The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  About the book

  The Men Who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar takes readers back into the pages of Indian history during the time of the partition, featuring the murder plot and assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

  The Men Who Killed Gandhi is a spellbinding non fictional recreation of the events which led to India’s partition, the eventual assassination of Gandhi, and the prosecution of those who were involved in Gandhi’s murder. This historical reenactment is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the British Raj. Malgonkar’s book is a result of painstaking research and from also having privileged access to many important documents and photographs related to the assassination.

  There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi played a leading role in obtaining independence from the British. But the problems that ensued afterwards, such as the structural rebuilding of the country and the Partition, led to many riots, massive migrations, and deep racial and cultural divides. Not everyone agreed with Gandhi and his ideals. As a result, a plot to assassinate Gandhi was devised by six individuals named, Narayan Apte, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge, and Nathuram Godse. This was eventually carried out in New Delhi, on the 30th of January, 1948. Eventually, these six individuals were tried and convicted. Four of them received life sentences while two of them received the death penalty.

  The first publication of The Men Who Killed Gandhi occurred in 1978, during the Emergency years. As a result, Malgonkar omitted many vital facts including Dr. Ambedkar’s role in minimizing Savarkar’s criminal conviction. This 11th edition of the text contains these omitted facts as well as rare documents, and photographs obtained from National Archives. After the four individuals who were convicted for Gandhi’s murder completed their life sentences, they were interviewed by Malgonkar. These individuals revealed many details to him which were never known before. The author also received access to the Kapur Commission from his friend Mr. Nayar, who was in the Indian Police Service. As a result, The Men Who Killed Gandhi is considered the most historically accurate account of Gandhi’s assassination plot.

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  This digital edition published in 2015

  First published in 2008 by

  The Lotus Collection

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  Copyright © Text: Manohar Malgonkar

  This Illustrated edition © Roli Books

  Credits: Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Corbis, Deepak Rao, Delhi Police, Getty Images, Hindustan Times Photo Archives, Magnum, Mrs Kilpady, Mrs Himani Savarkar, National Archives of India, Nehru Memorial Library, Romi Khosla, and Shivay Bhandari

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  eISBN: 978-93-5194-083-8

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  Contents

  Author’s Note to the First Edition

  A Look back in Gratitude

  Sketching an Assassination

  1. One

  2. Two

  3. Three

  4. Four

  5. Five

  6. Six

  7. Seven

  8. Eight

  9. Nine

  10. Ten

  11. Eleven

  12. Twelve

  Notes

  About the author

  AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

  Throughout the period covered by this book — that is, from Lord Mountbatten’s arrival as the Viceroy right up till the end of the Red Fort trial — I was living in New Delhi, only one bungalow away from Birla House where Gandhi was murdered. I can thus claim to have known the Delhi of those days as a citizen, an insider, and I also happen to be equally familiar with Poona (the place where the conspiracy was spawned), both as a city and as a state of mind.

  Of the six men who were finally adjudged to have been implicated in the murder conspiracy, two were hanged. The other four — the approver Badge and the three who got life sentences, Karkare, Gopal and Madanlal — talked to me freely and at length. My ability to speak Marathi well was an immense advantage because two of them, Karkare and Badge, were at home only in that language.

  All four gave me much information that they had never revealed beforehand. Gopal Godse and his wife Sindhu filled me in on details which could not have been known outside the Godse and Apte families. Gopal also kindly loaned me his personal papers among which were eight large volumes of printed records of the Red Fort trial which had been prepared for the High Court appeal. These volumes had been actually used by Nathuram Godse, the man who killed Gandhi, and were scribbled all over with his notes and comments.

  The author wishes to thank Mr R.E. Hawkins — who, for many years, guided the affairs of the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press — for going through the manuscript of this book and suggesting many improvements.

  Burbusa

  28 April 1975 Manohar Malgonkar

  A LOOK BACK IN GRATITUDE

  T he Men Who Killed Gandhi first came out in 1978, which means that it is now thirty years old. Then again this edition of it is the eleventh of its kind published in English with six in translations in other languages. Not many books do so well.

  I began modestly enough a whole decade earlier. In the late 1960’s I was well and truly launched as an author, a freelancer who made his living by the pen, and someone always on the lookout for stories to sell. At this time, the surviving members of the conspiracy to kill Mahatma Gandhi had served out their jail terms and were free to tell their stories. I thought I would find out from them why they had participated in the crime and what part they had played.

  I could try to get my story published on the 20th Anniversary of the Mahatma’s death.

  I was lucky and things went off as I had planned. One of the most prestigious magazines of the times, LIFE International, agreed to publish my story and commissioned a well-known photographer, Jehangir Gazdar to visit the homes of the men in it and take photographs. It came out in the magazine’s issue of February 1968. But by then I had realized that my story deserved a full book to itself. I broached the idea to my Agents in London and they agreed and found a publisher, Macmillan.

