed for. And it would not be long before the nation recognized them for what they were: heroes and public benefactors, true patriots who had rid their motherland of the evil genius who had assisted in her ravishment.

  If Apte knew that Shankar had not understood most of what he had been told, or indeed that he did not even know what Gandhi looked like, he was not worried. Shankar was merely an appendage of Badge’s, and it was Badge’s business to explain things to him. And Badge’s method of explaining the plan was to tell him ‘to throw his hand grenade at the person at whom I threw mine; that he was to fire his revolver at the person at whom I fired mine — an old man called Gandhiji who was to be “finished”.’

  There was nothing more to discuss. If it occurred to the others that the two leaders had given themselves no active roles, and that they would not even be carrying a weapon, it could not have seemed odd to them.

  They still had a whole hour to while away before setting out on their mission; they spent the hour in tacking small refinements onto their flawless plan.

  And this again plummeted into farce. It was as though the approach of zero hour had not only dispelled their tension, but had also retarded their mental capacities.

  Apte decreed that they should all adopt false names for the occasion. So Nathuram became ‘Deshpande’; Apte ‘Karmarkar’; Karkare ‘Bias’ (or ‘Vyas’); Badge, ‘Bandopant’; and Shankar ‘Tukaram’. No one now remembers what names Gopal and Madanlal were given; no one considered that it would be impossible in the confusion of the moment for all seven of them to remember everyone else’s false name.

  Karkare then made the suggestion that they should all assume disguises, and everyone agreed that it was an excellent idea. They rigged themselves out with one another’s clothes, everyone trying to put on something that he did not normally wear. Badge discarded his saffron robes and wore a white knee-length ‘Nehru’ shirt and white dhoti and a towel draped over his shoulders like a scarf. Nathuram put on khaki shorts and a shirt as though he were a policeman, Apte a dark suit with a black scarf; Madanlal wore the jacket of Apte’s Air Force blue suit, and Karkare ‘painted false moustaches, darkened his eyebrows, and made a red mark on his forehead’.

  And thus, made up like a troupe of village fun-men, they set out to murder the Mahatma.

  They were hypnotized by their own thoughts. They would kill Gandhi (to say nothing of the dozens of others who happened to be in his vicinity) and still go on as though nothing had happened. So sure were they that they would not even be suspected of the deed that they had made no preparations whatsoever to leave Delhi in a hurry in case anything went wrong. That very morning, both Nathuram and Apte had given clothes to be washed by the hotel dhobi (washerman) which they confidently expected to collect on the twenty-second.

  Surjit Singh, an unlettered young Sikh who had fled from Pakistan, had managed by some miracle to bring out his car with him. He now made a living in New Delhi by running the car as a ‘private’ taxi (which meant that he did not have a licence to run it as a taxi). He was proud of the fact that his car was of a distinctive yellow-green colour which he called moongi
a (the colour of gram) and that it was perhaps the only ‘taxi’ in Delhi, private or licensed, which had a luggage-carrier fitted on its top. On the afternoon of 20 January, Surjit was waiting for a fare near the Regal Cinema when four people came up and, since the taxi had no meter, settled the fare in advance for taking them to Birla House, waiting there for half an hour, and bringing them back.

  His four passengers were Apte, Gopal, Badge and Shankar. Apte directed Surjit to take his car to the back of Birla House, and they all got out near the servants’ quarters. Surjit saw them go through the gate and into the garden. He waited near his car for a few minutes, and then thought he would go and attend Gandhi’s prayer meeting; so he too went through the gate.

  Nathuram, Madanlal and Karkare had preceded the others to Birla House. All three now came up and reported that everything was going according to plan. Madanlal had placed the explosive charge in position and would set it off as soon as Apte gave him the signal, and Karkare had arranged that the occupant of the room with the ventilator-grille should let Badge go in and take a photograph.

  Nathuram and Apte walked with Badge towards the room and, as they approached it, Badge saw ‘a one-eyed man sitting on a cot near its door’.

  This was a bad omen. To see a one-eyed man at the start of any venture was to invite certain failure. Badge turned and told Apte that nothing would make him go into the room now.

