“I came alone in this world, I have walked
alone in the valley of the shadow of death, and I shall quit alone when the
time comes.”
Mahatma
Gandhi
“There was no legal machinery by which [Gandhi]
could be brought to book. I felt that he should not be allowed to meet a
natural death. . . As regards non-violence, it was absurd to expect 400 million
people to regulate their lives on such a lofty plane.”
Nathuram
Godse (the man who killed Gandhi)
In August 1947
more than 150 years of British Raj in
India came to an end. The day before the Union Jack was finally lowered and
India achieved its independence, another nation, the Muslim majority Pakistan,
was carved out of undivided India. In (very) simplistic terms, as Great
Britain, greatly weakened at the end of the Second World War, finally acknowledged
that it was going to be impossible to hold on to the “jewel in the crown”, the
Muslim League, spearheaded by the charismatic Mohammad Ali Jinnah, declared
that Muslims, of whom it had appointed itself as the sole representative, were
unwilling to live in India dominated by the majority Hindus. The other
political party the colonialists had allowed to function, the Indian National
Congress, which, unlike the Muslim League, had a pan-Indian presence, and which
viewed itself as representing all Indians, was, initially, unwilling for the
partition of the country; however in the face of Jinah’s intransigence (or
determination, depending on your view) the congress leaders buckled and agreed
to the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, who was
tasked with winding up the more than hundred years of British rule as speedily
as possible, that partition of India was inevitable. This was like, as
Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to become India’s first prime-minister, described,
cutting off the head to get rid of the headache; but that’s what Nehru and his
colleagues in Congress agreed. The biggest leader in Congress, who enjoyed an
unprecedented sway over Indian public, was Mohandas Gandhi, the “Father” of the
Indian nation and the driving force behind the movement for independence for
the best part of thirty years before India achieved its independence. Whether
Gandhi, too, like his colleagues in Congress, agreed for India’s partition is a
matter of opinion. What is undeniable is that, if he was against the partition,
he was unable to prevent it. The months leading to and after the partition of
India saw unprecedented levels of bloodshed and brutality, as the region was
engulfed in an inferno of communal frenzy. The Hindus and Sikhs, uprooted from
Pakistan, and Muslims exiled from India, along with their brethrens in their
respective homelands, inflicted unspeakable savagery on the other community. In
India, which, even after the partition, remained a huge country, the communal
violence was restricted to the Northern and Eastern parts which bordered the
newly formed (West and East) Pakistan; indeed, when the madness of partition finally
came to an end, more Muslims chose to stay in India than migrate to Pakistan, a
victory of sorts for the secular principles the Mahatma (the honorific—meaning great soul—by which Gandhi is still
affectionately referred to in India) had held dear all his life. That said the
partition of India saw tens of thousands killed, millions uprooted and the biggest forced mass-migration in
the recorded history of twentieth century.
Once Gandhi
accepted the reality of partition he worked tirelessly to promote communal
harmony in the independent India. His aim was to make the Muslims feel secure
in the country; not an easy task, and one which made him very unpopular in
certain sections of the Hindus, as the refugees from Pakistan poured into
India, bringing with them tales of unspeakable horrors wreaked on them by the
Muslim fanatics in Pakistan. Showing supreme courage the 77 year old Gandhi, in
frail physical health, undertook ‘peace pilgrimages’ in very hostile terrains,
rejecting any kind of security, even as the rest of the Congress leaders busied
themselves hacking out terms and conditions of the partition and division of
resources of undivided India. Delhi, which was going to be the capital of
independent India, was deluged within weeks of partition with more than a
million refugees. The refugees, all Hindus and Sikhs, were herded into camps in
subhuman conditions. The ruling Congress party (and its leaders, Gandhi
included), perhaps unprepared for the sheer scale of the refugee ‘problem’, did
little to ease their travails. It was
amongst the refugees that the hostility towards Gandhi was at its highest. When
the refugees, who had lost everything, arrived in India and saw the Muslims (those
who had chosen to stay back in India) enjoying what they (the refugees) saw as
easy and comfortable lives, they were filled with a great sense of injustice
and rage. The person they blamed most for this perverse state of affairs was Gandhi,
who, in what can only be described, in the circumstances, as an insane gesture
of idealism, suggested that the refugees, whose houses were burned, properties
looted, women raped, and children mutilated and killed, should go back to
Pakistan and resume their lives (as if nothing had happened)! This, the Mahatma felt, would encourage those
Muslims who had been subjected to a similar fate in Northern & Eastern
India, and had fled to Pakistan, to return to India. Gandhi, once described by
Lord Casey, the governor of (undivided) Bengal, as a saint among statesmen and
a statesman amongst saints, seems to have a very scrupulous sense of fair play.
