The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  About Apte, Nagarvala had a detective’s hunch that he would show up in Bombay itself. If he lived up to the image that Badge had painted of him, he was bound to get in touch with Manorama Salvi, and that would be like walking into the CID headquarters, because Manorama’s father’s flat was a Police Department flat, and his telephone an extension on the general police exchange. Nagarvala gave orders for the flat to be kept under surveillance and for the telephone to be tapped.

  And only then did he discover that both men were together and already in Bombay, or at least they had been in Bombay till the previous afternoon. Within minutes of his return from Poona, two shamefaced CID men brought the register of the Elphinstone Annexe for his inspection. They also told him that the man who was believed to be Nathuram’s companion, and who had given his name as Narainrao D., and another man who might be Karkare had been staying at the Elphinstone Annexe since 3 February and had checked out only minutes before they had gone to the hotel to nab them.

  Nagarvala cursed. Now the only thing to do was to wait and see if the tapped telephone would produce results. Much depended on how desperately Apte wanted to see his beloved. And, even then, would Karkare still be with him?

  Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere … our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more.’

  — Jawaharlal Nehru announcing the news on 30 January 1948

  Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

  The bullets fired at point-blank range were fatal. Gurbachan Singh, a Sikhbusinessman from Panipat who was only a few steps behind Gandhi as he fell,deposed that his last words were ‘Hai Rama!’On the contrary, Vishnu Karkare, who too stood within a few feet of him and saw him as the bullets struck him swore that all Gandhi uttered was a cry of pain, a guttural rasp, ‘Aaah!’ Visible on the left side of his chest is the bullet wound.

  The country was in mourning and people rushed to the Birla House for their last darshan of the Mahatma. Bapu was no more to guide them, to show them the way of life. Seen here is Mahatma Gandhi’s body being taken out of the Birla House in the presence of Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel. People from all religions and faiths flocked to be a part of the Mahatma’s last journey. Seen here in the picture above, are people digging earth from the spot where Gandhi was shot dead.

  The morning of 31 January saw Delhi being emptied of its citizens. The news had spread like a shock wave and almost a million people had come out to line the route of Gandhi’s funeral procession.

  Paying tribute to the Father of the Nation: An overwhelmed crowd watches as the Mahatma’s pyre is lit up.

  Complying with Gandhi’s wish that his remains be immersed in the rivers of India, his ashes were collected in twenty urns and later sent to different regions of the country.

  The Times London report of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.

  TWELVE

  I do not desire that any mercy

  should be shown to me.

  — NATHURAM GODSE

  The news of Gandhi’s death had spread like a shock wave, almost by its own power, and even before the All India Radio had broadcast it in a special bulletin a crowd had gathered at Birla House.

  Darkness had fallen. No one noticed two men, muffled in grey shawls, slip out of the service gate. They did not have to walk far to find a tonga. It took them to Old Delhi railway station.

  That night they slept on the platform among the refugees.

  The next morning they saw Delhi as a city that was being emptied of its citizens. Out of its population of two million, at least a million had gone to line the route of Gandhi’s funeral procession, ‘a crowd far too great for either the police or the military to check,’ as Alan Campbell-Johnson describes it. Apte and Karkare, whether they wanted to or not, became a part of that tide of humanity and witnessed Gandhi’s body being taken past.

  Actually they had hoped to call on one or two influential political leaders in Delhi whom they believed to subscribe to their thinking. Before them they would claim responsibility for Gandhi’s assassination and demand money and assistance to go and live in some foreign country. But, even if there were any such people in Delhi, that day they were not approachable. All doors were closed. Even if, as they resolutely insisted for the rest of their days, Apte and Karkare never felt the slightest regret for what they had done, it is impossible that on that day they could not have been overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of their deed, and made conscious of how great Gandhi was, how puny they themselves were.

  It was long past noon when they slunk back to the railway station, and even the vast station building wore a hushed and empty look. Knowing that the Bombay trains would be watched, they bought tickets for Allahabad by the Express which was due to leave at 3.30.

