The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  In fact, communal ferment was the Agrani’s food and drink. As the champion of Hinduism, it considered it its duty to keep its readers informed about the atrocities that the Muslims were committing upon the Hindus all over the subcontinent, to censure the government for its inability to protect the Hindus and, above all, to exhort the Hindus to stand up for themselves. To keep the Agrani in check the government ordered it to pay Rs 6000 as a security for good behaviour. The sum, modest as it was, was altogether beyond the resources of the Agrani, but Nathuram and Apte managed to raise it all the same by desperate borrowing from friends and moneylenders. After paying it, however, they went on just as before and the government retaliated by ‘forfeiting their deposit, to His Majesty’, and ordered the paper to be closed. Apte and Nathuram, who must have been prepared for this, obeyed the order but the very next morning started another paper, the Hindu Rashtra. What they had done was, of course, to bring out the Agrani under a new name. This paper, too, was called upon to pay Rs 5000 as an earnest of good behaviour and, much to the government’s surprise, the editor and manager were able to put up the money in time. With the spread of communal riots in the country, many affluent Hindus had begun to fall in line with the Mahasabha’s stand; and were coming out to support its paper with funds. The fear of government disapproval made some of these donors give their contribution secretly, but the fact remains that, from the middle of 1946, neither the paper nor its editor and manager were short of ready cash. As will be seen, they began to spend money much more freely on themselves and even branched out into the clandestine buying of arms and explosives for furthering their political objectives. Despite government threats of further reprisals they went on publishing their paper right up till 31 January 1948. The last issue carried the news of Gandhi’s murder.

  The blacking out of news about the riots in the press and the radio did little to ease the communal tension. In any case, the Congress Government in Bombay was quite powerless to control the Muslim League which, in the summer of 1946, decided to resort to what it called ‘direct action’.

  Direct action, according to its initiator, Mr Jinnah, was bidding ‘goodbye to constitutional methods’. Frank Moraes, in his biography of Nehru,suggests that it had ‘a sinister purpose’. It was, he goes on, ‘to set in train massacres, violence and bloody riots which were to extend beyond August 15,1947, culminating in the mass migration of 11,500,000 souls ... in a two-way trail of blood between India and Pakistan.’

  Jinnah may not himself have realized that his call for direct action would let loose the terror it did; and certainly he would not have wished for it. His followers ran amuck. Calcutta saw what The Statesman described as ‘The Great Killing.’ Within days the fire had spread to the other towns and villages of Bengal wherever the Muslims had the upper hand. A district called Noakhali became a synonym for genocide; here Muslim mobs went from village to village, setting fire to houses and killing the men and taking away the women as though they were herds of cattle.

  The Indian news media continued to black out all mention of who was killing whom. Even Gandhi deplored what he called ‘this hush-hush policy’.

  He was living in Delhi then so as to be close to the scene of action where momentous decisions concerning India’s future were being made. He decided to leave it all and go to Bengal to try to stop the massacres. ‘The heart of every man who believes in God bleeds for Bengal,’ he announced.

  Even as Gandhi’s train was speeding through the famine-parched land of Bihar, he could see the smoke and flames of villages burning. In Bihar, the Hindus were in a majority, and they had decided to answer Bengal’s direct action by a call of ‘blood for blood’ against the Muslims. As soon as he reached Calcutta, Gandhi issued a statement denouncing the Biharis for their ‘barbarities’, and threatened to go on a fast unto death if, within twenty-four hours ‘the erring Biharis have not turned over a new leaf ’.

  ‘A fast unto death.’ Coming from Gandhi the words held the threat of an unbearable calamity. In the event Gandhi did not even have to resort to a fast; the mere threat was enough to send the Biharis stampeding to make amends — at least till Gandhi’s attention was engaged elsewhere. Gandhi stayed in Calcutta for a few days and then went on to Noakhali.

  There were other men whose hearts bled for Bengal and who wanted to do all they could to help the victims of the holocaust. One of these was Vishnu Karkare, the little man from Ahmednagar who, it will be recalled, had organized the Hindu Mahasabha office there.

