The Men Who Killed Gandhi

Manohar Malgonkar, Pramod Kapoor

• Publisher: Roli Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9789351940838
• eBook ISBN: 9789351940838
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Men Who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar takes readers back into the pages of Indian history during the time of the partition, featuring the murder plot and assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
The Men Who Killed Gandhi is a spellbinding non fictional recreation of the events which led to India's partition, the eventual assassination of Gandhi, and the prosecution of those who were involved in Gandhi's murder. This historical reenactment is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the British Raj. Malgonkar's book is a result of painstaking research and from also having privileged access to many important documents and photographs related to the assassination.There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi played a leading role in obtaining independence from the British. But the problems that ensued afterwards, such as the structural rebuilding of the country and the Partition, led to many riots, massive migrations, and deep racial and cultural divides. Not everyone agreed with Gandhi and his ideals. As a result, a plot to assassinate Gandhi was devised by six individuals named, Narayan Apte, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge, and Nathuram Godse. This was eventually carried out in New Delhi, on the 30th of January, 1948. Eventually, these six individuals were tried and convicted. Four of them received life sentences while two of them received the death penalty.
The first publication of The Men Who Killed Gandhi occurred in 1978, during the Emergency years. As a result, Malgonkar omitted many vital facts including Dr. Ambedkar's role in minimizing Savarkar's criminal conviction. This 11th edition of the text contains these omitted facts as well as rare documents, and photographs obtained from National Archives. After the four individuals who were convicted for Gandhi's murder completed their life sentences, they were interviewed by Malgonkar. These individuals revealed many details to him which were never known before. The author also received access to the Kapur Commission from his friend Mr. Nayar, who was in the Indian Police Service. As a result, The Men Who Killed Gandhi is considered the most historically accurate account of Gandhi's assassination plot.

TEN

Every condition laid down by Gandhi for
giving up his fast is ... against the Hindus.

— NATHURAM GODSE

Ever since the advent of Independence, the nation’s capital had been put under one of the most pernicious enactments of the Indian Penal Code – section 144, which, among other things, empowers the authorities to disallow such public meetings as might, in their opinion, disrupt peace. This, in the charged atmosphere of the times, virtually meant that all public meetings had been banned. Nevertheless, during the hectic week of Gandhi’s fast, section 144 had not been enforced by the Delhi Police with their customary strictness because so many groups of citizens had come forward to demonstrate their zeal for communal harmony by making public pronouncements. To ban their meetings would have made the police look as though they were in league with the anti-Gandhi/anti- Muslim faction of the population.

Since public meetings of one kind had been allowed to take place, the Delhi unit of the Hindu Mahasabha thought of taking advantage of the laxness on the part of the authorities to sneak in a meeting of their own, and make known to the people of Delhi that their organization had never subscribed to the seven-point Peace Pledge that had been devised to persuade Gandhi to give up his fast.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of 27 January, they gathered in strength in, of all places, the great open space in the middle of the capital’s shoppingcentre, Connaught Place. And, even before the few policemen on duty realized that this was not just another meeting called by some civic group to preach communal harmony, speaker after speaker had got up and denounced Gandhi for ‘coercing’ the Government into paying Rs 55 crores to a country that was at war with India, and the government for letting Gandhi dictate terms to it. One speaker likened Gandhi to Hitler and predicted that he would meet Hitler’s fate. The meeting passed a resolution rejecting the Peace Pledge and denouncing the government for the payment of the cash balances to Pakistan. It ended with rousing cries of ‘Long live Hindu Unity! Turn out the Muslims! Long live Madanlal!’

Long live Madanlal! It was heresy. Even the refugees from the Punjab must have flinched when they found themselves called upon to join in that cry.

The government, of course, was horrified. How could such a meeting have taken place in the teeth of section 144? Congressmen thundered, officials squirmed and looked for scapegoats ; explanations were called for, reprimands doled out. It was sheepishly admitted that, on the part of the administration, there had been a ‘deplorable slip-up’.

That the meeting was allowed to take place at all may have been the result of an administrative slip-up, but the Delhi Police were perfectly aware that the meeting reflected the mood and sentiments of a large section of the city’s population, and who can say how many in their own ranks were not in sympathy. The truth was that the effect of the Peace Pledge was wearing off. The people of Delhi had heeded the Mahatma’s counsel and stopped killing the Muslims or driving them out of their houses. In all good faith they had waited for a similar halt in the atrocities across the border. There was no such halt.

Gandhi’s fast, which Mountbatten had hoped would serve as ‘the great gesture for Pakistan to act in the same way’, had affected Pakistan not at all. If anything, there had been a renewed frenzy of communal massacres in Pakistan, and every day the papers carried properly watered-down reports of whatever had happened in the past day or two in Bhawalpur, Gujarath, Okha and a dozen other places. After the first horrifying impact, one could only think of these incidents in generalities, as a number killed, wounded, abducted.

What came to be called ‘the Parachinar Tragedy’ is put down by Justice Kapur is his report in twenty-three words: ‘On the night of 22 January Parachinar camp was attacked by tribesmen. 130 non-Muslims were killed, 30 wounded and 50 abducted.’

But in describing the fate of those who were ‘abducted’ Justice Kapur cannot confine himself to cold judicial prose.

The kidnapping of young women and the treatment to which they were subjected was a sordid chapter in the history of human relations. They were taken, molested, raped, passed on from man to man, bartered, sold like cattle, and those who were subsequently rescued gave an account which would be, to put it mildly, hair-raising.