This, combined with a determined notion to not take cognisance of reality,
meant that the Mahatma’s actions and
views came to be viewed, increasingly, as eccentric at best and pernicious and
detrimental to India’s interests at worst by those who had never found it
possible, even before the madness of partition, to warm up to Gandhi’s methods.
These, mostly right wing Hindu ideologues, believed that Gandhi’s ahimsa (non-violence) had made Hindus spineless and
incapable of standing up to what they chose to view as the terror of the
Muslims and manipulations of the foxy British. (The British were viewed as, not
without reason, unfairly partial towards the Muslims). Gandhi had chosen not to
accept any position in the first government of independent India; however, as
the whole nation knew, such was Gandhi’s hold over the Congress leaders that
they dared not go against the great man’s wishes. Refusing to acknowledge
Mohammad Ali Jinah’s ideology that had led to the dismemberment of India and
formation of Pakistan (Hindus and Muslims are “separate nations” and can’t live
together), Gandhi chose to see Pakistan as India’s younger brother. It then
followed, logically, that the elder brother should do everything possible to
make life easier for the younger brother; which included meticulous division of
the resources of undivided India.
Within two
months of the independence of India and formation of Pakistan, the first
Indo-Pak war, over the disputed territory of Kashmir, had erupted. In light of
this the highly ranked members of the Indian government, in particular Patel,
the home minister (referred to in India as the Iron Man), were not in a mood to
hand over to Pakistan its share of money in the reserve Bank of India. This
irked Mountbatten, who had been invited to stay back by the Indian government as
the “Governor General” of the independent country. Mountbatten prided himself
in his sense of fair play (so long as it did not harm British interests). He,
however, knew that he would have little joy in convincing Patel and Nehru that
Pakistan should be given its share of money; but he knew the man who would
convince the Indian government. Mountbatten met Gandhi, and had little trouble
in convincing the Mahatma that
handing over 1/3rd of the wealth to Pakistan was a just thing to do,
although it was clear as daylight that it was not in India’s interest to do so,
seeing as the first Kashmir war was raging. The day after Gandhi’s meeting with
Mountbatten, the Indian newspapers announced that Gandhi was embarking on a
fast in Delhi to persuade the Indian government to hand over to Pakistan its
share of money.
Hundreds of
miles away from Delhi, in the city of Pune (then known as Poona), in the
Western part of India, a region untouched by the barbarity of partition in the
Northern and Eastern parts, two men read this news on the teleprinter of the
small Marathi language daily of which they were (respectively) editor and
manager. The two men—Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte—came simultaneously to the
same decision: Gandhi must be killed.
Manohar
Malgaonkar’s brilliant and unputdownable The Men who Killed Gandhi, first
published thirty years after Gandhi’s assassination, tells the story of the
conspiracy to kill Gandhi.
Nathuram Godse
The man who
pulled the trigger that extinguished the Mahatma’s
life was Nathuram Godse, a 38 year old Brahmin from the Western part of India.
Godse, who after killing Gandhi, made no efforts to escape, and pleaded guilty,
maintained all along that he acted on his own and no one else was involved in
the conspiracy; indeed there was no conspiracy. However, he was not alone.
Godse belonged to a group, the members of which were subsequently tried for
their involvement in the plot, one of them his younger brother, Gopal Godse, “a
gentle, soft-spoken and self-effacing man” who had fought for the British in
the Second World War in Iran and Iraq. Gopal Godse, much influenced by his elder
brother’s fanaticism, played a peripheral part in the conspiracy to kill
Gandhi, and, for his troubles, was handed down a life-sentence when the
plotters were apprehended.
