The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  Once his name was known, the newspapers were able to piece together a fragmentary picture of the man as the editor of a newspaper and as a prominent member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Quiet well-mannered, intelligent he seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of assassin. He was unmarried, and no scandal had ever touched his name. He spoke and wrote English well. Aquaintances could not remember any occasion when he had spoken vehemently against Gandhi, though from time to time he had written bitter editorials denouncing Gandhi and the Congress Party. He did not look like a man who would sacrifice his life for a cause.

  He was of medium height well-built, unusually fair, with a high forehead and close-cropped hair. He had finely carved features with a square jaw, an aquiline nose, heavy eyelids, and eyes which could spark fire on the rare occasions when he was angry. He could be taken for a junior professor in a provincial university, but in fact he had little formal education. He was the son of a village postmaster, the second child of a family of six, four brothers and two sisters. He showed no particular distinction at school and left without matriculating. He was about sixteen when he opened up a small shop selling cloth. When the shop failed, he became a tailor and made a poor living. Meanwhile he was attempting to catch up with his education, reading history and sociology and improving on his English. When he was about twenty he became an active member of the Hindu Mahasabha in Poona, taking part in the civil-disobedience movement against the Nizam of Hyderabad. He was arrested and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and on his release he started a newspaper to spread the ideas of Savarkar, with whom he was on friendly but not on intimate terms. Deciding to devote all his energies to the Hindu cause, he abandoned all thoughts of matrimony. He had a special devotion to the Bhagavad Gita, which he knew by heart, but unlike Gandhi he was convinced that Krishna was talking to Arjuna about real battles and not battles which take place in the soul.

  His brother Gopal was also arrested. He was twenty-seven. He lacked Nathuram’s air of refinement. He, too, had worked in the tailor’s shop, but had received more formal education, for he had passed his matriculation. He was married, and had two daughters. During the war he joined the Army as a storekeeper of automobile spare parts and saw service in Iraq and Iran. Like his brother, he was deeply influenced by Savarkar’s philosophy and became a convert to revolutionary violence. “You are a married man with responsibilities and commitments,” Nathuram warned him. “Think twice before embarking on this dangerous course.” Gopal did not hesitate: he became the willing pawn of his brother.

  Narayan Apte, who also came from a Brahmin family, had advantages denied to Nathuram Godse. His family was middle class, and he was able to go to a university and acquire a Bachelor of Science degree. For a while he belonged to the Hindu Rashtra Dal, a society of militant youths which he helped to organize at Poona with Nathuram Godse: the youths were trained in the use of weapons. In 1943 he joined the Royal Indian Air Force and received a King’s commission, but after a few months resigned from the service because his younger brother had died and it was necessary for him to look after his family’s affairs. During the following year he joined Nathuram Godse’s newspaper as managing editor in charge of production. He was a quiet, serious, determined man, who looked like a teacher in a high school; he had in fact been a teacher after his graduation from the university. He was thirty-four years old, three years younger than Nathuram Godse.

  Madanlal Pahwa was one of those hundreds of thousands of youths who were hopelessly disoriented by the partition of India. A Hindu from the small town of Pakpattan in the West Punjab, he ran away from school to join the Royal Indian Navy, but failed to pass the entrance examination. He then went to Poona and joined the Army. After serving for a few weeks he asked for and obtained his discharge and returned to Pakpattan, where he remained until large-scale rioting broke out early in 1947. Pakpattan fell within the frontiers of Pakistan and the Hindus were chased out of the town by the Muslims. He saw his father and an aunt being massacred by a Muslim mob. He slipped out of the town and somehow made his way to Ahmednagar, near Poona, where, after living for a while in a refugee camp, he obtained employment in the restaurant of Vishnu Karkare. In December 1947 he came to blows with a speaker from the Congress Party who was urging that Hindus and Muslims should live harmoniously together. He was already in close contact with Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, who regarded him as a promising member of the conspiracy they were already hatching. He was a firebrand with a ferocious temper, completely fearless. He was tall and slender, with a long bony face and the half-crazed look of a man who has seen too much murder and suffering ever to be comfortable in the world. Alone among the conspirators he had a score to settle with the Muslims. At the time of the trial he was only twenty.

