The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  Copy of Manorama Salvi’s statement in court wherein she acknowledged her relationship with Narayan Apte and stated that he used to write to her regularly and sign off as her friend Nirmala.

  At this particular time, Parchure had a very special reason for feeling enraged against the Congress Party and, by projection, against its superstar, Mahatma Gandhi. Parchure and his colleagues of the Mahasabha had tried to convince the Maharaja of Gwalior, Jayajirao Scindia, that theirs was the majority party in the state and thus, when the time came for the Maharaja to hand over the administration to the people’s representatives, it should be handed over to the Mahasabha. It seems that the Maharaja was himself convinced of the validity of this claim, but it soon became clear to him that the Government in Delhi would never have tolerated his handing over power to a non-Congress ministry. The result was that, on 24 January, and thus only four days before Nathuram and Apte were dropped at Dr Parchure’s doorstep by the tonga-driver Gariba, a Congress ministry had been formed in what had been the princely State of Gwalior.

  Parchure was furious.

  In his confession given before Mr R.B. Atal, the First Class Magistrate of Gwalior, three weeks later, which he later repudiated as having been extracted under duress, Parchure stated: ‘I had just gone to bed. My eldest son, Nilkant, came to my room and told me that two guests have come. I told my son to open the door... and came down immediately... and found Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte.’

  Parchure offered them tea, which Apte gratefully accepted but Nathuram, a confirmed coffee-drinker, declined. Upon Parchure expressing surprise that they should have turned up at his house ‘without any previous intimation’ Nathuram explained that they had decided to ‘do a terrible feat’, which was to kill Gandhi. He then produced a revolver which he told Parchure did not work properly, and asked him to try to get them ‘a better revolver from someone in Gwalior’. Parchure promised to see what he could do in the morning, and went back to sleep, taking it for granted that his two midnight visitors would become his house guests.

  The next morning Parchure sent off his son Nilkant and his ‘bodyguard’ Roopa to fetch a man called G.S. Dandvate and after telling his guests that they could trust him completely, went off to his dispensary in the Patankar Bazaar. At midday, when he returned, he found that Dandvate had arrived and he and his two guests were examining a ‘country-made’ revolver that he had brought. This weapon, after firing a shot with it in the enclosed garden on one side of Parchure’s house, Nathuram and Apte rejected.

  They had hoped to return to Delhi by the Punjab Mail which passed Gwalior in the afternoon but, upon Parchure protesting that it would not be possible for him to ‘arrange’ for a revolver in such a hurry, agreed to stay till evening. They joined their host for lunch and afterwards ‘had a talk on the current political developments’. Parchure goes on:

  In the evening Dandvate came to my house with a pistol with about 10-12 rounds... Godse and Apte examined its automatic arrangement and approved of this pistol. Dandvate said the price of the pistol was Rs 500. Apte paid him Rs 300 and promised to pay the rest later on.

  The pistol, an automatic 9 mm Beretta in excellent working order, would have made the mouth of any would-be assassin water; in fact, for the manner in which Nathuram had planned to kill Gandhi, it would have been difficult to find a more perfect weapon.

  The Beretta had travelled halfway across the world to serve its fateful destiny. Manufactured in Italy in 1934, it had been taken to Abyssinia by one of Mussolini’s officers. From him it was ‘liberated’ by an officer of the 4th Gwalior Infantry, which regiment had been sent to Abyssinia as part of the force which accepted the surrender of the Italians. But since the Battalion’s return to India the pistol had changed hands several times. In any case, in Gwalior itself there was nothing wrong with anyone possessing a pistol, because even though the Gwalior State had an Arms Registration Act, it had never been seriously enforced, and the mere possession of a firearmwas not, as it was in British India, a serious criminal offence. Dandvate, whosold the pistol to Nathuram, said in his statement that he had bought it froma man called Jagdish Prasad Goel, and during the course of the trial thisGoel admitted that he had sold it to Dandvate. But Goel did not explain howhe himself had come by it. Of course, once it became known that theBeretta had been used to kill Gandhi, no one wanted to own up that it had,at one time or another, belonged to him; and it is possible that Goel, byrefusing to mention the name of the person who had sold it to him, wasshielding him from trouble. In any case, since Nathuram had admitted hisguilt, the question of establishing the chain of ownership of the pistol beforeDandvate sold it to him was of little importance.