  Badge was paralysed with fear. He had convinced himself that the room was like a trap; that, if he once passed the one-eyed man at the door and entered the room, he would never come out of it alive. He begged his two companions to ‘let him strike Gandhi from the front’, and in the open meeting. Nathuram and Apte kept telling him that there was nothing to fear, that their plans of escape were foolproof. But nothing would make Badge change his mind. Meanwhile time was running out. Gandhi had already arrived, and the hum of the opening prayers chanted by the dozen or so young girls could be heard from where they were. The prayer meeting seldom lasted for more than twenty-five minutes. It was the hour of sunset, and within half an hour it would be too dark to see properly.

  There was nothing for it but to give in. Yes, Badge could shoot Gandhi in the open meeting.

  But Badge had already abandoned any thought of killing Gandhi. Just as he had agreed to join the plot of assassination as another man might agree to make a fourth at bridge, now, with the countdown about to begin, he was throwing in his hand. A mental process was reversing itself. A quirk of bravado had sparked it; a fit of panic had put out the fire. However, one should not suppose that the one-eyed man sitting in front of Chotu Ram’s room No. 3 had given Gandhi an extra ten days of life. As will be seen, even if Badge had agreed to go through with the plan he would never have been able to fire his revolver from one of the openings in the room.

  On the pretext of explaining the changed plan to Shankar, Badge took him back to the waiting taxi while the other conspirators strolled nervously in the garden. By coincidence, the taxi driver wasn’t there, and Badge had plenty of time to roll up his own and Shankar’s revolvers in the towel which he had draped around his shoulders. He placed the bundle on the rear seat of the taxi. After that he gave his hand grenade to Shankar to keep and warned him that he was not to ‘do anything with it’ till he, Badge, gave him the word. Then, balling both his fists and thrusting them deep inside the pockets of his Nehru shirt so as to create the impression that he was carrying both the revolver and the hand grenade in them, he and Shankar went back to rejoin the others.

  Despite the fact that he was now unarmed, Badge went up to Apte, who asked him if he was ready. Badge said later: ‘I told him I was ready and started walking towards the prayer ground. I saw Apte placing a hand on Madanlal’s shoulder and heard him say, “Chalo” [’OK’ or ‘Go ahead’].’

  Thus was Madanlal sacrificed.

  But thus, too, was prevented the mass slaughter of innocent bystanders; the simple-minded men and women who came to the prayer meetings as they would go to a temple, intent on getting the Mahatma’s darshan [sight] and nothing else. That day the crowd was small, perhaps no more than 200 people in all; but there can be no doubt that at least half of them would have found themselves caught in the killing-ground of one or the other of the five hand grenades that were to be thrown in their midst. That Apte and Nathuram should have thought that this slaughter was justified in their bid to kill one man shows how sick their minds were. Their victims would have been mainly Hindus, and thus their act would have been every bit as callous as the worst of the Muslim atrocities they were seeking to avenge.

  Nearly a hundred yards from the Birla House servants’ quarters, were the servants’ quarters of No. 9 Albuquerque Road, and in one of these lived Nanak Chand and his young wife Sulochana. Their three-year-old son, Mohinder, was always straying away to play with the children of the Birla House servants. On the evening of 20 January, when Sulochana had gone to the back of Birla House to look for her son, she saw ‘a person placing a bomb and then lighting a match-stick. I forcibly picked up my child... saw sparks coming out of the string or the thing attached to the bomb.’

  Madanlal, too, saw Sulochana. In fact, he told her to pick up her child and run. Then he hurried off to the meeting to tell Apte.

  ‘I told Apte that the gun-cotton would explode any moment. Apte assured me that everything was under control.’

  Apte could see both his front-line soldiers, Badge and Shankar, who had managed to take positions on both sides of Gandhi, and they were so obviously ready to empty their revolvers into him the moment the ‘bomb’ went off. Then the second line would go into action; Karkare, Madanlal and Gopal, as well as Badge and Shankar, would hurl their grenades at Gandhi and those around him.

