The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  This manual for making bombs was, according to the police in India, printed and distributed by Savarkar from London. Copies soon reached India and were to turn up in police searches in several widely distant parts of the country: Calcutta, Allahabad, Lahore, Nasik and Poona. A year later, one was discovered in the house of Savarkar’s eldest brother, Babarao, and clinched the government’s case that he was preparing to ‘wage war against His Majesty the King Emperor’. Babarao was sentenced to transportation for life.

  In 1908, the home-made bomb made its first appearance in India’s struggle against the Raj. Its intended victim was a Mr Kingsford, the District Judge in a place called Muzaffarpur, in Bengal; Kingsford was singled out for this punishment because he had ordered the whipping of a boy named Sushil Chandra Sen for getting into a fight with the police. A young man called Khudiram Bose stationed himself at the entrance of the British Club in Muzaffarpur and threw the bomb into a carriage which he believed to be Mr Kingsford’s. It was the wrong carriage and contained two women, a Mrs Kennedy and her daughter. Both were killed.

  While the bomb was being tried out in India, Savarkar had gone on working tirelessly. Spaced between the ‘daily discussions’, the weekly meetings, the ceaseless work of writing, printing, packing and posting thousands of revolutionary pamphlets and booklets to hundreds of addresses in India’, he contributed regularly to a newspaper called Talwar or ‘The Sword’.which was published in Paris, and brought out a Marathi translation of the life of Guiseppe Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary. The book became an instant success in India, and the government found it necessary to proscribe it and ‘to hunt out its copies’.wherever they could be found.

  His next project was the writing of what he called the true history of ‘the war of Independence of 1857’, which the British had always referred to as ‘the Mutiny of 1857’. This book, too, Savarkar wrote in Marathi and as he completed the chapters would read them out at the weekly meetings of the Free India Society, translating the sentences into English as he went along. British secret agents who had infiltrated the Society managed to steal two chapters of the book, which they sent to India. The Indian Government considered the material so inflammatory that it took the quite unprecedented step of banning the book before it was published, or even fully written.

  Savarkar rewrote the two missing chapters and completed the book in time for publication in 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the revolt. A copy of the manuscript was smuggled into India, where an obscure publisher in Sholapur undertook to print it secretly. But the police were already on the lookout for the book. Tipped off in advance by a friendly policeman that his premises were about to be raided, the publisher hastily distributed his type and sent the manuscript to Savarkar’s friends in Poona for safekeeping. After that it was impossible to find another publisher in India.

  Meanwhile, in England, Savarkar was busy translating the book into English. The English edition was eventually published in Holland. Patrons of the Free India Society enthusiastically bought hundreds of copies for free distribution in India. They were sent out in covers which bore the titles of the more popular works of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Supporters of the cause in America soon brought out an edition of their own and began to compete with their counterparts in Europe in sending free copies to addresses in India.

  Many of these copies were discovered by the Indian police; and the Indian Government, now convinced that Savarkar, despite his infatuation for an English girl, was not going to be turned into a docile sahib, served an order on him forbidding him to return to India.

  In London, in 1909, Madanlal Dhingra, an active member of the Free India Society and a close friend of Savarkar, shot and killed Sir Curzon Wylie, who had been the government’s prosecutor in the cases against Khudiram Bose and the other terrorists in Bengal. Dhingra gave himself up and was found to carry in his pocket a statement that he had killed Wylie ‘to avenge the inhuman sentences passed by the British officials on Indian youths...’.whose only crime was that they had taken up arms to free their motherland. Savarkar, who in any case had been too close to Dhingra to escape the suspicion that he was somehow connected with the murder, made himself even more conspicuous to the police. He sought an interview with Dhingra while he was held in custody, raised a fund for his defence, and openly opposed a resolution sponsored by other Indians in England to condemn the murder.