  Facing page: Copy of the Inspector-General of Delhi Police’s letter to the Director Scientific Laboratory, where the automatic pistol was sent with the spent bullet for examination.

  The past experience of 20 January had taught them to be careful with the weapon. After careful deliberation they zeroed in on an automatic pistol — 9 mm Beretta. Manufactured in Italy in 1934, the Beretta had travelled from Abyssinia to Gwalior, from where it was procured for the crime with the help of Dr Sadashiv Parchure.

  To continue with Dr Parchure’s subsequently repudiated confession:

  At 10.30p.m. on 28 January, Dandvate got a tonga and Nathuram Godse and Apteleft my house for the railway station ... I went to my bedroom and slept. Dandvatealso went to his house. The next day, i.e. 29 January 1948, I mentioned to my eldestbrother Krishnarao Parchure that two gentlemen had come to me with a plan to killGandhi at Delhi and that I had arranged a pistol for them.7

  By 11 p.m. the ‘two gentlemen’were back in the yard of the railway stationwhere the tongas waited behind the manure-fires throwing up slendercolumns of smoke in the light of the full moon. The Bombay-AmritsarExpress was due in another thirty minutes. But the train was late by nearlythree hours, and they did not leave Gwalior till well past two in the morning– the morning of the twenty-ninth.

  TEN

  Every condition laid down by Gandhi for

  giving up his fast is ... against the Hindus.

  — NATHURAM GODSE

  Ever since the advent of Independence, the nation’s capital had been put under one of the most pernicious enactments of the Indian Penal Code – section 144, which, among other things, empowers the authorities to disallow such public meetings as might, in their opinion, disrupt peace. This, in the charged atmosphere of the times, virtually meant that all public meetings had been banned. Nevertheless, during the hectic week of Gandhi’s fast, section 144 had not been enforced by the Delhi Police with their customary strictness because so many groups of citizens had come forward to demonstrate their zeal for communal harmony by making public pronouncements. To ban their meetings would have made the police look as though they were in league with the anti-Gandhi/anti- Muslim faction of the population.

  Since public meetings of one kind had been allowed to take place, the Delhi unit of the Hindu Mahasabha thought of taking advantage of the laxness on the part of the authorities to sneak in a meeting of their own, and make known to the people of Delhi that their organization had never subscribed to the seven-point Peace Pledge that had been devised to persuade Gandhi to give up his fast.

  At four o’clock on the afternoon of 27 January, they gathered in strength in, of all places, the great open space in the middle of the capital’s shoppingcentre, Connaught Place. And, even before the few policemen on duty realized that this was not just another meeting called by some civic group to preach communal harmony, speaker after speaker had got up and denounced Gandhi for ‘coercing’ the Government into paying Rs 55 crores to a country that was at war with India, and the government for letting Gandhi dictate terms to it. One speaker likened Gandhi to Hitler and predicted that he would meet Hitler’s fate. The meeting passed a resolution rejecting the Peace Pledge and denouncing the government for the payment of the cash balances to Pakistan. It ended with rousing cries of ‘Long live Hindu Unity! Turn out the
Muslims! Long live Madanlal!’

  Long live Madanlal! It was heresy. Even the refugees from the Punjab must have flinched when they found themselves called upon to join in that cry.

  The government, of course, was horrified. How could such a meeting have taken place in the teeth of section 144? Congressmen thundered, officials squirmed and looked for scapegoats ; explanations were called for, reprimands doled out. It was sheepishly admitted that, on the part of the administration, there had been a ‘deplorable slip-up’.

  That the meeting was allowed to take place at all may have been the result of an administrative slip-up, but the Delhi Police were perfectly aware that the meeting reflected the mood and sentiments of a large section of the city’s population, and who can say how many in their own ranks were not in sympathy. The truth was that the effect of the Peace Pledge was wearing off. The people of Delhi had heeded the Mahatma’s counsel and stopped killing the Muslims or driving them out of their houses. In all good faith they had waited for a similar halt in the atrocities across the border. There was no such halt.

