The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  Jain was later to state that he pressed Madanlal for the name of the leader, and that Madanlal ‘mentioned the name of Mahatma Gandhi’. Whereupon Jain admonished him ‘not to behave like a child’, and ‘had a long talk with him, trying to dissuade him from what he said he intended to do’.

  As a result of this talk, Madanlal, according to Jain, told him ‘that he was under my obligation since I had helped him much and that he considered me like his father; and that, in case he did not listen to my advice, he would be doomed.’

  Since Dr Jain, for reasons known only to himself, did not report this vital information to anyone in a position of authority for at least six days, and then, too, in an oral interview to a minister of the Bombay Government to whom he made a special request that his name be withheld from the police, it is not easy to fathom just how much of the plot Madanlal had really, revealed to him and, more, on what date he had revealed it. Dr Jain’s memory is not too reliable on either point. As will be seen, when finally he reported the purport of Madanlal’s talk, Madanlal had already exploded a charge of gun-cotton at Gandhi’s prayer meeting, and had been arrested with a live grenade in his pocket. Jain’s recollection of what Madanlal had said to him in Bombay is therefore likely to have been influenced by the actual event. For instance, Jain later stated that he knew the main ingredients of the plot as well as the names of Madanlal’s accomplices as early as 10 January. Madanlal, on the other hand, swears that he himself did not know anything about the plot till the fifteenth, and all the circumstances certainly support him. And Karkare, too, bears him out. Similarly, even though Dr Jain made something of a point that Madanlal, at this meeting, had told him that Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha, when he heard of his exploits in Ahmednagar, had sent for him and had a long talk with him for about two hours... had patted him on the back and said, “Carry on”, in his first recorded statement before a magistrate he had not even mentioned Savarkar’s name.

  But this much is clear. On the evening of 15 January, Dr Jain knew that Madanlal was implicated in a plot to kill or, as Jain later put it, to ‘overpower’ Gandhi. Beyond that he knew very little. He might have guessed that Madanlal’s particular friend whom he called Karkara Seth was bound to be one of the conspirators. But he certainly did not know, as he was later to claim that he did, the names of Madanlal’s other associates, and nor does he seem to have pressed Madanlal to reveal them.

  Anyway, accepting Madanlal’s dutiful assurance that he would never think of disobeying Jain, whom he regarded as his father, Jain did nothing. Two days later, Jain confided whatever Madanlal had told him to Angad Singh, who was a close family friend and frequent visitor to his house, and who, it will be recalled, had been introduced by Jain to Madanlal. Angad Singh, while he, too, felt that one should not take ‘the tall talk of a refugee’ seriously, advised Jain to report the information to the authorities all the same. Jain saw no one in a position of authority.

  After leaving Jain’s house, Madanlal had caught a bus to Victoria Terminus. Here Karkare was waiting for him with the tickets. They managed to find room in a third-class compartment of a train that called itself the Peshawar Express even though, because Peshawar was now deep in Pakistan, it did not go there. The train left on time, at 9.30 p.m.

  An hour later, from the same station, Badge and Shankar caught the Madras Mail which, as it happens, does not accept passengers for Poona, and Badge knew it. But this was no obstacle for a man like Badge, who was something of an old hand at ticketless travelling. Instead, he bought two platform tickets and, as the train was pulling out, he and Shankar jumped into one of its carriages. At the other end, he was confident of being able to slip through by offering a small tip to the ticket collector.

  All except Apte had left Bombay on the night of Thursday, 15 January, he had decided to stay on, as he told the others, to try to raise some funds for their expenses. But he had much more than money on his mind. He had no illusions that he could murder Gandhi and still return to his old life. He had to tell Manorama Salvi about what they were planning to do, and to prepare her for a final parting.

  For the next two days Apte kept his room (No. 6) at the Sea Green Hotel (South). If only because, on a later occasion, he was to stay in the Sea Green Hotel (North) it is necessary to explain that both these hotels are in the same building, but are under different managements; one cannot go from one to the other without first coming out on to the road.