  Scotland Yard began to keep a close watch on him, and in India the police stepped up their efforts to root out his movement. At this stage, someone threw a bomb at Lord Minto while he was on a visit to Ahmedabad, and even before the police had discovered the culprit, in Nasik, Savarkar’s home town, a man called Kanhere shot and killed Mr A.M.T. Jackson, the British Collector, ‘to avenge the sentence of transportation passed on Savarkar’s elder brother, Babarao’.

  The police suspected that the pistol with which Jackson was killed was supplied by Savarkar from London, and the Anglo-Indian press angrily demanded why ‘the man who was at the bottom of all this nefarious revolutionary activity [was not] made to pay the penalty for all these crimes?’.Sensing that his arrest was imminent, Savarkar’s friends hustled him off to Paris, where for a few weeks Savarkar, according to an anonymous biographer, busied himself with ‘infusing a new life into the small but influential colony of Indians living there’. But soon Paris began to pall. He longed to go back to India and take up the fight on the actual battleground. But India had been forbidden to him and he knew that he would be arrested even before he stepped on its shore. So he decided to go back to London, which seemed nearer the scene of action. Many people believed that he had gone back because he was pining for Margaret Lawrence. In the event he never saw Margaret again.

  He was arrested as his train pulled into Victoria Station. He was remanded in Brixton Prison where he was served a warrant for extradition to India: it seemed that the Indian Government had reversed its decision to extern him and now wanted to try him in India for the offence of waging war against the King. He was to be taken back as a maximum-security prisoner and with a police escort headed by a Deputy Superintendent of the Bombay police, C.L. Power, who had been sent all the way from India to bring him back. In London, Scotland Yard deputed their own man, Detective Inspector Edward Josh Parker, to assist Power and his men in guarding their prisoner on his homeward journey. As a precaution against the possibility of Savarkar’s influential friends in Paris moving a French court to secure his release on a petition of habeas corpus while he happened to be on French soil, it was decided not to take him by the normal overland route through France. Instead special accommodation was engaged on a ship going all the way to India, SS Maurea, and in her Savarkar was kept under watch night and day. Even when he went to the toilet two guards were required to sit outside the door and watch him in a mirror that had been specially fitted to the ceiling in front of a small opening cut into the door.

  For some unexplained reason the Maurea put in to Marseille. All night Savarkar lay awake, thinking of some way to escape and, just before dawn, asked to be allowed to use the toilet. The two guards took him to it and stood outside the door. Savarkar bolted the door and hung his dressing-gown over the opening. Then he made a grab for the porthole, wriggled through the narrow opening and hurled himself into the sea even as the guards were trying to break open the door.

  He had always been a strong swimmer and reached the shore before his pursuers, who had to wait for a boat to be lowered. He was now on French soil, and all he had to do was to find a policeman and demand political asylum.

  The dockside streets of Marseille were already astir and the trams had begun to ply. Savarkar, clad only in a pair of wringing wet striped pyjamas and barefoot, ran over the cobbled streets, pursued by a posse of frantic English and Indian policeman yelling ‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’.. Some people in the street joined the chase, but Savarkar managed to reach a gendarme all the same. He grabbed hold of him and told him in broken French to take him to a magistrate. The policeman, convinc
ed by his appearance that he was some lascar trying to run away from his ship, handed him back to the ship’s officers instead.

  The bid to escape at Marseille was the last bit of drama in Savarkar’s life. After that he was caught up in the toils of the law of the Raj. He had believed that, for his revolutionary activities in London, the maximum sentence that any court could give him was seven years’.imprisonment. He was given fifty years and sent to serve them in the cellular jail in the Andaman Islands to which his brother Babarao had already preceded him.

  He nearly died in the Andamans. Ten years later, his health shattered and close to a mental breakdown, he was brought back from the penal colony and put into an Indian jail. After another four years, he was released on parole and confined to the district of Ratnagiri. He had already served fourteen years in various prisons, a period of time which, in India, constitutes a normal ‘life’.sentence.