  Gandhi’s fast, which Mountbatten had hoped would serve as ‘the great gesture for Pakistan to act in the same way’, had affected Pakistan not at all. If anything, there had been a renewed frenzy of communal massacres in Pakistan, and every day the papers carried properly watered-down reports of whatever had happened in the past day or two in Bhawalpur, Gujarath, Okha and a dozen other places. After the first horrifying impact, one could only think of these incidents in generalities, as a number killed, wounded, abducted.

  What came to be called ‘the Parachinar Tragedy’ is put down by Justice Kapur is his report in twenty-three words: ‘On the night of 22 January Parachinar camp was attacked by tribesmen. 130 non-Muslims were killed, 30 wounded and 50 abducted.’

  But in describing the fate of those who were ‘abducted’ Justice Kapur cannot confine himself to cold judicial prose.

  The kidnapping of young women and the treatment to which they were subjected was a sordid chapter in the history of human relations. They were taken, molested, raped, passed on from man to man, bartered, sold like cattle, and those who were subsequently rescued gave an account which would be, to put it mildly, hair-raising.

  What a Supreme Court Judge, a man trained to look upon the passions of mankind with god-like detachment, found to be ‘hair-raising’ was enough to make many Hindus and Sikhs blind with rage. To them a week of life under the lash of the Peace Pledge had been like a penance. Their brethren were being driven out of Pakistan; they themselves had no houses to live in; the Muslims of Delhi had their houses. The answer was clear: ‘Turn out the Muslims!’

  To Gandhi, the Parachinar tragedy was a challenge, ‘a test of his faith’. It did not deflect him from his immediate objective, which was to make the capital of India safe for its Muslims. On 25 January, he told his prayer audience how ‘it gladdened his heart to be told by Hindu and Muslim friends that a reunion of hearts was in the course of being established.’

  And then he went on to tell his audience what a wonderful thing it was that the annual Mehrauli urs was going to be held from the next day.

  Mehrauli is a village where the cowherds who supplied milk to the imperial city had lived from times immemorial. It is close to the Palam airfield, and passengers looking down from planes see it as a vast anthill cut away from the top, its buildings no higher than its heaps of manure.

  Mehrauli came into its own but once a year, when it held a fair to honour its holy man, Qutb-ud-din Mazar, who had lived and died there. During the wave of the communal riots in and ground Delhi that had caused Gandhi to go on a fast, Mehrauli, too, had been sacked by crowds of Hindus and Sikhs. They had driven out its Muslim population and had smashed the screens and lights of the divine’s tomb. When the wave of violence had subsided, many of the Muslim families who had fled from Mehrauli had been prevailed upon to go back and live in their houses. But those that had gone back still lived in terror, and they had given up all thought of holding the urs, or fair, which that year was due to begin from 26 January.

  Gandhi had come forward as their champion. One of the conditions that he had laid down upon the Hindus and Sikhs of Delhi for giving up his fast was that they must make it possible for the Muslims of Mehrauli to hold their annual fair.

  The fair thus constituted a major point in the seven-point Pledge. Its signatories had assured Gandhi that ‘the annual fair of Khwaja Qutb-ud-din Mazar will be held this year, as in previous years.’

  For Gandhi, the fair was altogether symbolic; that it could be held at all represented to him the change of heart that he had been endeavouring to bring about. And it was entirely fitting that when, on 27 January, he visited the fair the Mullas led him right inside the shrine as though he was one of themselves. He told them how deeply he was moved to see the ‘wanton damage to the marble screens enclosing the inner shrines’.

  Gandhi has been called a saint, a villain, a politician, a statesman, a fool, a knave, a charlatan, an astute tradesman, a naked fakir and many other things, but the few words he now said at the urging of the Mullas of the Mehrauli shrine are enough to show that, whatever else he might have been, he was, above all, a truly civilized man.

  I have never known what it is to be communal. To unite all sections and all communities that people this vast land of ours has been my dream ever since my childhood, and till that dream is realized my spirit can know no rest.

