The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  For someone who belonged to a holy order, Dada Maharaj was extremely worldly. He had gone to a university and taken a degree in Sanskrit, but he also held a pilot’s licence. He took his position as the religious head of his sect very seriously, regarding himself as a spokesman and guardian of Hinduism itself. He was well read, businesslike and shrewd. Above all, he was an extremely rich man, with an annual income exceeding Rs 300,000 which was derived mainly from cash offerings left at his feet by his devotees ‘out of their love and respect’ for him.

  Dada Maharaj, too, had like Karkare, travelled through the Noakhali district to see things for himself and had come back full of thoughts of retaliation. He went from place to place preaching what was more or less Savarkar’s doctrine — that the Hindus must fight for their religious and political rights. But there was a hard, practical side to his resolution too, and to assist the Hindus to become militant he had secretly started to collect arms and explosives. The arms were to be distributed freely among the Hindus who lived in the areas bordering the Nizam’s territory, and the explosives were for carrying out operations right inside the Nizam’s territory.

  But this side of his work Dada Maharaj entrusted to his younger brother, Dixitji Maharaj, who also lived nearby in an apartment on the temple property. The two brothers were close to one another and worked as a team, Dada Maharaj being the organizer and the financier and the man who made the decisions, Dixitji the one who looked after the details. Even though he chose to remain in the background, Dada Maharaj always had a good idea of what his brother was doing and who his callers were, particularly since Dixitji, for his part, always accepted Dada’s superior status and kept him fully informed.

  Dada Maharaj thus knew that, among Dixitji’s suppliers of what were regarded as ‘permissible’ weapons, in that a licence was not required to buy or sell them, was a man called Digambar Badge, who lived in Poona and ran a small business somewhat grandiosely called Shastra Bhandar or the ‘Storehouse of Weapons’. This Badge was the man who had supplied the six chainmail jackets to Karkare’s group for their trip to Noakhali. Dada Maharaj had never spoken to Badge, but had seen him a few times.

  Digambar Badge was also known to Narayan Apte and Nathuram Godse, and was later to join them in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi. But in July 1947, when Dada Maharaj first heard about Apte’s plan to destroy Pakistan’s leadership in one stroke, both Apte and Nathuram were a little standoffish towards Badge. At any rate, they had not bought anything other than ‘Permissible’ weapons from him, and certainly had not told him anything about their secret plans.

  Dada Maharaj was so thrilled to hear about what Apte planned to do that he rushed to Poona to make his acquaintance and see if there was something he could do to help. In July 1947 he held at least two separate discussions with Apte, and in one of these they were joined by that enthusiastic new member of the team, Vishnu Karkare, who had been specially sent for by Apte to meet Dada Maharaj. Apte, now very much the Air Force Officer, spoke professionally about the plans in hand and asked Dada Maharaj for Rs 5000 for the purchase of two mortars with which to blow up the Pakistani Assembly. Dada Maharaj, who at the time had no idea what a mortar was, blessed the venture and drove back to Bombay deeply impressed. Later, he was to deny having paid Apte any money for the mortars, but this, under the circumstances, seems unlikely.

  Whether Apte did indeed have the two mortars on offer never became clear. He had told Dada Maharaj something about their being available in Goa, which was then in Portuguese hands. On the face of it, it was an unlikely story. The fact remains that he never got the mortars.

  What is perhaps more to the point is that, even if he had been able to get them, he would not have known how to make use of them, for he had received no training whatsoever in the use even of what the Army calls ’small arms’ and certainly did not know much about its more destructive weapons such as mortars or (something which he thought of using later) a flame-thrower. No doubt some friend in the Army or a discharged soldier could have explained to him how a mortar was fired, but it is hardly likely that he would have been given a demonstration in its use; of how to get it firmly in position and find the right range without wasting too much ammunition. Even in expert hands, a mortar is a far from accurate weapon, and for the purpose Apte had in mind, which was the slaughter of all the members of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly while they were in session, it was a most impracticable one. There were two kinds of mortar then in general use in the Indian Army, the two-inch and the three-inch, and assuming even that the one he had in mind was the smaller type how was he going to sneak it into the Assembly Hall, set it up, sight it without a trial round and fire it without being detected? Or, was he thinking of shelling from outside, in the hope of destroying the building itself, which was an even more impracticable proposition?

