The Men Who Killed Gandhi

by Manohar Malgonkar

  Nathuram and Apte came; from the way they walked he knew that they had got the revolver. ‘Chalo!’ Nathuram said, ‘Come! And all three walked towards the Old Delhi railway station.

  Karkare followed the other two into the retiring-room and, as Apte shut and bolted the door, Nathuram rummaged in his little steel trunk. ‘Look!’ he said to Karkare.

  Cradled in his hands was a shiny blue-black weapon such as he had never seen before. Karkare goggled. ‘But it has no wheel,’ he said

  ‘It’s an automatic. You just keep pressing the trigger and it’ll go on firing.’

  ‘And ammunition?’

  In answer, Nathuram held up a package done up in a handkerchief.

  Like a trophy won by a team, the Beretta was passed from hand to hand before Nathuram put it away again. ‘We’ll try it out in the morning,’ he said.

  After that they walked towards Chandni Chowk, aware of a heightened sense of perception, taking in the sights and sounds and smells as though they were tourists in a strange town; and, like tourists, they stopped in front of a cheap roadside photographer’s stall, and Nathuram had his picture taken. The photographer promised three copies within an hour. They spent the time eating dinner in a nearby vegetarian restaurant, and then separated. Karkare and Apte went to see a film, Nathuram to collect his photographs.

  All that Karkare later remembered of the film was that it was in Hindi, that it was based on a story of Rabindranath Tagore, and that it was very long because it was past midnight when it finished. The traffic on Queen’s Road had all but ceased as they walked back towards the railway station. At the entrance, Apte suddenly stopped and told Karkare that he was not going up to the room. ‘He might be sleeping and I’d never forgive myself if I were to disturb his sleep on his last night as a free man.’

  Karkare saw Apte walk back towards Chandni Chowk; he never discovered where he spent the night. He himself slept among the refugees on the platform. In the morning, when he went up to the retiring-room, he found that Apte had already arrived. Nathuram, Karkare discovered, had slept well.

  All three then walked across to the non-vegetarian restaurant on the first floor for breakfast. As they were about to order, the waiter gave Nathuram and Apte a sweeping salaam and a friendly grin and piped up in Marathi, ‘Sahibs you’ve come a long way from home, haven’t you?’

  They stared at him in panic. Then Nathuram said: ‘So have you. The last time I saw you, you were in the Poona station restaurant.’

  ‘That’s right, and I’ve served both of you many times there. Transferred here only a couple of weeks ago.’

  The European-style railway restaurants were, in those days, given under contract to one company, Brandon and Co., and waiters were constantly being shunted about from one railway restaurant to another. But it was worrying to be recognized, on this of all days.

  The waiter took their orders. Buttered toast, tea, coffee. After he had gone, Nathuram silently joined his wrists together as though they had been handcuffed, and shook his head at the coincidence. As soon as they had finished breakfast, they went back to their room and locked themselves in.

  ‘Nathuram wrote some letters,’ Karkare later recalled to the author. ‘And we watched in silence. We felt already separated from him and ashamed of ourselves that we could not do more for him. All that we could do was to stay with him, till the end, to show him that he was not alone, that I and Apte were with him.’

  Nathuram wrote three letters. Together with the telegram that Manorama Salvi had been told to send from Bombay, he hoped that these letters would provide Apte and Karkare with adequate alibis, and also explain away their joint effort of 20 January as ‘a peaceful demonstration that had been spoilt by the rash act of a friend’.

  The letters were dated that day, Friday, 30 January. Two of them were addressed to Apte at his home and office address respectively in Poona, and the third to Karkare in Ahmednagar. They were written in Marathi and the substance of all three letters was the same. It was that the recipient was bound to be shocked by whatever Nathuram had done; but he had been driven to do it because he had found that to register protests by holding demonstrations in Delhi was an altogether futile method. Then he had said:

  My mind is inflamed in the extreme because I see no solution to the political iniquities. I have therefore decided on my own to take a last and extreme step of which you are bound to hear in a day or two. I am convinced that the peaceful demonstrations such as the ones we staged at Panchgani or Delhi will serve no useful purpose in the present circumstances. I have therefore decided to do what I want to do, without depending on anyone else. The enclosed photograph should be carefully preserved.

