Gandhi & Churchill (103 page)

Since his meeting with Gandhi decades earlier Savarkar had continued his course as the leading exponent of terror and violence in the nationalist cause. The night they met in 1909 he had been a hunted man, moving from house to house to evade the London police. After his arrest he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life in the Andaman Islands for his role in the Curzon-Wyllie murder. He had still been there when Gandhi launched his Noncooperation campaign and George Lloyd locked the Mahatma up in the Yeravda jail.

Then in 1924 the new Labour-led government had come in, hoping to make bygones be bygones. It released Savarkar as well as Gandhi. Five years later, when Godse met him, Savarkar still had his prison pallor and was deeply bitter. If anything, his hatred of Gandhi had intensified. He had been outraged by Gandhi’s appeal for Muslim help and by his refusal to accept Hindu exclusivism as the basis of nationhood. To Savarkar’s mind, nonviolence was the philosophy of cowardice and an invitation to tyranny. “Because every evil doer has his avenger,” he once averred, “there is still some hope in the heart of the world that injustice cannot last.”
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Now in the wake of partition, he was determined that Durga would have her final say.

Many Hindus agreed with him. The elite Mahasabha boasted one million members, and its sympathizers numbered many more. The organization was a powerhouse in Congress politics, while the paramilitary RSS had been a major player in the recent violence. To many high-caste Hindus, Gandhi’s evangelical version of their religion seemed vulgar and weak-willed.
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They believed Indian independence should mean a reassertion of Hindu power, after centuries of British but also Mughal imperial domination. Gandhi’s appeal for Hindu-Muslim unity and for an end to untouchability seemed baffling, almost blasphemous.

This militant, even militaristic streak in Hindu culture was embedded in India’s great epics and its bloodstained history. An educated elite among Chitpavans and Bengalis had nurtured it and kept it alive. It had inspired B. G. Tilak at the beginning of the century and S.C. Bose in the middle. In 1947 it was embodied in the gun-toting bravos of the RSS and Savarkar’s own Hindu Rastra Dal, a secret society of Chitpavan Brahmins who were committed to achieving independence through terror. Their leader Savarkar and members like Godse called Gandhi “the father of Pakistan”—an unforgivable sin. Jinnah and the Muslims may have feared and distrusted Gandhi, but Savarkar and his followers truly despised him.

Many threats had been made against Gandhi’s life before. In 1934 a bomb was thrown at him. RSS militiamen chanted “Death to Gandhi” on a regular basis; many bystanders found it alarming, but few took it seriously. After all, when Gandhi arrived in Delhi, the crowds that at first had screamed
“Gandhi mordabad!”
then fell weeping at his feet. Godse and Apte realized that if Gandhi was to be punished for his betrayal of his faith, they would have to do it themselves. They discussed their plans in detail with Savarkar. The old man’s last words to Dhingra in 1909, as he had handed him his revolver, had been: “Don’t show me your face if you fail this time.” To Apte and Godse, he said only, “Be successful and come back.”

The pair headed downstairs. Later in the taxi they told Badge, “Gandhi’s hundred years are over.” Badge owned a store that sold guns, as well as steel tiger’s claws and knives—everything they would need. If Gandhi survived his fast, they would strike.
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Gandhi did survive. On the eighteenth, after the heads of the various faiths and communities signed a statement pledging to “once again live in Delhi like brothers in perfect amity,” Gandhi consented to break the fast in his usual way, with a glass of orange juice. The girls sang his favorite hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” Gandhi’s weight had fallen to just under 107 pounds. The next day he was so frail he could not get out of bed, but he still spoke over the radio about his last remaining hope for India: reconciliation.

