The Men Who Killed Gandhi
Page 16
Almost unbelievably, the floor of Chotu Ram’s room was at a lower level than the ground at the back from where, it will be recalled, Apte had measured the openings in the grille without much difficulty. In fact, from inside the room the height of the grille was a little more than seven feet. And, if Gopal could not fire a revolver through one of the holes, there was no question of Badge being able to do so, either. Gopal was not a tall man — perhaps five-feet eight inches — but Badge is barely five-feet.
In the car Karkare told them in Marathi how he had seen Madanlal being led by the police to the tent they had pitched outside the gate of Birla House, and how he had caught Madanlal’s eye and signalled to him that his friends would stand by him.
After the taxi dropped them, they strolled across into the open field in front of the Regal Cinema, and stood under the trees. Their minds were numbed by the realization of failure, and the only thing they could talk about was their immediate plans. Karkare, who regarded Madanlal as his special responsibility, was anxious to stay on in Delhi for another day and see if he could do something to help him. Then he would make his way to Bombay and lie low. Gopal was keen to go back to Poona and resume duty, and decided to catch the Punjab Mail the next morning. Apte and Nathuram were leaving Delhi that night, but in some direction other than that of Bombay.
They shook hands as though to encourage one another and parted. The bundle which contained both the revolvers was still in Gopal’s hands, and Gopal took it away with him. This was something they would soon come to regret.
Apte and Nathuram walked the short distance to the Marina and checked out, preferring not to make any inquiries about their laundry. Karkare and Gopal sat in a coffee shop for a few minutes and then took a tonga to the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan. They found that Badge had already removed his things from their room and had gone. They, too, collected their belongings and went to Old Delhi, where close to the railway station they found a cheap hotel, the Frontier Hindu Hotel. Here they took a room for a day, Gopal giving his name as ‘Rajagopalan’ and Karkare as ‘G.M. Joshi’.
Once outside Birla House, Badge hired a tonga, and he and Shankar went to Karkare’s room in the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan in which they had left their luggage. While he busied himself ‘tying up his bedding,’ he sent Shankar off to bury the two cloth bags full of grenades and explosives which they still possessed somewhere in the woods at the back of the Bhavan. After Shankar had gone on this errand, Apte and Nathuram turned up in a taxi and demanded to know why Badge had not carried out his part of the operation. Badge thereupon ‘abused them and asked them to get out. And they got out.’
As soon as Shankar came back Badge sent him to fetch a tonga, and in it they were driven to New Delhi railway station. But the station platform was bristling with policemen, so they drove on to the Old Delhi station. Here they did not see too many policemen, and a train for Bombay was ready to leave within half an hour. They got into a crowded compartment. Two days later they were back in Poona.
Badge did not know it then, but Apte and Nathuram also happened to be at the Old Delhi railway station at the time, but on a different platform. They were in a first-class compartment of the overnight train to Kanpur, which left only a few minutes after Badge’s train. Since they were by themselves in a four-berth sleeping compartment, they could talk to one another freely.
As Apte later recounted to Karkare:
To be sure, we were greatly distressed by our failure, but we had by no means lost our determination, and there was no question of packing in — of going back to the routine of business and family life. I kept telling Nathuram.
“We can’t turn back now; not at this stage. We’ll have another try, recruit a new lot of men, collect more money. But we just can’t drop the whole thing now.”
Nathuram didn’t say much, but somehow I could sense that he was not altogether in agreement. It was not till the next morning that I discovered what he was thinking about. It must have been past midnight when I dozed off. I had a disturbed sleep and, at about six the next morning, I was only half-awake when I heard Nathuram say:
“Nana, did you sleep well?”
I mumbled something and stretched my limbs and sleepily answered:
“Urn-hum, and you?”
He did not answer my question, Instead he said:
“I’m going to do it. I don’t need any help, not another man. No recruiting people, no depending on any one else.”
My eyes were still closed, and I swear that, in that instant, I saw Gandhi dead.
Their train reached Kanpur a little before noon on Wednesday, the twenty-first. By this time, the Delhi Police had succeeded in extracting enough information from Madanlal to put them on the trail of a ‘Kirkree Seth’ from Ahmednagar, and ‘the Manager of a Rashtriya paper in Poona’. They also had good descriptions of the others, such as ‘a man who called himself Deshpande and was staying at the Marina Hotel [Apte]. A man with a beard [Badge], and his servant, aged twenty years.’That same evening, Wednesday, two inspectors of the Delhi Police flew to Bombay.
In Kanpur, Nathuram went into the railway station office and, in his own name, booked a retiring-room with two beds. That day they spent on the station itself. At 11.30 the next morning they caught the Lucknow-Jhansi Mail which, at Jhansi, gave them a connection with the Delhi-Bombay Punjab Mail. They reached Bombay’s Victoria Terminus at noon on 23 January, and proceeded to a cheap mid-town hotel where Apte had stayed several times before with his mistress. It was the Arya Pathikashram on Sandhurst Road; and its Manager, Gaya Pershad Dube, regarded Apte, who always demanded and paid for a whole room to himself, as a favoured client. This time, however, Dube could not oblige Apte and his friend with a separate room; in fact, the best he could do was to give them two beds in a room that had six other lodgers, but promised to do something better for them the next morning.
