Savarkar being made an accused in the Gandhi-murder trial may well have been an act of political vendetta. Of course, Badge, on his track record is a slippery character and not to be relied upon, but he was most insistent to me that he had been forced to tell lies, and that his pardon and future stipend by the police department in Bombay depended upon his backing the official version of the case and, in particular that, he never saw Savarkar talking to Apte, and never heard him telling them: ‘Yeshaswi houn ya.’
But if the suspicion that big-name political figures were determined to ‘frame’ Savarkar was voiced in Delhi’s dinner-table conversation at the time, among Savarkar’s own followers it was an unassailable belief; something taken for granted but not to be openly talked about.
But many years later on 16 June 1983, the Poona newspaper Kal edited by S.R. Date, published a report on the subject, which was later reprinted in a volume published by the Savarkar Memorial Committee on 16 Feb. 89. I quote excerpts from it. It purports to report something that Savarkar’s counsel at the trial, L.B. (Annasahen) Bhopatkar, a Poona lawyer, had revealed to his friends after he returned to Poona from Delhi in January 1949, after the Red Fort trial was over, and Savarkar found ‘Not Guilty’.
Following pages 282-283: Copy of the affidavit submitted by Veer Savarkar to the magistrate in Bombay refuting the Police’s theory that he was the mastermind behind the Mahatma’s killing.
While in Delhi for the trial, Bhopatkar had been put up in the Hindu Mahasabha office. Bhopatkar had found it a little puzzling that while specific charges had been made against all the other accused, there was no specific charge against his client. He was pondering about his defence strategy when one morning he was told that he was wanted on the telephone, so he went up to the room in which the telephone was kept, picked up the receiver and identified himself. His caller was Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, who merely said; “Please meet me this evening at the sixth milestone on the Mathura road,” but before Bhopatkar could say anything more, put down the receiver.
That evening, when Bhopatkar had himself driven to the place indicated he found Ambedkar already waiting. He motioned to Bhopatkar to get into his car which he, Ambedkar himself, was driving. A few minutes later, he stopped the car and told Bhopatkar: There is no real charge against your client; quite worthless evidence has been concocted. Several members of the cabinet were strongly against it, but to no avail. Even Sardar Patel could not go against these orders. But, take it from me, there just is no case. You will win.” Who... Jawaharlal Nehru?... But why?
They had arrested Savarkar even though they did not possess sufficient evidence to do so. To be sure, the mass of papers seized from his house had yielded scores of letters from Nathuram and half a dozen from Apte, but these were disappointingly innocuous. All that they did was to establish the fact that Nathuram and Apte knew Savarkar and held him in great esteem. But this in itself was not enough to satisfy a magistrate that a prima facie case existed so that he could issue a warrant.
This, however, was no more than a technicality, and they got over it by arresting him under the Preventive Detention Act — one of the most malignant pieces of legislation with which the British had armed themselves while they ruled India. Even though Indian politicians of all shades of opinion had persistently condemned the British for this Act, the Congress had been in no hurry to repeal it after the British had gone. Under its provisions Savarkar was initially held ‘as a detenu’. After that they proceeded to build up evidence against him that would enable them to change his detention into arrest, with what would be called ‘retrospective effect’.
He was sixty-four years old, and had been ailing for a year or more. He was detained on 5 February 1948, and remained in prison for the whole of the year which the investigation and the trial took. He was adjudged ‘not guilty’ on 10 February 1949. The man who had undergone twenty-six years of imprisonment or detention under the British for his part in India’s struggle for freedom was thus slung back into jail for another year the moment that freedom came.
From Birla House, Nathuram was taken to the Tughlak Road police station for questioning. It seems that the police exercised moderation in their treatment of Nathuram.
