Freedom at Midnight (77 page)

Once again, Gandhi had to be carried to his prayer platform. His first words were for the hate-filled young refugee who had vowed to take revenge for the sufferings that partition had thrust onto him and his family. "Do not hate or condemn the man who threw the bomb," Gandhi pleaded. He urged the police to release Madanlal. "We have no right to punish a person we think wicked," he said.

For the man who had so unexpectedly taken over the investigation into the attempt on Gandhi's life, one thing was obvious: the conspiracy with which he was confronted had been hatched in Bombay province. Madanlal had indicated that his fellow conspirators were all Maharashtrans. He himself had come to Delhi from Bombay, where he admitted having visited Savarkar's residence. Sanjevi's first action, therefore, was to alert the Bombay police and ask them to assign someone to the case. To coordinate Bombay's investigation with his, Sanjevi ordered two officers of the Delhi C.I.D. to fly to Bombay to present the Bombay police officer assigned the case "all the facts" uncovered in Delhi.

Their trip would produce the first, almost incomprehensible blunder of the curious investigation. The two Delhi policemen neglected to take with them a copy of the key document in the investigation, Madanlal's preliminary statement completed and typed before midnight the eve-

ning before. The only document they took was a two-by-four card on which a few salient facts had been jotted down by hand. They included Karkare's name misspelled as "Kirkree." Missing was the most vital information the Delhi police possessed, the approximate identification of Apte and Godse's newspaper.

The man to whom their report was destined already had more and better information sitting on his desk than they had on their little slip of paper. At thirty-two, Jamshid "Jimmy" Nagarvalla was Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of the Bombay C.I.D. Special Branch's Sections One and Two, the gathering of local political intelligence and the surveillance of foreigners. It was not for his abilities as an investigator, however, that Nagarvalla had been assigned to the Madanlal case. The reason spoke volumes of a dilemma confronting the Indian police in selecting men for the investigation. It was his religion. To give the case to a Moslem had seemed inappropriate. To put it in the hands of a Hindu risked turning it over to an officer who harbored secret anti-Gandhi sentiments. Nagarvalla, fortunately, was neither. He was a Parsi.

Bombay province's Home (Interior) Minister Moraji Desai had given him the case along with the precious scrap of information on his desk that Desai had received from a source to whom Madanlal had boasted of his intention to kill Gandhi the week before. Madanlal's principal associate, the source revealed, was a man named Karkare. He came from Ahmednagar.

Nagarvalla set the machinery in motion to identify him. For the young officer there seemed no question that evening of January 21. Sooner or later the road to the men who had tried to murder Gandhi had to pass by the quiet house among the palms and medlar trees of Keluksar Road, where lived the enigmatic zealot whose carefully concealed hands had already manipulated two major political assassinations. Nagarvalla had asked Desai for permission to arrest Savarkar on the basis of Madanlal's visit to him the week before. Desai had refused with the angry query: "Are you mad? Do you think I want this whole province to go up in smoke?"

If Nagarvalla could not confine Savarkar to a prison cell, however, he could at least confine him to a brilliant

British created organization that was the pride of the Bombay C.I.D., its Watchers Branch. The branch was composed of 150 men and women whose identities were known only to their commander. Blind men, beggars with stunted limbs, Moslem women in burqas, fruit peddlers, sweepers, they had kept Bombay's political agitators under their surveillance for a quarter of a century. During all those years, they liked to boast, not a single figure assigned to their scrutiny had escaped them. Nagarvalla's first action in his new assignment was to fix their watchful eyes on Veer Savarkar and his Bombay residence.

Nagarvalla's investigation began with the same promising swiftness that Delhi's had. Within a few hours he had gotten the full identity of Vishnu Karkare, as well as his occupation and the fact he had been missing from Ahmed-nagar since January 6. Shortly thereafter, he learned from a police informer that "one Badge of Poona," a petty arms merchant, was an associate of Karkare in his "conspiracy to take the life of the Mahatma."

Immediately informed of the report, the Poona police called on Badge's shop, to find that he was missing. They told Nagarvalla he was probably hiding "in the jungles around the city."

