The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  Jain left Morarji’s office at about 5 p.m. and Morarji immediately sent for Mr J.D. Nagarvala, Bombay’s Deputy Commissioner in charge of the Intelligence Branch. But Nagarvala happened to be busy, so Morarji told him to see him at the Bombay Central railway station from where he was going to catch the Gujarat Mail at 8.30 p.m.

  Jamshed Dorab Nagarvala — ‘Jimmy’ to his numerous friends — had most of the sterling virtues of his calling as well as most of its blind spots. He was thirty-four years old, tall and well-built, with large round eyes in a round face which was thus not constructed for displaying sternness or for intimidating criminals. And yet he came close to Hollywood’s concept of an ideal police officer. He was altogether wedded to his profession and revelled in the power it gave him; bluff, jovial, a devoted friend and a terrifying enemy, he was worshipped by his subordinates and trusted by his superiors.

  He was also utterly loyal to Morarji Desai, who, for his part, treated him as his special favourite, or at least thought of him as his star policeman. At the railway station Morarji told Nagarvala what Jain had reported to him, without of course revealing Jain’s name. It will be recalled that, according to Jain, Madanlal had been taken by his friend Karkare to see Savarkar who, after listening to Madanlal’s exploits for two hours, had patted him on the back and told him to ‘carry on’.

  Whether Morarji Desai, by his manner more than by his words, indicated to his subordinate that this complaint would serve as a useful handle to discipline Savarkar, who had been as much a thorn in the flesh of the Congress Raj as of the British Raj, will never be known; but whatever he said seems to have been enough for Nagarvala to discern Savarkar’s hand in whatever conspiracy was being hatched even if, as will be apparent, he had still no idea of the nature of the conspiracy. The result was that, in addition to the routine measures Nagarvala initiated to prevent the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, he also ‘organized an unobtrusive watch on Savarkar’s house’.

  ‘We already had a dossier on Savarkar,’ Nagarvala later explained. Of course they did. But, then, they must also have had dossiers on Morarji Desai and Nehru as well, and a monster one on Gandhi himself. During the British days all these men were seditionists.

  Long after Savarkar had been cleared of any complicity in the plot, and at least two years after Nagarvala, who, having duly reached the pinnacle of a policeman’s career and served as the Inspector-General of Police, had retired, Nagarvala was still to insist to the author, ‘To my dying day I shall believe that Savarkar was the man who organized Gandhi’s murder.’

  But similarly, long after they had served their terms of imprisonment, Vishnu Karkare, Gopal Godse and Madanlal Pahwa, who were separately questioned by the author, as to whether they thought that Gandhi’s murder had served the national interest, were unanimous in insisting that it had.

  Such are the convictions of the truly committed.

  In the train, Gopal Godse had plenty of time to think. The sight of Madanlal, handcuffed and hooded and being led around by his captors to hunt out his erstwhile companions, kept tormenting him. But for a chance the prisoner might have been himself. He longed to get back to Poona and be with his wife and little daughters and to submerge himself deeply in the blissful routine that had governed his life before the past week. He would gladly have given a whole year of his life to be able to undo whatever had happened in that week. In the event, he was to give seventeen years of his life to atone for the brief seizure of insanity that had overtaken him.

  And, as though to drive home the lesson that his repentance was already too late, towards the end of his journey, Gopal received yet another jolt of panic.

  He had alighted at the Dadar junction and was waiting on the platform for his Poona connection when a railway policeman came up and demanded to inspect his baggage. Aside from the cloth bag in which he was carrying the two revolvers and the unused grenade, Gopal also had a bedroll. Trying to gulp down his fear, be dutifully opened the bed-roll with alacrity. The policeman prodded and probed among the bedclothes and sauntered off. Apparently he was on the lookout for some stolen goods which could not have been contained in a small cloth bag. Gopal never discovered what they were.

