Who Killed Gandhi: The Fast, the Bomb, the Ten Lost Days and the Shots at Birla House

Birla House, New Delhi, Tuesday 20 January 1948. A frail old man sits on a low wooden platform in the garden of a businessman’s mansion, talking to a few hundred people about peace. He is 78, and two days earlier he ended a fast that nearly killed him.

Behind him, against the back wall, something explodes. Smoke rises. People scramble.

Mahatma Gandhi barely looks round. His secretary Pyarelal later told an inquiry that Gandhi at first took it for army practice nearby. Only afterwards did he say aloud what it was: a plot to kill him.

The police caught one man at the spot, a 20-year-old refugee from West Punjab called Madanlal Pahwa. Gandhi asked them not to harass him, calling him a misguided youth who should be won over with persuasion and affection.

Madanlal talked. He told the police there were others. He spoke of a man from Ahmednagar and of the editor of a Marathi paper in Poona. The others had fled.

Ten days later one of them came back with a pistol. This is the story of those ten days, the men who planned the murder, the trial and the hangings, and a fight over blame that India is still having.

Gandhi had meant to go to Punjab. He reached Delhi from Calcutta on 9 September 1947, and Sardar Patel, the Home Minister, told him what was happening in the capital itself. He stayed.

Delhi that winter was a city of the dispossessed. Hindu and Sikh families who had fled the massacres in West Punjab slept in camps, on pavements and in the homes and mosques that Delhi’s Muslims had abandoned or been driven from. Muslims who stayed were crowded into a few quarters, afraid to step out. Our long read on the Partition of Punjab tells how that exodus began.

Every evening at five, Gandhi held a prayer meeting in the Birla House garden, open to anyone who walked in. Hindu, Muslim and Christian prayers were read. Some in the crowd objected loudly to the verses from the Quran.

His message never changed: Muslims who chose India must be safe in India, and seized mosques must be returned. To refugees who had lost everything, it sounded like taking the other side.

On 12 January 1948, at his prayer meeting, Gandhi announced that he would begin a fast the next day, without a set end. He meant it, he said, to quicken conscience, not deaden it. He would end it only when peace returned to Delhi.

He was 78 and had fasted many times, but within days his doctors were alarmed. Crowds gathered outside Birla House. Some prayed. Some, according to evidence before the later Kapur Commission, shouted a different slogan at Hindu Mahasabha meetings that month: marta hai to marne do, if he is dying, let him die.

On 18 January more than a hundred representatives of Delhi’s communities came to his bedside with a signed pledge. Rajendra Prasad led them. The signatories included the Hindu Mahasabha, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind, and Pakistan’s High Commissioner, Zahid Hussain, was in the room. They promised that the annual Urs at the shrine of Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki in Mehrauli would be held as before, that Muslims could move freely in Subzi Mandi, Karol Bagh and Paharganj, that occupied mosques would be returned and that Muslims who had fled could come home.

Gandhi broke his fast with a glass of orange juice.

Into all this fell a sum of money that is still argued over on Indian social media every January.

When British India was divided, its cash had to be split. On 8 December 1947 India and Pakistan agreed that Pakistan’s share of the cash balances was 75 crore rupees. Twenty crore had already been paid. Then tribal fighters backed by Pakistan’s army poured into Kashmir, Indian troops were fighting them, and India decided to hold back the last 55 crore. Patel defended the decision in public.

The Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten, told Gandhi that withholding money India had agreed to pay was wrong, and Gandhi agreed. On 15 January, two days into the fast, the government announced it would implement the cash agreement immediately. Its statement spoke of sharing the world-wide anxiety over the fast.

So did Gandhi fast to make India pay Pakistan? Not in his own words: his announcement and the pledge that ended the fast are about peace in Delhi. But the money was paid because of the fast, and his killers saw it that way.

Two hundred kilometres from Bombay, in Poona, two men ran a small Marathi daily. Nathuram Godse, 37, was its editor. Narayan Apte, a science graduate and former schoolteacher who had served in the Royal Indian Air Force during the war, was its manager. Started in 1944 as Agrani, it was renamed Hindu Rashtra to escape closure. Savarkar, the founder of the idea of Hindutva and their political hero, had kept it alive with donations.

Godse had been in the RSS in the 1930s, and in the Hindu Mahasabha. In 1942 he formed a small group of his own, the Hindu Rashtra Dal. To these men, Partition was Gandhi’s fault, and his concern for India’s Muslims was betrayal.

They had met Gandhi before. In July 1944 a group of Poona youths heckled him at Panchgani; The Times of India named their spokesman as N.D. Apte. Gandhi’s followers later said Godse rushed at him with a dagger; the Kapur Commission found only the report of heckling.