Unfortunately, the Poona police never bothered to verify the continued absence of the wanted arms peddler. A few hours after the first inquiry, Badge returned to the city from his expedition to Delhi. For the next ten days, while the police who had associated his name with Madan-lal's bomb less than forty-eight hours after its explosion were looking for him, the fake sadhu would be sitting in the back room of his arms shop knitting up the bulletproof vests of which he was so proud.

Given the progress of his own investigation, Nagarvalla was not impressed by the information handed to him by the Delhi police officers. Moreover, the two men, one of whom was a Sikh, had elected to stay in a hotel whose proprietor was known to the Bombay C.I.D. as a Sikh extremist agitator. That hardly seemed to Nagarvalla a judicious action on the part of officers assigned to investigate a conspiracy to kill Gandhi.

He decided that he didn't need their help. Brusquely, he ordered them to return to their hotel and stay out of sight

until he sent for them. The following day, January 23, he called them to his office, gave them the information that he had uncovered and ordered them to return to Delhi.

On their return, the senior of the two officers submitted a police-case diary covering their visit to Bombay. It contained an astonishing declaration. They had, he said, laid "special stress" on the "immediate apprehension" of the editor of the "Hindu Rashtriya or the Agrani newspaper." To substantiate the report, the officer appended to his diary a document containing that information, which he claimed to have shown to Nagarvalla. The Bombay policeman had never laid eyes on it. Years later, it would be conclusively established that the document was written after the Delhi policemen had left for Bombay, and appended by them to their diary following their return to the capital.

At midday on that January 23, the investigation into the conspiracy in India's capital took an enormous leap forward. Madanlal finally broke down and told his interrogators that he was ready to make a full statement. The Punjabi refugee would later claim that his decision was the result of torture, a charge the Delhi police would always deny.* It took his interrogators almost two full days to record and type his fifty-four-page confession. Madanlal finally reread it and signed it in his cell at nine-thirty on the evening of January 24. It was immediately rushed in triumph to Sanjevi's desk.

This time, Madanlal had not held back. Everything he knew was in his statement. Although he did not identify Badge by name, he described him as the owner of the Shastra Bhandar of Poona. He gave Karkare's name and the details of his political activities. Above all, this time the name Madanlal gave for Godse and Apte's paper was almost letter perfect, "Hindu Rashtriya." Most important, he gave its location, Poona. To identify its proprietor and

* In a series of interviews with the authors of this book in the spring and fall of 1973, Madanlal said that blocks of ice had been suspended from his testicles by a string to get him to talk. On another occasion, he said, sugared water was splashed on his face, and a horde of ants set upon it. Such charges are dismissed by the Delhi police as MadanlaTs fantasies. Their own records of his interrogation note, however, that on January 21 and 22, he was repeatedly warned that he was giving incorrect information and the interrogators were told to "instruct him accordingly."

editor was now for Sanjevi an act of almost juvenile simplicity. He had only to send an inspector to one of two places in Delhi, the Home Department and the Information and Broadcasting Department, to examine a slim volume called the Annual Statement of Newspapers, Bombay Province. One of its pages contained the following entry:

Hindu Rashtra. A Mahratti daily of Poona.

Editor: N. V. Godse. Proprietor: N. D. Apte. A

Savarkarite group newspaper.

The conclusive, corroborating evidence that the man they were looking for was "N. V. Godse" had been deposited in the laps of the Delhi police the day Madanlal had begun to make his confession. It was a pile of laundry left behind by the occupants of the Marina Hotel's Room 40 in their hasty departure January 20. The Spartan items of apparel in the bundle turned over to the police by the hotel's laundryman all contained one common laundry mark, the initials N.V.G.

From the moment he had taken on the case, a puzzling lack of zeal had characterized D. J. Sanjevi's handling of it. He was a vain, secretive man, and he had watched over the investigation with an obsessive jealousy that made him hostile to any attempt on the part of his subordinates to become involved in the case. He had rebuffed even the efforts of his senior aide to join the investigation.