  His train reached Kirkee station at 5 p.m. on the twenty-second. He went home and shut himself in a room and brooded. His first concern was to get his revolvers stored somewhere safely. Frugal to the last, it does not seem to have occurred to him to fling them out of the window of the train during the night or while it was crossing a river, and both weapons and their ammunition were still with him. By nine o’clock he had decided to find a home for at least one of them. He took out his .38 and wrapped it, together with its spare cartridges, in Badge’s towel and placed the bundle in a cloth bag. An hour later he was in Poona and knocking at the door of a family friend who lived in Sadashiv Peth. The friend, Pandurang Godbole, later testified: ‘I opened the door. Gopal was alone. He told me he wanted to keep with me an article. The article was a revolver with some cartridges... wrapped in a towel and placed in a bag. The bag was then placed in a box by me.’

  So at least one of the weapons had been safely stored away, or so Gopal thought. He still had the .32 which, it will be recalled, Badge had taken in exchange from a man called Sharma who lived in Poona. Gopal had some vague idea of returning it to its rightful owner through Badge and getting back his brother’s .22 pistol which Sharma had been given in exchange. He still had three days of his leave left, and thus plenty of time in which to get rid of the other revolver.

  After Gopal’s train had pulled out, Karkare had gone on sitting in the tea-room at Delhi railway station till he felt sure that the police party had gone away. Then he walked across to the Frontier Hindu Hotel, paid his bill and brought his luggage to the railway station waiting-room. In the afternoon he went to see one or two of his Hindu Mahasabha friends.

  Karkare was desperate to do something to help Madanlal, such as engaging a good lawyer who would try to get him released on bail or at least to advise him about his best defence. But his friends had no wish to get mixed up in anything so dangerous and refused to help. Karkare spent the whole of Wednesday and Thursday tramping the streets of Delhi like a lost soul and coming to the waiting-room to sleep. With the help of some of Madanlal’s relatives, he was able to enlist the services of an advocate, Mehta Puran Chand, to act for him.

  On 23 January, he left Delhi, filled with an overpowering sense of guilt that he was abandoning his friend. In the story-book tradition of a hunted criminal trying to shake off pursuit, he got off the train at Mathura, then took a bus to Agra where he caught another train, changed trains twice during the night at a junction called Itarsi and again at Kalyan, and in the early hours of the morning of the twenty-fifth, which was a Sunday, alighted on the Thana railway station.

  At 5 a.m. he reached Mr Joshi’s house, Shanta Sadan, in the Navpada enclave and called up to him from the street. Despite the early hour the Joshi family welcomed Karkare. One of the first things they told him was that Apte and Nathuram had come looking for him two days earlier. Karkare was thrilled to get news of his colleagues and wanted to get in touch with them at once, but his host had no idea where they were staying in Bombay or indeed whether they were still in Bombay. Karkare decided to send a telegram to Apte’s house in Poona but, knowing that the police might be watching Apte’s house, and not wishing to reveal his own whereabouts, did not want to send it from Thana. Joshi’s eighteen-year-old son, Vasant, was sent to the Central Telegraph Office in Bombay, which is all of twenty miles from Thana, to send the telegram which, because it was a Sunday, had to be sent express.

  APTE

  ANANDASHARAM

  POONA

  BOTH COME IMMEDIATELY – VYAS

  ‘Vyas’(which is also spelt as ‘Bias’) it will be recalled, was the code nameKarkare had been given.

  When the guards at Birla House had overpowered Madanlal andhandcuffed him and marched him off in triumph to their tent outside thegate, he had turned on them with a snarl
of contempt and told them: ‘Phir ayega!’ (‘They will come again!’ )

  The threat had given the police a jolt. So this was not just a case of ademented refugee registering his protest in a startlingly novel manner. Hehad companions. They would come again. Who? When?

  Mr T.G. Sanjevi, the Chief of Delhi Police, at once gave orders to increase the strength of the guard at Birla House from five men to twenty-six, of whom seven were to be in plain clothes, and he detailed some of his best officers to find out from Madanlal who his companions were, and what they were going to do.

  Nearly a dozen officers of the Delhi Police took it in turns to interrogate Madanlal. The questioning went on almost continuously over the next ten days; in fact, right up to the evening of 30 January, when suddenly from being the star criminal Madanlal, much to his own relief, found himself relegated to a position of minor importance.

