The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  If Nehru shied away from difficult decisions, Gandhi, who took pride in his ability not to let sentiment come in the way of the national good or at least of political expediency, could be brutally pragmatic. Many years ago he had declared Nehru to be his ‘chosen son’. Now, according to the diary maintained by Patel’s daughter Maniben, he was having second thoughts about that choice. Gandhi is quoted as saying to Patel: ‘You both are unable to get on and it will ever be so. One of you should withdraw. Looking to your popularity [record?] at present, you should be raised.’

  But, upon this question on which his own future revolved as on most others, Patel was far more clear-sighted than Gandhi or Nehru. Arguing that Jawaharlal was younger and far more popular than himself, and also that he was internationally known, Patel sent a letter to Gandhi asking that he ’should be relieved’.

  Unable to agree with him, Gandhi had told Patel to come and talk to him again on the afternoon of the thirtieth.

  With his mind almost totally absorbed by these two problems, Gandhi could not have given much thought to himself. The stir caused by the incident days ago had passed off. But, even at the time, Gandhi had not even bothered by the explosion because he had thought it was some kind of ‘military practice’. And when Lady Mountbatten, who had come to see him soon afterwards, had congratulated him on his coolness he had explained to her that he had not even realized that something had been exploded in the grounds of Birla House. ‘If somebody fired at me point blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart, I should be deserving of congratulations.’

  That moment and that test had arrived.

  Gandhi had risen at his usual hour, at 3.30 in the morning, said his prayers, done three hours’ work at his desk, and gone to sleep again before most other men were awake. He was up again at eight, had glanced over the day’s papers, and had his body massage and bath. He had taken breakfast at 9.30, and as usual it consisted of goat’s milk, cooked and raw vegetables, oranges and a decoction of ginger and sour limes. Another two hours of work had been followed by another nap. By two o’clock he was ready for the twenty or so daily visitors who were privileged to come into his room: refugee leaders, favoured reporters, hangers-on, a few devotees come for his darshan, and those who had friends among the members of his entourage, senior government officials and, of course, ministers. Birla House was still the place where the highest decisions of the government were made or could be set aside.

  At four o’clock came Sardar Patel, accompanied by his daughter. Even though Patel stayed with Gandhi for the next hour, nothing definite seems to have been decided about his letter of resignation. Miss Patel’s diary contains a maddeningly meaningless entry which purports to be the substance of what her father told her Gandhi had said to him.

  I had talks with Gandhiji even on the last day. At the time [he] told me that it is not possible to pull on with [sic] either of you. Both of you should remain. Tomorrow we shall clarify everything when we meet.

  Facing page:Statement of Manubehn Gandhi given to the Delhi Police.

  The Last Walk: Gandhi walking towards the lawn for his last prayer meeting on 30 January1948 with his grandniece Abha, his ‘living walking stick’.

  On 30 January 1948, Gandhi left his room at ten past five for the prayer meeting. As usual, Manu and Abha, his grandnieces, walked on either side. He walked briskly across the lawn and climbed the five shallow semi-circular steps that led to the raised portion of the lawn where people were waiting for him. Godse, Apte and Karkare pushed their way forward. With the pistol in his hand, Godse folded his hands to say ‘Namaste’. And then, as he testified later, ‘… the shots went off, almost on their own.’

  That tomorrow never came. But surely what Gandhi had said was that Patel and Nehru should both remain because it was not possible to ‘pull on’ without either of them?

  A little before five, Gandhi’s two teenaged grand-nieces, Manu and Abha, came into the room. Gandhi consulted the big watch he wore dangling from his waist by a cord and told Patel that it was time to go for his prayers. At ten past five he left the room. As usual Manu and Abha walked on each side so that he could lean on their shoulders. In her hands Manu carried Gandhi’s spittoon and rosary. Gandhi walked briskly across the lawn and climbed the five shallow semi-circular steps that led to the raised portion of the lawn where the prayer-meeting audience awaited him. He folded his hands to return their greeting.

  The crowd that day was fairly large for a prayer meeting; it must have numbered nearly five hundred. Karkare and Apte had pushed their way forward and stood on either side of Nathuram, but if he saw them he gave no sign of recognition. There was a stir in the crowd, and they saw Gandhi coming across the lawn and go up the steps.

  Nathuram later told his brother Gopal that he was put off by the two girls walking in front of Gandhi. As Gandhi raised his hand to greet the crowd, Nathuram slid forward the safety catch on the Beretta while it was still in his pocket, and then stepped up to him.

  With the pistol in my right hand. I folded my hands and said

  “Namaste!” [Greetings!] With my left hand I pushed aside the girl who might have come in my line of fire. Then the shots went off, almost on their own. I never knew whether I had fired two rounds or three. Gandhi gave a quick gasp, a sound like “Aaaah!” and fell down, I kept holding my hand high, gripping the pistol tightly, and began to yell “Police... Police!” I wanted everyone to see that this was something premeditated, something deliberate – that I had not acted in a fit of passion. I wanted no one to say that I tried to run away or to get rid of the pistol, but wanted to be caught complete with the pistol. But everything was suddenly still, and for at least half a minute no one came forward.