  During the two days, Apte made no efforts to collect any funds. For much of the time, Manorama Salvi was with him, and she was desolate. ‘I was quite upset and cried,’ she was later to testify. ‘He tried to console me. He told me that, if anything happened to him [I was] not to worry but try to be happy.’

  It was a tall order. For Manorama Salvi, it was as good as the end of her life.4 She was still in her twentieth year, and if she had not become infatuated with Apte she would have sat for her BA examination in another three months. She would thus have become the first graduate in the Salvi family and one of the first girls in the community to have gone through college. A rosy future awaited her; a well-to-do husband, or, if she preferred, a decent job. Now there would be neither graduation nor marriage. All her life she would have to live with the guilt of unchastity, the social ostracism of bearing an illegitimate child. The tight little community of mission-raised Christians in which she had grown up would treat her family like lepers.

  And the man for whom she had brought all this on herself was now going off on some mysterious mission from which he was not likely to return. As it happened, Manorama belonged to a Christian family, but the life that awaited her was that of a Hindu widow, a life of renunciation and self-abnegation, a relegation to a limbo of unimaginable bleakness. Manorama played no part whatsoever in Gandhi’s murder, but there can be no doubt that the punishment she received was no less severe than the sentences awarded by the judges to the conspirators.

  Badge’s train got into Poona at 2 a.m. on 16 January. At the barrier, Badge expertly slipped a two-rupee note into the hands of the ticket collector, and he and Shankar passed through. As soon as there was enough light to see, Shankar brought in all the stocks of explosives and weapons that had been buried in the backyard and he and Badge between them stuffed them into two bags. Badge then slept till noon and went off with the two bags. Not surprisingly it was not easy to find someone who was willing to look after them for him, or even who could be trusted not to blackmail him, and it was not till after 7 p.m. that he struck any luck. He had called at the house of Ganpat Kharat, at 148 Narayan Peth. Kharat was a member of the Bombay Legislative Assembly who had been elected on a Congress ticket, and thus, under a Congress regime, a man who wielded considerable influence.

  Kharat later stated that, when Badge brought the ‘bundles’ to his house, he was hurrying off ‘to answer the call of nature’. He only heard Badge mumble something about keeping the bags for the Hyderabad State Congress and said yes. When, ‘in 3-4 minutes’ time’, Kharat returned Badge had already left. Kharat later told the police that he never knew what the bags contained, and his contention was not called into question. Kharat was, nonetheless, anxious not to keep the bags in his own house. Within an hour of Badge leaving them, two of his political workers came to see him and he ‘handed over one bundle to each of them for safe custody.

  Badge returned to his store just before eight, and was told by Shankar that Nathuram had been trying to get hold of him; that he had twice called at the shop, and was even then waiting for him at his office.

  Nathuram had left Bombay by a fast afternoon train, the Deccan Queen, got off at Kirkee, and gone to see his brother Gopal. He was relieved to hear that Gopal was getting his leave from Saturday the seventeenth. Gopal told him that on Friday evening he would go to Uksan (his village) where he had buried the revolver, and from there catch an early train to Bombay. He would thus be in Bombay in good time to catch the Punjab Mail which left in the afternoon. It was arranged that Nathuram and Apte would meet Gopal’s tra
in at Delhi railway station on the evening of the eighteenth.

  The brothers ate their evening meal together, and Nathuram went to his own room for the night. Friday morning Nathuram spent in trying to get hold of another pistol or revolver, and managed to buy a .22 bore magazine pistol. He was not at all happy with it. He wanted something of a bigger bore, and, if possible, a revolver in preference to a pistol.

  When Badge came to the Hindu Rashtra office, the first thing that Nathuram asked him was whether he had made up his mind to go with them and Badge answered that he was ready. As Badge later recalled, ‘Nathuram Godse then took out a pistol and gave it to me. He asked me to exchange it for a big revolver, but, in case I could not get hold of a big revolver, to bring the pistol with me to Bombay.’