  Vishnu Karkare, his employer, looked strangely out of place in the prisoners’ dock. Plump and curly-haired, with an ingratiating smile, he was every inch the restaurant owner who spends a good deal of his time in the kitchen. His parents were too poor to support him and gave him to an orphanage. When he was in his teens he ran away and took odd jobs in hotels and restaurants, where at least he could be sure of a meal. Then he joined a troupe of traveling actors, but it was an unrewarding experience and he settled down to run a restaurant in Ahmednagar. The Hindu Mahasabha filled his spare time, and with Apte’s assistance he ran for election as the Mahasabha representative on the Ahmednagar municipal council. He won the election, and as an official representative of the municipal council he accompanied a relief party to Noakhali in 1946, remaining for three months and witnessing the kidnapping of Hindu women by Muslims. When he returned to Ahmednagar, he was an angry and deeply embittered man, and fell more and more under the influence of Nathuram Godse.

  Dr. Dattatraya Parchure was the son of a high official in the education department in Gwalior and was brought up in considerable wealth. For some time he served in the medical service of Gwalior, but resigned or was dismissed in 1934 and then went into private practice. He was an active member of the Hindu Mahasabha and “dictator” of the local Hindu Rashtriya Sena, a troop of militant youths who were being secretly drilled and trained to use firearms. He was not a man of any great force of character and the conspirators seem to have distrusted him, while using him for their own purposes. He was forty-nine, and therefore the oldest, except for Savarkar, of the prisoners in the dock.

  Shankar Kistayya was the youngest. He was a tousle-haired, rather unkempt youth, with no schooling and completely illiterate. He was the son of a village carpenter, but practiced no trade. Finally he became the servant of Digambar Badge, a bookseller, running errands, washing clothes, and doing all the menial jobs in the bookshop. Sometimes he was sent out to collect money owed to Badge and on one occasion, having received some money from an old woman, he simply vanished. Some days later, having spent the money, he returned to his master and was given even more important duties. In addition to selling books, Badge sold knives, daggers and knuckle-dusters, for which he needed no license, and firearms and ammunition, which he sold surreptitiously. Shankar Kistayya proved to be a willing and accomplished carrier of contraband weapons. Badge’s principal role in the conspiracy was as a supplier of weapons. A Maratha from East Khandesh, he had little education and lived on his wits. At the trial he became an “approver,” that is, he informed on the other defendants.

  Finally there was Vinayak Savarkar, now ailing, looking at sixty-five like an old man, and still imperious and domineering in manner. He sat alone in the last row in the prisoners’ dock, as though he still felt the need to be protected by a bodyguard. In London, forty years before, he had been on fairly intimate terms with Gandhi, but there had been little occasion or opportunity for them to meet during the intervening years. The only known meeting took place on March 1, 1927, when Gandhi was visiting Ratnagiri where Savarkar was living under house arrest after his release from the Andaman Islands. Ratnagiri was the birthplace of Tilak, and in his speech to the welcoming committee Gandhi mentioned that he had come to a
town celebrated as the birthplace of a great national leader and as the place of residence of another leader. He said he had known Savarkar well in England and his spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism had made him deservedly famous. It was a graceful tribute, and it was followed by a brief meeting. They spoke about their encounters in London, and as they took leave of one another there were some fairly acrimonious exchanges. “It is clear that we disagree on some problems,” Gandhi said, “but I hope you have no objection to my making experiments.” Savarkar was not in an amiable mood. “You know the story of the boys and the frogs,” he replied. “You will be making the experiment at the cost of the nation.” Now Savarkar sat in the dock, accused of being the conspirator who had master-minded the assassination of Gandhi