  He realized that they were frightened to come near him while he still held the smoking pistol in his hand and hoped that they would somehow realize that he was not going to resist arrest. He felt almost limp with relief when a man in an Air Force uniform sprang at him and caught his wrist. He released the pistol. Then other people who later testified how they had rushed and overpowered him came crowding all round, screaming abuse and hitting him. He saw the pistol being passed from hand to hand and shouted to a Police Officer, ‘You’d better take possession of it and put on the safety catch before they shoot one another!’

  By the time Manu Gandhi had picked up the spittoon and the rosary that had fallen from her hands when she had been pushed aside, and turned to look at her great-uncle, he was laying still and the blood was pouring from the bullet wounds in his bare chest.

  No one noticed whether Gandhi’s face bore a smile as he faced his assailant. But Gurbachan Singh, a Sikh businessman from Panipat who was a devotee of Gandhi and who was only a few steps behind him as he fell, deposed that Gandhi’s last words were, ‘Hai Rama!’ Karkare, on the other hand, who stood within a few feet of Gandhi and saw him as the bullets struck him swore to the author that all Gandhi uttered was a cry of pain, a guttural rasp, ‘Aaaah!’

  It is, of course, possible that both are wrong, and that what they heard, or say they heard, was conditioned by the one man’s veneration for Gandhi and the other man’s contempt. Then again it is possible that both are right, and the invocation ‘Hai Rama!’ uttered with his last breath may have sounded to Karkare like a cry of pain.

  While Nathuram was being led away by the police to one side of the building to save him from being lynched by a section of the crowd, many frightened people were making a scramble for the exits.

  Following pages 252-273: Nathuram Godse was arrested from Birla House as he did not make any attempt to escape from the scene of crime. He was arrested and taken to the Tuqlak Road police station, where the DSP, Sardar Jaswant Singh filed the First Information Report. A copy of the translation of the report as prepared by S. Jaswant Singh.

  Justice G.D. Khosla: At the unprecedented interest aroused by the case, the Chief Justice of India decided to constitute a bench of three judges to hear the appeal by Godse and his a
ccomplices. The judges were Justice Bhandari, Justice Achhruram and Justice G.D. Khosla.

  ELEVEN

  ...had the audience of that day [in the High

  Court] been constituted into a jury and

  entrusted with the task of deciding

  Godse’s appeal, they would have brought

  in a verdict of ‘not guilty’.

  — JUSTICE G.D. KHOSLA

  It was exactly as Madanlal had said, ‘Phir Ayega!’ They had come again, and this time they had struck. The police had been given at least nine days’ advance notice and told that one of the principal leaders of the plot was the editor of a Marathi paper in Poona or Bombay which Madanlal had said was called Hindu Rashtra. Now that very man had killed Gandhi.

  The murder galvanized the authorities into a frenzy of action. Within twenty minutes of it, Bombay’s Home Minister, Morarji Desai, who, it will be recalled, had been told by Professor Jain nine days earlier that Madanlal and his accomplices had plotted to kill Gandhi, was on the telephone to Deputy Commissioner Nagarvala, telling him about the murder and ordering him to ‘take any necessary further action’.

  However, for the time being, any action to arrest the people on the police list of suspects had to cede precedence to a fresh problem of law and order set in motion by Gandhi’s murder. As soon as it became known that the murderer was a Brahmin, in the towns and villages of central and western India Brahmins were jeered at and stoned, and their houses and places of business burned by gangs of hooligans professing to be outraged by what one of the order had done.

  Balchandra Haldipur, part of the special cell on trail of the co-conspirators of Nathuram Godse, was responsible for finally trapping Apte and Karkare in Bombay. A National Olympics champion, Haldipur sketched images of various people he met during the course of the trial. According to his wife Vasudha, Haldipur, during the days he was lying in wait to nab Apte and Karkare, didn’t come home for weeks and survived on just raw eggs!

  This is a madness peculiar to India, where communal strife means much more than the hostility between two religions. The entire fabric of society is fissured with it, and nowhere is it more deep-seated or more savage than among the different gradations of the Hindu caste structure. Whichever caste or sub-caste or clan Gandhi’s killer may have belonged to, there would inevitably have been some people who would have wanted to use the opportunity to get their own back on that caste or sub-caste or clan.

  And, if the killer had been a Muslim, it would have given the Hindus and Sikhs a legitimate grievance to rise against the entire Muslim population of India, which in turn would, almost in the natural course of events, have extended to a full-scale war with Pakistan. Lord Mountbatten was perhaps quicker to sense this danger than the Indian leaders. He had reached Birla House within minutes of Gandhi’s murder. Alan Campbell-Johnson describes what happened:

  The tension is such that one careless word and rumour will spread like a forest fire. Even on our arrival, [Mountbatten] was greeted by a scaremonger who told him “It was a Moslem who did it.” At that moment we still did not know the religion and the name of the assassin, but Mountbatten, appreciating that if he was a Moslem we were lost anyhow and that nothing could then avert the most disastrous civil war, replied in a flash, “You fool, don’t you know it was a Hindu!”