  The Amritsar Express got into Old Delhi station a little before noon. Nathuram walked up to the ticket window, showed his second-class tickets and asked to book a retiring-room with two beds. The clerk on duty, Sundarilal, told them a room would be vacant in an hour. They whiled away the hour at the station itself and, soon after one o’clock, got into the room, No. 6. Nathuram gave his name as ‘N. Venaik Rao’.

  Some of the bigger railway stations were provided with these retiringrooms for the use of first- or second-class passengers who, instead of going to some hotel in town, could stay at the station itself in reasonable comfort. The rooms were large and high-ceilinged and provided with their own bathrooms. They could be occupied only for twenty-four hours, and the charge for a double room was Rs 5. Old Delhi station had seven such retiring-rooms.

  Nathuram and Apte, who had had a pretty strenuous and tense time for the past three days, bathed and changed their clothes and then, calling the shoeshine boy who was attached to the retiring-rooms, arranged to have their soiled clothes washed. Then they went to one of the station restaurants, treated themselves to a good lunch, went back to their room and settled down to a long siesta.

  All this while, the third man, Karkare, had been waiting for them in the park across the road barely two hundred yards away.

  He had got into Delhi the previous evening, and he, too, was camping in the station, but not in a retiring-room. He had spread his blanket on the platform itself and gone to sleep among the hundreds of refugees who had made the railway station their temporary home till someone came and drove them away. In the morning he had queued up for one of the public lavatories, washed himself at one of the public taps and eaten his breakfast in the tea shop. Then, asking one of the refugees with whom he had struck up a friendship to mind his bed-roll, he had gone across to the park to start his vigil.

  It was a raw, cloudy morning, and Karkare shivered as he sat perched on the side of the fountain and smoked cigarettes. After a couple of hours, he had begun to walk slowly round the park, turning every few seconds to look in the direction of the entrance. He was by no means alone, because many of the refugees had overflowed from the station into the Queen’s Garden and settled down under the great trees, converting the park into a grubby gypsy encampment.

  On one of his rounds, Karkare passed a man lighting a kerosene stove and brewing tea. Then, from a gunny bag the man took out a few cups and saucers and set them out in the dust. When Karkare came round again, he saw that four or five men and women from among the inhabitants of the garden had gathered round and w
ere drinking tea. Karkare stopped and asked the man if he was selling tea.

  ‘Yes, Babuji. Just set up my tea shop,’ the man said, waving a hand at the array of cups.

  ‘Shop?’ Karkare could not help asking.

  ‘What more does one need to support oneself?’ the man answered. ‘No one to support, see! Both my sons were killed even as I looked on, the wife clubbed to death.’

  Karkare had nothing to do. After the other customers had gone away, he squatted down and paid for another cup while the man talked; and, oddly enough, what he was saying made Karkare believe that what they were about to do was somehow going to be the answer to all that the Hindus and Sikhs had gone through.

  It was just another refugee saga, with only slight variations, told without bitterness or anger but with a sense of resignation. Chased out of his home... rescued by soldiers ... the trek to India ... no food and water for a whole day and then a dry biscuit ... the time thousands of them fell like wolves on a man carrying a few loaves of bread ... Delhi at last and a release from purgatory. In Delhi he was able to find a place ... just a lean-to with barely enough room for a man to stretch out.

  ‘I set up my tea shop there; and then I was driven out.’ He had lost his composure. He uttered a foul word and betrayed the first sign of hatred, anger.

  ‘Driven out?’

  Ji-han — by our own soldiers, with bayonets – the great man had gone on a fast because I had occupied a Muslim house. Hah! So they threw me out – bodily.

  Karkare wished him luck and got up. Then he said, ‘You know, I too began with no more than what you have now. Yes, I too started a tea shop. I prospered.’

  ‘Babuji, I have no wish to prosper – merely to live out my days.’

  Karkare went back to his post near the fountain. The stone was now warmed by the sun. He sat down, smoking. Soon after five, the sun went down and a cold wind sprang up. The refugees had started cow-dung fires for cooking their evening rotis. Then through the smoke he saw them. He had been waiting for more than seven hours.