Sanjevi now had in Madanlal's confession the material needed to readily establish the identity of at least five of the six men involved in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi. Yet no one from the Delhi police, no one from his office ever made the rudimentary gesture of consulting the list of Bombay province newspapers in which Godse's name was to be found. Nor did anyone question the Hindu Maha-sabha official whose text had been found in the Marina Hotel and who had known Apte and Godse for almost a decade. He did not communicate the information contained in Madanlal's confession by urgent courier to Nagarvalla in Bombay. Even worse, he made no effort to contact the Poona police by telephone to request the identity of the editor of the Hindu Rashtra. He was the author of a series of acts of such staggering incompetence, so close, finally,

to being criminal in nature, that a quarter of a century later, India would still be wondering how they could have happened.*

Nor was Sanjevi the only police officer whose behavior would never be satisfactorily explained. In Delhi for a conference that Sunday, January 25, was the Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Poona Police, U. H. Rana. His files in Poona contained the material that could instantly have identified Godse, Apte, Badge and Karkare. They contained photographs of Karkare and Apte that could have been given to the police at Birla House to prevent their returning to the Mahatma's prayer meetings. They contained all the reports that his own officers had been making regularly for months on their Hindu extremist activists.

Sanjevi summoned Rana to his office and for two hours went over MadanlaTs confession with him page by page. Almost every line of that text should have alerted the Poona police officer. It established the fact that at least two of the men who had tried to murder Gandhi came from his jurisdiction in Poona. It was inconceivable that the name Hindu Rashtra was not almost as familiar to him as that of the Times of India. The paper had been ordered closed the previous July because of its subversive tone, and it was he himself who had canceled in November the police surveillance of the paper's editor and administrator. Apte had even been named as having furnished the only bomb exploded in Poona the summer before.

* A long and patient effort to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and the failure of the police to arrest his killers after the explosion of Madanlal's bomb January 20, 1948, was undertaken in the late 1960's by an official Commission of Inquiry. The work of the Commission, headed by Justice J. L. Kapur, a retired judge of the Indian Supreme Court, was severely handicapped by the fact that many of the key police officers in tie investigation, including Sanjevi, were dead. The Commission uncovered the fraudulent entry made by the Delhi officers in their case diary on their return from Bombay, but the officer responsible was dead.

The Commission's six-volume report was submitted to the Indian government on September 30, 1969. It came to the unhappy conclusion that at no point was the investigation into the conspiracy to murder India's national hero conducted "with that earnestness or that alacrity which an attempt on the life of Mahatma Gandhi required or deserved."

His reaction, in the face of that accumulation of vital material concerning his jurisdiction, was and would always remain incomprehensible. He did not bother to telephone his subordinates in Poona with the information. He did not send back orders to begin an immediate investigation. Nor did he rush back by plane with the information to take charge himself. He did not like to fly. It made him sick. He traveled home by train, which took almost thirty-six hours to cross half the subcontinent on its route from Delhi to Bombay. He did not even take a fast train. He took, instead, a roundabout route that added six hours to his trip.

He would claim that his bizarre behavior had been inspired by the attitude of the man in charge of the investigation. If one overwhelming certainty determined Sanjevi's actions, it was his belief that the killers would never come back. He dismissed them as a bunch of crackpots. His was the innate conviction that after the lamentable fiasco of January 20, they would never raise the courage to strike again. He was wrong. Time was running out on Sanjevi and the seventy-eight-year-old leader who had so narrowly escaped death at Birla House five days before. What Sanjevi's investigation needed, above all else, was the element it most conspicuously lacked, a sense of urgency.

One emotion motivated the leader of the four men squatting in the darkness just outside the reach of the pale shafts of light falling from the last lamppost along the platform of the little railroad station of Thana, a suburb of Bombay. It was a sense of urgency. What a high police officer in Delhi had dismissed as utterly improbable was going to happen. The killers were coming back. This time their deed would not be the work of a disorganized gang. It would follow the classic pattern of political assassination, one man, one weapon; one zealous fanatic prepared to sacrifice his life to commit murder.