  Savarkar never made any apologies for adopting the methods of the anarchists in Europe to fight India’s battle against the Raj. In an article he contributed to Talwar he asserted:

  We hold that whenever the open preaching and practising of truth is banned by enthroned violence, then alone are secret societies and warfare justified... whenever the natural process of national and political evolution is violently suppressed by the forces of wrong, revolution must step in.

  Such was the man Nathuram Godse met in Ratnagiri in the summer of 1929. Savarkar was forty-six years old, a soft, bald man with the face of a family priest. In the five years he had been out of jail, he had regained his full bodily and mental vigour. He was working to bring about social and religious reforms among the Hindus; he read voraciously and wrote innocuous articles and plays and novels which were required to bear a publisher’s declaration that they were wholly divorced from politics. But the torrent of energy was far from fully engaged, nor had it found its natural outlet, politics.

  Nathuram came under Savarkar’s spell. Savarkar had been forbidden political activities but he could not be prevented from talking about politics in private conversation to anyone who was willing to listen.

  Nathuram sat and listened and was thrilled when, a few months later, Savarkar asked him to serve as his secretary. In this capacity he learned to write English well, to assemble his thoughts and to deliver speeches. By the spring of 1931, when Nathuram’s father retired from service and the family had to leave Ratnagiri, Nathuram had become a disciple of Savarkar.

  Nathuram’s father settled down in Sangli because he believed that ‘living would be cheap in a small town’. To supplement the family’s income, Nathuram took lessons in cutting and sewing and set himself up as a tailor. Later he added a fruit stall to his tailoring business.

  At this time, some leading Hindus in Nagpur started a movement called Hindu Sanghatan. Its object was to unite the Hindus to guard their political interests which, they felt, were being eroded by Muslim intransigence on the one hand and, on the other; by the excessive meekness of the Congress leaders like Gandhi and Nehru who were anxious to placate the Muslims at all cost. It called upon the Hindus to give up non-violence as a creed because it was emasculating them, and to learn to stand up and fight for their rights.

  Hindu Sanghatan, of course, was a stepchild of Savarkar’s own revolutionary movement against the Raj and, in his talks with Savarkar in Ratnagiri, Nathuram had discovered that it had the Master’s full support. So when, a year later, a branch of Hindu Sanghatan was opened in Sangli Nathuram eagerly volunteered to work for it. He was appointed its secretary.

  Nathuram was now in his early twenties and earning a modest living, and his parents thought he should get married and settle down. He told them that he had no intention of marrying, ever. It was a resolve he stuck to, and it, too, was all of a piece with his Spartan lifestyle. He neither smoked nor drank, wore the simplest clothes, read a lot of books on politics, history and Hindu religion and worked hard.

  In 1937, when the British were trying out a new constitution for India, the first elected government was formed in what was then known as the Bombay Presidency. One of the first acts of this government was to release Savarkar unconditionally; to them he was no seditionist but a freedom fighter, even if of a different brand from themselves. Savarkar’s trip from Ratnagiri to Bombay was a triumphal lecture tour in all the major towns along the route, of which Sangli was one. Here Nathuram rejoined Savarkar’s staff and then went along with him on his tour. What he saw convinced him that Sangli was too small a place for his field of activities. He shifted to Poona and set up his tailoring shop there; but here, too, his time was taken up in the work of Hindu Sanghatan, which now, with Savarkar’s return to the political arena, was fast gathering momentum, strength and, even more, direction. The British officials were no longer the villains; the real enemies were the Muslims, who seemed bent on carving out a piece of India for themselves and by extension the weak-kneed leaders of the Indian National Congress who looked as though they were going to give in to this demand. Under Savarkar’s leadership, the Sanghatan movement blossomed as a political party, the Hindu Mahasabha, whose declared aim was to keep India whole and a Hindu land; but, it is only fair to explain, not a purely Hindu land. As Savarkar, who was now acclaimed by his adherents as ‘Veer’.or ‘The Warrior’, explained, the Mahasabha wanted that

  India should be essentially a secular state in which (all citizens) should have equal rights and duties irrespective of religion, caste or creed. [But we] refuse to tolerate that Hindus should be robbed to enable the Muslims to get more than their due simply because they were Muslims and would not otherwise behave as loyal citizens.