  Among those who sat in the dock he alone seemed to be well cast for the role he was playing. Some inner fire burned in him, in that deathly pale face which had been reduced by illness and suffering to the dimensions of a skull. He had been placed under house arrest within eight hours of the assassination, and the only surprising thing is that he was not arrested earlier, for he was the prime suspect, the one man who would inevitably be suspected of the crime. Suspicion would have fastened on him even if he had been living in Londoa As for the other prisoners, they were such as a man might encounter at random on Connaught Circus in New Delhi Except for Nathuram Godse, who possessed a natural dignity and unusually clean-cut features, they were all strangely faceless and anonymous, almost without any character of their own.

  The prosecution had no difficulty in showing that Nathuram Godse had organized the conspiracy, but it was a vastly more difficult task to prove the direct complicity of Savarkar. He claimed that he was ill during the months preceding the assassination, saw very few people, and had not been in communication with Godse or Apte for more than a year. In the past he had conducted an extensive correspondence with them, for they were continually demanding that he should write articles for the Hindu Rashtra or for permission to accompany him on his travels; he had refused to write articles for them, but he had willingly granted them permission to travel with him. But all this belonged to the past. He had retired from politics and lived quietly in his house in Bombay, shielded from visitors by his secretary and his bodyguard.

  Badge, the informer, claimed that on January 17, three days before the assassination, he accompanied Godse and Apte to Savarkar’s house in Bombay at nine o’clock in the morning. While Badge waited downstairs, Godse and Apte went upstairs to Savarkar’s study to receive the last darshan of their political leader and to obtain his final instructions. Five or ten minutes later they came downstairs accompanied by Savarkar, who said: “Be successful and come back.” In the taxi later, Apte turned to Badge and said: “Savarkar predicted that Gandhi’s hundred years are over. There is therefore no doubt that our mission will be successfully accomplished.”

  In his defense Savarkar said he made no such prediction, did not meet Godse or Apte that morning, had no knowledge of their visit if indeed it took place, and could suggest half a dozen reasons why they might want to visit the house without seeing the house’s owner. There was a reading room downstairs, there was a telephone, there were friends they might want to meet, there were workers belonging to the Hindu Mahasabha, and so on. He denied that he had said: “Be successful and come back.” Yet he could not deny that he was present in the house on the day that Godse and Apte visited it, and the more he defended himself—for on this point he defended himself strenuously, pointing out all the possibilities of error that arise from hearsay evidence and elaborating on all the incongruities of Badge’s confession—the more likely it appeared that there had been some communication between him and Nathuram Godse: a whisper, a brief written message which could be quickly destroyed, or simply an approving glance. Savarkar bore a heavy moral responsibility for the murder, and when he presented himself as a man who deplored the death of Gandhi with every fiber of his being, he was never convincing.

  In 1909 he had shown that he was perfectly capable of ordering a young Indian to murder Sir Curzon Wyllie. To his biographer Dhananjay Keer, who wrote an account of Savarkar and his times, he claimed full credit for the murder. He had given Madanlal Dhingra a nickel-plated revolver, saying curtly: “Don’t show me your face if you fail this time.” Dhingra had acted like an automaton, blindly obedient to him, convinced that he was sacrificing himself on the altar of India’s freedom, and throughout the trial Savarkar continually encouraged him in the belief that he was a martyr whose name would be remembered for centuries. The London police strongly suspected Savarkar of complicity in the crime, but there was never enough evidence to convict him. He was finally convicted of complicity in the murder of Mr. Jackson at the Nasik Conspiracy Trial and sentenced to transportation for life.

  The memory of this earlier murder hovered like a ghostly presence over the trial at the Red Fort, never mentioned in court, forgotten except by the oldest members of the audience who crowded the public benches. Savarkar had achieved respectability, and his crimes had taken place so long ago that they could be discovered only in the crumbling pages of ancient newspapers. He was responsible for the murders of Sir Curzon Wyllie and Mr. Jackson, although the weapons had been wielded by others. The prosecution contended that he had engaged in a secret conspiracy with Godse and Apte, and was legally responsible for the murder of Gandhi.