He maintained that he alone was responsible for killing Gandhi, and that he had no accomplices, and took great care not to give away any information that might implicate any of the others. But men like Nathuram make bad liars. For one thing, the police had discovered in his pocket a diary in which he had meticulously put down all the sums that he had spent from their common fund. And these included, in addition to ‘Rs 9-00 Taxi. Rs 8- 00 Dinner’, and even ‘Rs 2-00 Tongawala’, sums given to people such as ‘Rs 50-00 Bandopant, Rs 250-00 Gopal’, and ‘Rs 308-00 Bombay-Delhi Aeroplane’, Even if the police had experienced a little difficulty in discovering who Bandopant might be – it was that Nathuram and Apte called Badge – they must have known right from the start that Gopal was the name of Nathuram’s brother and that Rs 308-00 was the price of two tickets from Bombay to Delhi, not one.
But it seems that Nathuram, for all his care, had also given his interrogators other pointers. He had told them that between 20 and 30 January he was mostly in Bombay, and that from 24 to 27 January he had stayed at the ‘Elphinstone Hotel’.
Accordingly the Delhi Police had asked the Bombay Police to find out from the register of the Elphinstone who else had been staying with Nathuram form 24 to 27 January.
The Elphinstone Hotel is in Hornby Road. On 5 February a couple of Bombay’s CID men went there to look over its register of guests. The entries in the register were of no help to them and neither the manager nor any of the hotel servants could remember anyone who might have fitted the description of Nathuram that the Delhi Police had sent out. Or did they mean the Elphinstone Annexe, the manager asked, which was a branch of the Elphinstone on Carnac Road?
The policemen asked the manager to ring up the other hotel and find out.
The Elphinstone Annexe is a small and cheap hotel in a crowded locality, and as its manager, Kashmiri Lal, took the call he could be easily seen and even heard from the open gallery which also served as a passage to some of the rooms on the same floor. As Kashmiri Lal later testified:
Two passengers [sic] who were putting up in Room No. 5 happened to come out into the gallery. Govinda [one of the room-boys] thereon told me that one of the two passengers looked like one who had stayed in Room No. 6 on 24 January.
One of the two men came over and asked Kashmiri Lal what the excitement was about and Kashmiri Lal brushed him off by telling him that ‘it did not concern him’. He then took the register over to the Elphinstone Hotel where the two policemen were waiting for it. By the time he returned, accompanied by the policemen, the two ‘passengers’ had already left.
They were Apte and Karkare.
In its efforts to dig up facts about who knew what about the conspiracy in advance, the Kapur Commission kept encountering an exasperating tendency among the country’s most senior officers to differ from one another in their versions of what one had told the other. Mr Nagarvala’s account of what the two police officers from Delhi, Sardar Jaswant Singh and Mr Balkishen, told him differs sharply from what they themselves have to say. Asked by the Kapur Commission whether he thought that a certain paragraph in the report of these two officers, which contained a reference to a paper they had shown him in Bombay, was a fake [sic], Mr Nagarvala replied: ‘As far as I am concerned, yes.’
There are similar differences on vital points between Mr Sanjevi, the Police Chief of Delhi, and Mr Rana, the Deputy Inspector General of the CID of the Bombay province; Mr Sanjevi and Mr Nagarvala; and even Mr Nagarvala and his immediate superior, Mr Bharucha, who was the Commissioner of Police for the city of Bombay, and from whom, incredibly, the fact that his department was investigating a report that some people were trying to murder Gandhi was being kept as ‘confidential’.
In the main, these differences can be ascribed to the fact that the officers concerne
d were giving evidence before a commission of inquiry. They were being excessively guarded in their answers, and taking shelter behind what the Kapur Commission calls the ‘multi-secitionalsim’ of the organization. In the initial stages, the investigation was not the business of just one department under one man who could be held responsible for the way it was run, but of three separate police forces – the Delhi Police, the Bombay Provincial Police, and the Bombay City Police – and cooperation among the three was far from perfect. There were several instances where vital information available on the files of one force was not passed on to another promptly merely because it was not asked for. As Nagarvala told the Kapur Commission: ‘The investigation was by the Delhi Police and it was up to them to ask for help.’
To be sure, this is true of departmental procedures all over the world; big organizations must work in compartments, and it is mainly by hindsight that one learns that some piece of information in the possession of one office might have averted a catastrophe if it had been in the possession of another.