  But, during those ten days, the investigating officers in Delhi were so totally absorbed in grilling their solitary captive that they overlooked what might have proved a far less un-cooperative and more reliable source of information — the Hindu Mahasabha office in New Delhi. After all, within hours of Madanlal’s arrest, they had discovered in the Marina Hotel room a copy of Ashutosh Lahiri’s statement of the previous day. If, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the discovery of this statement showed that the Mahasabha had had a hand in the murder plot, they had used it to seek a clarification from its author, he would at the very least have told them that the Editor mentioned by Madanlal was none other than Nathuram Godse of the Hindu Rashtra.

  The Kapur Commission observes that ‘the investigation was not of a high order’, and that it gave one ‘the impression that the Delhi Police was entirely paralysed’. In particular, Justice Kapur points out: ‘No investigation was made of the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan where a majority of the conspirators had stayed... (nor of) Mr Ashutosh Lahiri, who knew Nathuram Godse well and also Apte.’

  Nor, as it turned out did Madanlal tell them much.

  The case-diaries of the officers who conducted his interrogation make pointed reference to his intransigence, that he made mukhtalif or contradictory statements, and that he ‘did not disclose information about his accomplices,’ for which, the diary observes, he was ‘instructed accordingly’. Another diary has a more ominous comment, that he was ‘taken to the civil lines and advised to state true facts and not indulge in incorrect statements.’

  Madanlal, too, confirms that, once he got his second wind, he did not give away much information. But, on the day of his arrest, he had told the police that he had six other accomplices and had furnished descriptions of them, given particulars of the taxi in which they had driven to Birla House, had named Karkara Seth from Ahmednagar as one of the accomplices and also revealed that another was ‘the Editor of the Hindu Rashtra or the Agrani which was the Marathi language newspaper published either in Bombay or Poona’.

  On the afternoon of the twenty-first, within twenty-four hours of Madanlal’s arrest, two officers of the Delhi Police, Deputy Superintendent Jaswant Singh and Inspector Balkishen, were on the plane to Bombay. Their orders were to see Mr J. D. Nagarvala, the Deputy Commissioner of Police in Bombay, and apprise him of the facts, and then proceed to Poona to see Raosaheb Gurtu, the Deputy Assistant Inspector-General of Police, CID. They were also to assist the Bombay Police in the investigation of the case. They later said that they had carried with them a copy of Madanlal’s statement. This statement was, in conformity with the police procedure then in practice all over northern India, written in the Urdu script which hardly any of the senior police officials in Bombay could read.

  Early on the morning of 22 January the two officers saw Deputy Commissioner Nagarvala and, according to them, gave him a copy of Madanlal’s statements ‘together with an English note containing its precis,’ and also verbally told him everything they knew and, in particular, that Madanlal had mentioned the editor of the Hindu Rashtra or the Agrani as being one of his principal accomplices. Nagarvala, for his part, denies that they ever mentioned anyone other than Karkare.

  Their request was for arresting Karkare, even whose name they did not know properly ... they had no documents excepting a small piece of paper on which they had something written in Urdu — one or two words in Urdu.

  Much fuss was later made about whether or not the Delhi Police had asked the Bombay Police to trace the man who was the ‘Editor of the Hindu Rashtra’. The whole controversy acquires a strangely Alice in Wonderland quality when one, remembers that any police officer in Delhi — or, indeed, any private individual — by merely making a telephone call to Bombay could have found out that the Editor’s name was Nathuram Vinayak Godse. Under the Press Act, every provincial government maintained a register of all the newspapers published within its jurisdiction, showing the names of their editors and proprietors.

  If Nagarvala had been given this information, he might possibly have succeeded in apprehending Nathuram in time to prevent Gandhi’s murder, or at least arranged to post a few Poona policemen who knew Nathuram by sight among the guards at Birla House. But, having mentioned this as a fairly reasonable possibility, it must be pointed out that at the time Nagarvala, too, was obsessed by an equally Alice in Wonderland type of hunch of his own, and was not particularly receptive to such facts, opinions or inferences that did not fit in with his pet theories.