  I was fully aware that what I was going to write was based on people’s memories of events that had taken place more than twenty years earlier. Then again, those who had themselves participated in the murder plot were only going to tell me what they thought worth revealing. But my real problem was the lack of precision in their knowledge. Some details, which Iregarded as vital, were beyond their comprehension. For instance, after closeand painstaking questioning, all I had been able to find out about themurder weapon, was that it was a magazine pistol and not a revolver.

  None of them knew.

  That was when, almost as an answer to an unsaid prayer, a friend in Delhi who knew of my predicament, Mr Shankar Nayar of the Indian Police Service, sent me a copy of the Kapur Commission’s published report.

  In the mid 1960’s, what with the revelations made by some of those involved in the crime, there we
re persistent allegations that several people in responsible positions in Mumbai had advance knowledge of the murder plot but had failed to report the information to the police. To determine the truth behind these allegations, the Government had appointed a one-man Commission headed by Justice K.L. Kapur. It was the report of the findings of this Commission that my friend had sent me.

  Now I had a wide-ranging and penetrating report of the commission and all I had to do was to check out the authenticity of my own findings against those of Justice Kapur.

  Sure I could still have written my book. But without the help of the Kapur Commission’s report I doubt if The Men Who Killed Gandhi would have turned out to be so robust, or lived so long.

  The book first came out when the country was in the grip of the ‘Emergency’, and books were subjected to a censorship of the utmost ruthlessness. This made it incumbent upon me to omit certain vital facts such as, for instance, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s secret assurance to Mr L.B. Bhopatkar, that his client, Mr V.D. Savarkar had been implicated as a murder-suspect on the flimsiest grounds. Then again, certain other pertinent details such as the ‘doctering’ of a confession by a magistrate whose duty it was only to record what was said only came out in later years.

  With these and other bits and pieces fitted into their right places I feel confident that this book is now the complete single account of the plot to murder Mahatma Gandhi.

  Barbusa

  January 2008 Manohar Malgonkar

  ‘I came alone in this world, I have walked alone in the valley of the shadow of death, and I shall quit alone when the time comes.’

  —Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948

  SKETCHING AN ASSASSINATION

  In the early 1970s, when Manohar Malgonkar was researching this book, most of the protagonists involved with the story were alive. Their memories were fresh and their notes and papers intact. He was able to meet and talk to Gopal Godse, Vishnu Karkare, and Madanlal Pahwa, who had each served his life sentence, and approver Badge, who was pardoned. Each one of them gave his part of the story freely, perhaps spicing it with many more details that may not have figured in the trial.

  Thirty-three years later, I took upon myself the task of putting faces, figures and graphics to his text when we decided to publish an illustrated edition of this incredibly well-researched book that reads like a thriller.

  Unparalleled in recent history, this was no ordinary murder. This was an assassination that shook the world. Mahatma Gandhi, a messiah of peace, who fought and saw an end to an empire with his non-violence, was violently put to death by some of his own people. If he was to make a postmortem statement, he would have done so with a sense of failure. After all he was unable to convert his very own people to his philosophy of peace and harmony.

  On the other hand, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, fiercely patriotic Hindu fanatics, who ironically held Gandhi in esteem, put their religious zeal above all and murdered a leader who, if he had survived, would have perhaps completely changed the shape of India’s polity and society. The world may not have been as violent as it is today.

  With all this and more, it was not an easy book to illustrate. The players had passed away. A majority of photographs had perished and a lot of documents had decayed beyond recognition. Whatever remained was difficult to locate.

  However, through painstaking research, we found some very rare and unpublished photographs and documents. I would rate our discovery of trial pictures as the first among other equally important visuals. These images show Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte, Gopal Godse and Vishnu Karkare, looking rather relaxed in the courtroom.

  Group photographs of the killers with Veer Savarkar and Nathuram Godse’s photo as martyr, hung proudly in Gopal Godse’s daughter’s home, make their own statements. Police investigator Haldipur was an amateur but an accomplished caricaturist. His daughter very generously gave us the sketches he made of Godse and Jaswant Singh, the investigating officer of Delhi Police.

  At the National Archive we found the Bombay-Delhi air tickets used by Godse and Apte, and bills of the hotel used by Godse. There were many affidavits and other court records. I found the statement made by Nathuram Godse in his defence in the special court rather impressive. Despite having committed a heinous crime, he was convinced what he did was correct. These photographs and documents helped us greatly in attempting to re-construct the murder trial.

  We were greatly helped by Nehru Memorial Library, Hindustan Times, Gopal Godse’s family, and descendants of police inspector Mr Haldipur, Getty Images London, Corbis Worldwide, Justice G.D. Khosla’s son Romi Khosla, Deepak Rao in Mumbai, and photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri, who photographed the sites connected with the crime in Pune and Mumbai.