  It is a comment on the lifelong habits of the two men who, even now, could have derived some small measure of comfort from being together, that Apte travelled second class and Karkare third.

  Even before their train pulled out, the Secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha had received a telegram from Bombay which said: ‘ARRIVING DELHI ARRANGE FOR DEFENCE N.D. APTE.’

  Manorama had dutifully sent off the agreed telegram as soon as she had heard that something ‘had happened to Nathuram’. But it seems that Apte had already realized that it was not going to be of much use as an alibi.

  They reached Bombay on 2 February and went to the Sea Green (North) Hotel. All the rooms were full, and the best that the Manager, Mr Satyavan Rele, could do for them was to give them a bed each in two separate rooms which they would have to share with other occupants, and for which they would have to pay in advance. They accepted the beds, and the next morning moved to the Elphinstone Annexe Hotel where they managed to get a room to themselves. That same day they went and saw Karkare’s friend G.M. Joshi in Thana. Joshi later told the police that, when he asked his visitors where they had been since he last saw them, Apte told him: ‘It won’t do us any good to tell you, and it would be too dangerous for you to know.’

  Joshi seems to have been satisfied with the answer, and had no more questions to ask. At least that is the impression he gave the police.

  When they had bolted from the Elphinstone Annexe, Apte and Karkare had jumped into a taxi and driven to the Arya Pathikashram at Sandhurst Bridge where, Apte confidently told Karkare, he could easily get a room because he knew the Manager, G.P. Dube. He left Karkare in the taxi with the luggage and went in to see Dube. But this time Dube had no room for Apte and, if anything, he went out of his way to be rude. Noticing that Apte was wearing a dhoti Dube sneeringly asked him ‘why he had changed his dress from English style to Indian.’ Apte had meekly answered, ‘Such things happen.’ Later Dube revealed that he could easily have given Apte a room but was put off by his ‘dirty clothes and dishevelled appearance as if he had no change and wash for three days’.

  When Apte returned to the taxi, looking crestfallen, Karkare for the first time felt that they were like hunted animals whom nothing could save.

  They had themselves dropped at the Victoria Station, took a train to Thana and again turned up at Mr G.M. Joshi’s house in Navpada, this time with their luggage.

  No one can believe that even now Joshi was unaware that his two visitors were deeply involved in Gandhi’s murder and were hiding from the police. Nonetheless, he stuck by them. They were desperately in need of a base while they decided on their next course of action, and Joshi’s relationship with Karkare and Apte was such that he could never have turned them out of his house. Indeed, it is possible that it was he who now went to see a few friends on their behalf and brought a man called M.G. Ghaisas to see them.

  Ghaisas came on the morning of the seventh, had a long talk with Apte and Karkare, and went to Poona to see what the situation was like there and to bring them news of their families. He returned on the morning of the ninth, and what he had to say must have persuaded Apte and Karkare that they could visit Poona without much risk. That same afternoo
n they caught a train to Poona.

  Now they were on home ground – a great bustling city which had always been regarded as the headquarters of the Hindu Sanghatan movement, and where they had dozens of close friends. It was the ideal place to get lost in. Their friends hid them in their houses, commiserated with them, gave them food, and even brought some of Apte’s clothes from his house.

  If Karkare is to be believed, it was only after they were back in their own environment that they were both gnawed by a problem of conscience. Nathuram, Madanlal, Gopal, Badge, and even the solitary camp-follower Shankar had been arrested; so had Savarkar and dozens of others who had no direct connection with the crime. It somehow did not seem right that they themselves should still be free and go on incriminating more and more of their friends who were helping them. And still less did it seem right that they should try to escape.

  Karkare told the author that he believed they could quite easily have crossed into the Hyderabad state which was barely a hundred miles away and which, in those days, was as good as ‘foreign’ territory. What was more, in Hyderabad he had dozens of friends who subscribed to their thinking on the Hindu revival movement and whom he had helped with money as well as weapons in their struggle to hold out against the marauding gangs of Kassim Rizvi.

