Freedom at Midnight (76 page)

that no sound of firing, no roar of Karkare's exploding grenade was coming from the prayer ground. All he could hear was the voice of Gandhi calling for order.

With all the strength of his weak frame, Gandhi was pleading to the crowd. "Listen! Listen!" he said. "It's nothing. It's just the army having some practice. Sit down and be calm. The prayers continue."

Confusion and panic had swept the garden in the wake of Madanlal's bomb. No one had been injured by the explosion, but it had provoked exactly the burst of panic the conspirators had counted on to cover the assassination. In the confusion, Karkare pushed up to within fifteen feet of Gandhi.

The weakened man was an exposed, helpless target, as defenseless as a cripple in a wheelchair.

Karkare started to pull out his grenade. As he did, he looked at the grille behind Gandhi's head for the confirming glint of a pistol barrel or the tumbling black form of a grenade. There was nothing. Karkare froze.

Gopal Godse jumped down from the charpoy. He wasn't going to do it. Let the others strike, he thought. He wasn't prepared to drop his grenade with no idea of whom he would kill. He hurried through the darkness to the door and grasped for its clasp. He couldn't find it. When his nervous fingers located it, they couldn't make it work. A sense of panic swept him. He was going to be trapped there in the room of the one-eyed man.

In the garden, Karkare, his fingers wrapped tight around his hand grenade, continued to stare at the little grille, waiting for some gleam of a pistol. With each passing instant, his courage faded. Suddenly he saw Badge in the crowd thirty feet away. What's he doing here? Karkare thought. Why doesn't he do something?

Badge no longer had any intention of doing anything but fleeing. The man who had thirty-seven arrests did not propose to get another. He was not an idealist or a political fanatic, but a businessman. His business, he told himself, was selling arms, not using them. Avoiding Karkare's glare, he slipped off into the crowd.

To the rear of Birla House, the mother of a three-year-old boy playing behind the brick wall had seen Madanlal light his bomb and walk away. Now she pointed him out to an Air Force officer. "It's him! It's him!" she screamed. Gopal, solving at last the riddle of the door lock,

emerged from his cell blinking at the sunlight. He heard her screams, then saw two men, one in a blue uniform, dragging Madanlal to the ground. He spotted Apte and his brother in the crowd. They seemed bewildered, not yet comprehending what was happening. Gopal joined them. The three Chitpawan Brahmans hesitated a second. Then, realizing that their effort had been a total failure, they headed for the green Chevrolet taxicab that Apte had hired for twelve rupees. Without a thought for their fellow conspirators, they got in and told the driver to head for downtown Delhi as fast as he could.

A few seconds later, Karkare saw the police bundling Madanlal along the drive paralleling one side of the garden toward the tent that they had set up in front of the house. What resolution he had left disappeared. He relaxed his grip on his grenade. He had only one thought now: how to escape.

On the platform, Gandhi had at last restored order. While the rumor that "a crazy Punjabi refugee" had made a demonstration against him swept the crowd, he calmly announced, "I may start for Pakistan now. If the government and doctors permit me, I can start immediately."

Then, smiling happily, quite unaware of his miraculous escape, Gandhi was lifted back into his chair and carried in triumph from his prayer meeting.

An overwhelming, depressing sense of failure assailed Apte and the Godses in their taxi heading back to town. Nathuram buried his head in his hands; the pain of his migraine headache had become unbearable. They had no idea what their next step should be. Their confidence in Apte's scheme had been so complete that none of them had even envisioned the possibility of its failing. They were in grave danger now. Madanlal did not know their names, but he knew they came from Poona and he knew the name of their paper. With that, it would not take the police long to get them.

To the bitter reality of failure were added the pangs of humiliation. They had failed the fanatics of Bombay from whom they had taken money for their "important mission." Above all, they had failed the zealot at Savarkar Sadan to whom they had sworn allegiance.

Nathuram aroused himself from his stupor and told his

brother in Mahratti to go back to Poona and establish an alibi. He had a family to worry about. He and Apte would decide on the next step. Apte ordered the driver to stop. Gopal got out. The taxi bearing Apte and Nathuram disappeared in the traffic.

