How Our Leaders Failed to Save Gandhi from Godse’s Bullets (2022)

‘My late mother Kamalamma Madikera Sharada Prasad was part of the prosecution team in the Mahatma Gandhi murder trial before Justice Atma Charan in Red Fort in 1948, a role for which she had been specifically handpicked by Oscar Henry Brown, chief presidency magistrate of Mumbai. A postgraduate in psychology, she was a freedom fighter who was arrested in the 1942 Quit India Movement. She had worked for a leading law firm, in the Home Department of the government of Bombay, as well as other government departments...’

Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad

It is quite likely that the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi could have been prevented if clues in Mumbai, Pune, Gwalior, and Ahmednagar were investigated diligently. However, overwhelming political and strategic considerations ensured that the role of the Hindu Mahasabha was not investigated closely.

Even after the assassination, the investigation was deliberately weakened under instructions from deputy prime minister and home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to ensure that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mahasabha leaders in Gwalior got away scot free. The Italian Beretta revolver which Nathuram Godse used to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi belonged to the Military Secretary to the Maharaja of Gwalior.

Of the five people who dispatched the revolver to Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, Jagadish Prasad Goyal, the biggest weapons dealer in Gwalior, was not named in the charge sheet at all.

The leader of the chain, Dr Dattatreya Sadashiv Parchure, head of the Hindu Mahasabha in Gwalior state, and physician to the Scindia royal family, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the trial court, but was acquitted on technicalities by the High Court of Punjab in Shimla.

The three other persons, who were key leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha in Gwalior, were listed as untraceable in the charge sheet filed in the trial court of Justice Atma Charan, although they were openly moving around in Gwalior.

My late mother Kamalamma Madikera Sharada Prasad was part of the prosecution team in the Mahatma Gandhi murder trial before Justice Atma Charan in Red Fort in 1948, a role for which she had been specifically handpicked by Oscar Henry Brown, chief presidency magistrate of Mumbai. A postgraduate in psychology, she was a freedom fighter who was arrested in the 1942 Quit India Movement. She had worked for a leading law firm, in the Home Department of the government of Bombay, as well as other government departments.

Her assigned task was to elicit evidence from one of the accused Shankar Kistayya, servant of Digambar Ramachandra Badge. Badge, a weapons dealer in Pune and a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, had turned approver in return for a pardon.

Brown, a Scotsman who stayed on in India after independence, thought that with her post graduate degree in psychology and with her knowledge of her mother tongue Telugu, my mother would be able to elicit evidence from Shankar Kistayya, who was illiterate and spoke only rustic Telugu, and a bit of Marathi.

Flawed Priorities

According to my mother, there were numerous national interest considerations for Sardar Patel to ensure that the investigation did not probe the involvement of the Hindu Mahasabha too closely. First, the Mahasabha was conducting a proxy war against the Nizam of Hyderabad’s kingdom, where fanatical Muslim Razakars were butchering Hindus.

In 1938 itself, five Mahasabha leaders, including Nature Godse and the grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, GV Ketkar, had launched the Bhaganagar Movement against the Nizam, in close cooperation with the Hyderabad branch of the Congress party, as well as the Arya Samaj. The Hyderabad Congress agitation against the Nizam was led by Swami Ramananda Teertha, aided by his lieutenants NV Gadgil, PV Narasimha Rao, SB Chavan, and Veerendra Patil.

After the Congress cadres were massacred by the Muslim Razakars, the leadership of the anti-Nizam agitation devolved to the Mahasabha, led by Nathuram Godse, GV Ketkar, GM Nalavade, VB Davre, SL Karandikar, and PM Bapat….

https://openthemagazine.com/columns/leaders-failed-save-gandhi-godses-bullets

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Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha

V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder

Remembering Mahatma Gandhi: उड जायेगा हंस अकेला // Abide with me: Gandhiji’s favourite hymn

How Mahatma’s ashes travelled: In Pune lingers traces of Gandhi family’s 1948 decision to engage a nation in mourning

Delhi Police Archive on RSS activity in October-December 1947

The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS

Sarojini Naidu’s broadcast February 1, 1948: My Father, Do Not Rest / T. N. Madan: Secret of Gandhi’s Greatness / Gopalkrishna Gandhi: We need to do more than lament the tragedy

Remembering Mahatma Gandhi: उड जायेगा हंस अकेला // Abide with me: Gandhiji’s favourite hymn

Anil Nauriya: Gandhi on secular law and state (2003)

RIP Bhiku Daji Bhilare: the man who saved Gandhiji’s life in 1944