  As Nagarvala told a fellow police officer at the time, ‘The conspiracy was to kidnap Mahatma Gandhi. It was a very big organization, with about twenty principal conspirators, each assisted by twenty persons and in possession of considerable quantities of firearms and other lethal weapons.’

  So convinced was Nagarvala of the genuineness of his theory that in spite of the information that was later fed to him by the Delhi Police, and even after reading a copy of Madanlal’s statement, he went on pressing for its acceptance and, in fact, blandly suggested that ‘the Delhi Police had been won over by the gang of kidnappers.’ As late as 30 January, Nagarvala wrote to the Chief of Delhi Police two letters which ‘highlight the theory of kidnapping

  It was only after Gandhi was murdered that Nagarvala gave up working to the scenario that he had himself dreamed up.

  Also, and this is hardly likely to be admitted, there existed between the Bombay and Delhi police departments the sort of rivalry and areas of sensitivity that commonly afflict the different branches of the civil authority in every country. From the point of view of Bombay, it was hardly seemly on the part of the Delhi Police to offer to assist in the detection of Bombay’s own bad men. And, to be sure, over the next few days, there were instances of one network conveniently failing to pass on to the other some vital piece of evidence that it had managed to unearth. After Gandhi was murdered, some inspired person in Delhi (who is believed to have been the Deputy Prime Minister, Sardar Patel), being mindful of these crosscurrents, took steps to modify their effect by deputing one man, Nagarvala, as the special officer in charge of the investigation, thus forming under that officer what amounted to a separate police team that did not belong exclusively to either network.

  It was therefore hardly surprising that the two Delhi policemen felt that their reception in Bombay was far from cordial. During the twenty-second and twenty-third, they had at least three interviews with Mr Nagarvala, who outranked them, and who brusquely told them to get out of their uniforms, to leave their hotel room because he did not want their presence to be advertised in Bombay, and to refrain from conducting any inquiries on their own. If, while in Bombay, they had somhow kept in touch with their own headquarters, they would have learned that the dhobi at the Marina had produced the laundry left behind by the inmates of room No. 40, and that it contained three pieces of clothing which were clearly marked with the initials ‘NVG’. This detail, coupled with Madanlal’s mention of an Editor of the Hindu Rashtra, should have led them a step further in the process of discovering the identity of Nathuram. But the information was not divulged by the Delhi Police to their men i
n Bombay; and Nagarvala, the man who had the means to make use of it, knew nothing about it. According to the Kapur Commission, ‘There is no indication of any importance having been attached to the discovery of “NVG” or of any use having been made of it.’

  The attempt on Gandhi’s life on January 20 had failed. Though all the other six conspirators were able to flee the spot, it was Madanlal who was arrested by the Delhi Police. Through his distorted statements and pretending that he did not understand any Marathi, in which the others were proficient, he was able to hide the identities of his partners in crime. Recorded in Urdu, his statement to the Delhi Police was of no use to the police in Bombay as a copy of the same was taken for them without being translated.

  Facing page: Translation of Madanlal’s statement.

  In the event, the police did not cotton on to it till after the murder, when Nathuram gave himself up and himself gave his name to the police. Justice Kapur observes, ‘As a matter of fact the police had not been able to establish the identity of the conspirators till after the murder.’

  On the afternoon of 23 January, the two Delhi policemen were admitted into Nagarvala’s presence again. It will be recalled that their orders had been to proceed to Poona to see Raosaheb Gurtu, the Assistant Deputy Inspector-General of the CID, who could have almost instantly cleared up the mystery about the editor’s identity, and the two men were all ready to go on to Poona. But Nagarvala ‘ordered them in plain words that they should return to Delhi’.

  They took a train the same evening, and were back in the capital twenty-four hours later. From the station they took a taxi directly to their headquarters and reported how they had fared in Bombay: they had not been able to secure the arrest of Karkare, nor had they discovered the editor’s identity. They also told their departmental superiors how cavalierly they had been treated in Bombay. ‘We were actually put under some sort of “Nazar quaid” [house arrest],’ they complained.