The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  Amazingly enough, none of these bombs caused any serious damage and no one was killed by them. The one at the Mohurrum procession was thrown when the procession was passing through Kapad Bazaar, which is Ahmednagar’s most crowded thoroughfare. It is also the street where Karkare’s Deccan Guest House was situated.

  At first, no one connected these bombs with either Karkare or Madanlal. Even though, because of the lead taken by both in the several demonstrations organized by the refugees, their names were well known to the police, they tended to regard the pair as agitators and slogan-shouters rather than men of violence. There is also the factor that most of the police officials were Hindus. They felt sorry for the refugees and at the same time they had good reason to feel resentful against a section of the local Muslims whom they believed to be secretly in sympathy with Kassim Rizvi and his Razakars, and who seemed to delight in provoking the refugees by putting up the Pakistani flag on their houses and mosques. At least a few of the policemen were kindly disposed towards people like Madanlal and Karkare who, they believed, were only fighting for the refugees.

  It was pure chance that enabled the police to connect Karkare’s name with the bombs. In the course of investigating a murder which had been committed in Poona several months earlier, the police found it necessary to carry out a search of the house where Karkare’s manager, a Mr S.V. Ketkar, lived. In the event they found nothing to connect Ketkar with this murder but, during the course of the search, came upon a steel trunk which contained ‘country made hand grenades, a revolver, daggers, explosives, fuses and about a hundred rounds of ammunition for both pistols and rifles’. What was more, the grenades were identified by experts as being of the same type as the ones thrown into the cinema and at the Mohurrum procession. Ketkar told the police that the trunk had been kept in his house by his employer, Karkare. This discovery was made on 1 January and, needless to say, it led the police to search Karkare’s house and his hotel, but nothing incriminating was discovered at either place. After this incident, Karkare was ‘ordered to be kept under constant surveillance’.

  Nevertheless, the police seem to have shown towards Karkare an unusual degree of indulgence. In normal circumstances he would have been arrested and kept in detention while further investigation proceeded. The crime of possessing explosives, arms and ammunition without a licence was a serious one.

  In police reports Madanlal’s name had already been coupled with Karkare’s as a man who ‘was always creating trouble’. The last time he had created trouble in Ahmednagar was on 5 January, when a prominent Congress leader, Raosaheb Patwardhan, had come to town to preach communal harmony. Madanlal heckled him repeatedly and, by his own admission, rushed upto the platform and ’snatched away the microphone from Patwardhan’. He was arrested on the spot and marched off to the police station where he was kept in the lock-up till the next morning.

  On 9 January, Inspector Razak of the Ahmednagar police recommended to his superiors that both Madanlal and Karkare should be kept in detention. It took three days for the recommendation to be processed and the final order issued. By then both Karkare and Madanlal had fled — in fact, they had run away on the very day Razak had recommended their arrest.

  There can be no doubt that some friend in the Police Department who had access to the secret files had tipped them off. Inspector J.N. Joshi, who at the time acted as the Secretary to the District Police Superintendent (DSP) of Ahmednagar, later stated that he had run into Madanlal at the Ahmednagar railway station ‘on or about 10 January’ (it must have been on the ninth) and had actually spoken to him, and that Madanlal had told him that he was going to Delhi to get married. Joshi, who over the next couple of days, could not have been unaware that a warrant was about to be made out for arresting Madanlal, never thought of telling his chief that Madanlal had already gone away. In fact, he did not say anything about it till 21 January. By that time Madanlal had already exploded a charge of gun-cotton at Gandhi’s prayer meeting in Delhi, and was caught by the police red-handed, while he still nursed a live grenade in his pocket.

  For his part, Madanlal had not gone to any special trouble to keep his movements a secret. In fact, what he had told Inspector Joshi was quite true. He was on his way to Delhi to see about his marriage. And, if he had not told the Inspector that on the way he would be stopping in Bombay for a while, within two days of his reaching Bombay he had written a letter to his girl friend and in it he had given her an address in Bombay at which she should write to him. This address was care of his author friend, Professor J.C. Jain: Mangal Nivas, Shivaji Park, Dadar.