  Everyone was relieved that it was a Hindu — everyone that is, except the Brahmins, who now suddenly became ‘Gandhi-killers’. The anti-Brahmin riots were particularly virulent in the city of Bombay where the Army had to be called in to help the police to restore order. As such, it was not till the next afternoon that Nagarvala was able to take the further action that was ordered by his political superior, and this took the form of a raid on Savarkar’s house and the seizure of all his private papers, which consisted of ’some 143 files containing as many as 10,000 letters’.

  But that day Savarkar was left a free man. The evidence against him was not strong enough to charge him with being an accomplice in a murder plot. In fact, there was no evidence at all. What was known was the affiliation of the conspirators to the Hindu Mahasabha and their personal veneration for Savarkar. And this, in addition to whatever Morarji Desai may have told Nagarvala (which was based on what Jain had told Morarji), provided the main, if not the only, basis for suspecting Savarkar as the man behind the conspiracy. But even Professor Jain cannot be shown to have mentioned Savarkar’s name in his confidential revelations to Morarji Desai. During his cross-examination at the murder trial, Jain admitted, ‘I did not give the facts of the case to anyone in writing till 17 February 1948 and [in a] statement I made some ten days later I did not state that Madanlal had told me that Veer Savarkar had sent for him.’

  It was not till much later, and when Jain polished up his story, that Savarkar’s name first appeared in it. How or why he had failed to mention so vital a piece of information in his first sworn statement was never satisfactorily explained.

  Madanlal, on the other hand, is far more emphatic on this point. ‘I had never been sent for by Savarkar... I had never had any talk at any time about Savarkar with Jain,’ he told the judge at his trial. And, even twenty years later, after he had served his sentence and was a free man again, he still swore8 that he had not even mentioned Savarkar’s name to Jain.

  Two other men who served ‘life’ sentences for Gandhi’s murder, Vishnu Karkare and Gopal Godse, who were also questioned on this point after Savarkar had died, were equally insistent, when the author spoke to them, that he had absolutely no connection with the plot to murder Gandhi.

  All three thought that it was significant that Dr Jain should not have even mentioned Savarkar’s name in his first recorded statement, which, they pointed out, had been made more than three weeks after the murder, and also after Savarkar had been ‘detained’. From this they inferred that his name had been included later.

  Their argument ran as follows. Jain had undergone a term of detention and had acquired a marked aversion for the police. He had irritated the police hierarchy by going over their heads to their political superior, with the result that, at Jain’s very first interview with him, Deputy Commissioner Nagarvala had treated him with brusqueness and had even threatened to put him under arrest.

  They believed that Jain was seeking to make amends by strengthening the prosecution’s case against Savarkar, and supported this contention by citing the discrepancies between Jain’s first version of what Madanlal had told him and later versions which had also struck Justice Kapur. According to Justice Kapur, ‘Jain first said that Madanlal’s statement indicated a conspiracy to murder and later introduced the story of the objective being to create confusion and kidnapping Mahatma Gandhi.’All this, they felt, fitted snugly into Nagarvala’s own ‘kidnapping’ theory.

  Oddly enough, even Justice Kapur finds it puzzling that Jain should have gone with his story to a minister instead of to a police officer, and suggests that this may have been because ‘he could not have been very fond of the police’, being a ‘progressive’ and a ‘leftist’.

  But, in fairness to Jain, it must be emphasized that few people in his position would have gone to the police with so sensational a story. On the contrary, it is quite common in India for most citizens who have been witnesses to a road accident or a robbery to disappear from the scene as quickly as possible to avoid becoming involved in the subsequent inquiries and court proceedings. And, if Justice Kapur found Jain’s reluctance to approach the police somewhat unusual, another judge, Justice Atma Charan, who tried the Gandhi murder case, has actually commended him for his ‘courage and integrity’ in making a report at all: ‘He rose to the occasion. He shouldered the burden of inevitable consequences and did his duty to society.’

  As such, the contention of some of the accused that Dr Jain was dutifully trying to strengthen ‘the prosecution’s case by bringing in Savarkar’s name is hardly tenable. But, even if it were, why were the police so anxious to implicate Savarkar? Was it merely that, having failed in their proper functi
on to arrest Nathuram before he killed Gandhi, they were making a bid to save face by raising the bogey of some sensational plot which involved a big leader who, providentially happened to be in bad odour with the government of the day? Or was that government itself, or some powerful group in it, using the police agency to destroy a rival political organization or at least to destroy a fiercely uncompromising opposition stalwart?

  Or, again, was the whole thing a manifestation of some form of phobia peculiar to India, religious, racial, linguistic, or provincial, that made Savarkar a natural target for the venom of some section of society?

  Whatever it was, Savarkar himself was so conscious of these currents, so convinced that the authorities were determined to take him to court as an accomplice of Nathuram, that when, five days after Gandhi’s murder, a police party entered his house he went forward to meet it and asked: ‘So you’ve come to arrest me for Gandhi’s murder?’