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

by Robert Payne

  Nathuram Godse’s defense was no defense: it was a cry of triumph, wholly irrational, explicable only in terms of the ancient myths. When he spoke of Krishna’s promise to appear in a tenth reincarnation whenever Hinduism was in danger, remembering a passage in the works of Jaya-deva, the author of the Gita Govinda, he was speaking with a towering pride, justifying his action by an appeal to forces infinitely greater than himself. “I shall assume incarnation for the re-establishment of the religion,” he said, meaning that he would himself become Krishna. Gandhi, too, had been a prisoner of ancient Hindu legends, continually returning to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to seek justification for his acts.

  The court could not pass judgment on the enduring power of legends, but they are essential to an understanding of the murder. After Godse’s speech the trial seemed to be strangely irrelevant. For a month, from December 1 to December 30, the counsels continued their arguments, although there was almost nothing left to argue about. Savarkar was able to demonstrate that no one had seen him actively engaged in planning the assassination or in giving his blessing to the conspirators; he proclaimed his innocence by continual appeals to the laws of evidence. Sitting in the back row, resembling a death’s head with the skin stretched tight over the brittle bones, his lips forming into a thin and contemptuous smile, his black-rimmed spectacles glinting, he professed his undying admiration of Gandhi and quoted the telegram he had sent to the Mahatma on the occasion of Kasturbhai’s death. No one spoke of his moral responsibility for the crime; his earlier murders were forgotten; his defense was made all the easier by Nathuram Godse’s determination to shoulder the entire responsibility. Yet to many who attended the trial he seemed more sinister than Nathuram Godse, who possessed many human qualities and showed no disposition to hide behind the letter of the law.

  Finally, on February 10, 1949, the judgment was handed down. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death and in addition they were given seven years’ rigorous imprisonment, but since the death penalty outweighed the imprisonment, the added punishment was merely a formality. All the other prisoners except Savarkar were sentenced to transportation for life with varying terms of rigorous imprisonment. Savarkar was found not guilty on all charges and acquitted, but for some days he was ordered confined to the Red Fort for his own safety. Mr. Justice Atma Charan accompanied the sentences with a severe censure of the police, saying that they had been inexcusably lax in guarding the life of Mahatma Gandhi.

  Since all the defendants appealed the verdict, a special court of appeal was instituted. Since it was felt desirable to remove the court from Delhi, the appeal was heard in the former Viceregal Lodge at Simla where an upper room was hastily converted into a courtroom. For six weeks the court, with three judges sitting on the bench, reviewed the evidence, listened to the statements of the accused, and deliberated on the exact weight to be given to the words of the witnesses. The judges wore wigs and were preceded in the courtroom by liveried ushers carrying silver-mounted staffs.

  While the appeal was continuing, Nathuram Godse received an unexpected letter from Ramdas Gandhi, the third son of the Mahatma. Ramdas had read Godse’s denunciation of his father delivered in court, and he prayed that even at this late date the assassin could be brought to see the superiority of non-violence over violence. Godse claimed to be a man of reason and logic, but was it reasonable or logical to kill a man dedicated to peace? “You seem to take great pride in having assassinated him,” Ramdas wrote bitterly, adding that he had written to the Governor General “giving him my reasons why you should not be made to suffer the penalty awarded by the Special Tribunal.”

  Godse wrote to Ramdas immediately after receiving the letter:

  DEAR BROTHER SHRI RAMDAS GANDHI,

  Received your most kind letter yesterday of 17th May 1949. As a human being I have no words to express my feeling for the wounds that you and your relatives must have received by the tragic end of your revered father, by my hands. But at the same time I state that there is the other side also to look at. I am not in a position to write all my thoughts on paper nor am I in a position to see you personally. But certainly you are in a position to see me in jail before my execution.

  You say that you have heard that I am a man of “reason and logic.” True! But you will be surprised to note that I am a man of very powerful sentiments also, and devotion to my Motherland is the topmost of the same.

  You say that once my mind is free from misunderstandings then I shall no doubt repent and realize my blunders. Brother, I say I am an open-minded man always subject to correction. But what is the way to remove my misunderstanding, if any, to make me repent. Certainly not the gallows nor a big show of mercy and to commute my punishment. The only way is to see me and to make me realize. Until now I have come across nothing which will make me repent.

  Anyway I must request you to see me and if possible with some prominent disciples of your father, particularly those who are not interested in power politics, and to bring to my notice my most fatal mistake. Otherwise I shall always feel that this show of mercy is nothing but an eyewash.

  If you actually see me and have a talk with me either sentimentally or with reason, then who knows? You may be able to change me and make me repent, or I may change you and make you realize my stand. The condition of the talk must be that we stick to the truth alone. Again I express utmost regrets as a human being for your sufferings due to the death of your father at my hands.

