The Men Who Killed Gandhi Read online

  For one thing, his son’s madness had become steadily worse and, a couple of months earlier, he had hardened his heart and had him committed to the mental asylum in Poona. His wife’s grief when she discovered that he had come back without the boy was inconsolable. There were hysterical outbursts every day, and their weekly visits to the asylum were periods of torment. The son and the mother would cling together and sob bitterly and had to be torn apart by sheer force when the visiting-hours ended. The boy would mumble horrifying stories of the humiliation to which he had been subjected by the other inmates. Convinced that a few more weeks of life in the asylum would kill his son, Apte had persuaded the authorities to let him take him back on the promise of never letting him out on his own. The homecoming took place in an atmosphere of neighbourhood hostility and made little difference to his son’s health, but at least the mother and son were together again, and she had ceased to look upon Apte as some kind of monster.

  Then something else had happened to shatter whatever peace of mind Apte still had left. A couple of weeks earlier his mistress, Manorama Salvi, had told him that she was pregnant.

  She was still at Wilson College, but no longer in the women’s hostel. Now she lived with her parents in a Police Department flat in Byculla, almost next door to the Northcote Police Hospital in which her father, Daulatrao Salvi, worked as the medical assistant. She was in the senior BA class, and thus in her final year before graduation. Her romance with Apte had been going on for the best part of three years.

  The Salvis were Christians. More, the family had lived in what, in India, is called a ‘mission compound’ and thus were full of missionary taboos. They were typical of the low-income, lower-middle-class Christians in India who were still too close to their conversion to allow for any liberal thinking on matters of sex and religion. The daughter had violated both. Not only was she going to have an illegitimate child, but the father was a Hindu who, if not an orthodox practitioner of Hinduism, yet took his obligations to it with terrifying earnestness. In the closed-circuit community of local Indian Christians, the shock of such a transgression would be altogether shattering.

  Manorama Salvi had not told her parents that she was pregnant and, amazing as it might seem, in October 1947 the family still did not know of her long-standing romance with Apte.

  Apte’s less extroverted partner, Nathuram, had no such embarrassing problems, even though he, too, had numerous relatives in Poona. In fact, his father had left Sangli and brought his entire family to Poona, and his brothers and sisters had married and started their families. One of the brothers had set up his own house in Poona, and another, Gopal, in Kirkee, which is a suburb of Poona barely four miles from the centre of the town. Though Nathuram saw all these relatives fairly frequently and was particularly close to Gopal, he lived alone, in a single room which he had rented from a friend at 334 Shanwar Peth. This room was within walking distance of his new office, which was at 495 Shanwar Peth. His austerity, too, had, if anything become more pronounced. He ate the simplest of meals, and slept on a single blanket which, as often as not, was flung directly on to the floor. His one indulgence, as always, was coffee, of which he drank at least six cups every day. He spent much of his day in his office, which was in a tent pitched behind the main Hindu Rashtra building.

  If, in the partnership of unlikes, Nathuram was very much the backroom boy, the man who did all the hard work and struggled with the day-to-day problems, it was a relationship that he accepted. He and Apte had if anything come closer. Both were totally convinced of each other’s dedication to the cause and, after all, that was what mattered.

  In everything except running the paper, Nathuram accepted Apte as the leader, or at least the senior partner. He knew all about the plans that Apte was hatching and, indeed, they held long and earnest discussions about their possibilities in Nathuram’s tent. Since Nathuram knew even less about firearms and explosives than Apte did, he left such matters entirely to Apte and carried out his orders without question.

  Apte and Nathuram and, at a different level, Badge and his servant, Shankar, were both integrated two-man teams. It was difficult to think of any one of them without the other. Karkare was the odd man out, unattached. Now he, too, was to acquire a partner and form a team.

  Karkare was endowed by nature with quite phenomenal energy, which was perhaps the one quality that had enabled him to raise himself from the gutter to at least the lowest rung of the middle-class ladder and the fringe of respectability. Doubtless he could have gone on making money and expanding his business, but, as far as he was concerned, he had arrived. His Deccan Guest House was being run by a manager and making a handsome profit. Now he wanted to devote all his energies to the service, by his lights, of his country and religion.