  The girl’s name was Shevanta. All the police had to do, if they really wanted to arrest Madanlal before he could do any mischief, was to keep an eye on Shevanta’s mail, and it would have led them to him. Intercepting the letters of everyone connected with a suspected criminal is quite a common practice in India. That the police were not aware of Shevanta’s infatuation for Madanlal is difficult to believe; after all, they were supposed to have been keeping a close watch on his movements.

  Poor Shevanta. Her identity was never revealed, and must remain for ever confined to the two letters she wrote to Madanlal in reply to his. All that is certain is that she was desperately in love with him, and, further, that she had no idea that he had decided to jilt her. She was barely literate, and yet wanted to tell him of her passion for him; for this she resorts to a time-worn device, the quoting of Hindi couplets which have a double meaning, capable of an interpretation which can be either dreamily romantic or daringly erotic.

  The first letter written on 15 January is fairly innocuous. It acknowledges the one sent by Madanlal and assures him that ’she understand everything’. She accuses him of leaving after ’showing your love for only two days’, and tells him that her heart yearns for him. She implores him to treat her letter as though it were a telegram and return at once, and to read in her words much more than they say.

  The second letter written the very next day, sets out to describe the extent of her infatuation. After telling him that his memory haunts her, she asks him to return at once and to bring for her a sari and a pair of sandals. ‘Come soon because my heart remains sad,’ she concludes and then quotes:

  My flower garden looks desolate without you.

  Oh, come, my simple-minded hunter.

  Nights are passing, days are going,

  And my heart is sinking,

  Spring has come and the flower-bed waits to be looted.

  Oh, come, my simple-minded hunter.

  My life’s companion, your love troubles me

  And says something else which I dare not tell.

  How can I live without you,

  Oh, come my simple-minded hunter.

  This time Shevanta signs herself as Madanlal’s darling, and scribbles yet another couplet which the translator appointed by the court found to be ‘illegible’.

  The hunter had left Bombay even before the first letter got there. He was to see both letters for the first time only when they were included by the prosecution among the documents on which they would rely to prove their case against Madanlal and others.

  As for Shevanta, only four days after she wrote that love-sick letter she must have heard what Madanlal had been up to. On 20 January he was arrested by the police in Delhi for throwing a bomb in the compound of Birla House while Gandhi was holding his prayer meeting.

  The cast of characters: Seven in number — the three pairs — Apte-Nathuram, Karkare-Madanlal, and Badge-Shankar; and the odd man Gopal Godse, who just wanted to be of some help to his brother. Veer Savarkar (sitting second from left), believed to be their leader and the brain behind the killing. An affidavit submitted by Savarkar in the Bombay High Court sites this picture as taken without his consent on 11 May 1948, at the CID office Bombay. He later testified in the affidavit that the police might use this photograph to ‘prejudice his defence’ in the trial.

  FIVE

  As regards non-violence, it was absurd to

  ex
pect forty crores of people to regulate their

  lives on such a lofty plane.

  — NATHURAM GODSE

  J anuary 9 was a Friday. Karkare and Madanlal left Ahmednagar by the afternoon train and were in Poona late in the evening. Now that their carefully hoarded stock of explosives had been confiscated, their first concern was to find more supplies. From the station they took a tonga to Badge’s store and reached it at 8.30 p.m. As Badge testified later, he ‘was introduced to Madanlal for the first time by Karkare. Karkare then asked me to show what mal I had with me.’

  Badge and Karkare, of course, spoke in Marathi, and mal, which merely means ‘goods’ was a term they had started using in conversation to describe the contraband part of Badge’s wares, such as explosives, arms, detonators and ammunition. Badge ordered his servant, Shankar, to bring out the goods from where they were hidden under a stone slab at the back of the house. When Shankar returned with an assortment of ‘gun-cotton slabs, hand grenades, cartridges, a pistol, and fuse wire’, Madanlal, after a professional look at it, pronounced that ‘he knew how to operate the articles’. Madanlal and Karkare then went away, without buying anything.