The scope
of The
Men who Killed Gandhi is clear yet limited. The book aims to disentangle
the plot that Godse and his co-conspirator hatched to kill Gandhi. It also sets
forth (very vividly) the extraordinary times that surrounded the independence
and partition of India, at the centre of which was Gandhi. It is not the
author’s intention to expound any theories of his own, and for the most part he
refrains from giving his own interpretation of the events, except to point out
the glaring and the obvious. In meticulous details the book traces the events
that led to Gandhi’s murder. It also elucidates, in measured language and tone,
the ideology and the belief systems that motivated the these men.
Narayan Apte
What
motivated these men was the concept of Hindu nationalism. It is interesting to
know that they considered themselves to be fervent patriots. The two
ringleaders (Nathuram Godse & Narayan Apte) were educated, middle class,
men who pursued journalistic profession. Their spiritual guru was the charismatic
right wing ideologue and intellectual, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, or Veer (Indian word, meaning a great
warrior) Savarkar. Savarkar was the guiding light of the right wing political
party called Hindu Mahasabha (literal
meaning the great gathering of the Hindus, although Savarkar appears to have
used the words Hindu and Indian interchangeably). Both the ring-leaders and
some of the other plotters were active members of Hindu
Mahasabha. The views of Savarkar, a barrister trained in England, like
Gandhi, on what would bring a speedy end to the iniquitous British rule in
India couldn’t have been more removed from those of Gandhi. Savarkar belonged
to the group of Indian freedom-fighters who called themselves revolutionaries
and were not averse to using violent methods and killing to bring an end to the
British rule in India. The British called them terrorists, and dealt with them
far more viciously and harshly than they did with the followers of Gandhi’s
non-violent methods. Savarkar, who was a thorn in the British flesh, was shown
no mercy when he was caught, and was sent to the cellular jail in the Andaman islands
for 50 years’ imprisonment in 1910, where he was subjected to extraordinary hardships. He
was twenty-seven at the time. Ten years later, “his health wrecked and on the
verge of mental breakdown”, he was brought back to India and made to spend four
more years in Indian jails. He was then released and kept under virtual
house-arrest for 13 more years in the district of Ratnagiri. He was allowed to
travel in the district on the strict condition that he undertook no political
activity. His every move was monitored by the British secret police. All in all
Savarkar spent twenty-seven years in jail or house arrest, the best part of his
life, a tall ordeal by any yardstick, under the British rule. It was during the
13 years in Ratnagiri when he was prohibited from undertaking any political
activity that Savarkar busied himself with the Hindu cause. This included
amongst other laudable projects (such as abolishing of untouchability) making
Hindus strong and stand up for themselves; which meant standing up to Muslims with
whom the Hindus had centuries of enmity and who were seen (with good reason) as
receiving preferential treatment from the British in keeping with colonialists’
policy of divide and rule.
Veer Savarkar
The Men who Killed Gandhi does not go into the minutiae of Savarkar’s
doctrine; such information as is provided suggests that his was a bizarre
mixture of secularism and religious intolerance, the latter probably driven by
a sense of historical injustice meted out to Hindus in their own land by Muslim
rulers. Savarkar believed that “India should essentially be a secular country
in which all citizens should have equal rights and duties irrespective of
religion, caste and creed.” He also held the view—without any apparent internal
contradiction— that Hindus should not be “robbed to enable the Muslims to get
more than their due simply because they were Muslims and would not otherwise
behave as loyal citizens.” In Ratnagiri, one of the many admirers of the magnetic
revolutionary (or a terrorist; take your pick) was Nathuram Godse, whose family
had shifted to the same district. Godse came under the spell of Savarkar’s
doctrine. This was in the mid-1920s. For the remainder of his life, which ended
in at the gallows in a jail in Northern India, Godse saw no reason to deviate
from the path he decided to follow when he first met Veer Savarkar.