  Yours sincerely,

  NATHURAM GODSE

  Ramdas wrote back more in sorrow than in anger that he felt there was no need for Godse to stipulate that in any conversation between them they should “stick to the truth alone.” Yet he was anxious for the meeting, hoping against hope to hear words of repentance from the lips of his father’s murderer. He begged Godse to pray for divine grace and to submit himself to God’s will; perhaps he would come to Realize that “it was after all Gandhiji who knew best how the interest of the Motherland and the Hindu religion in particular could be protected from insult or injury.” He prayed that after their conversations they would be able to chant together the last words of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita as he submits himself to the will of Vishnu:

  By Thy grace, O Thou who never failest,

  My delusions are shattered, my understanding is renewed;

  Now I stand steadfast, and my doubts are all ended.

  I submit myself wholly to Thy will.

  During the interval between the letters Godse’s appeal had been dismissed, and together with Apte he was removed to the Central Jail at Ambala, a hundred and fifty miles north of Delhi He was in good spirits, though he had little to hope for. Writing on June 24, 1949, three days after his appeal was dismissed, Godse said he was looking forward to the visit of Ramdas Gandhi even if it took place “one day before my execution.” He warned Ramdas that if they spoke frankly to one another, then it might be necessary for him to say many bitter things. As for the verse from the Bhagavad Gita, he was sure he would have no difficulty in chanting it. “And Arjuna actually performed what Krishna commanded.”

  So the debate on the interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita—whether it was concerned with the actual war on the plain of Kurukshetra or an imaginary battle taking place in the human soul—continued to the end. Godse believed that Krishna commanded Arjuna to engage in mortal combat with his enemies, while Ramdas Gandhi, like his father, believed that the struggle was to be fought in the human heart.

  When Godse wrote from prison: “And Arjuna actually performed what Krishna commanded,” he was triumphantly expressing his belief that he had acted in full conformity with the Bhagavad Gita.

  Sixty years before, when Gandhi first came upon Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita in London, he concluded that it could only have been written about the struggles of the human heart in search of a savior. Indeed, such an opinion could scarcely be avoided by anyone reading the English translation alone, for the rhythms of the Victorian verse do
not permit the reader to see the battle at close quarters. In the original, however, the Bhagavad Gita is written in taut, springy couplets, almost physical in their impact; the commands of Krishna have an urgency, a kind of paroxysmic fury, which powerfully suggest the utterance of a god in a mood of intense and visionary exaltation; and what he says, in the eyes of most Sanskrit scholars, relates to both heaven and earth, to the world of the spirit and to the battle fought on the plain of Kurukshetra. “My interpretation of the Gita has been criticized by orthodox scholars as being unduly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount,” Gandhi wrote, and it was no more than the truth. Godse’s interpretation was more direct and more uncompromising. Yet both of them insisted on their own exclusive interpretations, refusing to acknowledge that a poem of such vast scope and authority must necessarily have many interpretations.

  The correspondence between Godse and Ramdas Gandhi came to an abrupt end, and there was no meeting in Ambala jail between them.

  In jail both Godse and Apte were model prisoners. Godse read voluminously, and Apte wrote a treatise on Indian philosophy, which he completed shortly before his execution. They were preoccupied with their reading and writing, and showed little interest in the lawyers who sometimes came to visit them.

  By the beginning of November 1949 it became evident that all the resources of the defense had been exhausted and the verdict would soon be carried out. Early in the morning of November 15, nearly two years after the assassination of Gandhi, they were led out into the prison courtyard. Godse, the first to leave his cell, was visibly shaken by the sight of the gallows in the dawn light, but Apte was quietly serene and self-possessed. As he walked toward the gallows, Godse kept shouting “Akhand Bharat!” (India united!), and the cry was taken up in a stronger voice by Apte who cried: “Amar rahe!” (May it be forever!) They both marched toward the gallows as though they eagerly welcomed their own deaths, as something long desired.

  Two ropes hung side by side on the gallows, for it had been arranged that they would die together at the same time. Black cloth bags were drawn over their heads and tied at the necks. The nooses were adjusted, the executioner sprang the trap, and the bodies hurtled down. Apte died instantaneously, his body swinging in slow oscillating circles. Godse died slowly, and fifteen minutes passed before the convulsions came to an end. Then the bodies were cut down and cremated inside the prison walls, and the ground where the cremation took place was plowed over in case anyone should seek to make relics from the ashes. That night all that remained of the bodies of Apte and Godse was thrown into the Ghaggar River at a secret place.

  Although Gandhi himself had always proclaimed his detestation of judicial murders, there were few who protested the execution. Among the few was the young English Quaker, Reginald Reynolds, who had once been the bearer of an important message from Gandhi to the Viceroy. When he realized that the executions would soon take place, he hurried to India and interviewed all the great officials he had known in the days when they were lowly followers of Gandhi, saying that to his certain knowledge Gandhi would not have wanted the murderers hanged. They listened politely, and explained that the matter was no longer in their hands, for the court had pronounced sentence. Ironically, the sentence of the court was carried out exactly as it would have been carried out in England.