  When Savarkar rose to make his long statement in which he denied any possible involvement in the crime, he mentioned by way of introduction that he graduated from Bombay University in 1905, read law at Gray’s Inn in London and qualified himself for the Bar “in 1909 or thereabouts,” had since written many books of verse, drama, criticism and history in Marathi and English, had received an honorary doctorate from Nagpur University in appreciation of his services to literature, and had been elected to preside over numerous “sessions, conventions and conferences, political, social, religious, literary and others, held in almost all Indian provinces from Assam to Sindh and Kashmir to Cape Cormorin.” He had not in fact qualified himself for the Bar, for he had been struck off the rolls at Gray’s Inn, but all the other statements were true. He was presenting himself as a man of learning and dignity, the chairman of many committees, choosing among his achievements those that were least characteristic of him; the events of “1909 or thereabouts” were discreetly forgotten; he was essentially the man who stands in judgment, not the man who is judged.

  It was a brilliant façade, which he maintained successfully throughout the trial. While Nathuram Godse expended his energies in proclaiming the historical necessity to do away with Gandhi, taking all the blame upon himself and presenting himself as a romantic hero doomed to die for the sake of Hinduism, Savarkar, with a greater knowledge of correct behavior in a courtroom, contented himself with a minute examination of all the evidence linking him with Godse, showing that he could have no knowledge of the conspiracy and that all the links could be interpreted as innocent associations. His speech in his own defense covered fifty-two pages. He went to extraordinary lengths to deny that he had anything to do with the conspiracy. He had never met the conspirators; if he did, then the meeting had nothing to do with the conspiracy; he never came down the stairs; if he did, and if he spoke the parting words: “Be successful and come back,” then it must be understood that he was talking about something entirely remote from the conspiracy such as the sale of shares of Hindu Rashtra or civil resistance to the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad or any one of a hundred legitimate undertakings. So he went on, examining each word he was supposed to have said in purely legalistic terms, as though he were remote from the conflict. The circumstantial evidence was impressive; the story told by Badge was a convincing one. Savarkar took each sentence out of its context and showed that it was devoid of any precise meaning. In this way he earned the intellectual admiration of the judge, who sat without a jury.

  Although Savarkar was finally released on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to convict him
, the question of his complicity in the crime was never satisfactorily settled. There was more than enough evidence that he had shaped the minds of innumerable Hindu militants, goading them to oppose Gandhi and the Congress Party with all the means at their disposal. But there was only circumstantial evidence to show that he was engaged in a conspiracy to kill Gandhi, and this was not enough to convict him.

  The story of the conspiracy, as it emerged gradually during the trial, revolved largely around Godse, Apte, and Savarkar. The remaining conspirators played minor roles; they were the spear-carriers waiting in the wings to be summoned at the orders of their masters. According to Godse, the decision to kill Gandhi was made at the time of the partition of India in August 1947, for he regarded Gandhi as solely responsible for the catastrophe. For various reasons he delayed carrying out his decision, and it was not until November that he began actively searching for weapons and ammunition and for associates who would help him to commit the crime. Not until the last moment did he consider acting alone. It was not that he was terrified by the prospect of assuming the role of executioner, but he wanted above all the assurance of success which comes when four or five dedicated terrorists act simultaneously, or, like the Russian terrorists of the last century, with front-line units and reserves who will take over if the others fail. Many accounts of Russian terrorists were available. A useful introductory handbook, widely available in India, was Sir Samuel Hoare’s The Fourth Seal, with its detailed account of the assassins who were commanded by Boris Savinkov. Gandhi had read the book when he was in Yeravda Jail and discussed it with his secretary, Mahadev Desai, saying that the passages about Ivan Kaliayev, who killed the Grand Duke Sergius, were sufficiently important to deserve being copied out.