  Each letter contained a copy of Nathuram’s photograph, taken the previous night.

  After that they discussed the best way for Nathuram to get within pistol range of Gandhi. They had heard reports that the guard at Birla House had been doubled and that many plain-clothes men had been detailed to move about among the prayer-meeting audience. Thinking a step ahead of both the Delhi and Bombay police chiefs, they feared that some of these plainclothes men might be from Poona and might know them by sight.

  Apte then came out with a suggestion which deserves mention if only to show how juvenile his mind was – that Nathuram should pretend to be an old-fashioned photographer and enter the grounds with a camera and tripod and with a black cloth draped over his head.

  And when Nathuram turned it down Apte came out with something equally preposterous. ‘What about a burqua? Many women go to the prayer meeting wearing burquas.’

  A burqua is like a walking tent with slits for the eyes, and is commonly worn by orthodox Muslim women all over the world.

  ‘And they’re permitted to sit right in the first circle,’ Karkare added. It was quite true that the women who came to the prayer meetings sat closest to Gandhi, within eight or ten feet, which would bring Nathuram close enough to make sure of killing him.

  All three thought it was an excellent idea, and Apte and Karkare dashed off to try to get hold of a burqua. They knew two or three shopkeepers in Chandni Chowk who might help. But the shopkeepers were Hindus and had no idea as to where to buy burquas, which only Muslim women wore, But, seeing how disappointed they looked, one of them offered to get a burqua from somewhere in half an hour’s time. ‘For what size of woman?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, a very tall one,’ Karkare told him. ‘Not too fat.’

  Within half an hour they were back at the man’s shop, and right enough he had a burqua ready.

  It cost them fifty rupees. They carried it in triumph to their room where Nathuram wriggled into it and, according to Karkare, looked no different from a rather strapping Muslim lady. Then Nathuram tried to walk and found himself stumbling at every step; nor could he move his arms freely. He peeled the thing off and flung it on the bed. ‘No use,’ he pronounced.

  ‘If you only knew how much it cost,’ Karkare complained. ‘What a day to start worrying about expenses,’ Nathuram remarked. With the question of disguise still unsettled, they took a taxi to the Birla temple and walked half a mile into the wooded country at the back, almost to the same spot where, ten days earlier, some of them had held their first target practice. Here, according to Karkare:

  We selected a tree roughly as broad as a man’s trunk. On it we drew circles to indicate the head, the chest and stomach. Nathuram stood about 20 to 25 feet away and began firing. He was able to get his bullets into the circles. After that he fired more shots from varying distances, from fifteen feet, then ten, and in the end five. He was fully satisfied with the performance of the Beretta. He put on the safety catch and slipped the automatic in his pocket.

  It was while they were walking back from the woods behind the Birla temple that Nathuram told the others that he had given up the idea of wearing any kind of disguise. Instead, he would wear clothes that would resemble a uniform. In a wayside store they chose a grey militia-cloth shirt with deep pockets and shoulder flaps and a khaki fo
rage cap such as some regiments wore and which could be tucked under a shoulder flap. Afterwards they went and had lunch in a Punjabi restaurant close to the railway station and went back to the room. Here Nathuram tried on the shirt. It fitted well.

  By now it was nearing 1 p.m., which was the hour at which they had to leave their retiring-room. Nathuram and Apte went down to the ticket counter. The same clerk who had given them the room, Sundarilal, was on duty. Nathuram asked if he could have the room for another day. To ask an Indian railway clerk to book a retiring-room at a busy station for more than twenty-four hours is like asking a policeman if you could double park in a shopping-area — guaranteed to provoke a reaction. Sundarilal bristled with authority and not only told Nathuram that he could not have the room for another day, but also went upstairs and stood around to see that they cleared out at the proper time; and, as they were taking their belongings out, he loudly ordered the attendant to put a lock on the door.

  It was typical of their methods that, after taking all the trouble to set up alibis for his colleagues, Nathuram had succeeded in making sure that Sundarilal and the attendant would both remember him and his two companions only too well.