  ‘Then, again, we might have been able to flee to Goa,’ Karkare added. ‘But, even though we talked about all this often enough, we knew we were not going to do it.’

  In his book, Gandhi hatya ani Mee (The Gandhi Assassination and I) Gopal Godse, too, speaks of the same sort of reluctance to escape. A day or two after Gandhi’s murder, while Gopal was burning some letters, he heard a knock on the door. A Punjabi friend whom he calls Ramnath was standing outside.

  ‘So it was your brother,’ Ramnath said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen. I think that you should vanish. I’ll give you a letter to a friend in Delhi. He’ll look after you and then you go and live among the refugees. You speak Punjabi well in any case. No one’ll find you out if you’re careful.’

  And then Ramnath had offered him Rs 150 in case Gopal didn’t have the money to go to Delhi.

  But Gopal turned down the offer – not, he says, because he thought it was impractical, but because he just did not want to run away.

  Apte and Karkare now found themselves in a similar situation. It is possible that they were incapable of rational thinking anyway, or were afflicted by a fit of bravado. They decided to return to Bombay instead.

  On the morning of 11 February, they were back in Joshi’s house, and acutely aware that the game of hide-and-seek was up.

  Any hour, any minute, they expected to hear the sirens in the street or see a group of casual passers-by suddenly coming to a halt and deploying themselves all round the house. The suspense had the effect of making them desperate. They endured it for two days and then, as if drawn by a spell to meet trouble halfway, they decided to go and live in a hotel in Bombay. The date was 13 February, the day a Friday.

  Apte boldly walked into the foyer of Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel behind the Regal Cinema and demanded a room. The Apollo was one of several hotels in Bombay at which he and Manorama Salvi had stayed earlier as ‘Mr and Mrs N.D. Apte.’ The reception clerk, Candido Pinto, offered him room No. 29 on the second floor. Apte agreed to take it, went out and returned with Karkare and their luggage. He signed the register as ‘N Kashinath’ and put Karkare’s name down as ‘R Bishnu’. This was their act of surrender. Throughout that day and during much of the night, they waited for the sound of stealthy footsteps, a loud banging on their door.

  No one came for them and towards the morning, they got a little sleep.

  To use the telephone at Pyrke’s Apollo guests have to go down to the reception desk. Soon after ten o’clock on the morning of the fourteenth, Apte and Karkare came down the steps and Apte made a telephone call. After that both went out.

  Used as a ‘love nest’ on many occasions by Narayan Apte, he along with Karkare checked in Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel, Bombay on 13 February. Inspector Haldipur arrested them from there on 14 February 1948.

  At eleven a police party under inspector B.A. Haldipur came looking for the occupants of room No. 29. Pinto told Haldipur that both ‘Mr Kashinath’ and ‘Mr Bishnu’ had gone out.

  The inspector sat down to wait. He had to wait a long time. Apte had asked Manorama to meet him at the hotel at six in the evening, and it was not till 5.30 that he returned. Haldipur saw a taxi stop at the door and glanced inquiringly at Pinto. Pinto gave him a nod.

  Haldipur arrested Apte and sent him off under escort to the CID headquarters, and himself, decided to wait in the hope that Karkare would show up. Karkare, who had again gone to Thana and seen Joshi, came in at 8.25.

  The register of retiring-rooms at Old Delhi railway station showed that Nathuram had held two tickets from Gwalior to Delhi, and with this information in hand the police, even with their ’soft’ interrogation, seem to have made him admit that the pistol had been given by Dr Parchure of Gwalior. Armed with this information, Deputy superintendent N.Y. Duelkar of the Bombay CID arrived in Gwalior on 14 February to secure Parchure’s arrest.

  He discovered that Parchure was already under arrest, and that he was being held as a maximum-security prisoner in a dark cell in the ancient fort of Gwalior in which the Mogul emperors used to incarcerate their maximum-security prisoners.