But, if Nagarvala had stated the case to show that what the Kapur Commission characterized as a ‘bland and legalistic approach’ was only to be expected in organizations such as his, ironically enough it was Nagarvala himself who was to be tripped badly by a tricky little departmental fence. In fact, it would be quite correct to say that, if a certain order issued by him had been carried out by the concerned ’section’ with no more than routine diligence, it would have averted Gandhi’s assassination.
On 24 January Nagarvala had ordered the Poona Police to arrest Badge. Poona is just over a hundred miles from Bombay and, as far as communications go, might be regarded almost as a suburb of Bombay. But 24 January was a Saturday, and it is unlikely that the order was even read in Poona by whoever was to act on it until after the weekend. Badge, as has been narrated earlier, had reached Poona on the night of the twenty-second, and was living at his usual address. His arrest was not effected till the morning of 31 January, seven days after Nagarvala had issued the order for it and, as it happened, twelve hours after Gandhi was shot down.
Badge’s arrest turned out to be the sort of lottery-winning stroke of luck that policemen all over the world must dream of; a single break that presents them with a panoramic view of a highly complex criminal plot.
The curious part is that, when he gave that order, Nagarvala had no idea that Badge himself might be implicated in the plot. In fact, the only name he knew at this stage, apart from Madanlal’s, was that of Karkare. But what he had gathered from whatever the two Delhi policemen had told him was that, according to Madanlal’s statement, all the people in the plot were either from Bombay or Poona, and that they had armed themselves with grenades and explosives.
On the basis of this information, Nagarvala had his records checked for the names of people who were known to traffic in illicit arms and explosives and, perhaps among half a dozen others, had come upon that of Digambar Badge. He thought he would get hold of Badge and see if he could put them on the right track as to how Madanlal and his colleagues could have acquired gun-cotton slabs and hand grenades. As Nagarvala told the Kapur Commission, they wanted Badge only ‘as a person dealing in illicit arms who might tell us from where the gun-cotton slab had come’.
As it happened, the Poona Police did not even need to go through too many tiresome formalities to effect Badge’s arrest; he was what was called a habitual offender, who could be pulled in any time the police needed him for questioning.
But the request had come from the Bombay City Police, and the Poona District Police, who came under the provincial organization, took their time to carry it out. Later they made the excuse that Badge had been ‘hiding in a jungle’ for seven days, and at the subsequent inquiries Nagarvala dutifully backed them up. Badge himself says that he had done nothing of the kind, that he had hardly left his home since his return, and in any case never left it at night.
At 5.30 in the morning of 31 January, Badge was awakened by a knocking at the door. Inspector Oak of the Poona District Police had come to arrest him and take him to the police station. Badge went quietly.
At the station the Inspector began by explaining how a man called Madanlal, who had exploded a charge of gun-cotton near Gandhi’s prayer meeting in Delhi, was arrested on the spot and was found to have primed hand grenade in his pocket. Then he asked Badge if he could tell them how Madanlal might have got hold of the gun-cotton slab and the grenade.
Badge could. He had supplied both articles himself.
Badge was familiar with police procedure. He had no wish to submit himself to the kind of interrogation that is commonly practised by the police in India. He made a clean breast of everything.
The details came pouring out, and names were mentioned by the dozen. Madanlal being brought to his store by Karkare; the request by Apte and Nathuram for grenades, explosives and revolvers; the trip to Bombay to deliver the mal and the rendezvous at the Hindu Mahasabha office. What Apte had to say about his chance meeting with the actress Shanta Modak, whose professional name was Bimba; the name and address of Karkare’s friend in Bombay, G.M. Joshi; the several meetings with the two holy brothers of the Bhuleshwar temple; the efforts to get hold of a more powerful revolver, the long taxi-ride, Apte’s romance with Manorama Salvi, and the names and addresses of the people who had paid money to Nathuram and Apte in Bombay.
Following pages 290-299: Copy of the crime report as prepared by the Special Branch CID, Bombay, which named all the conspirators.