  After his return from Noakhali, he had taken to visiting Poona at least once every week at Apte’s bidding, and he had several times accompanied Apte to Bombay; but he still lived in Ahmednagar and ran his Deccan Guest House as well as the Hindu Mahasabha office. But routine work no longer interested him or kept him occupied. Then, towards the middle of the year, advance elements of a refugee column reached Ahmednagar and suddenly Karkare found the sort of work that he craved for: refugee relief. He plunged into it with gusto.

  With an increase in the popularity of the Hindu Rashtra and its endorsement by many rich Hindu families, money was flowing in. Godse and Apte were able to buy a plot of land to start their own press and also bought a teleprinter. 495 Shanwar Peth was the address from where the press operated, this was at a walking distance from 334 Shanwar Peth, where Godse stayed alone in a room he rented from a friend. The main street of Shanwar Peth as it is today.

  During these years of political turmoil there was something more happening in the life of Narayan Apte that stripped him of his peace of mind. While on the one hand was his son and his deteriorating mental condition, on the other was his mistress Manorama Salvi, who had now shifted to stay with her parents to a Police Department flat in Byculla in Bombay, was pregnant. Seen here is the flat where Manorama stayed with her parents.

  One of Karkare’s associates in this work, Ghanashyam Gilda, has described how, when the refugees first started to arrive in Ahmednagar, the government had made no arrangements for them whatsoever. They were dumped beside the railway track to fend for themselves and forgotten. Gilda borrowed a few lorries from haulage contractors to bring the refugees into town and even managed to find some tin shelters for them. But the problem of feeding them seemed quite insoluble until

  Karkare took on the responsibility. I would bring the refugees into town, and he would give them a meal in his hotel. After a few days, Karkare even managed to borrow some tents from the army and had them set up. For nearly a month, till the Visapur refugee camp was established by the government, Karkare must have given between 25,000 and 30,000 free meals.

  The Visapur camp was an abandoned jail, situated twenty-six miles from Ahmednagar, and in it at least 10,000 refugees had been crammed. The refugees, according to an official report, ‘were in an angry mood’, for here, too, as in Delhi they could see the Muslims ‘enjoying their properties and pursuing their avocations and politics in peace and even under official protection’.

  If anything, here in Ahmednagar, the refugees had even more cause for anger than the refugees in Delhi. The district of Ahmednagar bordered on the princely state of Hyderabad which, even though 85 per cent of its people were Hindus, happened to be ruled by a Muslim prince, His Exalted Highness the Nizam. The Nizam had always favoured his co-religionists so outrageously that 80 per cent of all government jobs in his state were held by Muslims. Further, the Nizam had no intention of letting his dominion become a part of an independent India, and as the independence talks progressed his agents in Europe had been buying arms secretly to start what he sought to pass off as a people’s rebellion. This irregular army of fanatics whom he had armed called themselves the Razakars — Volunteers. They had now come into their own and terrorized the Hindu popul
ation of Hyderabad and even carried out raids into the neighbouring districts. The leader of the Razakars, a firebrand maniac called Kassim Rizvi, who claimed that ‘Hyderabad was a Muslim state by right of conquest,’ had openly boasted that he would lead his Razakars and conquer Delhi itself.

  The refugee camp buzzed with talk of retaliation. Their handiest targets were the unfortunate Muslims of Ahmednagar. They had the jobs, the houses, the shops, everything which, the refugees felt, should have been distributed among themselves. They began to wander about the streets, shouting slogans and uttering threats, and they formed processions to voice their demands. Their mood so alarmed the authorities that they immediately passed an order forbidding anyone in the whole of Ahmednagar district from carrying arms.

  Karkare considered that the order was perverse; its only consequence would be that the Hindus of his district would find themselves defenceless against the raids of Kassim Rizvi’s thugs. He, Karkare, had no intention of abiding by it. On the contrary, he was at the time busy making preparations for the raid on the octroi post that Apte had planned. That raid was to be launched from Ahmednagar, and everyone hoped that it would provide enough money to finance even more spectacular future operations. Karkare was looking out for someone who would sell him a few hand grenades cheaply. Badge’s price for them had gone up, and he demanded anything up to Rs 200 apiece.