  Karkare was born of Brahmin parents, which is about all he knew of his early days. He did not even know the date of his birth, because both his parents had died when he was a small child, and he had been brought up in the Northcote Orphanage in Bombay, which put down his approximate date of birth as 1910. As a boy he had received little or no schooling even though later he taught himself to read and write Marathi and to speak Hindi. At ten he began to work as a tea shop drudge in Bombay, and later ran away to Poona. After fifteen years of hard work, he moved to Ahmednagar, carrying all he possessed in a gunny bag slung over his shoulder. Here, in a disused cowshed near the motor stand, he started his own tea shop. The only food he served beside tea was puris (fresh unleavened bread) and, to go with it, a chilli concoction which he called ‘blood-purifying sauce’.

  How any man who had been treated so shabbily by life should have come to feel passionately about abstract things such as religion or the motherland is difficult to imagine. The fact remains that both were the driving forces — even obsessions — of his life.

  The tea shop was a success, and Karkare was able to expand it into a cheap hotel or what, in this part of the world, is invariably described as a ‘lodging and boarding house’. The hotel, too, did well, and Karkare erected his own building to house it. He married, and employed servants to work in his hotel. Now he had time to do what he was later to describe — perhaps with excessive licence — as ’social service’.

  Himself uneducated, he thought he would help the cause of education by giving concessional rates or at times even free rooms in his hotel to students. He got together an amateur dramatic company and also began to take a keen interest in the work of the Hindu Mahasabha.

  In 1938, Savarkar came to Ahmednagar for his party work, and Karkare decided to treat him to a special performance of his theatre group. Savarkar happened to be extremely busy, but in the end agreed to come for fifteen minutes. He sat through the full show, three hours. Karkare was thrilled.

  In 1939, when Apte first came into contact with him, Karkare had already become the District Secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha. Three years later, he stood as a candidate for the municipal elections and was elected unopposed. Thus at the age of thirty-two, Vishnu Karkare was the owner of the Deccan Guest House, Kapad Bazaar, Ahmednagar, as well as a municipal councillor.

  The child from the Northcote Orphanage had come a long way when the massacre of Noakhali began.

  ‘I wanted to do something,’ Karkare later told a friend. To bring back into Hinduism those who had been forcibly converted, to set free some of the women who had been abducted — anything. I had no idea exactly what I could do. I thought I'd get there first and see what needed to be done.’

  He was conscious that by himself he could do nothing; he needed others to go with him. And for this he did not have enough money. So on the day of the Bhaubij or the Hindu festival of ‘Brothers’ day’ on which it is customary for brothers to give presents to their sisters, he called upon the public of Ahmednagar to come to his shop and donate whatever they could for their ’sisters’ in Noakhali. By the end of the day he had collected more than Rs 3000.

  He confessed that, when he saw how the people had responded to his call, tears came to his eyes. He and six Mahasabha workers went off to Noakhali. They wore typically Hindu turbans and dhotis and conspicuous caste-marks daubed on their forehead. Knowing that they were likely to be singled out for attacks, under their shirts they wore chain-mail jackets which they had bought from a man in
Poona whom Karkare knew, Digambar Badge. Once in Noakhali, they travelled from village to village, and at places opened up relief centres in the name of ‘Veer Savarkar’. They were horrified by what they saw and heard. At first the policemen would come into a village and force the villagers to surrender whatever arms they possessed by telling them that the government had made even the possession of swords and knives an offence. Then the mobs would swoop down on the defenceless villages. Accomplices would point out the houses of the richer Hindus. They would be looted and burned and the men killed, the women raped. Hindu women were regarded almost as a kind of perquisite of the Muslim elite. Karkare was given photographs of processions of naked women made to march through village streets followed by their swaggering abductors.

  They were able to restore a few women to their families, save a handful of lives, feed a few children, reconvert perhaps a score of men in all. The problem was vast. Nothing that they were able to do looked as though it had made the slightest dent in it. Karkare once flew back to collect more funds. But when that money ran out they returned, humbled and despairing, and talking of revenge. This was a problem that had no solution; it was something that had to be prevented from happening ever again. The trouble in Bengal would not have been so bad if the Hindus had not been rendered incapable of standing up for themselves by repeated doses of Gandhi’s ahimsa, non-violence. The answer was to fight back. That was the teaching of the Mahasabha; blood for blood.