  The explosion was heard. Everyone in the crowd heard it. No one fired a shot; no one hurled a grenade. Madanlal, who happened to be looking at Shankar, saw him ‘take to his heels’, and then saw that Badge, too, was running. At that time, Apte tapped him on the shoulder and whispered that the plan had miscarried.

  Madanlal had never been to Birla House before, and had no idea of where to go. He took off in the direction of what he thought would be an exit and found himself in the imposing porch of Birla House. He whirled about .and dashed through the bushes and across a drive and found himself approaching the main entrance to the building and a group of agitated-looking policemen. The one thing he could not now afford to submit to was a search of his person, for he still had the grenade in his pocket. He doubled back and managed to find the servants’ gate through which he had come, and this brought him close to the spot where he had placed the explosive charge. The woman with her child was still there, saying something to a policeman with a rifle and two other men. She turned to Madanlal and pointed a finger. ‘That’s the man!’ she screamed.

  Surjit Singh, the taxi-driver, had never seen Gandhi before. Today he saw him being carried to the meeting in a chair. This was Gandhi’s first public appearance after his fast had ended, and he was still too weak to walk. From his place in the outer circle of the crowd, Surjit heard the chanting of the verses from the Gita, and then Gandhi addressed the meeting. But all Surjit heard was an indistinct murmur. It was nearly twenty minutes before someone told him that the microphone had broken down. Disappointed, he sauntered back to where he had left his car. He heard an explosion, but is not certain whether it occurred while he was still at the meeting or after he had returned to his taxi. From what Gopal Godse states, Surjit must have returned to his taxi a couple of minutes after the bomb had exploded.

  ‘The explosion was loud enough to be heard at a far-off distance’, writes Tendulkar, Gandhi’s biographer, but ‘Gandhi remained unruffled’. He went on with his address as though nothing had happened, and soon the restive crowd settled down. The prayer meeting went through its prescribed routine of opening chorus, speech, recitations from the Koran, the Bible and the Gita, and finally the Ramdhun with its bi-religious invocation to Ishwar (Hindu) and Allah (Muslim) to ‘give wisdom to al
l’.

  The Mahatma’s own reaction to the incident was utterly true to character. In talking about it later in the evening, he was, if anything, full of praise for Madanlal. ‘The boy is a bahadur [brave warrior],’ he declared, and compared him to Bhagat Singh, the leader of a terrorist gang whom the British had executed and who had become something of a national hero. Gandhi went on: ‘Bachhe hain, Ahbi yeh samajhte nahin. Maroonga tab yaad karenge, ke boodha theek kehta tha.’ (‘They’re like children. They don’t understand. After I’m gone they’ll realize that what the old man used to say was right.’)

  When Gopal Godse saw Shankar and Badge running away, his first instinct was to bolt. But, as he got to the waiting taxi, saw the white bundle on the rear seat, realized what it was, and discovered that the driver was absent, the thought suddenly struck him that this was his one chance of finishing the job on his own. He grabbed the bundle, thrust it into the cloth bag in which he was carrying the grenade and dashed in the direction of the servants’ quarter. Since everyone was running about at this time, no one took any notice of him. All the servants’ quarter were suddenly empty and their doors wide open. He boldly walked into Chotu Ram’s room, shut the door behind him and fastened it with the chain with which it was meant to be secured from inside, and took out the .38 revolver.

  A glance at the grille made him realize that it was set too high in the wall to provide a view of the prayer ground. He jumped and managed to grab hold of a ledge and heaved himself up. But he needed both his hands to keep in this position. For a few seconds he struggled frantically to hold himself up with one hand and use the other to grip the revolver. It was impossible. He let go, ran back to the door and tried to release the chain. He broke into a cold sweat when he realized that he couldn’t pull it out. For a few seconds he struggled desperately, terrified that he had locked himself in. Then he put down the bag he was carrying and, applying both hands, prised the chain off its hook. The door opened with a startling bang. He ran out and made for the waiting taxi. Nathuram, Apte and Karkare had already come there, and so had their taxi driver. They piled into the car and, according to the driver, told him urgently to ’start the car - start the car!’ He drove them back to Connaught Place.