  Badge seems to have taken this last-minute commission quite calmly; certainly he did not protest that he, too, had a train to catch. He pocketed the pistol and dashed off to see a man called S.D. Sharma to whom, a few weeks earlier, he had sold a revolver which he remembered to have been bigger. Sharma readily agreed to the exchange. ‘I gave him the pistol and took back the revolver,’ Badge said in his testimony; ‘And Sharma also gave me four cartridges with the revolver.’

  This revolver was of .32 bore, but the cartridges that Sharma gave with it, even though they seemed to fit snugly enough into its chamber, happened to be of a slightly smaller bore, and possibly meant for use in a magazine pistol. But the conspirators were not to discover that they were the wrong cartridges till the morning of the day on which they had planned to kill Gandhi with them.

  After giving the pistol to Badge, Nathuram had plenty of time to go and see his parents before the eleven o'clock train to Bombay. Badge was not able to finish his business with Sharma till well past midnight, and after that the only train to Bombay was at 2 a.m. As usual, the third-class compartments were crowded to capacity, and he and Shankar were unable to find room in the same compartment. The rest of the night they spent sitting up on the hard-wooden benches. They had arranged that Shankar should get out at Dadar station and go and wait for Badge at the Hindu Mahasabha office. At seven the train steamed into Victoria Station. Badge got out. Apte and Nathuram were waiting for him on the platform.

  Sketch of Nathuram Godse, as drawn by Balchandra Haldipur, a member of the special cell to trace the conspiracy of the murder and arrest the co-accused. Haldipur liked making sketches and through the course of the Gandhi murder case trial made sketches of many people he met.

  SIX

  ‘Gandhi-ko?

  Marne do.

  Ham ko?

  Makan do.’

  (Let Gandki die. Give us skelter.)

  — REFUGEE SLOGAN

  Nathuram Godse was an avid reader of detective novels, his favourite author being Erle Stanley Gardner. Apte, on the other hand, showed a marked preference for Agatha Christie. But their familiarity with crime in fiction had taught them nothing of the ways of criminals in real life. To the end they remained rank amateurs, shockingly incompetent in almost everything they did. Nathuram even kept an account book in which he meticulously put down all the sums of money they paid to their accomplices. Instead of trying to cover their tracks, they seemed if anything to go to special trouble to leave a well-blazed trail.

  Delighted that Badge had managed to swap the fancy pistol for a more businesslike weapon, they decided to spend the morning trying to raise money for their mission. For this they engaged a taxi and shuttled all over Bombay to see people whose addresses were on their list of donors to the Hindu cause. In between there were other trips. One to Dixitji Maharaj to make yet another bid to borrow his pistol (which he refused to part with), another to the Hindu Mahasabha office to see Shankar and give him instructions. Then back to the Fort area to the Sea Green Hotel (South) to pick up a tearful Manorama Salvi and drop her, still convulsed with sobs, near her house. If Badge is to be believed, they then went all the way back to Dadar to pick up Shankar and visit Savarkar’s house to seek the great man’s blessing.

  Badge’s amazing ability to remember every single thing that happened within his sight or hearing during those days is itself suspicious; his performance as a witness was so flawless as to resemble that of an actor who has studied his lines thoroughly and never fumbles for a word. According to him:

  We got down from the taxi and walked down to the house of Savarkar. Shankar was asked to wait outside the compound... Apte, Nathuram and I entered the compound. Apte asked me to wait in the room on the ground floor. Nathuram and Apte went up. They came down after 5-10 minutes... followed immediately by Tatyarao [Savarkar] who said to them: “Yeshaswi houn ya!” [Literally, “Come back successful!”]5

  That Nathuram and Apte should wish to see Savarkar before setting out on their mission is altogether understandable. Both venerated Savarkar as many Congressmen venerated Gandhi, as the man whose darshan (sight) would constitute an auspicious beginning for any venture. But to deduce from this visit, if it ever took place, that it was Savarkar who directed the two to kill Gandhi, or that he even sanctioned a killing that was proposed to be accomplished in so clumsy and so inhuman a manner, would be altogether fatuous. The taxi driver remained conveniently out of sight of the house, and Shankar, who was made to wait outside the gate, never saw Savarkar. An interesting sidelight on Badge’s brilliant performance as a witness is provided by Shankar in his testimony. Even in custody, Shankar was subjected to almost incessant coaching by Badge as to what precisely he was required to say in court. He has some pertinent revelations to make about how industriously Badge himself was practising his lines.