  The personnel at the National Archive, the storehouse of Indian history, were helpful and facilitated the search with everything they had. They were helpless when it came to locating the material that was missing. This extremely important institution needs to be urgently rescued with manpower and money. If the government, the corporate sector and the citizens of India do not come forward soon, a great part of our documented past will soon become oral history and who knows, after a few hundred years, the assassination of Gandhi and many such defining moments may become part of Indian mythology.

  On a more personal note I would like to thank my editorial colleague Neelam Narula, who worked tirelessly to collect material to ensure that this book comes out on the 60th anniversary of the Mahatma’s assassination. Thanks also to my colleague Priya Kapoor, who persuaded Gopal Godse’s daughter, Himani Savarkar, widow of Veer Savarkar’s nephew, to share her memories and photographs. Thanks also to Supriya, Naresh Mondal, Kapil, Naresh Nigam and Raman for speedy and creative design and production.

  Incidentally, this was the first manuscript I read as a publishing intern in 1975. That I was able to produce an illustrated edition thirty-three years later cements my belief that publishing is the most satisfying profession I could have pursued.

  New Delhi

  January 2008 PRAMOD KAPOOR

  The world was stunned:Young women reading a newspaper among members of London’s Indian and Pakistani population outside India House after hearing of the assassination of the Mahatma.

  ONE

  I shall see to it that

  there is no bloodshed and riot.

  — LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

  Around six in the evening on 12 January 1948, Alan Campbell-Johnson, the Press Secretary to the Governor-General of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was returning to his bungalow in New Delhi’s Government House estate after a hard game of squash when, passing the french windows of Mountbatten’s study, he saw His Excellency in earnest talk with Mahatma Gandhi. Campbell-Johnson knew that the meeting had been arranged at short notice and at Gandhi’s instance, but did not at the time attach any special importance to it.

  The Raj had pulled out five months earlier in a ceremonial lowering of the Union Jack from public buildings, and India was now an independent country. But Mountbatten, who in his person represented Britannia’s rule far more palpably than any flag could have done, had stayed on.

  He had come to India almost straight from his glittering triumphs as the Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia, to be Britain’s last Viceroy, charged by His Majesty’s Government with the task of winding up the Empire as quickly and as cleanly as possible.

  MANOHAR MALGONKAR

  Lord Louis Mounbatten’s success as the representative of the British Raj lay in persuading the Congress leaders to accept the inevitability of Partition. Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were the three stalwarts of Congress who consented to his formula, as Nehru expressed it, ‘to the cutting off of the head to get rid of the headache’.

  Facing page: The last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten stayed on after August 1947 as the designated Governor-General, on the request of the Indian leaders ‘to see the interim phase through’. Like Gandhi, he too believed that peace in Delhi was the ‘last hope of world peace’. Mahatma Gan
dhi is seen here with Mountbatten and his wife Edwina at the Governor-General’s house in New Delhi.

  Partition – also Jinnah’s formula lead to the creation of a new country, Pakistan. Revered as ‘Quaid-e-Azam’, Jinnah insisted on a separate Muslim state and was sworn in as the first Governor-General of free Pakistan on 17 August 1947 in Karachi.

  A noble birth, theatrical good looks, a personality nurtured on strong doses of the Royal Navy’s ‘Destroyer Spirit’ and crackling with charisma, a reputation for efficiency combined with dynamic physical energy and abounding self-confidence – all these ‘superman’ attributes were now, at the age of forty-six, backed up by a row of resounding military victories. No man could have more fittingly been appointed to fill this epoch-making role or have assumed it with so overpowering a conviction of his fitness for it. Even as Viceroy, Mountbatten still remained very much the Supreme Commander, the man in absolute control, the final authority.

  He was both a dazzling success and a colossal failure. The leaders of the Indian National Congress, notably Gandhi, Nehru and (to a lesser extent) Patel, immediately fell victim to his ebullience, sincerity and, above all, charm, which Nehru described as being ‘dangerous’. But before the flinty obduracy of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who headed the only other major political party, the Muslim League, it was Mountbatten who capitulated. Unable to get the two leading parties to agree upon a common formula for taking over power, he proceeded to impose on them his own formula, which was, virtually, Jinnah’s formula: Partition. He agreed to the creation of a new country, Pakistan, by hacking away from India the areas which contained predominantly Muslim populations, and thus left for the Congress a truncated India that was mainly a Hindu land. As it happened, the Congress had never hankered for a purely, or even mainly, Hindu land. On the contrary, its declared creed and proud boast was that it was a wholly secular organization, embracing within its fold all the diverse religions of India: Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism as well as Islam and Hinduism.