  They carried their luggage to the common waiting-room for secondclass passengers – an enormous hall strewn with cane-bottomed benches and a few tables – that was occupied, at any given moment of the night or day, by at least twenty passengers with their families and luggage. Children bawled, waiters brought trays of food, and porters trotted in and out with more luggage. It was certainly no place to discuss anything secret.

  They found an empty bench for Nathuram to rest on, and the two others crouched on the floor beside him ready to jump at his slightest bidding and talking in undertones. Did he feel like anything special to eat or drink? they kept asking him.

  Yes, he did. He felt a craving for salted peanuts.

  Karkare and Apte hopped up. ‘We’ll go down and get you some,’ they told him. But none of the shops in the station itself or its vicinity had salted peanuts. Sheepishly they went back to the waiting room. Nathuram, who was reading a paperback copy of Night in Glenzyle by John Ferguson, grinned as they approached. ‘I knew you wouldn’t get any here,’ he told them. ‘I’ve known that from previous visits.’

  For a few minutes they sat near him, feeling like relatives sitting near a man’s deathbed. Apte got up and beckoned to Karkare. ‘We’ll be back in an hour,’ he told Nathuram, who merely smiled but did not ask them where they were going.

  Out in the corridor, Apte explained to Karkare that they might as well use the time to find out if the guard at Birla House contained any policemen who looked as though they might be from Poona.

  They took a taxi and had themselves dropped at the corner of Akbar Road where it meets Albuquerque Road. From there they walked along Albuquerque Road to Aurangzeb Road and back again, and thus had a good look at the gate of Birla House. There were certainly more policemen at the gate, but all of them looked like north Indians. They turned back and at the cab rank near the Edward Road Officers’ Mess got a taxi. As they were passing India Gate, Karkare, in an agitated voice, told the driver to stop.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Apte asked in alarm.

  ‘Look!’ He was pointing a finger at the food barrows around India Gate and, right enough, there was one selling salted peanuts.

  The big clock on the tower of Delhi station was showing three o’clock when they returned. When Karkare presented the packet of peanuts to Nathuram his eyes opened wide. ‘Did you have to go to Poona for them?’ he asked.

  He shared out the peanuts and, as they munched, Apte told Nathuram in whispers that, though there were more policemen at the gate of Birla House, they hadn’t seen anyone who looked as though he might be from their own parts.

  They still had an hour to kill. Suddenly there was nothing more they had to say to one another. Every time Karkare tried to say something his voice would choke, and Apte kept giving him warning looks.

  Somehow the time passed. Nathuram glanced at his watch and rose. ‘Quarter-past four,’ he said. ‘I’d better get going. I have posted those letters.’

  ‘Do you want us to be there?’ Apte asked. ‘Why not?’ Nathuram said, ‘After coming so far.’ He tapped the pockets of his uniform shirt as though to make sure that the Beretta was there. Then he went out.

  The other two sat on the bench on which he had lain. After ten minutes Apte said: ‘Chalo.’ They went down and got a tonga. As the tonga started, Karkare could not stop himself from crying.

  ‘Steady, Vishnupant, steady,’ Apte kept telling him. ‘You don’t want to spoil everything for him now, do you.’

  At Connaught Place they dismissed their tonga and got into another, and had themselves dropped while they were still a couple of hundred yards away from Birla House.

  At this stage, the police had ample evidence to suspect the existence of a plot to kill Gandhi. Apart from Madanlal’s initial threat of ‘Phir Ayega’ (‘They will come again!’), they now possessed his detailed statement, which was also supported by the revelations made by Dr Jain in Bombay. But if the Bombay Police, in whose jurisdiction literally all the suspects lived, had made little use of the information than to initiate a watch on the movements of a favourite bugbear of Kiplings’ India, Savarkar, the Delhi Police, whose duty it was to protect Gandhi’s person, had done little more than to double the strength of the guard at the gate of Birla House and to plant a few plain-clothes men among the Birla House servants.

  But the Delhi Police at least had a valid excuse for their arthritic action. It was Gandhi’s own resistance to any measures to protect his life.