  He had heard that in Bombay it was easier to buy grenades cheaply, because several people there manufactured them. He went to Bombay to find out, and there in the refugee camp at Chembur discover his man — someone who actually made hand grenades.

  His name was Madanlal Pahwa, some of whose experiences as a refugee have been related in an earlier chapter. He came from a small town called Pakpattan, now deep in Pakistan. He had passed his matriculation examination and had served in the Royal Indian Navy as a wireless operator. He was honourably discharged from the Navy in 1946, and had gone back to his home. A few months later, when the Hindus were routed out of his part of the Punjab, he became part of a refugee column.

  While in the Navy, he had been for a time posted in Bombay. So when, after his horrifying experiences in the refugee column, he finally reached India in the summer of 1947, he at once made for Bombay in the hope of finding a job.

  Madanlal was now twenty years old. He was a thick-set, muscular man with dark brown hair and a wine-red smudge of a moustache who was not averse to using his hands to make a living and his fists to get what he considered his due. He wore the belligerent scowl of a man who bears a grudge against the world. He was, in short, the sort of young tough whom any commando captain would be glad to enlist in his unit.

  In Bombay, Madanlal found himself shoved into the Chembur refugee camp, which was like a vast scrapheap of unwanted humanity that, for the sake of decency, had to be kept out of sight. He did not make a good, docile refugee. Every morning he would set off for the city and tramp its steamy streets in search of a job. A fellow-refugee took him to see a professor who taught Hindi in the Ruia College at Dadar, a Dr J.C. Jain. Dr Jain, who was the author of several Hindi books on esoteric subjects and who must have been looking for a strong young man who would peddle his books from house to house, is said to have taken pity on him and ‘in order to help him monetarily’ engaged him as a salesman. Madanlal was to receive no salary, but retain a 25 per cent commission on the sales he made.

  The books were not easy to sell — nor, to be sure, did Madanlal try very hard to sell them. In the two months that he worked as Dr Jain’s salesman, his commission did not exceed Rs 50.

  While Madanlal was hawking Dr Jain’s books, a social worker of Bombay, a lady called Mrs Modak, who was thinking of starting a drama group of amateur artists for providing free entertainment to the refugees, offered to engage him as her private secretary. But Madanlal declined because, as he told Mrs Modak, he had joined ‘the fire-cracker business’.

  Indians love noise; it is an index of high spirits, even a status symbol, for in olden days the right to beat the loudest drums was a privilege enjoyed only by the highest in the land. Our festivals during which fire-crackers are let off in their millions can be a trying time for foreign visitors, and even many Indians run away from the cities and into the country. The manufacture of fire-crackers is therefore a thriving business, and it was true enough that Madanlal Pahwa had found employment in a factory which was licensed to make them, Messrs Vassen Puspasen.

  But this part of the firm’s business was no more than a front for its more profitable and less legitimate activity, the turning out of hand grenades. In those days of communal conflicts, there was a ready demand for such handy missiles and, judging from the number of crudely made bombs that were for ever turning up in police raids, there must have been dozens of factories making them.

  It was this part of the fire-cracker business that Madanlal had wormed his way into. He not only worked on the factory’s grenade-making machine, but also served as a salesman for the grenades it made — an activity for which Professor Jain’s unsaleable books provided an excellent cover.

  One of the men to whom Madanlal was able to sell a book was Dixitji Maharaj, the younger brother of Dada Maharaj who had been so carried away by Apte’s schemes. The price paid for the book was Rs 5. Whether Dixitji also bought a few of the grenades which Madanlal usually carried in his bag of books was never revealed by either. That no such transaction took place seems unlikely. After all, it was Dixitji’s job to buy explosives and weapons on his brother’s behalf, and it was at just about this time (end of August 1947) that his brother had hinted to Apte that he could provide him with a few ‘hand grenades and dynamite’. Be that as it may, the sale of just one book seems to have established a fairly cordial relationship between the two men. Madanlal was encouraged to call again and, on these later occasions, was given some clothes and cooking pots for distribution among the refugees in the Chembur camp.