Others joined: Vishnu Karkare, an orphan who ran a guest house in Ahmednagar; Digambar Badge, a Poona arms dealer, and his servant Shankar Kistayya; and Gopal Godse, Nathuram’s brother.

And Madanlal Pahwa. Born in 1927 at Pakpattan, in Montgomery district of West Punjab, now Pakistan, he crossed the new border in a refugee caravan in 1947 and found his family again at Ferozepur. In interviews decades later with the scholar Ashis Nandy’s team, he said he had attacked Muslims in Gwalior and Bombay before Karkare took him up in Ahmednagar. Partition made him; the plot used him.

On 13 January, the day the fast began, the plotters began to move. By 20 January Godse, Apte, Karkare, Badge, Kistayya, Gopal Godse and Madanlal were all in Delhi. The plan was a blast at the back wall to cause panic, then grenades and pistol shots at the old man on the platform.

It fell apart. Madanlal lit the guncotton slab. Badge, it was later said, lost his nerve, and nobody threw a grenade or fired a shot. Everyone else fled. Madanlal was caught.

This is the hardest part of the story, and it is all in the official record.

That night, Madanlal told the Delhi police there was a gang, that one man was from Ahmednagar, and that another was the editor of a Poona paper, Agrani or Hindu Rashtra. There was only one such editor: Nathuram Godse.

On 21 January, in Bombay, a Hindi professor named Jagdish Chandra Jain went to the Premier, B.G. Kher, and the Home Minister, Morarji Desai. Madanlal had confided the plan to him weeks earlier and Jain had told no one in authority. Now he did. The Kapur Commission found Desai passed it on with ‘commendable promptitude’ to Deputy Commissioner J.D. Nagarvala, who put a watch on Savarkar’s house that night.

The watch caught nobody. Godse and Apte were in Bombay and Poona for days. Then they went north again, collected a Beretta pistol in Gwalior and were in Delhi by 29 January.

In Delhi the police added men at Birla House and asked to search everyone entering the prayer meetings. Gandhi would not allow it. The police said that, without searches, they could not spot one man with a small pistol in a crowd. The Kapur Commission did not accept that excuse.

Either it was sheer inefficiency or lack of will.Pyarelal, Gandhi’s secretary, to the Kapur Commission, on the police failure to trace Madanlal’s associates

The commission listed three great failures of the Delhi police: no unobtrusive protection for Gandhi, no Bombay officers who knew the plotters by sight posted as spotters, and no effort to identify the proprietor of Hindu Rashtra and set the Poona police on his trail. It called the watch on Savarkar’s house ‘most inefficient’ and agreed with a senior official, R.N. Banerjee, that the police had been guilty of lethargy and inefficiency.

On Friday 30 January Gandhi spent the late afternoon in a long talk with Sardar Patel, part of his effort to keep Patel and Prime Minister Nehru working together. It made him late for prayer. He hated that.

He came out leaning on his grandnieces, Abha and Manu. Manu later recorded him scolding the two girls: they were his timekeepers.

I do not like being late for the prayer meeting.Gandhi, 30 January 1948, as recorded by Manu Gandhi

As he walked up the few steps into the prayer ground, a man in a khaki jacket pushed forward through the crowd. Manu thought he wanted to touch Gandhi’s feet and told him they were late; by her account he pushed her aside. Then Nathuram Godse fired three shots at point-blank range, into Gandhi’s chest and stomach. Manu’s watch said 5.17.

Gandhi fell. Herbert Reiner, a young American vice-consul, grabbed the gunman by the shoulders; men of the Royal Indian Air Force and the police took the pistol from him. Godse did not try to run. Apte and Karkare, who had been in the crowd, slipped away.

Gandhi was carried inside Birla House and was dead within the half-hour. Most eyewitnesses say his last words were ‘He Ram’, O God.

That night Nehru went on the radio.

The light has gone out of our lives.Jawaharlal Nehru, radio broadcast, 30 January 1948

Across India, people waited in dread to hear who the killer was. Had he been a Muslim, many feared, the killing of 1947 would have started again. The news that he was a Hindu from Maharashtra spared India that.

The next day huge crowds followed his body to Raj Ghat on the Yamuna for the cremation.

Then came another kind of revenge, the kind this story usually leaves out. Godse was a Chitpavan Brahmin from Maharashtra, and in Poona, Satara, Sangli and other towns, mobs attacked Brahmin families who had nothing to do with him, looting and burning their homes. Morarji Desai later recorded that Brahmins were attacked and their property destroyed in several places. People were killed; nobody has an agreed count. In Bombay a crowd tried to set fire to Savarkar’s house until police arrived.