“I cannot forecast the future,” he said, “but God has endowed me with intellect and a sincere heart…If for one reason or another, we fail to maintain friendly relations with one another, with not only the Moslems of India but the Moslems of Pakistan and the whole world, we should know—and I have no doubt—that India will cease to be ours…We shall become slaves, Pakistan will go into slavery, the Union [of India] will go into slavery, and we shall lose our hard-won freedom.”
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Gandhi’s dream of satyagraha and nonviolence was over. “Today I am the only one left who has faith in ahimsa,” he remarked. “I mistook the non-violence of the weak—which I now see is a misnomer and contradiction in terms—for true non-violence.”
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Moreover the clash over Kashmir and the massacres still taking place across India seemed to mark the doom of his other great dream: of Indian Swaraj, self-rule in the moral sense. Would Indians be governed by their love of truth, or would they be slaves to their passion for power and revenge? Gandhi wanted the former; but he made it clear he had no desire to remain alive, if it turned out to be the latter. “If India has no more use for nonviolence,” he told Pyarelal, “can she have any for me?”

The morning of the twentieth dawned bright and clear. Although Gandhi was still weak, he insisted on attending his daily prayer meeting in the Birla House garden, with his grandniece Manubehn as always by his side. About three hundred people gathered to hear him, while All-India Radio set up microphones to broadcast his message. As Gandhi began speaking in a low croaking voice, there was a sudden explosion.

People turned startled toward the back of the garden. A small section of the wall had been blown out by a slab of guncotton. Police were wrestling a young man to the ground while four others, unnoticed by the crowd, fled. Manubehn had been terrified by the blast, but Gandhi was unshaken. “Why are you frightened?” he asked her as she threw herself at his feet. “What would you do if they really tried to shoot at you and me?” He resumed the prayer meeting as if nothing had happened.
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The police, however, knew better. After questioning the arrested man, a Punjabi, they realized that there was a conspiracy afoot to kill Gandhi. As they began issuing bulletins, the other would-be killers, including Godse and Apte, scattered. News of the attack reached a teacher of some of the plotters, Dr. Jain, who frantically alerted police. However, the bureaucratic wheels turned as slowly in the Union of India as they had under the Raj, especially when the police included in their ranks members of RSS.
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No other arrests were made. After the attack on the twentieth, Patel ordered more guards to be put around Gandhi, but otherwise he remained unconcerned. Still, evidence was mounting that at least fifty people knew of the plot and that the main perpetrators, Apte and Godse, were still on the loose.

As for Gandhi, “it is Rama who protects me,” he said. “I become more and more convinced everything else is futile.” He refused to have any bodyguards. He sensed that the day he had been preparing for all his life was coming. Two days later he went for a walk with Manubehn and told her, “The explosion was brought about by Him,” meaning God. “I wish I might face the assassin’s bullets while lying in your lap and repeating the name of Rama with a smile on my face.”

He turned to her tenderly. “But whether the world says it or not—for the world has a double face—I tell you that you should regard me as your true mother. I am a true Mahatma.”
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It was the one time Gandhi acknowledged his formal title and revealed how he preferred to die.

Eight days later he got his wish.

Under the heat of the police search, the number of conspirators still at large had shriveled down to three. Apte and Godse had fled to Bombay in hopes of getting a revolver—which, with the help of an elderly member of the Mahasabha, they managed to do. Then they managed to catch a plane back to Delhi, under assumed names, and met the third remaining member, Vishnu Karkare. At noon on January 29 the trio gathered at the Birla Temple to pray and plot under the plaque that read, “He who is known as Vishnu the Preserver is verily Rudra the Destroyer, and He who is Rudra is Brahma the Creator.”
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Gandhi began the next day as he always did, rising at 3:30 a.m. He woke up Manubehn in his usual way, by tweaking her ear. That morning he was querulous and fussy. During his fast he had developed a deep disturbing cough, which grew worse in the evenings. Manubehn offered to prepare him some clove lozenges. “Who knows what is going to happen before nightfall or whether I shall be alive? If at night I am still alive, you can easily prepare them.”
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Gandhi was unhappy too because he had to face the usual stream of visitors, thirty on this day alone. One wanted to discuss opening of a nursing home and orphanage; one to discuss publishing the late Mahadev Desai’s diary; another had come all the way from Ceylon to get an autograph (the last Gandhi ever wrote). A male French photographer came, and an American female one, Margaret Bourke-White. She had met and photographed Gandhi before. This time she asked him how he would deal with an atomic bomb attack.