At Birla House, the mood was similar to that which had followed Gandhi's escape from death when he broke his fast two days before. Telegrams began to pour in congratulating the Mahatma. The phone rang incessantly. Nehru and Patel rushed to embrace him. Scores of visitors descended on his quarters. Among the first to arrive was Edwina Mountbatten.

"I have shown no bravery," Gandhi gaily told the former vicereine. He really had thought Madanlal's bomb was an Army unit practicing.

"Ah," he sighed, "but if someone fired at me point-blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama, then I should indeed be deserving of congratulations!"

Three messages reached the bedside of D. W. Mehra, Delhi's Deputy Inspector General of Police, in the evening of January 20. The man who would normally have been responsible for investigating the attempt on Gandhi's life was in bed with the flu and a 103-degree fever. The first simply informed him that someone had exploded a bomb at Gandhi's prayer meeting and that the bomb thrower had been arrested. The second, two hours after the first, informed him that the bomb thrower was resisting interrogation. Mehra authorized third-degree procedures.

It was the third and last message he received that was going to determine the course of the investigation. It came from the man who was the nominal head of the Delhi police, D. J. Sanjevi, a political policeman whose real function was directing India's Central Intelligence Bureau. A tacit accord existed between the two men. Sanjevi had arranged to be assigned the top job in Delhi in December, because, as he explained to Mehra, "before I retire I want a flag flying on my car, a jeep escort and a guard presenting arms when I get to the office." He got that by making himself Delhi's police chief, but he had always left running the police to Mehra. Now to Mehra's surprise, San-

jevi bluntly informed him, "Don't bother about the Madanlal case. I'll handle the investigation myself."

In his cell in the Parliament Street police station, Madanlal was beginning to pay the price of his notoriety. Bruised and exhausted, he began to cave in under the pressures of the three policemen who had been interrogating him for two hours. Madanlal was still loyal to his fellow conspirators. Despite the fact that he alone had acted, he was sure that they would try again. He was determined to win them as much time as he could by refusing to talk.

Nonetheless, at the very beginning, he yielded a vital piece of information. He admitted he was not a crazy Punjabi refugee acting alone, but one of a group of killers. He gave the number of people involved—six. They had agreed to kill Gandhi, he said, because "he was forcing the refugees to give up the mosques, was responsible for giving Pakistan her rupees and was helping the Moslems every way he could."

Then, calculating that the others had by now had time to flee, he gave a harmless account of their activities in Delhi. Suddenly, in a moment of self-assertion, he gave the police a second clue. He admitted that he had been at Savarkar Sadan with his associates and boasted that he had personally met the famous political figure. The police then forced him to describe each of his fellow conspirators. His descriptions were not very helpful. He gave only one name, Karkare's, and managed to give it wrong— "Kirkree."

His description of Godse, however, contained a third vital scrap of information. He gave his occupation. He said that he was the "editor of Rashtriya or Agrani Mahratti language newspaper." The name of the paper was incomplete and misspelled, but those words were still the most precious scrap of information the police could have had that night.

While the interrogation continued, police rushed off to search the Hindu Mahasabha and the Marina Hotel. They found no one. Badge and his servant were miles away, on a train heading for Poona. Karkare and Gopal Godse were registered under false names in a hotel in Old Delhi. Apte and Nathuram Godse had disappeared from the Marina in a rush, hours before. On the desk of Room 40,

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however, the police found a fourth vital clue. It was a typewritten document denouncing the agreement produced by Delhi's leaders to get Gandhi to end his fast. The man whose signature it bore, Ashutosh Lahiri, an official of the Hindu Mahasabha, had known Apte and Godse well for eight years. He knew perfectly well that they were the administrator and editor of a Savarkarite Mahratti newspaper called the Hindu Rashtra.

At midnight the police ended their interrogation of Madanlal for the night and closed their first daily register of the case. They had every reason to be satisfied with the results of their first seven hours' work. They knew that they were faced with a plot. They knew how many people were involved. They knew that it involved followers of Veer Savarkar, whose organization had been under regular police surveillance since May. They had information that, with a little patient effort, would allow them to identify Godse and, with him, Apte. It was an impressive performance. No reasonable policeman in Delhi that night would have given the conspirators more than a few hours before they were identified and the stage set for their arrest. Yet, that inquiry, so well begun, was now to be pursued in a manner so desultory, so ineffectual that it would still, almost thirty years later, inflame controversy in India.