  The last train to Bombay left Poona just before midnight. That gave Karkare and Madanlal plenty of time to go and see Apte and Nathuram and hold a prolonged consultation with them. Madanlal had seen whatever Badge had to sell, and was satisfied that he could use it, but everyone was agreed that Badge’s prices were far too high. Apte, who had to worry about the finances, was particularly anxious that they should find a cheaper source of supplies. Madanlal’s old firm was no longer in business, but he had contacts among the refugees in the Chembur camp who, he felt sure, would lead him to someone who manufactured bombs and sold them cheaply.

  He himself had no plans for returning immediately, for he was on his way to Delhi to take a look at one or two prospective brides about whom his uncle and father had written to him. But, in the few days that he would be in Bombay, he would try to locate a reliable supplier and introduce him to ‘Karkara Seth’, who was accompanying Madanlal as far as Bombay.

  According to Karkare, once again the talk went round and round: a commando sortie into Hyderabad, the attack against the ammunition train, the raid on the octroi post. Now that they had an expert sitting in on their discussion they were much more down to earth. For the first two schemes they did not have the right kind of armaments, for the third they did not have the right kind of car.

  They all felt indignant: about Kassim Rizvi and his fanatical challenges, and they reviled Gandhi and Nehru and the other leaders for not dealing firmly enough with Rizvi and his Razakars and the Muslims in general. But both Madanlal and Karkare told the author, after their release from prison and long after it could be of any conceivable advantage to either to be secretive about such details, that on the evening of 9 January there was no talk of murdering Gandhi.

  In fact, nothing definite was decided upon. Madanlal and Karkare were to proceed to Bombay and look around for another supplier of mal. Apte and Nathuram would stay on in Poona and think out the next move. The one thing they were all agreed about was that it was high time they struck somewhere. Apte and Nathuram knew where to contact Karkare in Bombay, for he either stayed with his wife’s sister, a Mrs Lalit, in the Girgaum area or with a friend, a Mr G.M. Joshi, who lived in the suburb of Thana, but ran a printing press, the Shivaji Printing Press, in Dadar. They would contact Karkare immediately in case something urgent turned up. Not that anything was likely to turn up.

  Madanlal and Karkare reached Bombay early on the morning of 10 January. After stopping at Mrs Lalit’s house for a cup of tea, they went to the Chembur refugee camp and got down to work. The weekend was a good time to find everyone at home.

  On Sunday afternoon, Madanlal ran into his professor friend Dr Jain in front of the Plaza Cinema in Dardar and told him that he would come and see him later in the evening. He turned up at eight, when another friend of Dr Jain’s, a textile broker named Angad Singh, who had met Madanlal before, also happened to be there. According to Angad Singh, Madanlal was full of ‘tall talk’ about his exploits in Ahmednagar. He told them how they had formed a party in Ahmednagar with the object of hounding out the Muslims and that the party was financed by his good friend Karkara Seth; that they had already taken over the fruit and vegetable stalls that had belonged to the Muslims; and that, when the Congress leader, Raosaheb Patwardhan, had come to preach tolerance and told them that the Hindus should think of the Muslims as their brothers, he, Madanlal, had ‘rushed up to him, whipped out a knife, caught hold of his collar and challenged him, if he dared, to repeat what he had said.’

  Madanlal then ‘took out from his pocket some Marathi newspapers and gave them to Dr Jain saying that they were full of praise for him.’

  As it happened, neither Jain nor Angad Singh could read Marathi well, and in any case Jain was far more interested in what Madanlal had to say about the money he owed him than in what the papers had to say about Madanlal.

  At about 8.30 Angad Singh left. Madanlal told Jain that he would call again in the next few days and pay him his dues. Then he went back to Chembur.

  That night he wrote to Shevanta, his girl in Ahmednagar, and asked her to address her reply care of Dr Jain. But he did not post the letter till late on Monday, with the result that Shevanta did not receive it till the morning of Wednesday, 14 January.