Nathuram Godse
and Narayan Apte, whom the book describes as the “principals”, were close
friends. The book depicts vivid portraits of Godse and Apte, who appear to be
like chalk and cheese. Indeed for the best part of the month that led to the
murder it was not Godse but Apte who was the ring-leader, and hatched plots of outstanding
ineptitude to finish off Gandhi. The book shows these two men for what they
were: one (Godse) an awkward, intense, introverted man, who probably had never
had a relationship; the other (Apte) a flamboyant fantasist. Before he
alighted on the idea of killing Gandhi—simultaneously with Godse—Apte had
cooked up plans to launch a mortar attack on the newly formed Pakistani
assembly (Apte had never fired a revolver in his life, the reader is told),
blowing up trains carrying goods from India to Pakistan etcetera. Incredible as it may seem, Apte was able to
sell these improbable ideas to wealthy men who had sympathies towards the Hindu
cause and who gave him large sums of money. Apte emerges from these descriptions
not so much a determined revolutionary (or a manipulative psychopath) as a
Walter Mitty character; but this fantastist, thanks to the astonishing
incompetence of Indian police, managed to concoct a plot—every bit as
cack-handed as his other plots—that ended the life of Gandhi.
What bound Godse
and Apte together was their fervid devotion to the Hindu cause and unwavering
faith in the doctrine of Veer
Savarkar. Godse was a confirmed bachelor while Apte—a married man—was a
philanderer. In the hectic month before Gandhi’s killing during which Apte was
buzzing to different parts of West, North and Central India, he still found
time to sleep with a Christian ex- student with whom he had been carrying on,
unbeknown to his wife, for three years. The rest of the cast included Vishnu
Karkare—a successful hotelier who rose from a very humble start (he was an orphan
and lived on the streets as a child) to a position of success; Digambar Badge—a
wheeler-dealer who earned his living by selling “legitimate arms” and who
became an “approver” for the prosecution during the trial, a man so
caricaturesque it is difficult to believe he even existed (the book narrates an
incident when Badge, while travelling from Bombay to Delhi, decided to travel
in a disguise as a sadhu (a holy
man), and wore a garb of such florid saffron colour that he probably attracted
attention of the whole compartment in which he was travelling)—and his servant
Shankar Kistayya—an illiterate man who apparently did not even know who Gandhi
was; Gopal Godse—Nathuram’s younger brother, another educated man in the group
but of average abilities, who, in a brief seizure of madness, aligned himself
with his fanatic brother a week before the killing; and Madanlal Pahwa—a
refugee from Pakistan, the only one amongst the conspirators who had a
firsthand experience of the horrors of partition and who was taken under his
wing by Karkare, long before either of them got entangled in the conspiracy.
What also
becomes clear, as the book progresses, is that these men were rank amateurs.
They might have been many things, but professional killers they were not. Both
Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte—the book informs—were lovers of detective
novels: Godse was a fan of Earl Stanly Gardner’s novels, while Apte was an
Agataha Christie fan; however, neither seems to have picked up any tips from
the novels of their favourite detective writers. The plans Apte cooked up to
finish off Gandhi were juvenile in the extreme. What is even more remarkable is
that the men not only made no efforts to cover their tracks, they seemed to
have gone out of their way to blaze a trail of their movements and activities,
so that when they were eventually caught, the prosecution had no difficulty in
lining up witnesses who confirmed their movements. The rest of the conspirators
were equally inept; Madanlal Pahwa, for example, even boasted a couple of weeks
before the murder that he was planning to go to Delhi along with some others to
kill a “big leader”.
To call
what this gang of bungling, bumbling readers of detective novels plotted a
conspiracy would be a hyperbole. The plot, such as it was, was not thought of
until three weeks before Gandhi was killed. The initial plan was to throw
grenades indiscriminately at Gandhi’s prayer meeting on the spacious grounds of
Birla House in Delhi (where Gandhi stayed for the last 144 days of his life),
followed by shooting bullets at Gandhi (in case he didn’t die with the
grenades). According to this plan, the only two persons who would mastermind
the operation but not take any part in the actual grenade throwing and shooting
were Nathuram Godse and Apte. The date set was 20 January 1948. As it happened
the plan did not work. Madanlal Pahwa was
the only one who exploded a bomb in the congregation (which did not kill
anyone); those who were supposed to shoot at Gandhi didn’t, either because they
developed cold feet (Badge), or had not actually checked whether Gandhi could
be shot at from the hiding place, a servant’s room behind Gandhi’s prayer meeting
(Gopal Godse). Following the bomb blast Madanlal Pahwa was arrested (he had not
bothered to make himself familiar with the geography of the grounds of the
Birla House and—even though he could have easily made himself scarce in the
commotion that ensued following the blast—ran straight in the direction of the
police!) By all accounts Gandhi remained supremely serene and unperturbed throughout
the commotion, and, the next day, even praised the “young man” for his bravery!