WE MUST GET GANDHI BEFORE THE POLICE GET US"

New Delhi and Bombay, January 21-29,1948

Gopal Godse's half-eaten biscuit clung to the roof of a mouth suddenly gone dry at the sight before him. Handcuffed, his head covered with a hood into which eye slits had been cut, with a score of policemen surrounding him, a man was being marched straight toward the lunch counter at which Gopal and Karkare stood in the Old Delhi railroad station. Petrified, Gopal recognized the man's rumpled blue suit as the one that Madanlal had so proudly donned the day before.

As unobtrusively as possible, he turned back to the counter, trying to disappear into its dark wooden bulk. Under his stifling hood, Madanlal continued his march. For the fifth time since dawn, in their search for his coconspirators, the police were forcing him to scrutinize the passengers boarding a train in Delhi station.

Hungry, dizzy with fatigue, he contemplated the crowds rushing toward the cars of the Bombay Express with the restricted vision imposed by the sack over his head. As his eyes fell on the familiar bulk of Karkare's back hunched over the lunch counter, he started. A policeman, sensing his movement, caught his arm. Madanlal coughed to cover his inadvertent gesture. Then he marched straight past Godse and Karkare to the waiting Bombay train. The last two conspirators left in Delhi would flee undetected.

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The major preoccupation of the police in the aftermath of MadanlaTs bomb explosion was assuring Gandhi's safety. Although his nominal superior, Sanjevi, had taken over responsibility for the investigation, Gandhi's protection was still the responsibility of the flu-stricken D. W. Mehra. Bundled up in an overcoat, his fever still raging, Mehra presented himself at Birla House at midday.

"Double mubarak" he said as he bowed in greeting to India's leader.

"Why this double mubarak?" asked Gandhi.

"Because," Mehra said, "you successfully completed your fast and did what my police could not do. You brought peace to Delhi. Secondly, you escaped the bomb."

"Brother," Gandhi replied with his toothless smile, "my life is in the hands of God." It was precisely because he wanted the Mahatma to put it in his own hands that Mehra was in the garden of Birla House. The man who had tried to kill him, Mehra explained to Gandhi, had not acted alone. He was one of a group of seven plotters. There was a serious likelihood that the others would try again. He wanted his permission to increase the guard at Birla House, and to search suspicious characters coming to his prayer meeting.

"I will never agree," Gandhi said in a sort of half shriek, "Do you search people going into a temple or chapel for prayer?"

"No, sir," Mehra replied, "but there is no one in them who is a target for an assassin's bullet."

"Rama is my only protection," Gandhi retorted. "If he wants to end my life, nobody can save me even if a million of your policemen were posted here to guard me. The rulers of this country have no faith in my nonviolence. They think your police guard will save my life. Well, my protection is Rama, and you will not violate my prayer meeting with your police or stop people coming in. If you do, I will leave Delhi and denounce you as the reason for my leaving."

Mehra was crestfallen. He knew Gandhi well enough to know that he was not going to change his mind. He would have to find a way to protect the Mahatma in spite of himself.

"At least," Mehra said, "will you allow me to come to the prayer meeting every day personally?"

"Ah," said Gandhi, "as an individual you are always welcome."

At ten minutes to five, despite his fever, Mehra was back at Birla House in civilian clothes. He had already increased the police contingent around the house from five to thirty-six, most of them plainclothesmen ordered to mingle with the prayer-meeting crowd. Hidden under Mehra's coat, loaded and cocked, was a Webley and Scott .38. The veteran of the Frontier could get it off his hip and put three rounds in a bull's eye twenty feet away in less than five seconds. As the Mahatma left his quarters for the prayer ground, Mehra took up the spot he intended to occupy every afternoon while Gandhi remained in Delhi. It was right at Gandhi's side. As long as he was there, the policeman felt reasonably confident no assassin was going to kill Gandhi.