  Apte and Godse were dead, and they had taken with them many secrets to the grave. We know day by day, hour by hour, how they carried out their conspiracy; we know who fired the seven-chambered revolver; we know from their own lips why they were determined to kill Gandhi. But always there is the sense of something missing. When we see them talking together in their cheap lodginghouses, we are made aware of shadowy presences lurking in the background; they come forward for a moment, whisper an order or proffer advice, and then they are gone. Their names are unknown to history, or can only be guessed at. The attentive reader of the voluminous trial reports soon finds himself haunted by the certainty that many others who never stood trial were involved in the conspiracy.

  The years passed, and the murder of Gandhi became a fact of history, strangely remote and strangely final. The case was closed, the murderers had been punished, many of the witnesses were dead, and it seemed hopeless to revive an inquiry which must in the nature of things remain incomplete and insubstantial. But all through the years there had been a nagging doubt as to the validity of the findings reached at the trial, and quite suddenly in 1967 the Government of India decided to reopen the question. A judicial committee under Mr. Justice Jiwan Lal Kapur was appointed to inquire into all the circumstances which led up to the assassination, with full powers to demand the production of all the documents held by the police and to cross-examine everyone involved directly or indirectly with the conspiracy.

  The Kapur Committee worked well, and slowly. As the weeks passed, there came mounting evidence that the police were themselves involved in the conspiracy. The police-in Bombay deliberately frustrated the police in Delhi, who proved to be incompetent. Important police documents were lost or deliberately destroyed, and no serious effort was made to apprehend the conspirators even when their names were known. After the explosion of the slab of guncotton, the police had more than a week in which to pursue their inquiries and there were clues in abundance. All the policemen who came before Mr. Justice Kapur presented their excuses and apologies. They did nothing; it was inconceivable, but so it was. No one had acted decisively; no one had cared. Logic demanded that someone should have spoken out, that Nehru should have been warned, that the police all over the country should have been alerted, and that every available scrap of evidence should have been channeled into a central office, but none of these things was done. The inescapable conclusion is that they were not done because there were people who did not want them to be done.

  So Gandhi died, and there was no comfort in the knowledge that his death could have been prevented. In the eyes of too many officials, he was an old man who had outlived his usefulness: he had become expendable. By negligence, by indifference, by deliberate desire on the part of many faceless people, the assassination had been accomplished. It was a new kind of murder—the permissive assassination, and there may be many more, in the future.

  For Gandhi, this death was a triumph. He had always believed that men should be prepared to die for their beliefs. He died as kings die, felled at the height of their powers, and Sarojini Naidu was right when she said that it was appropriate that he should die in Delhi, the city of kings. “What is all this snivelling about?” she exclaimed, when she saw the women crooning over the dead body of Gandhi. “Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion? This was the only death great enough for him.”

  Appendixes

  Genealogical Tree

  of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

  Glossary

  Acharya

  teacher.

  Ahimsa

  non-violence.

  Anna

  one sixteenth of a rupee.

  Arati

  blessing with lights.

  Ashram

  a retreat for communal living.

  Asthis

  burned bones collected from a funeral pyre.

  Babu

  mister.

  Bapu, Bapuji

  father, term of affection used for Gandhi.

  Bhai-bhai

  brothers or sisters.

  Boodan Yagna

  land gift.

  Brahmacharya

  observance of chastity in quest for God.

  Brahmahatya

  the death of a Brahmin.

  Chaddar

  shawl.

  Chapati

  pancake.

  Charkha

  spinning wheel.

  Dal

  peas.

  Darshan

  the vision of sanctity.

  Devanagari

  the alphabet usually employed in writing Sanskrit, as well as various vernacular languages of central, western, and northern India.

  Dhoti
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  the long cloth worn by Indians from the waist.

  Ghee

  clarified butter.

  Goondas

  hooligans.

  Granth Saheb

  the sacred book of the Sikhs.

  Guru

  spiritual teacher.

  Harijans

  literally: children of God.

  Hartal

  strike.

  Inquilah zindabad!

  Long live revolution.

  -ji

  suffix suggesting affection, thus Gandhiji, Panditji.

  Khabari

  chief adviser.

  Khadi

  handspun, handwoven cloth.

  Khaddar

  handspun, handwoven cloth.

  Khilafat

  The Caliph is the spiritual head of Muslims. The Khilafat refers to his office.

  Ki jai

  to him victory.

  Kirpan

  the small Sikh dagger.

  Kshatriya

  The military caste of Hindus.

  Kukri

  curved knife or sword.

  Lathis

  wooden poles, usually iron-tipped.

  Mantra

  sacred verse.

  Maulana

  title of respect given to learned Muslims.

  Maulvi

  religious teacher.

  Modh Bania