  Obviously the mortars were no more than a Walter Mitty dream, a device which his mind had endowed with capabilities it never possessed. And, unable to get hold of them, Apte turned to something only a little less Grand Guignol, a Sten gun. A Sten is a modified and mass-produced Thompson sub-machine gun and it had come into general use as an infantry soldier’s weapon in both the Indian and British armies towards the end of the war. Apte and Karkare must have seen soldiers in Poona and Ahmednagar carrying Stens slung over their shoulders, and heard stories about the damage they were capable of doing. At least Stens were not too difficult to acquire. With the confusion attendant upon general demobilization, the repatriation of British troops from India (who were glad to unburden themselves of all surplus gear) and the division of the Indian Army as well as its stock of weapons, a large quantity of Stens and other easily concealable weapons had found their way into private hands. In the summer of 1947, therefore, it was fairly easy to buy a rifle or a Sten if you knew where to go.

  Karkare, who had come to Poona to assist Apte in his talks with Dada Maharaj, had stayed on, and he now suggested to Apte that they should go and see if Digambar Badge could provide them with a Sten gun.

  Up till now Apte and Nathuram had been chary of Badge. He was not the sort of person who inspired confidence at first sight. A face with its features askew as though seen in a mirror, Badge is small, almost diminutive, but thick-set and well built, so that he looks like a stunted wrestler. As the result of some childhood injury, one of his eyes is much smaller than the other, giving the impression of a cast. He has the swagger of a warrior in a shadow-play, and he is an inveterate name-dropper and a big talker who is all but unsnubbable, so that people must often have bought his knives and daggers merely to get away from him. Because of his short stature and the mismatched eyes, he is easy to locate even in a crowd.

  Nonetheless, he fancies himself as someone who could escape detection by resorting to the oddest disguises, and as proof of this ability keeps an album full of theatrically posed photographs of himself in the garbs that he had supposedly worn while carrying out some especially hazardous mission. The photographs, usually taken in studios, show him dressed up variously as a Muslim butcher, a Brahmin priest doing pooja, a Sikh farmer and even as a prisoner in a barred cell guarded by a sentry. Once he turned up in Dixitji Maharaj’s place dressed up as a professional musician, with his servant carrying the twin drums, tabla and dugga which invariably accompany true professionals. In the presence of Dixitji ‘Badge opened the drums and took out daggers’.3

  No description of Badge as he was at this time can be complete without bringing in his servant, Shankar Kistayya, and no generality can show up the workings of Badge’s mind better than his relationship with this servant. Both might have stepped straight out of the pages of Kim.

  Shankar, who was born in Sholapur and spoke only Telugu, was illiterate. In 1945, he lived with his mother and was working as an apprentice carpenter when Badge came upon him during one of his selling trips. Badge, who was looking for someone who could put handles on the dagger blades that he bought at cut rate from a supplier, offered Shankar the job. The salary was to be Rs 20 per
month, plus food and clothes. Shankar joined Badge and went to Poona.

  In Poona he did not even know the local language, Marathi, and was almost completely dependent on his master, who communicated with him in a mixture of broken Telugu and Hindi for all his needs. According to Badge, Shankar’s duties were to prepare the handles for the daggers, to pedal the bicycle rickshaw in which Badge rode and carried his wares, and to act as his delivery boy and domestic servant.

  The domestic chores, it turned out, included everything that a diligent housewife could conceivably be called upon to perform such as the washing of Badge’s clothes and massaging his limbs, drawing water from the tap in the street, sweeping the floors, helping with the cooking and marketing, and anything else that Badge or his sister, who lived a few doors away, ordered him to do.