Apte and Nathuram left their luggage in the hotel and hurried off to Thana, to the house of Mr G.M. Joshi, were Karkare normally stayed whenever he was in Bombay. But Joshi had not seen anything of Karkare since he had left for Delhi, so they went to the two or three other people whom Karkare was known to visit. Considering that the new plan was to be a one-man effort, their anxiety to get in touch with Karkare seems strange, but they had been out of touch since Madanlal’s arrest and did not even know whether any of the others were still free. Nor were they sure whether they were going to stay on in Bombay or proceed to Poona, and thus did not leave any instructions for Karkare at these houses as to how he was to contact them when he finally did come.
In the evening they sent a friend to Poona to pass word to Gopal that they had arrived in Bombay and that Miss Salvi would know where they were staying.
They did not return to the hotel till late at night. Next morning the manager came and told Apte that they would have a double room to themselves, which Apte accepted. They then went to a nearby hotel, the Elphinstone Annexe in Carnac Road, and booked another room there. Nathuram registered here as ‘N. Vinayakrao and friend’. According to the Arya Pathikashram’s manager, Apte returned before noon with ‘a lady who stayed with him throughout the day of 24 January and the night between 24 and 25’. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Sunday, Apte shifted to the room in the other hotel, and the ‘lady’, Manorama Salvi, went with him, and stayed with him through most of the next two days, while Nathuram saw movies and otherwise managed to leave the two as much to themselves as possible.
EIGHT
They will come again.
— MADANLAL PAHWA
At his prayer meeting on the evening after Madanlal’s arrest, Gandhi again spoke of him with kindness.
No one should look down upon the misguided young man who had thrown the bomb. He probably looked upon me as an enemy of Hinduism. After all, had not the Gita said that, whenever there was an evil-minded person damaging religion, God sent someone to end his life?
And, as though knowing something about the methods of interrogation practised by the police in India,
Gandhi also made a special appeal to the Inspector-General of Police ‘not to harass the youth in any way’.
According to Madanlal, he was not only harassed, but also subjected to some revoltingly sadistic tortures. He was pounded on the soles of his feet with a twist of hard rope while questions were fired at him; made to lie on the floor with two legs of a charpoy [string bed] resting on his hands and on which a policeman jumped up and down; his sexual organs were played with, abused, prodded and beaten with sticks; and — something he came to dread most — he was treated to what he believes was a local speciality, ‘the ordeal by ants’. They would hold big red ants in their fingers, infuriate them by spitting on them, and then release them on his naked body.
He screamed, he howled like an animal, but he talked too — and what he said went down in the records as a confession made voluntarily because his companions ‘had deserted him and run away and he considered it his duty to get them arrested’.
He believes to this day that no one could have withstood the sort of interrogation that he was put through, but he is also proud of the fact that he did not tell them everything he knew. By making distorted statements and pretending that he did not understand any Marathi he was able to camouflage the identities of his colleagues.
By screaming louder than he need have, by ranting incoherently and whispering meekly in turns, and revealing too many irrelevant details which went down into the ‘case-diaries’ as they were uttered he was able to throw the police off the right trial for just long enough to prevent them from arresting the ringleaders before they were able to strike again.
But, if Madanlal had not told them everything he knew, he certainly had told them enough. If the police had acted with more than routine zeal, it is doubtful if Nathuram Godse or any of the other conspirators would still have been free on 30 January, the day on which Gandhi was murdered.
Chotu Ram, the occupant of room No. 3 in the Birla House servants’ quarters, had told the police how some men had come to ask him to be allowed to take a photograph of Gandhi from his room, and his description of them tallied with that given by Madanlal. Within three hours of Madanlal’s arrest, the police knew that what he had done was intended to serve as a signal for an attempt on Gandhi’s life, that the final preparations for a concerted assault had been made, and the final instructions given in a room in the Marina Hotel. Late at night, they took Madanlal to the Marina. As Mr C. Pacheco, the manager of the Marina Hotel later testified: ‘He was brought handcuffed and with his face covered. The covering was removed and he was asked to lead them to the room where his friends were staying. He led them to room No. 40.’
The police called in witnesses and searched the room. In a drawer of a table they came upon a typewritten sheet. It was the statement issued by Ashutosh Lahiri, the General Secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, declaring that his party had not signed the seven-point pledge that had been instrumental in making Gandhi give up his fast
Later, the judge who tried the case, Mr Atma Charan, declared this bit of evidence to be inadmissible and ‘altogether discarded [it] for the purpose of arriving at any conclusion, one way or the other’. But at the time it led the police to suspect that the Hindu Mahasabha was connected with the plot to murder Gandhi; and the Hindu Mahasabha, by projection, led them to Savarkar.
