The Men Who Killed Gandhi Read online

  One can imagine Narayan Apte as the sort of man who might some day commit adultery (which he did) but not as a murderer; and Nathuram is difficult to imagine as one who would even think of reusing a postage stamp that had remained unfranked. That two men who were so different should become the closest of friends seems almost unnatural, but people who knew them well assert that neither was a homosexual and that the friendship was due entirely to a total identity of views on the Sanghatan movement.

  Narayan Apte was born in 1911 and was thus a year younger than Nathuram. His family lived in Poona, and his father was a well-known historian and Sanskrit scholar. Narayan, the eldest male child among three sisters and four brothers, was educated in Poona. In 1932 he graduated from Bombay University as a Bachelor of Science. In those days of depression jobs were not easy to come by and he had to mark time for three years before finding an opening as a teacher in the American Mission High School in Ahmednagar, run by a Miss Bruce.

  But before the job came marriage, to a girl named Champa from the Fedtare family of Poona. The marriage, arranged by Narayan’s parents, is described as being one of convenience, for the Fedtares were an old and influential family and relatively affluent. It was considered a good match for a jobless youth even if the youth himself may never have given his approval to it or even been consulted beforehand.

  Narayan worked hard at his job, and soon became popular with his colleagues and students alike. In 1938, he thought of opening a rifle club in Ahmednagar ‘with the object of training young men in the use of firearms’, and the Congress Government which had come into office in Bombay gave him leave to do so. The ‘firearms’.were in fact airguns with slugs, but even those in Indian hands were looked upon with suspicion in the days of the Raj, and clubs formed to train young men to use them regarded as positively dangerous. Apte’s club became popular and the idea caught on. Within a year, Poona and half a dozen other towns had their own rifle clubs.

  In 1939, Apte joined the local branch of the Hindu Mahasabha and met for the first time another man who was to be drawn into the conspiracy to murder Gandhi, Vishnu Karkare, a spry little Brahmin with wavy black hair and sharp piercing eyes who, with very little outside help, had established the branch of the Mahasabha in Ahmednagar, and had by now become its leading light. But initially Apte and Karkare were cool towards one another. To Karkare Apte’s job in a Christian school was reason enough to suspect his credentials as a good Hindu, and Apte for his part must have tended to look down on Karkare who, for all his importance in the Party’s office, was a man with no family background and almost illiterate. It was Nathuram who later brought the two together.

  At this time Apte was not really keen on Party work. He was actually thinking of settling down and making a career of teaching, and had gone to special trouble to improve his qualifications for it by passing the BT (Bachelor of Teaching) examination. His wife Champa had borne him a son whom he adored. He had given the son a conventional Hindu name but called him Pappan, which is merely a term of endearment.

  It took him almost two years to discover that his son was mentally retarded. People who knew him then say that he was shattered by the discovery. He wanted to leave Ahmednagar and all its memories and give up the teaching profession.

  In the spring of 1942, most of the Congress leaders were behind bars and Savarkar’s party, the Hindu Mahasabha, was making excellent progress. Savarkar now thought of setting up a secret organization for doing work ‘that could not be openly undertaken by a political party’. This organization, which was given the name of Hindu Rashtra Dal and which later gained notoriety as merely the ‘Dal’.was set up in May 1942, and both Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were selected to be its office-bearers. Both subsequently held training camps in their respective areas. According to the report of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) informers who had wormed their way into the Dal, the camps ‘trained volunteers in Indian games, physical exercise, shooting practice with airguns, and also classes in Savarkar ideology.’.But, even according to these informers, the total membership of the Dal ‘never exceeded 150’.

  Meanwhile, Apte, who was still keen to get away from Ahmednagar, had applied for a job as a recruiting officer. He was taken on in early 1943, and appointed an assistant technical recruiting officer for the Royal (as it then was) Indian Air Force. He was gazetted a flight-lieutenant and posted to Poona. The job was temporary and meant to last only for the duration of the war, but he was now entitled to wear the insignia and uniform of an officer holding the King’s commission, and to all the rights and privileges that went with it.