The Delhi police were not in the same benevolent mood as the Mahatma, and used special methods (i.e.
torture) to find out whether Pahwa was acting alone or had accomplices. Years later
Pahwa claimed to the author that no one would have survived the torture; still
he did not tell them all. But he talked enough: he told the Delhi police that
one of the principle plotters was the editor of a Marathi language daily called
Hindu Rashtra, published from Pune.
He also revealed the name of his mentor and benefactor, Karkare. With this
information members of Delhi police arrived in Bombay. There then followed
petty, at times comical, but ultimately exceedingly harmful, bureaucracy and
interdepartmental rivalry, which resulted in very obvious clues being ignored.
It didn’t help that the man in charge of the investigation in Bombay, Jimmy
Nagarvala,the deputy commissioner of police, had a crackpot theory of his own:
Nagarvala didn’t believe that there was a plot to murder Gandhi at all; the
plot was—Nagarvala believed with the tenacity of the deluded—to kidnap Gandhi,
and at least 20 to 30 people were involved! In the meanwhile, one of the
persons—a professor of language—whose books Madnalal Pahwa had sold and to whom
he had boasted that a big leader was going to be bumped off in Delhi, sought a
meeting with the then Home Minister of the Bombay Province, Morarji Desai (who
decades later became India’s prime minister), and informed him of what he had
been told by Madanlal. Incredibly, Morarji (a Gandhian of impeccable
credential) failed to act on this information. Ten vital days were wasted in
these shenanigans even though Pahwa had told his interrogators that they (the
conspirators) would come again. And come again they did. Nathuram, the quiet
man, who, until then, had allowed Apte to take the lead, probably had had
enough of the harebrained ideas of his close friend. He declared that he was
going to kill Gandhi himself; there was not going to be anyone else involved;
he was going to shoot Gandhi at point blank range; and then he was going to
give himself up. Such was apparently the determination of Godse that Apte and
Karkare did not dare to make him change his mind. Godse urged both of them to
go back to Pune, but the two decided to stay by his side till the end. Apte,
true to his nature, tried to create an alibi (with Godse’s knowledge) for
himself, which was so unconvincing that even he must have known that it would
fool no one. The conspirators however, still, did not have a reliable revolver.
While the Bombay and Delhi police were busy scoring petty bureaucratic points
over each other (how difficult would it have been to apprehend Godse, seeing as
Pahwa had told the police the city and the name of the daily Godse edited?),
the conspirators finally managed to get an automatic, this time from a Central
Indian state, from another sympathizer to their cause, and returned to Delhi on
29 January 1948. Gandhi had once said that if somebody fired at him point blank
and he faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in his heart,
he should be deserving of congratulations. The time of Gandhi’s ultimate test
had arrived. On the evening of 30 January Gandhi arrived on the grounds of
Birla House for his evening prayer meeting. The crowd was slightly larger than
usual on the day. One of the men in the crowd was Nathuram Godse, who was wearing
a brown coloured shirt and half-pants. As Gandhi neared, Godse pushed his way
forward towards the great man. He performed the Indian greeting—Namaste—which
is also a way of showing respect; with his left hand he pushed aside a girl who
might have come in his line of fire; and then, as he much later told his
younger brother, Gopal, the shots went off, almost on their own. Gandhi gave a
gasp and collapsed. The still very popular story in India about Gandhi’s last
moments, apparently, is that his last words were “Hey Ram”. This can be traced
to an account given by a Sikh devotee of Gandhi who was standing very close
when Gandhi died. However, according to Karkare, to whom the author spoke after
his release from prison, and who, too, was standing very close when Gandhi
fell, Gandhi did not say anything as he collapsed; he just gave a gasp—“Aah”—as
he died.