“Ah,” he said with a smile. “How shall I answer.” He gave two or three turns of his charkha and then said enigmatically, “I would meet it with
prayerful action
.”

This prompted a discussion of the postwar world. With considerable prescience, Gandhi said, “It is a question now whether the victors are really victorious or victims.” Then in a slow, low voice he went on: “Because the world is not at peace. It is still more dreadful.”
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At four o’clock his most important visitor arrived: Patel, now deputy prime minister, who wanted to discuss his growing rivalry with Nehru and his fear that it would split the government. Gandhi listened politely to his oldest and closest disciple but with disappointment in his heart. This was what he had feared most about politics: that it inevitably boiled down to power and the clash of personalities. “Everyone who goes into politics gets contaminated,” he had declared in December. “Let us keep out of it altogether.”
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Now it was too late. As they talked, Gandhi worked at his charkha and then ate soup, goat’s milk, and three oranges until Patel’s daughter told him he was late for the prayer meeting.

Patel left, and Gandhi strolled into the garden. The grandnieces Manubehn and Abhabehn, his “walking sticks,” stood on either side. Manubehn carried his notebook, spectacle case, and bead bracelet for saying his prayers. It was a crisp and clear evening. The crowd parted to let him pass, and Gandhi bowed with his hands folded in
namaskar
fashion and smiled.

Suddenly a man in a bright green pullover darted forward, nearly knocking Manubehn to the ground. She thought he was going to touch Gandhi’s feet, as many people did in the moment of
darshan,
and started to scold him. Instead, he pulled out a revolver and fired three quick shots. Nathuram Godse would have fired more if Indian Air Force Sergeant Devraj Singh hadn’t been standing nearby and snatched the gun from him.

One of Godse’s bullets went into Gandhi’s stomach, the two others into his chest. As Gandhi fell, his hands still folded, he was already dying. Manubehn fell sobbing and gathered him in her lap.
“Hai Rama! Hai Rama!”
They were Gandhi’s last words. He died as he had wished, with his two young girls at his side.

The news electrified India. Nirad Chaudhuri was sitting at his typewriter when his eldest son burst in and cried: “They have killed Gandhi!” Chaudhuri did not have to ask who “they” were. He had many acquaintances who considered Gandhi a disaster for the nationalist cause, including the now-dead Subhas Bose and his brother Sarat. Chaudhuri knew also that “although the people of India venerated Gandhi for his moral role, they followed him only in so far as he stood for their hatred of British rule.” Even his closest Congress followers had heeded “his direction and advice only when that suited them, and totally disregarded them otherwise.”
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Those followers had joined elections for India’s legislature in 1924, when Gandhi had told them not to. They had forced him to give way on holding office under the new constitution in 1937. Finally they had ignored his plea to support the war effort in 1939. Even on partition, he had fought against it, then been forced to surrender. His great campaigns to foist the British out nonviolently, from the Noncooperation campaign of 1920–21 to Quit India in 1942, had been failures. It was the trial of Bose’s INA officers, not the Salt March, that broke the back of British rule. It was fear of more violence, not respect for nonviolence, that finally made them leave.

Even so, Chaudhuri had to recognize, “In India the masses make a god of a great man collectively and unconsciously, and succeed in giving to his memory a permanence…There will be no time in the future history of the Hindus in which Mahatma Gandhi will not be remembered in this way. He
has
taken his place in our Pantheon.”
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The man who had been the intermediary between Gandhi and Churchill in the 1930s, G. D. Birla, was in Pilani and heard the news from college students who were listening to the BBC. Gandhi had been staying at Birla’s home for nearly four months. “I immediately felt like dashing to Delhi by car,” he recalled, but friends persuaded him to stay until morning. That night he had a dream in which Gandhiji appeared to him and said, “Don’t worry about me…I am going to dance with joy as my mission is now over.” The next day Birla returned to his home and gazed on the dead face of the man who had been his mentor for thirty-two years: “Alas, we would now be missing that face aglow with human warmth and kindliness.”
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