  At last Apte could turn his back on Ahmednagar and the teaching profession.

  It was, from all accounts, a touching farewell, for he had been an extraordinarily popular teacher. The High School was a coeducational institution, and many of the senior girls who came to see him in a batch actually had tears in their eyes. Apte made a suitably humorous speech and told them to stop being silly. It was not as though he was being posted to some distant theatre of war but only to Poona. For a few of them he scribbled the address of his Poona office in case they felt like writing to him some day to let him know how they were faring.

  One of these girls was Manorama Salvi, then aged seventeen. She belonged to an Indian Christian family, and was brought up in the rigidly orthodox manner typical of such families, to the daily singing of hymns and in an atmosphere crackling with missionary piety. She was studious and moody and painfully shy. She was dark and plain. She carefully made a note of Apte’s address and, more than a year later, while she was a student in a Bombay college, wrote to him. They met several times after that and eventually became lovers.

  In Poona, the Air Force was sufficiently impressed by Apte’s performance as a recruiting officer to offer him a permanent commission, which he eagerly accepted. To be an officer of the Royal Indian Air Force was to be launched on a sound, respectable and fairly lucrative career with a guaranteed pension at the end of it. But within a few months Apte resigned his permanent commission, preferring to go on working as a wartime officer. The reason he gave for doing so was good enough to satisfy the Air Force authorities. It was that his father had died a few months earlier and that, as his eldest son, all the responsibilities of the head of the family, or Karta, of looking after his widowed mother and several brothers and sisters had become solely his. This was, of course, quite true. But there was a far more compelling reason which made it out of question for Apte to remain in a service in which he was liable to be transferred away from Poona. His wife Champa, who had become somewhat abstracted in her behaviour, seemed to live only for their son Pappan, who was showing increasing signs of a virulent form of insanity. Apte had been resisting pressure from friends and neighbours and the advice of doctors to have the boy committed to a mental asylum. Apart from the fact that he himself could not bear the thought of consigning his small son, so innocent and trusting except during his fits, to the mercies of an institution, he knew that it would break his wife’s heart.

  It was the sort of problem that has no solution except through death. But at least, by remaining on the spot, he could keep things from getting worse, and the thought of what might happen to his family if he was posted away to some remote place was too horrifying to think about.

  That was why Apte had to reject his permanent commission in the Air Force, but there was no reason why he should not go on working as a recruiting officer so long as they kept him in Poona.

  Once the major decision was made and the prospect of an Air Force career thrown away, Apte had to think of something else to do after the war. Even as it was, recruiting had all but stopped and he had plenty of spare time on his hands. So, when his friend Nathuram asked him if he would like to join a venture that he was about to start to propagate the Party’s ideals, he jumped at the offer.

  Nathuram was starting a newspaper, and Veer Savarkar had made him a loan of Rs 15,000 to do it.

  The Marathi daily Agrani (which means The
Forerunner) began publication on the day of the Hindu New Year, which that year (1944) fell on 28 March. On its front page it bore a picture of Savarkar and a Sanskrit motto: ‘Public good, not mere popularity’. Nathuram Godse was its Editor. Narayan Apte, who still held his job as a recruiting officer and still wore uniform, was its Manager. Right from the start, the paper ran into difficulties: wartime shortages, control on newsprint, censorship, CID surveillance and, above all, a desperate lack of money. But the Editor and the Manager worked hard in a spirit of dedication. The difficulties only brought them closer; they cheerfully shared one another’s work, and borrowed from friends and moneylenders to keep the paper going.