  The salary that Shankar had been promised, Rs 20 per month was low even for those days. But, in actual practice, Shankar seldom if ever received his full salary. Badge would give him a couple of rupees once every week or so, and if Shankar protested Badge would berate him as a slacker and a bungler and his sister would call him even worse names. Once Shankar’s mother came from Sholapur to plead for the payment of his arrears of salary, but fared no better than her son. In the middle of 1946, Shankar found that he was owed six months’ wages and that there was no prospect of ever being paid them. In desperation, he fled.

  But Badge had the answer to block that particular escape hole. He promptly filed a complaint with the police that his servant had stolen Rs 200 and run away. Shankar, who had gone straight back to his mother’s house in Sholapur, was arrested and brought back in chains. A few nights in the police lock-up and his experience of police methods of interrogation convinced Shankar that Badge was too powerful a man even to run away from: that, no matter how he was treated, he had to stick with his master for the rest of his life. He appealed to Badge for mercy; and his master, after arranging for him to be released on bail, took him back and magnanimously raised his salary to Rs 30 per month. Shankar resumed his job as Badge’s man of all work with the total resignation of a lamb entering a slaughterhouse. He was then eighteen years old.

  Shankar Kistaya, servant of Digambar Badge, became a part of the conspiracy without even being aware of it. He was the only member of the group who didn't even know who Gandhi was.

  Digambar Badge, not the kind of person who inspired confidence, was the owner of Shastra Bhandar, the ‘Storehouse of Weapons’. An ‘inverterate name-dropper and a big talker’, he came in contact with Godse and Apte through Dixitji Maharaj.

  Shastra Bhandar, or ‘Storehouse of Weapons’, at 300 Narayan Peth, Poona, was from where Digambar Badge ran his business of supplying ‘Permissible’ weapons. This photograph shows the present day site of the Shastra Bhandar. Badge became a part of the conspiracy to kill Gandhi when he supplied Godse and Apte with a revolver.

  When the case against Shankar finally came up for a hearing Badge never showed up to press the charges. After adjourning the case several times for want of the complainant, the magistrate finally dropped it. But by this time nearly a year had gone, and Shankar, despite the fact that he never saw much of the money he had been promised, had become firmly established in the Badge household as a permanent servant.

  On a rainy afternoon towards the end of July 1947, Apte and Karkare drove in a borrowed car to the Shastra Bhandar, or the ‘Storehouse of Weapons’, at 300 Narayan Peth. As Badge was to testify later, Apte, after telling him that he was doing business on behalf of ‘influential persons’ asked to buy a Sten gun.

  Badge called out to Shankar to mind the store, and got into the car. They picked up a Sikh called Gurdayal Singh and drove on to the road that skirted the rear wall of the great Yeravda Central Prison. Here Gurdayal told them to stop, and got out of the car. He returned after only a few minutes. Cradled in his arms was a Sten gun.

  It was as simple as that. Badge, the little man whom they had never taken seriously before, had established his credentials; he could produce the goods. They dropped Gurdayal Singh and, back in the Shastra Bhandar, Apte gladly paid Badge the price he asked, Rs 1200. He and Karkare then returned to the Hindu Rashtra office, delighted with the day’s work. The end was in sight.

  A Sten is not the kind of weapon a man can fire without a good deal of preliminary instruction in the manner of loading it and handling it and, of course, firing it. It is used mainly to spray a large quantity of ammunition in a single burst, and since it is normally fired from the hip, aimed in a general direction, it is a far from accurate weapon. Above all, it uses up enormous quantities of ammunition. Even granting that Apte might have managed to get a dozen or so loaded magazines for his Sten, he still had to get someone who was trained in its use and would be prepared to risk his life in an attempt to spray the Pakistani Constituent Assembly during one of its sessions in Delhi. In the event, the Sten was never used.

  Meanwhile, time was running out. The date set for the granting of Independence was fast approaching. All through July, the Pakistani leaders had been leaving India in planeloads and, by 10 August, Delhi was virtually empty of them. On 14 August, Jinnah and his assembly were safely installed in their new capital Karachi.