What a Supreme Court Judge, a man trained to look upon the passions of mankind with god-like detachment, found to be ‘hair-raising’ was enough to make many Hindus and Sikhs blind with rage. To them a week of life under the lash of the Peace Pledge had been like a penance. Their brethren were being driven out of Pakistan; they themselves had no houses to live in; the Muslims of Delhi had their houses. The answer was clear: ‘Turn out the Muslims!’

To Gandhi, the Parachinar tragedy was a challenge, ‘a test of his faith’. It did not deflect him from his immediate objective, which was to make the capital of India safe for its Muslims. On 25 January, he told his prayer audience how ‘it gladdened his heart to be told by Hindu and Muslim friends that a reunion of hearts was in the course of being established.’

And then he went on to tell his audience what a wonderful thing it was that the annual Mehrauli urs was going to be held from the next day.

Mehrauli is a village where the cowherds who supplied milk to the imperial city had lived from times immemorial. It is close to the Palam airfield, and passengers looking down from planes see it as a vast anthill cut away from the top, its buildings no higher than its heaps of manure.

Mehrauli came into its own but once a year, when it held a fair to honour its holy man, Qutb-ud-din Mazar, who had lived and died there. During the wave of the communal riots in and ground Delhi that had caused Gandhi to go on a fast, Mehrauli, too, had been sacked by crowds of Hindus and Sikhs. They had driven out its Muslim population and had smashed the screens and lights of the divine’s tomb. When the wave of violence had subsided, many of the Muslim families who had fled from Mehrauli had been prevailed upon to go back and live in their houses. But those that had gone back still lived in terror, and they had given up all thought of holding the urs, or fair, which that year was due to begin from 26 January.

Gandhi had come forward as their champion. One of the conditions that he had laid down upon the Hindus and Sikhs of Delhi for giving up his fast was that they must make it possible for the Muslims of Mehrauli to hold their annual fair.

The fair thus constituted a major point in the seven-point Pledge. Its signatories had assured Gandhi that ‘the annual fair of Khwaja Qutb-ud-din Mazar will be held this year, as in previous years.’

For Gandhi, the fair was altogether symbolic; that it could be held at all represented to him the change of heart that he had been endeavouring to bring about. And it was entirely fitting that when, on 27 January, he visited the fair the Mullas led him right inside the shrine as though he was one of themselves. He told them how deeply he was moved to see the ‘wanton damage to the marble screens enclosing the inner shrines’.

Gandhi has been called a saint, a villain, a politician, a statesman, a fool, a knave, a charlatan, an astute tradesman, a naked fakir and many other things, but the few words he now said at the urging of the Mullas of the Mehrauli shrine are enough to show that, whatever else he might have been, he was, above all, a truly civilized man.

I have never known what it is to be communal. To unite all sections and all communities that people this vast land of ours has been my dream ever since my childhood, and till that dream is realized my spirit can know no rest.

The Amritsar Express got into Old Delhi station a little before noon. Nathuram walked up to the ticket window, showed his second-class tickets and asked to book a retiring-room with two beds. The clerk on duty, Sundarilal, told them a room would be vacant in an hour. They whiled away the hour at the station itself and, soon after one o’clock, got into the room, No. 6. Nathuram gave his name as ‘N. Venaik Rao’.

Some of the bigger railway stations were provided with these retiringrooms for the use of first- or second-class passengers who, instead of going to some hotel in town, could stay at the station itself in reasonable comfort. The rooms were large and high-ceilinged and provided with their own bathrooms. They could be occupied only for twenty-four hours, and the charge for a double room was Rs 5. Old Delhi station had seven such retiring-rooms.

Nathuram and Apte, who had had a pretty strenuous and tense time for the past three days, bathed and changed their clothes and then, calling the shoeshine boy who was attached to the retiring-rooms, arranged to have their soiled clothes washed. Then they went to one of the station restaurants, treated themselves to a good lunch, went back to their room and settled down to a long siesta.

All this while, the third man, Karkare, had been waiting for them in the park across the road barely two hundred yards away.

He had got into Delhi the previous evening, and he, too, was camping in the station, but not in a retiring-room. He had spread his blanket on the platform itself and gone to sleep among the hundreds of refugees who had made the railway station their temporary home till someone came and drove them away. In the morning he had queued up for one of the public lavatories, washed himself at one of the public taps and eaten his breakfast in the tea shop. Then, asking one of the refugees with whom he had struck up a friendship to mind his bed-roll, he had gone across to the park to start his vigil.

It was a raw, cloudy morning, and Karkare shivered as he sat perched on the side of the fountain and smoked cigarettes. After a couple of hours, he had begun to walk slowly round the park, turning every few seconds to look in the direction of the entrance. He was by no means alone, because many of the refugees had overflowed from the station into the Queen’s Garden and settled down under the great trees, converting the park into a grubby gypsy encampment.

On one of his rounds, Karkare passed a man lighting a kerosene stove and brewing tea. Then, from a gunny bag the man took out a few cups and saucers and set them out in the dust. When Karkare came round again, he saw that four or five men and women from among the inhabitants of the garden had gathered round and were drinking tea. Karkare stopped and asked the man if he was selling tea.

‘Yes, Babuji. Just set up my tea shop,’ the man said, waving a hand at the array of cups.

‘Shop?’ Karkare could not help asking.

‘What more does one need to support oneself?’ the man answered. ‘No one to support, see! Both my sons were killed even as I looked on, the wife clubbed to death.’

Karkare had nothing to do. After the other customers had gone away, he squ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Book
• Book Name
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author's Note to the First Edition
• A Look back in Gratitude
• Sketching An Assassionation
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Notes
• About the Author
• Backcover