  Initially, there was not much difference between the sentiments of the Indian National Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha; both wanted Swaraj, or self-rule, and both wanted India to remain undivided. The only difference was that the Congress was prepared to make considerable concessions to the Muslims to keep India undivided, and the Mahasabha was opposed to any such concessions. Gandhi for his part had repeated his cry, ‘Vivisect me before you vivisect India’, and Nehru and others, if less dramatic in the way they expressed it, were equally firm against partition. Later, when it turned out that the Muslim League was altogether unappeasable, the Congress began to show signs of giving in to their demand for Pakistan, but Savarkar and his followers remained staunchly opposed to it till the very end, and so, to be fair, did a large number of people within the Congress itself.

  Even as late as March 1947, Gandhi had insisted: ‘If Congress wishes to accept Partition, it will be over my dead body. So long as I live, I will never agree to the Partition of India.’

  But these were like the words of a charm repeated again and again in the hope that they might work a miracle. For Gandhi had already accepted the inevitability of partition a whole three years earlier, soon after he had been released from jail in 1944. In those days it was his habit to spend a few weeks every year in the hill resort of Panchgani, a bare fifty miles away from Poona. And here Narayan Apte had led a batch of his followers to confront him and denounce him for reneging on his promises.

  The Times of India of 23 July 1944, under the headline ‘MR GANDHI HECKLED’, carried a report that a Poona journalist named N.D. Apte had led a demonstration of Hindu youths to express their resentment at Gandhi having given his ‘blessings’.to the formula of partition. The Times went on to say that there were at least four armed police officials in mufti close to Gandhi. As Apte and his party shouted slogans and waved black flags, and the small crowd of about four hundred people began to grow restive, the policemen swooped and hustled Apte to the local station for questioning. Deputy Superintendent N.Y. Deulkar, a tall, athletic man with a fruity unctuous voice and a persuasive manner, who was on duty in Panchgani at the time and who later played a crucial part in the investigation following Gandhi’s murder, questioned Apte closely. These details assume an importance only because they prove that, at least from July 1944, Apte was well known to the police as a man who detested Gandhi. Subsequently too, both Godse and Apte were repeatedly pulled in by the authorities for some infringement of the Indian Press (Emergency) Act. Despite this, and even though the police had at least a week’s advance warning that the editor of a Marathi journal called the Hindu Rashtra, as the Agrani was later renamed, was among those who had planned to kill Gandhi, they were unable to prevent the murder. The information got caught up in a tangle of procedure and in departmental rivalries and never filtered through to Deulkar who, at the time of Gandhi’s murder, happened to be the Deputy Superintendent of the CID in Poona itself, and lived within walking distance of the paper’s office.

  The Agrani’s own reporting of the Panchgani incident was far more dramatic. It carried on its front page a photograph of Apte posed against one of Gandhi, and bearing the caption: ‘I denounce you a hundred times because you have conceded Pakistan!’.

  What with this deep involvement in the politics of the Mahasabha, in addition to holding down his two jobs, Apte might be thought to have had his hands too full for anything else. But he was a man of extraordinary energy and had time for other pursuits as well. So when, on this return from Panchgani after heckling Gandhi, he received a letter from one of his erstwhile pupils, Manorama Salvi, to come and see her, he responded with alacrity.

  ’. wrote to Apte at Poona,’.Manorama was to testify before a Bombay magistrate, ‘and a few days later he called at the hostel to see me and two other former students.’

  The hostel was the Ramabai hostel for girls in Bombay, attached to the Wilson College. Apte, a dashing figure in his Air Force uniform, came in the middle of the afternoon, charmed the warden of the hostel, a Mrs Hewat, who was known for her strictness towards her wards, with a snappy salute and a dazzling smile, and took all three girls out. They saw an afternoon movie and later walked on the sands in front of Wilson College. By 7.30 all three girls were back in their hostel.