  And on 15 August freedom came to India. A ‘tryst with destiny’, Nehru called it; a ‘historic hour’, said Mountbatten. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte and their friends boycotted the festivities because they were ‘painful and disgraceful’ to them, ‘while the whole of the Punjab was set by the Muslims in flames and Hindu blood ran in rivers’.

  And the Mahatma too, for reasons of his own, observed Independence Day as a day of fasting and prayer.

  In Bombay, Dada Maharaj, who was nothing if not practical, had been making his own inquiries about the capabilities and limitations of mortars. But, before his confidence in his new-found daredevil, Apte, was irrevocably shaken, Apte himself, accompanied by the devoted Karkare, turned up at his house with some elaborate explanation as to why the plan had to be abandoned. But, at the same time, they reassured Dada Maharaj that they had two other equally daring plans ready which they had come to discuss.

  One, was to carry out a midnight raid on a busy octroi post on the Hyderabad side of the border, kill the officials with a couple of bursts from their Sten and make off with the day’s collection of cash, which was believed to be considerable. This fund they would set aside to pay for further adventures. All the help they needed to carry out this plan was the use of a large car for the raiding party to travel in, something like Dada Maharaj’s own Chevrolet station-wagon. The other plan, far more daring, was to lie in wait and destroy a train that was carrying a part of Pakistan’s share of the stocks of ammunition left by the British. But, to put this one through, they would need Rs 10,000 to buy a couple of flame-throwers.

  Dada Maharaj, now certainly less enthusiastic than at his first exposure to Apte, offered him his car for the raid on the octroi post but declined to put up the money for the flame-throwers ‘unless I saw them’. Further, as though to show him that he too was not entirely a novice in such matters, he hinted that he knew where to lay his hands on ’some hand grenades and dynamite’, if Apte needed them.

  But Apte, who could not have seen a flame-thrower in action other than in a wartime newsreel, had pinned his hopes on that outlandish weapon. He declined the offer of grenades and dynamite, but accepted the loan of the car, and drove off in it to see Manorama Salvi.

  For the next two months, Dada Maharaj heard nothing more from Apte, and at the beginning of October he went to Poona to find out what was happening, and to reclaim his car. Here Apte but on another show for him by inviting couple of dozen earnest young men from his Dal to meet him. He told him that they were all only waiting for the flame throwers to arrive before setting out to destroy the next ammunition train on its way to Pakistan. Apte also placated Dada Maharaj by inviting him to perform the opening ceremony of the new building that he and his partner had put up to house their press and staff. The Hindu Rashtra was going i
nto its own premises.

  Nothing was said about the raid on the octroi post, but Dada Maharaj must have considered himself lucky to see his car again. Also he must have been considerably flattered by the invitation to perform the opening ceremony. By rights it should have been Savarkar’s privilege, but for the past few months Savarkar had not been in good health, and had stopped accepting engagements outside Bombay. Anyway, Dada Maharaj once again showed his readiness to help Apte, but declined to put up the money for the flame-throwers unless they were produced for his inspection. As Dada Maharaj later testified, there followed ‘a talk about explosives for the purpose. Apte then suggested that he would send for Badge, through whom explosives could be obtained.

  Dada Maharaj had, of course, known who Badge was and had even seen him once or twice when he came to do business with his brother, but had ‘had no dealings with him’. He arrived loaded with ‘gun-cotton slabs, fuse wire, detonators, and “808” packets containing explosive substances’. (This last was Nobel’s nitroglycerine.) Dada Maharaj bought nearly everything that Badge had brought with him but most of it to one side to take back to Bombay for distribution to the Hindus in Hyderabad through his brother, Dixitji. Apte then produced a crudely made pistol which he said he had bought for Rs 400, and asked Dada Maharaj if he could have it exchanged for a more reliable pistol or revolver of a fairly large calibre. Dada Maharaj accepted Apte’s pistol and promised that he would either get him a serviceable revolver in exchange or, failing that, reimburse the price of his pistol. After that he drove off in his car with the parting command: ‘The ammunition train to Pakistan must be destroyed.’

  But there was more on Apte’s mind than the destruction of the ammunition train. In fact, he was quite frantic with domestic worries.