By the time they had finished the search of room No. 40 and gone through the procedure of recording the discoveries in the presence of witnesses it was long past midnight. All the same, Madanlal’s interrogation continued. It was important to prevent him from dropping off to sleep. The case-diary of one of the interrogating officers records that he ‘was talking in whispers’. Early the next morning, he was led to the Old Delhi railway station.
Two trains leave Delhi for Bombay in the morning; the Frontier Mail at eight, and the Punjab Mail at nine. Gopal Godse was leaving by the second, and Karkare had come to see him off. Gopal had already found a seat in a third-class compartment, and had deposited his cloth bag which contained both the revolvers as well as his unused hand grenade under his bunk, and he and Karkare had gone into the tea-room on the platform for breakfast. As Gopal later admitted to the author:
We had just sat down when we saw a police party arriving with a man whose head and shoulders were covered with a brown blanket. Even before the blanket was removed, we knew that the man was Madanlal. We were quite certain that he had revealed our names and that he had been brought to the station to identify us.
The tea-room is large, perhaps forty feet by thirty and it was not crowded. Madanlal was made to take a good look all around while two policeman watched his eyes for signs of recognition. After he had turned the full circle, he shook his head. His escort again covered his head with the brown blanket and he was marched out. ‘It was just our good luck that he did not look in our direction,’ Gopal added.
But Gopal was wrong. Madanlal had seen Gopal as well as his good friend Karkara Seth the moment the hood was removed from his head, but had managed to stare straight through them. Only after he had completed his inspection did he shake his head. They took him out and began to search the carriages of the train. When they had gone to the other end of the train, Gopal sauntered back to his compartment and took his seat.
One of the people who had got himself into a state over Madanlal’s arrest was his professor friend in Bombay, Dr J.C. Jain. Several of Jain’s friends knew that he knew Madanlal, and at least one, Angad Singh, knew that Madanlal had hinted to him that he was involved in a plot to murder Gandhi. Jain had done nothing whatsoever to report this information to the police, and must have realized that, if Madanlal said anything about it in his statement, there was a possibility that his own silence might land him into trouble.
Jain was in his fortieth year. He held a Ph.D. degree in Hindi and was a professor in a college. He was thus a man of education and social background who was well aware of his duties and responsibilities as a citizen. That he should have originally passed off Madanlal’s revelations as refugee bombast is altogether understandable. But now, after Madanlal had been caught, Jain knew that it was his clear duty to report what he had heard to someone in authority.
His normal course would have been to rush to the nearest police station to make a report. Instead, for reasons which were never satisfactorily explained, he sought interviews with the Deputy Prime Minister of India and the Chief of Bombay’s Congress Party and, when he failed to make contact with either, descended, as it were, to Bombay’s Chief Minister, B. G. Kher. (The approximate analogy for this sort of behaviour would be for a professor in Columbia University who had discovered that President Kennedy was to be murdered during his Dallas visit insisting on passing on the information only to the Vice-President or, failing him, to no one of less than cabinet rank.)
It was not till four o’clock in the afternoon of the twenty-first that Jain was admitted into Mr Kher’s room. But, before Jain could come to the point, Kher had to go somewhere else, and he passed him on to his Home Minister, Morarji Desai.
Morarji, as it happens, also held the police portfolio and, if only in fairness to his department, should have ordered Jain to go to the police with his story; at least he should have taken the precaution of getting someone to make a record of what Jain had to say. Instead, he gave Jain what amounted to a confidential hearing and, incredibly, he even agreed to Jain’s request not to ‘disclose even to the police’ the source of his information. One result of this was that both Jain and Morarji had later to rely entirely on their memories to recall exactly what had been said at this interview. Morarji believes that the only name Jain mentioned as a conspirator of Madanlal was that of Karkare, whereas Jain ‘claimed to have disclosed the names of Madanlal’s confederates [as given by him in his interrogation] and made a grievance of their not having been arrested.’
After Gandhi was murdered, what Jain claims to have told Morarji and what Morarji believes he heard was to spark a bout of caustic histrionics between the two men. Morarji, according to Jain,
Following pages: 194-97: Copy of Dr J.C. Jain’s statement to the court. A close friend and mentor of Madanlal Pahwa, Dr Jain from Bombay had some inkling about Madanlal’s trip to Delhi, which he had passed off earlier as refugee bombast. If what Mr Jain told to Bombay Home Minister, Morarji Desai, on 21 January had been taken cognizance of at an appropriate time, maybe the tragedy could have been averted.
Neither was guilty of murder or conspiracy. Justice K.L. Kapur, who headed the one-man commission (known as the Kapur Commission), which was later appointed to investigate the allegations that several people had advance information of the plot to murder Gandhi, questioned Professor Jain at length. He was led to conclude that he could not be ‘clear about what exactly Jain had told the Home Minister’, and in his report calls attention to the more obvious discrepancies between Jain’s first and subsequent versions of what he had reported. But this much is certain. On 21 January, Jain told the Home Minister of Bombay that there was a plot to murder Gandhi and that, other than Madanlal, a man called Karkare who lived in Ahmednagar was involved in it.