Mahatma Gandhi

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry, deleting portions of the kind nor mally not used in encyclopaedia entries. Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings; and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

Mahatma Gandhi

Murder of the Mahatma: The Mumbai trail

Let’s Kill Gandhi

Tushar Gandhi

Rupa &Co

Dawn

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi was shot in Delhi. But the plot to assassinate him was hatched here, in what was then called the Bombay Province. It followed, therefore, that the investigation of the murder was placed under the direct charge of the Bombay deputy commissioner of police, Special Branch, J D Nagarwala.

Jimmy Nagarwala was a dashing Parsi officer whom the eminent writer Manohar Malgonkar described in his book The Men Who Killed Gandhi as having a film star’s cut of features.

He was chosen as Special Investigation Officer not only for his investigative skills but also because, fortuitously, he was neither Hindu nor Muslim and therefore had the crucial trump card of communal neutrality. After all, the Mahatma’s killing was as much an act of religious hate as a political one.

But to wind back to the plot itself. It was not as if Nathuram Godse had broken from the crowd in a sudden fit of impulse and fired three bullets into Gandhiji.

The radio announcements, ‘A madman has shot the Mahatma’ gave the erroneous impression of an extempore, wildcard attack, and Godse too, in his statement to the police, claimed that he had acted alone. This was of course proved to be completely untrue.

As it soon emerged, the young Nathuram, who shot, from a crouch of obeisance an old man hurrying to prayer, was no more and no less than the human trigger: behind the barrel of that 9mm Beretta lay months of planning and logistics, and a supporting cast of players.

Bombay, as it turned out, was the city in which three of the conspirators were apprehended; it was also the city in which key links in the assassination plan had been forged, and where the weapon was purchased.

A number of buildings in which the conspirators stayed before and after the murder, where they were arrested, and which were associated with the trial in some way, still stand.

In Tushar Gandhi’s provocatively titled new book Let’s Kill Gandhi (Rupa & Co), which is being launched at the Delhi Habitat Centre on Tuesday, there is detailed information on the Mumbai murder trail.

Tushar Gandhi, with the help of local history scholar Sharada Dwivedi tracked some of the buildings whose names have changed. All the facts in the book are mentioned in police records.

On the anniversary of Gandhi’s death, we go back in time and through this building trail—of hotels, lodges, offices, and even a temple—trace the footsteps of Nathuram Godse and the others from Marine Drive to Parel to Crawford Market and Carnac Road. The information here is from the book.