  And so the weekend passed; a quiet weekend. The news in the papers was chiefly about the discussions that Mountbatten was holding with the Indian princes.

  It was not till Monday evening that things suddenly began to move. Gandhi announced his decision to fast, and as the news came clacking out over their office teleprinter Apte and Nathuram made up their minds to kill him.

  So a target had presented itself. ‘D-Day’ was immediately fixed 20 January.

  It was typical of the pair that nothing else was decided — how the killing was to be accomplished, with what weapons, and who else they would need to go to Delhi to assist them in the killing. The details were to be worked out as they went along, the weapons collected, the men assembled and allotted their roles.

  Over the next week, in Poona, in Bombay and in New Delhi, in taxicabs and trains, and in the streets of Bombay, their imagination added the bits and pieces till they had created a many-limbed monster. The plan to kill one man became a plan of indiscriminate slaughter. To accomplish the death of Gandhi, they zestfully set out to kill or maim scores of men and women who, they knew for certain, would be crowding around Gandhi at the time. It was something that only sick minds could have conjured up, something that even the most brutal of commandos operating within enemy territory might have thought too callous. As it finally crystallized in the Marina Hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Circus on the afternoon of 20 January, the scenario was a horrifying mixture that was part farce and part Marat-Sade. If it did not show up Apte and Nathuram as cowards, equally so it did not show them up as men of courage, either, for they had managed to farm out all the dangerous roles to their subordinates and themselves intended to remain in the background. They had even put a pistol into the hands of that most inoffensive of men, Badge’s servant, Shankar Kistayya. Poor Shankar didn't even know who Gandhi was, or what he had done, or why he has to fire the pistol at him.

  Nathuram’s first act connected with the plot was an altogether practical one. Two years earlier, he had taken out two insurance policies on his life, one for Rs 3000 and the other of Rs 2000. On the morning of 13 January he wrote off to the insurance company that he had nominated his beneficiaries for both. The first was Sindhu, his brother Gopal’s wife; the second Champa, Narayan Apte’s wife. That Apte himself was not nominated is understandable; but it seems clear that Nathuram also knew that Gopal was going to share whatever dangers Apte and himself were going to be exposed to.

  Gopal Godse was twenty-seven years old. A gentler, more soft-spoken and self-effacing man, someone who would more neatly fit into the definition of a quiet hou
seholder, would be difficult to imagine. Admittedly he had been influenced by his brother’s fervent zeal for the Hindu cause, but so far he had never felt involved in it. He was far more concerned with the problems of day-to-day living, of bringing up his family, holding down his job, the good opinion of friends and neighbours.

  After passing the matriculation examination, he had joined the Military Ordnance Service as a civilian clerk. When the war began he volunteered for service overseas and in 1941 found himself sent off with the British column that went to Iran and Iraq, PAIFORCE. He had remained with PAIFORCE for the next three years, and had returned to India in April 1944. Since then he had been posted as an assistant storekeeper in the vast complex that is the Ordnance Depot at Kirkee, four miles out of Poona. His service record was wholly unblemished, and he was hoping to be promoted soon. He was married and had two daughters, one aged two years and the other four months. He had rented a couple of rooms tucked away behind the bazaar of Kirkee, where he and his wife lived, but his wife had gone away for a few days to her parents’ house in Poona and taken the children with her.

  Gopal had always been particularly close to Nathuram and so had a fair idea of the plans that Nathuram and his partner were constantly hatching, but he had never envisaged his own participation in them. Badge, who was a fairly frequent visitor to the Hindu Rashtra office and had had dealings with Apte and Nathuram, had never met Gopal.

  The one reason why Gopal had been taken into their confidence was that he possessed a revolver. It was a service revolver that he had picked up while he was with PAIFORCE, and which he had managed to bring back to India. A service revolver is of a ‘prohibited’ bore and cannot be bought or sold by civilians. Nor were Gopal’s social position and income such that he would have been granted a licence for a pistol or revolver even of a non-prohibited bore. On his return home he had buried it in the yard of his village house.