  In 1938 the Mahasabha decided to carry out a protest march into the princely state of Hyderabad where the Hindu citizens were being discriminated against, and Nathuram Godse was given the leadership of the first batch of protest marchers. He was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. By the time he came out, the Second World War had begun, and the political scene in India had suffered a startling transformation.

  During the First World War, Gandhi had vigorously championed Britain’s cause and had recruited troops in India to fight for it, and the British had rewarded these services by granting him the Kaiser-i-Hind medal. Since then, Gandhi had become the foremost leader of India’s struggle for freedom from Britain, and when Hitler’s war had begun he had called upon his followers to boycott the war effort. A little later, he had followed this up with a nationwide campaign of non-cooperation and had demanded that the British should quit India forthwith. And Nehru, who at the outset of the war had declared that India ‘should offer unconditional cooperation to the British’, shifted his stance and aligned himself with Gandhi’s campaign, which sought to strangulate the Indian Government’s war effort. For this, Gandhi and Nehru and other Congress leaders had been rounded up and given stiff jail terms.

  Savarkar, who during the First World War had been a prisoner in the Andaman jail and had longed for a German victory, had now given a call to his followers to offer their fullest cooperation to the British war effort and to join the armed forces in large numbers. His motive was openly stated. He wanted the Hindus to learn to be proficient in the use of arms so that they would be able to hold their own in the battles that they were sure to be called upon to fight in the near future. Here was Britain, which had inflicted inhuman punishment upon Indians for possessing arms and trying to learn how to use them, offering to train them in the use of the latest weapons of war. It would be foolish not to take the fullest advantage of such an opportunity. Savarkar was looking into the future, beyond the Second World War, to a time when the British would have gone and left the country to the Hindus and Muslims and when the Hindus would be called upon to fend for themselves.

  The Raj did not care why Savarkar was being helpful so long as he was being helpful; if he was no friend of the British, for the moment he was not an enemy, either. They allowed him to remain free but, as will presently appear, kept him under surveillance. It was the Congress le
aders who now tended to look upon him as a renegade, if not an enemy; the man who was helping the British at a time when the Congress had called upon them to quit India. Outspoken as always, Savarkar made many powerful enemies among the leading Congressmen, and was to pay dearly for these indiscretions.

  Savarkar concentrated on building up his party, the Hindu Mahasabha, into a national organization to compete with the Congress and the Muslim League. It made some limited progress all over India, but developed rapidly in the parts of India where the Marathi language was spoken, and the cities of Poona and Nagpur became its principal centres.

  After his release from the jail in Hyderabad, Nathuram Godse had returned to Poona and resumed work in the Party’s office. Here in 1941 he was visited by a dynamic young man who had been active in the Party’s work in Ahmednagar, a cantonment town only seventy miles from Poona. His name was Narayan Dattatray Apte. Over the next two years, Nathuram and Apte became close friends.

  At thirty-one, Nathuram Godse was a quiet man of simple, almost austere tastes and a serious turn of mind. Pledged to celibacy he shied away from the company of women and deliberately shunned the temptations of life. He was bothered by even small lapses of middle-class morality and strove to keep his thoughts on a high plane. His favourite reading was books on religion and philosophy, his secret pride his ability to sway crowds with his speeches, and his admitted weakness a liking for coffee.

  Narayan Apte was altogether different. He was quick-witted, lively and intelligent, well educated, and with a family background of pure scholarship. He smoked and drank, wore expensive clothes, and was fond of the good things of life. Though he came from the same sort of middle-class Brahmin background as Nathuram, he scoffed at the scruples and prohibitions of both his class and caste. He was good-looking in a somewhat effeminate way, and was vain about his prowess with women.