And then the activities in Delhi: the meeting with Gopal Godse, who had brought his own revolver; the reconnaissance survey of the Birla House grounds; the target practice in the woods at the back of the Birla temple; the final briefing in the room at the Marina Hotel; the full story, as far as he knew it, of what happened at Birla House; and the stashing away of the unused explosives in the grounds of the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan in Delhi.
Nagarvala asked for Badge to be sent to Bombay so that he could arrange to have him ‘confront’ Madanlal, who was being flown over from Delhi. Apparently, even at this confrontation, Madanlal did not give away much more information than he already had. But, by then, Nagarvala himself had a long interview with Badge and must have realized his potential as an ‘approver’ or state witness, who knew enough about the plot to make it easy for him to arrest the remaining members of the conspiracy and even to prove the charges against them in a court of law.
Badge was altogether in the dark about what the others had been doing since the evening of 20 January, and thus was not able to enlighten the police as to who might have supplied the Beretta. But he gave them the names of all those who had gathered in the Marina Hotel room on the afternoon of the twentieth: Nathuram, Apte, Karkare, Madanlal, Gopal, Shankar and himself.
On 5 February, Nagarvala drove to Poona to see if he could find Apte and Gopal Godse as well as Shankar Kistayya who, Badge had told him, had gone on ‘leave’ to see his mother but was due back on that day. But Apte, his neighbours told Nagarvala’s men had not been seen in Poona for more than two weeks, and they discovered that Shankar had still not returned. But Gopal was in his house. He was arrested and taken to Bombay.
Facing page: Arrested on 31 January in Poona, Digambhar Badge was the first conspirator to be arrested. Familiar with the police procedures he had no wish to submit himself to the interrogation. Quite easily he gave out all the details and became the police approver. Copy of the pardon passed on by Atma Charan, Judge of the Special court hearing the Gandhi murder trial.
As it happened, Shankar, who had gone to Sholapur for a few days to see his mother, returned to Poona within a couple of hours after the police party which had come to arrest him had gone away. When he was told that his master, Badge, had been arrested and taken to Bombay, he decided to go to Bombay in search of him. As he later told the judge who tried him: ‘At Bombay I did not know where to go. I thought of Dixitji Maharaj and went to his house. I met one of his servants who took me to the CID building.
I met Mr Nagarvala there. Somebody said something to Mr Nagarvala. He thereupon gave me a slap.’
Among other things that Gopal blurted out under what he has described as ‘inescapable procedural harassment’ was the fact that he had entrusted his revolver to a friend for safekeeping. On 8 February the Bombay Police brought Gopal to Poona for a ‘confrontation’ with that friend, Pandurang Godbole. They stopped their car a little distance from his house and two policemen in plain clothes accompanied Gopal to the door.
When Godbole had come to know that it was Gopal’s brother Nathuram who had killed Gandhi, he was seized by a fit of panic at the thought that he was keeping Gopal’s revolver. He mentioned his fear to a friend, Gopal Kale, and Kale had offered to get rid of the revolver for him.
So when Gopal Godse, accompanied by the plain-clothes men, came to reclaim his revolver, Godbole, after first trying to make out that he had thrown it away, told them that he had given it to Kale. Upon this, they bundled Godbole into the car and drove to Kale’s house. But Kale, true to his word, actually had thrown the revolver away ‘on the right side of the road opposite the main gate of the Feruguson College’.
Gopal’s revolver was never found. Both Godbole and Kale were arrested and taken for questioning. They were kept in custody for six weeks.
Of the seven men whose names Badge had given Nagarvala, five were already in the hands of the police, in addition to Savarkar, whose name Badge may not have mentioned. Now only Apte and Karkare remained.
It was Karkare who caused Nagarvala special worry. He was sharpwitted and unpredictable, a man who had knocked around and learned to fend for himself, who was used to a low-key life and able to merge into his background. Already he had been in hiding for nearly a month. How were they going to nab Karkare before he finally slipped into Goa, which in those days was a Portugese colony and a convenient hiding-ground for criminals from India.
The Men Who Killed Gandhi Page 22