  So the little men brooded as their train rumbled through the heart of India. Meanwhile, the man whom they held responsible for the suffering of Bengal was himself walking from village to village in the Noakhali district; and his coming had stopped the carnage as though a switch had been turned off.

  Gandhi toured Noakhali for seven weeks, taking in a village a day, and, when he felt sure that the trouble had really subsided, turned to Bihar. Unlike the Mahasabha, who only stood for the Hindus, Gandhi regarded himself as the champion of all sufferers. In Bihar, even though his threat to go on a fast had held the Hindus in check, it was feared that they were only waiting for Gandhi to go back to political work before attacking the Muslims again. To forestall this Gandhi toured all over Bihar, admonishing the Hindus and reassuring the Muslims, and he collected a fund for the Muslims who had suffered in the Bihar riots. He was still in Bihar when Lord Mountbatten came to India as the new Viceroy. At Mountbatten’s pressing invitation, Gandhi went to Delhi on 30 March 1947. By then the riots had already broken out in the Punjab, and the refugee exodus had begun.

  Ahmednagar is situated on a branch line, and to get to it from almost anywhere it is necessary to pass through Poona. Karkare, who was bursting with anger and eager to tell the world about the terrible things he had seen in Noakhali, took time off in Poona to see his two friends who ran the Party’s newspaper. He knew that at least he could rely on them to publish his reports without watering them down for fear of the Press Act. He was greatly moved when he discovered that Apte and Nathuram, even though they themselves had not seen the atrocities, were just as worked up about them as himself. More, that they had already thought out several plans for retaliation. Karkare was so dazzled by the sheer audacity of these plans that he prevailed upon his friends to accept his services in their execution.

  From the summer of 1947, Karkare became the team’s messenger and contact man for nosing out suppliers of explosives, firearms and, as often as not, cash. In the pursuit of these clandestine activities, he had to shuttle constantly between Ahmednagar and Poona and make frequent trips to Bombay and other places at short notice.

  Early in 1947, with their paper doing well, Apte and Nathuram decided to take on an extra hand as assistant editor, B.D. Kher, a close friend of Karkare. In fact Karkare actually seems to have shoehorned Kher into the job. Anyhow, what is significant here is that whenever Karkare came to Poona to see Apte, he stayed with this man, Kher.

  The house in which Kher lived, No 2 Narayan Peth, had begun life as one of the city’s wadas, or mansions of the grandees: a double-storeyed building with an inner chowk, or courtyard, which was the size of a badminton court. Over the years, the wada’s fifty-odd rooms had been divided up into a dozen or so flats of different sizes, and perhaps the largest of these flats was occupied by a senior police officer, Deputy Superintendent N.Y. Deulkar, the same Deulkar who had been on duty at Panchgani when Apte had heckled Gandhi at a public meeting, in the summer of 1944, and who knew by sight both Nathuram and Apte, as hot-headed Hindu Sanghatanites who looked upon Gandhi as an enemy of India.

  The flat Deulkar lived in adjoined that of Kher, and in fact, a partition wall that divided their two flats had a grilled window to allow the free flow of air. As neighbours, Deulkar and Kher knew each other well... and exchanged pleasantries. What is more, Deulkar had also come to know, if only by sight, the man from Ahmednagar who frequently stayed with Kher, Karkare.

  On one occasion, when Karkare had brought his drama group with him to Poona to give a few performances, some local friends had given a dinner party for the players in the courtyard of the house, and Deulkar had actually attended this dinner.

  So here we come across a plot-twist which would seem too contrived in a work of fiction: a senior and highly competent officer of the Secret Police had personally known three principal conspirators in the Gandhi murder plot: Apte and Nathuram, whom he had to deal with when they heckled Gandhi in Panchgani and Karkare, a frequent guest of his neighbour, Kher. Which means that if only Deulkar had been given some inkling that such a plot was suspected and that Apte, Nathuram and Karkare were implicated, he could have nabbed them at short notice. To have defeated such a plot would surely have been the crowning achievement of Deulkar’s career as a policeman.