  When, a few days later, Apte called at the hostel again, he only asked for Manorama. This was the first of many such meetings, as a result of which she later admitted becoming ‘very friendly with him’. They began to correspond, Apte writing his letters in a feminine handwriting and signing himself Nirmala, as though he were a girl, to ensure that they were not intercepted by the eagle-eyed Mrs Hewat. By the end of the year, she had taken to spending nights with him in various seedy hotels. In the hotel registers, he boldly entered their names as Mr and Mrs Apte.

  Agrani, literally meaning the ‘Forerunner’.began publication on the day of the Hindu New Year in 1944, with Savarkar’s photograph on the masthead with a motto in Sanskrit, ‘Public good not mere popularity’. Veer Savarkar was the guiding force who was often requested by Godse and Apte to write articles for Agrani to increase its circulation. Seen here is Savarkar (sitting in the centre) with Nathuram Godse (sitting second from right), Narayan Apte (sitting second from left) and other staff members of Agrani.

  Quick-witted, lively and intelligent, Narayan Apte was good looking and was vain about his prowess with women. Married to Champa Fedtare at a young age, he was very popular with his students in American Mission High School in Ahmednagar where he taught for a few years. Manorama Salvi, his student, later became very close to him. It was during her stay in the Ramabai Hostel in Bombay that Apte used to come to meet her and take her for nights out in Bombay hotels, always checking in as Mr and Mrs Apte.

  Communal riots and mass hatred was Agrani’s ‘food and drink’. A medium propagate the Hindu viewpoint, the circulation and popularity of the paper increased with the growing discontent in people.

  THREE

  Is it [non-violence] not a futile experiment I am

  conducting? What if, when the fury bursts, not a

  man, woman or child is safe, and every man’s

  hand is raised against his neighbour?

  — M.K. GANDHI

  For two years the Agrani was like a patient on his deathbed, barely twitching with life and hardly breathing; it was the will-power of its Editor and Manager that kept it alive. At least once every month Nathuram wrote to Savarkar about the Agrani’s affairs, and in between he as well as Apte kept pressing him to write an article or two for it which, they firmly believed, would enhance its prestige and improve its circulation. But, after he had provided a part of its initial capital, Savarkar had had little to do with the Agrani and certainly did not, as he was later to protest, contribute ‘even a small note’ to it.

  Meanwhile the war had ended, and with it had ended Apte’s job as a recruiting officer. The British were eager to quite India, but Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted them to partition the country first.

  Tension among the Hindus and Muslims grew into mass hatred. The Agrani, which fervently propounded the Hindu viewpoint, gradually began to make converts; its circulation improved and advertisements trickled in. Its monthly losses were reduced and it even began to think in terms of expanding. It acquired a printing press of its own and installed a teleprinter. Apte and N
athuram began to look for a site where they could put up their own building. Ultimately they found a vacant plot in a good area, 495 Shanwar Peth, and drew up plans to build a shed there to house their press and office.

  Thus, on a high note, they entered the year 1946, the year before Independence and Partition; and the year in which the massacres began.

  In the spring there were elections, both for the provincial legislatures and for the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi. The business of the Constituent Assembly was to hammer out independent India’s constitution so that Britain could hand over power to a government in authority and not merely a political party. Till such time as the new constitution came into force, the Viceroy would rule the country with a caretaker all-Indian Cabinet.

  As a result of the provincial elections, Bombay once again got a Congress government; and this government at once turned its attention to the Agrani’s misdemeanours. On 26 June, Nathuram reported to Savarkar that it had stopped the Agrani’s ‘advertisements by a single order and transferred them to the Lokashakti’ a rival Poona daily. Nathuram and Apte were discovering that the Indian ministers were far more intolerant of their views and methods of reporting than the guardians of the Raj had shown themselves to be.

  Both were convinced that the reason behind the Agrani’s chastisement was party jealousy, for the Congress was now also the Government. But, even if there was an element of truth in this, it cannot be denied that the Agrani for its part had consistently flouted the requirements of the Press Act, which sought to black out all news of communal rioting and also to prevent the publication of such sentiments as would arouse communal passions.