  As might be expected, the moment Madanlal’s back was turned after that first visit, the elder brother, Dada Maharaj, was given a full report of whatever had transpired. And it is also likely that, during one of the subsequent visits, Dada Maharaj was given an opportunity to see Madanlal without himself being seen.

  Karkare, who had come from Ahmednagar to look for a reliable source of hand grenades, met Madanlal in late September or early October. At this time, Madanlal could not have been actually working in the factory, because a few days earlier he had had an accident in which he had lost the top portion of the index finger of his left hand. The finger had got caught in the gears of a turntable when his hand had slipped. His assistant had immediately stopped the machinery, but the finger was wedged between the teeth of two rotary wheels, and was bleeding profusely.

  ‘There were half-made bombs lying all over the place,’ Madanlal told the author many years later. ‘To send for a doctor would have been suicidal. So I picked up a knife and chopped the finger off.’

  Karkare, who had the easy small talk of a small-town hotelier and a ready wit, was also free with his money, and he was able to persuade Madanlal to go with him to Ahmednagar. Ahmednagar, too, had its own refugees, he explained, more than 10,000 of them, and many of them were from Madanlal’s own part of the Punjab. They would make ideal recruits for the work he and his partners had in mind — that of sending raiding parties into the state of Hyderabad. He also promised to set up Madanlal in business. He made Ahmednagar seem a land of opportunity; in Bombay, Madanlal was wasting his time.

  Madanlal needed a new job anyway, while his finger healed. He went with Karkare, and with them they carried a steel trunk filled with the bombs that Madanlal had made, together with a few slabs of explosive and some fuse wire.

  For Madanlal it was a fateful decision. Within days after he had left, the firm of Vassen Puspasen was raided by the police and the owners and workers were arrested. If Madanlal, too, had been caught in the factory, he was sure to have earned at least a year in jail. But, if he escaped imprisonment this time, ironically it was only to b
e drawn into a far bigger crime — the conspiracy to murder Gandhi and a term of life imprisonment.

  Madanlal had left without settling accounts with Dr Jain, but wrote two letters to him from Ahmednagar, and when, in the middle of December, he happened to visit Bombay he went and saw Jain at his house, Mangal Nivas, in Shivaji Park, Dadar. Despite a slight unpleasantness over the accounts for the books, it seems that his relations with Jain continued to be amicable. According to Jain, Madanlal once told him that he ‘considered me as his father’.

  In Ahmednagar, Madanlal opened a fruit stall or, as he told Dr Jain later, occupied a fruit stall from which he and his friends had driven away its Muslim owner. His business was financed by his friend Karkare whom he invariably referred to as Karkara Seth; ‘Seth’ means a banker or rich trader. He admired Karkare for what he had done for the refugees in Ahmednager, and himself became active in all of Karkare’s schemes. Within two weeks of arrival, he had made up his mind to stay on in Ahmednagar because, as he testified later, ‘my business was in a flourishing condition’. What was more, in those two weeks he had also managed to become friendly with a local girl.

  In the middle of December, on one of his periodic visits to Poona, Karkare took Madanlal along with him and introduced him to Apte and Nathuram. Apte was particularly pleased that they had at last found someone who was familiar with explosives. All four sat together in the editor’s tent at the Hindu Rashtra office and went over their plans to raid the octroi post. Now all they needed to put it through was a large car. As soon as Apte managed to get hold of one he and Nathuram would drive down in it to Ahmednagar. They left it at that.

  The order forbidding the people to carry arms was made applicable to most parts of the Ahmednagar district on 6 November 1947. And with that, the police hoped, they had prevented all possibility of communal disorders.

  But it soon turned out that someone in Ahmednagar possessed a stock of hand grenades, and at least four of these were thrown between 24 November and 26 December. One of them exploded in a packed cinema, the Vasant Talkies, and another in the midst of a Muslim procession on the occasion of the Mohurrum festival.