  By noon, when it was time for Apte and Nathuram to call at the Tata Airlines office to catch the company’s coach to the airport, they had collected more than Rs 2000, and they still had to visit two more people who had asked them to call later in the day. One of the two, who had promised Rs 400, lived in the suburb of Kurla, the other was a mill-owner living in the Mahalakshmi area and, even though he had not named a definite sum, they felt sure that his contribution would be much the bigger. They gave Badge Rs 350 ‘for expenses’, told him to collect the Rs 400 from the Kurla man later in the afternoon, and themselves went to the mill-owner.

  Here they got another Rs 1000, but found that they had wasted a whole hour, so they ordered the driver to take them directly to the Santa Cruz airport, which was at least fifteen miles away. Their flight was scheduled to take off at 2 p.m. All the way they talked with great animation and Apte impressed on Badge the importance of catching the Frontier Mail that evening, and promised to meet him at New Delhi Station the following evening. But if, for some reason, they missed one another at the station Badge was to go on his own to the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan where one of them would be waiting for him.

  When, however, the taxi reached Santa Cruz they discovered that their plane was to take off from the Kalina aerodrome, about a mile further on. Apte, now worried about missing the plane, kept exhorting the driver to go like the wind, and when they got to Kalina he and Nathuram dashed off to catch their plane, yelling to Badge to pay off the taxi.

  As though all this was not enough to make certain that the taxi driver would remember them well, Badge retained the same taxi to go back to Kurla to collect the Rs 400, and afterwards had himself and Shankar dropped at Kurla Station.

  It was now past 3 p.m. The taxi had been engaged at seven in the morning. The meter had clocked Rs 55-10-00. The normal daily earnings of a taxi driver were then around Rs 30. Badge, who, it will be recalled, was still dressed in the flaming garb of a sadhu, paid the fare and, much to the driver’s surprise, demanded a receipt. This the driver, Aitappa Kotian, was glad to give.

  It seems that Badge had every intention of catching the Frontier Mail as Apte had enjoined him to, but, since the train did not start till 7 p.m. and he had plenty of time to get to the station, decided to call on an old friend, a Mr Navre, who ran the Asra Hotel in Dadar, which was not far from where they were. Navre, Badge later revealed, invited him to spend the night
in his hotel ‘as a guest of the proprietor’, and Badge, who, to give him his due, had done a lot of running around for the past four days and had had hardly a full night’s sleep, made up his mind to treat himself to the luxury of sleeping in a real bed. After all, he told himself, even if he left Bombay the next evening, he would still be in Delhi in good time for playing his allotted part in the plot to kill Gandhi.

  With all their pre-flight publicity, there seemed little point in Apte and Nathuram having gone to the trouble of buying their tickets under false names. The service they were travelling on was scheduled to touch Ahmedabad on the way, and among the passengers to Ahmedabad, going there to attend an important religious gathering, was none other than Dada Maharaj, who had now become so cool towards them that they had not even thought of calling on him in Bombay. In the plane he managed to catch their eye and waved to them, and they waved back. At the airport building in Ahmedabad, Dada Maharaj, loaded with the garlands brought by his devotees, who now thronged around him, called out to Apte across the width of the hall: ‘You had talked a lot but it does not appear that anything has been done.’

  To which Apte’s reply was: ‘When we do the work, you will know.’

  But, in the matter of blazing a clear trail, the second team, Karkare and Madanlal, had, if possible, surpassed the performance of their principals.

  Karkare, who spent most of his earnings on others, had been far too well grounded in the ways of poverty to spend money on himself. Even though, because they had missed their proper train, they were now going by a very slow one requiring over forty hours for a journey that ordinarily took twenty-four, he and Madanlal still travelled third class.

  Among the score or so of passengers who were crowded into their compartment was a man named Angchekar, a refugee from Pakistan, who had held a petty government job there, and who was now going to Delhi to get his services transferred to India.