  As will be seen, even though the vital facts about the plot and the names of the people involved in it were known to the police in Bombay at least a week before the murder, that information never percolated to Deulkar in Poona.

  A refugee from Pakistan, Madanlal Pahwa had experienced the atrocities first hand. An accused in the Gandhi’s murder case, for throwing a bomb at his prayer meeting on 20 January, he came in contact with Godse and Apte through Vishnu Karkare, who took him from a refugee camp in Bombay to Ahmednagar and helped him earn his living.

  FOUR

  I have joined the fire-cracker business.

  — MADANLAL PAHWA

  Karkare coming to tell them of the horrors he had seen was to Apte and Nathuram an experience similar to that of staff officers at some safe rear headquarters being told about front-line fighting by a private soldier. Both were acutely aware that they had done nothing practical in the service of the cause that was so dear to their hearts. They had written a series of fiery editorials condemning the Congress leaders for trying to placate Jinnah and, in defiance of the Press Act, had gone on publishing lurid accounts of the atrocities committed by the Muslims against the Hindus. And, if they had not actually commended similar atrocities on the part of the Hindus and Sikhs against the Muslims, they certainly had not denounced them.

  In Poona, Apte lived in the family house, Anandashram, a two-storeyed building in Budhwar Peth. He had a large family to look after, consisting of his own wife and child as well as all of his six brothers and sisters, and it is said that he took his duties as the head of the family fairly seriously. But away from his family he instantly became obsessed by his role as a worker for the Hindu cause. His stint as a wartime officer in the Air Force, even in a purely administrative capacity, had brought him into daily contact with other officers who had flown missions over enemy territory and who talked casually about bomb runs and blowing bridges and busting dams. That was the sort of punishment that he now dreamed of inflicting upon the enemies of Hinduism. The role he fancied himself in was that of a stern and dauntless leader of a band of dedicated men who were blindly devoted to him and whom he would dispassionately order to carry out the most dangerous of missions.

  Anandashram, the family house of Narayan Apte in Budhwar Peth, Poo
na, where he stayed with his six brothers and sisters, and wife Champa.

  While Nathuram concentrated on the day-to-day work of their paper, Apte bustled about all over the place trying to raise funds to keep it going. He was a glib talker with a salesman’s irrepressible manner and a ready smile, and his sincerity was undeniable. In Bombay he was able to make several useful contacts among the richer Hindu merchants who, themselves soft and ease-loving, were ready to pay conscience-money to a man who was so obviously doing something for their common religion.

  During his frequent trips to Bombay, Apte combined business with pleasure by taking Manorama Salvi out. They would take in a film, eat dinner at a moderately priced western-style restaurant, and spend the night together in a hotel room. Apte bought himself a motorcycle and thought nothing of the 120-mile journey to Bombay just to be with Manorama for a few hours, and once he brought her with him on his motorcycle all the way to Poona.

  If Apte’s donors in Bombay had known about these escapades, they might not have been quite so generous to him; the fact that he was the lover of a Christian girl would, in their eyes, have tarnished his credentials as a worker for a Hindu cause.

  For someone who thought of himself as a hard-boiled commando leader Apte was shockingly unsecretive. In Poona as well as in Bombay, he would hold forth over a drink about his favourite schemes to a circle of admiring friends, and often create the impression that he was about to give the go-ahead signal to some dramatically daring assault upon the enemy. The result was that several people who had not even met him had come to hear of his plans.

  Among these was Dada Maharaj, the head of a sect of affluent Hindus known as the Pushtimarg Vaishnavas. He was forty-two years old, and lived in Bombay in a house in the precincts of the famous Bhuleshwar temple, which is one of the city’s landmarks. A man called Mukund Malaviya told Dada Maharaj that he knew someone who was going to ‘destroy the whole of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly’, and that his name was Narayan Apte.