  The substance of the accusation against Parchure seems to have been that, when he heard that Gandhi had been assassinated, he had ‘distributed sweets’. The distribution of sweets, in India, has the same sort of significance as standing a round of drinks would have in Europe, a gesture of celebration. If Parchure was indeed so stupid as to ‘celebrate’ Gandhi’s death, he was by no means alone in doing so. There are crackpots everywhere, and even men like Gandhi have their detractors. The fact remains that in several towns, and particularly in some of the refugee camps, Gandhi’s murder had been similarly celebrated. Parchure later denied that he had distributed sweets when Gandhi died, but admitted that he had said plenty of things that were sure to raise the ire of the newly formed local Congress ministry.

  The register of retiring-room at Old Delhi railway station showed that Godse had held two tickets from Gwalior to Delhi. This information helped the police to nail Sadashiv Parchure who had arranged the murder weapon. The picture shows the retiring-room as it is today.

  In Gwalior, the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha were rival parties of matching strength, and Parchure for one firmly believed that it was the government at Delhi that had dragooned the Maharaja of Gwalior into handing over power to the Congress instead of to his party. For their part, Congressmen in Gwalior hated Parchure with the true vehemence of suburban politicians. So when, following Gandhi’s murder, there were communal disturbances in Gwalior, they seized the chance of locking up Parchure and his lieutenants under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance.

  It was a reversal of fortune reminiscent of Mogul days. Parchure had been riding on the crest of a wave and gambling for the highest stakes. Only a couple of weeks earlier, he had confidently expected to be called in to head Gwalior’s first-ever democratic government. Now he was in prison.

  Gwalior at this lime was neither a princely state nor a part of India but something in-between. The maharaja’s powers had passed to a Congress ministry, but the legislative formalities to merge Gwalior into the Indian Union had still not been completed. This meant that the police in India were still required by law to seek the extradition of criminals who might have escaped into Gwalior territory.

  But neither the Bombay Police nor the Gwalior Police seem to have bothered unduly about this fine print in the procedure. Deulkar came and interrogated Parchure who, within two days, seems to have been persuaded to make a full confession. By this time Deulkar’s superior, Deputy Inspector- General U.G. Rana, had also arrived in Gwalior. They both demanded that Parchure, who was to be charged as a member of the conspiracy to murder Gandhi, should be
transferred to the ‘Dominion Police’. This was done on 17 February, ‘without completing the extradition proceedings’

  This unseemly hurry might have cost the police dearly. Later, they tried to make out that they did not need to have Parchure extradited in any case on the grounds that, even though he was born in Gwalior, he happened to be a citizen of ‘the dominion of India’. To support this contention, they produced Parchure’s genealogical tree showing that his ancestors had lived in India, that his father had passed the matriculation examination of the Bombay University in 1879, and that his family had paid local taxes in the Bombay province as far back as 1855.

  On 17 February, Nagarvala received a telephone call from Delhi telling him that he had been appointed as the superintendent on special duty to conduct the investigation into Gandhi’s murder. The appointment was clearly a mark of special approbation; for a police officer, it was nothing less than the chance of a lifetime to prove his professional abilities.

  By this time, all the principal suspects were in his hands. The only three wanted men who were still ‘absconding’ were very much on the edge of things. They were G.S. Dandvate, who had sold the Beretta to Nathuram; Gangadhar Jadhav, a lieutenant of Parchure’s; and S.D. Sharma, the man who had given Badge a .32 revolver in exchange for Nathuram’s .22 pistol.

  To judge by the evidence of four of the men who figured in this case – Madanlal, Gopal, Karkare and Badge – the process of building up a case of this nature is largely a matter of extorting confessions from the persons already in police hands, and then setting about trying to unearth evidence to sustain these confessions. For instance, if a suspect revealed that he had taken a meal in a certain restaurant, the police then went to that restaurant and as often as not managed to discover some waiter, or at least another customer, who could swear to having seen the man in the restaurant. If there are flashes of inspiration, or feats of intellectual deduction, at best they only supplement this process of investigation through third-degree.