Nathuram
Godse accepted full responsibility for Gandhi’s murder and pleaded guilty. He
maintained till the end that he acted alone and no one other than him was responsible
for the murder of the Mahatma. He
also made it clear that he did not desire that any mercy be shown to him.
Nevertheless the prosecution charged Nathuram and all the co-conspirators in
the conspiracy to kill Gandhi. Plus one more. Veer Savarkar. Savarkar, the prosecution claimed, was in the know
right from the beginning; Nathuram and Apte had met him frequently in the
months and weeks leading to Gandhi’s murder; and the murderers had Savarkar’s
blessings. The first thing Jimmy Nagarvala, the Bombay Deputy Commissioner in
charge of the investigation, who had wasted crucial time pursuing his crackpot
theory of kidnapping, did after Gandhi’s murder was raid Savarkar’s house. With
great alacrity the party in power, Congress, the leader of which (Jawaharlal Nehru)
had a known antipathy to Savarkar and his brand of right wing Hindu nationalistic
politics, zeroed on Savarkar. In a final twist of what was, by then, already a
remarkable life, Savarkar, who had spent 27 years in jail fighting for India’s
independence, 11 of which in extremely harsh conditions in Andaman none of the
leaders of Congress, Gandhi included, had been subjected to, was arrested, this time round by the first government of Independent India, and
kept in prison for several months without a charge “under the draconian
Preventive Detention Act, a malignant piece of legislation the British had
armed themselves when they ruled India” to suppress India’s freedom fighters.
Savarkar was depicted by the prosecution as the organizer of the plot to kill
Gandhi. There was no direct evidence, of course, to link Savarkar to the
murder. The rest of the accused, including Godse and Apte, maintained till the
end that the conspiracy to kill Gandhi had nothing to do with Savarkar. The
only person who provided evidence—albeit indirect—linking Savarkar to the
conspiracy was the “approver”, Digambar Badge. The case of the prosecution
against savarkar was a straw-man, and, in the lower session court, he was found
not guilty, and acquitted. However, his health was ruined, reputation tarnished
and he withdrew more or less completely from the public life. You get the
impression after reading some of the evidence quaoted that the case against
Savarkar was politically motivated, and the person who had a vendetta against
Savarkar was none other than Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
Barring
Savarkar the rest of the accused were found guilty. Nathuram Godse (who
accepted his guilt) and Apte (who claimed he wasn’t involved, fully supported
in this assertion by Godse, till the end) were hanged. The rest, Karkare, Pahwa,
Gopal Godse and the unfortunate Shanakr Kistayya, Badge’s minion were sentenced
to life imprisonment. The author spoke separately to all except Kistayya after
they were released from prison having served lengthy life sentences; and all
three—Karkare, Pahwa and Gopal Godse— were unanimous that they had absolutely
no regrets for what they had done and that killing Gandhi was in the best
interest of the nation. Almost fifty years after Gandhi’s murder and two years
before his own death Madanlal Pahwa said: “In my opinion Gandhi ruined this
country. I regret I wasn’t the man who killed him.” Such are the beliefs of the
truly fanatics.
A great
pleasure of reading The Men who Killed Gandhi is Malgaonkar’s dry sense of humour
and his ability to take the reader to the searing truth effortlessly.
Malgaonkar clearly has great respect for Gandhi, but he avoids falling into the
trap of blind veneration of the great man. The book has a pronounced tone of
neutrality which slips only occasionally. This is a non-fiction book written in
a reportage style, but such is the ease and mastery of Malgaonkar’s prose that
the book reads like a thriller, a real page turner. This is without doubt the
best book I have read this year.
Manohar
Malgaonkar, the author of The Men who Killed Gandhi, was born
100 years ago (and died, after a long life, only three years ago). Malgaonkar,
I learned, was one of the first generations of Indian writers who wrote in
English. He wrote a number of novels and non-fiction books He is an author who
ought to be known more widely.