  Aside from the murder threat, the Delhi Police were worried about the rising truculence among the refugees. They could see that the effects of the shock treatment of Gandhi’s fast were wearing off rapidly, and many refugees were openly shouting slogans in praise of Madanlal, whom they regarded as one of themselves, as a man who had registered their protest in such a daring manner. Supposing another refugee fanatic thought of emulating Madanlal?

  One way of making sure that no person who came for the prayer meeting carried a lethal weapon was to subject everyone to a personal search. But when someone mentioned the idea to Gandhi he was horrified. ‘Would you search people who go to a church or a temple or a mosque?’ he demanded.

  The fact was that of late Gandhi had tended to live more and more in a world of his own making, and which bore no relationship to the world in which people who had to run the government, or administer the laws of the country, lived – or, indeed, to any conceivable social order of the past or present. He spoke in all seriousness of an army which should be non-violent, of a majority party, which should voluntarily withdraw from the business of governing, of an economy which should reject all technological advances, of a society that should abide by his own standards of austerity as well as humanitarian ideals.

  The lot of the policemen charged with guarding him was not easy. In his vicinity, you had to creep on tiptoe as though afraid to cause harm to wrongdoers. The idea of subjecting all comers to a personal search was quickly dropped. Anyone could come and go.

  So on 30 January, when a man wearing a grey shirt and a forage cap tucked in his left shoulder flap walked in through the service gate, no one checked him. Nor did anyone accost the two men who came half an hour later, swathed in grey shawls against the cold and wearing flat woollen caps.

  Even on the previous evening, 29 January, there had been a little unpleasantness at Birla House. A batch of refugees from Bannu had come to see Gandhi. They complained to him that, after all the agonies they had endured, they had now been evicted from the houses they had occupied.

  They were embittered and angry and in no mood to be fobbed off by explanations of the duties and responsibilities of a secular government. But still less were they prepared to put up with Gandhi’s philosophical flourishes.

  ‘I want to reach peace through agony’, Gandhi told them.

  ‘W
e owe all our miseries to you,’ one of the refugees shouted back. ‘Why don’t you just leave us to our own devices and go and retire in the Himalayas?’

  ‘My Himalayas are here,’ Gandhi had countered.

  Before the man could come out with anything more offensive, he had been hustled out of Gandhi’s presence by a couple of plain-clothes policemen.

  30 January. If Gandhi himself had a feeling that it was not just any other day, it was because he believed that he had accomplished what he had come to Delhi to do – to make life safe for its Muslim inhabitants. Now he was free to go on his way, to other places and other problems. And he was anxious to go; but he still had to grapple with two more questions before he left. He had been working on them for the past two days. Today he had the answers ready, or nearly ready.

  One concerned the party, the other the government. He had been appalled by the ‘ungainly skirmish for power’ indulged in by Congress stalwarts, giving the impression that their struggle for Independence from Britain was motivated primarily by greed for power and personal gains. The other was the question of choosing between Nehru and Patel to head the Government of India.

  He had decided the first question all on his own, exactly as if the Indian National Congress, with a membership running into millions, was under his personal command. The party, he declared, had ‘outlived its use’. He had therefore changed its role and drafted for it a new constitution in which he had charged it to withdraw from active politics and serve the people as a kind of mammoth Moral Rearmament Army.

  The other question was not so easily decided. He had to make up his mind between the two men whose friendship he most cherished.

  The rivalry of Nehru and Patel had been a long-standing affair; but so long as both had remained in Gandhi’s shadow there was no question of one taking precedence over the other. Now that they were both members of the government, if only because a country could not have two prime ministers, one had to outrank the other; and, indeed, the post of the deputy prime minister had been specially created as a sop to Patel’s self-esteem. But this at best was a makeshift solution, and Patel certainly had not resigned himself to playing No. 2 to Nehru. What was more to the point, in the five months since their taking office Patel, in the departments he headed, had shown some spectacular achievements. As Patel had grown more confident of his ability to get things done, he had begun to show increasing resentment of Nehru’s dominance, and in private conversation lost no opportunity to debunk Nehru’s idealism and his reluctance to make difficult decisions. The relationship between them, which had never been really friendly, had steadily worsened. Each, in his all but daily interview with Gandhi, had some complaint to make about the other, and they wrote waspish little notes to one another on their office files.