On 4 February the government banned the RSS. Savarkar was arrested in Bombay. Apte and Karkare were picked up there in mid-February.

The trial was held in a special court set up inside the Red Fort, Delhi, before Judge Atma Charan. The charge sheet was filed on 27 May 1948. Nine men stood in the dock; three more, Gangadhar Dandavate, Gangadhar Jadhav and Suryadeo Sharma, were declared absconders and never tried.

On 21 June Digambar Badge was pardoned and turned approver. His evidence, of meetings, weapons and a visit with Godse and Apte to Savarkar’s house in Bombay, became the spine of the prosecution. The prosecution called 149 witnesses.

On 8 November 1948 Godse read out a statement of 150 paragraphs. He said he alone had decided on the killing. He blamed Gandhi for Partition and for what he called appeasement of Muslims, and he named the fast as the final provocation.

the accumulating provocation of 32 years culminating in his last pro-Muslim fastNathuram Godse, statement to the Special Court, 8 November 1948

The statement later circulated widely in books, including one brought out by his brother Gopal, and in 2017 the Central Information Commission ordered the National Archives to put it online.

Judgment came on 10 February 1949. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death. Karkare, Madanlal, Gopal Godse, Kistayya and Parchure were convicted and given life terms. Savarkar was acquitted. The case against him rested on Badge alone, and the judge held it would be unsafe to convict on an approver’s word without independent corroboration.

The appeal went to the East Punjab High Court, which after Partition had moved from Lahore to Peterhoff, an old viceregal lodge in Simla. Three Punjab judges heard it from 2 May 1949: A.N. Bhandari, Achhru Ram and G.D. Khosla.

Nathuram Godse did not appeal against his death sentence. He appealed only against the conspiracy verdict, insisting he had acted alone, and argued his case in person.

Justice Khosla later wrote that the audience in court was visibly moved, with women in tears. Had they been the jury, he thought, they would have found Godse not guilty by an overwhelming majority. It was his comment on the power of the speech, not on the evidence. Khosla himself voted to uphold the conviction.

On 21 June 1949 the court upheld the convictions of Nathuram Godse, Apte, Karkare, Madanlal and Gopal Godse. It acquitted Parchure, whose retracted confession it would not trust, and Kistayya, against whom it found too little on the conspiracy. Two of the judges recommended leniency for the youngest, Gopal Godse and Madanlal, because of their age. The Privy Council in London refused leave to appeal.

Gandhi had preached all his life against killing. Two of his sons held to it.

Manilal Gandhi and Ramdas Gandhi asked for the death sentences on Godse and Apte to be commuted. Ramdas also wanted to meet Godse. Nehru wrote to him in June 1949 advising against the visit, saying he did not think it could serve any useful purpose. The pleas for mercy were turned down by Nehru, Patel and the Governor-General, C. Rajagopalachari.

Godse, for his part, had never appealed against his own death sentence. The family’s view has lasted: in 2015 Gandhi’s grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi, asking mercy for another condemned man, said his opposition to the death penalty was a conviction against reprisal punishment, not a matter of any one case.

On the morning of 15 November 1949, at Ambala Central Jail in East Punjab, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were led to the gallows. Godse called out ‘Akhand Bharat’, undivided India. Apte answered ‘Amar rahe’, may it live forever. They were hanged together.

Godse had asked that his ashes be kept until they could be scattered in the Indus in a reunited India. In 2015 his family in Pune told Business Standard it still kept the urn.

On 4 February 1948 the government banned the RSS, to root out, it said, the forces of hate and violence at work in the country. Its chief, M.S. Golwalkar, was arrested, and thousands of members were jailed.

Nehru suspected the RSS. Patel, who ran the investigation, wrote to him on 27 February 1948 that it was not involved in the murder itself.

a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under SavarkarSardar Patel to Nehru, 27 February 1948, on who hatched the conspiracy

But Patel did not let the RSS off. In July 1948 he wrote to Syama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha that the RSS and the Mahasabha had created an atmosphere in which such a tragedy became possible. In September he wrote to Golwalkar that RSS speeches were full of communal poison, that the country had lost Gandhi as a result, and that RSS men had distributed sweets after his death.

In December 1948 the RSS launched a satyagraha against the ban. In 1949 Golwalkar accepted a written constitution promising loyalty to the Constitution and the flag, with no place for people who believed in violent or secret methods. The ban was lifted on 11 July 1949.

Whether Nathuram Godse ever really left the RSS is still argued over. In 1994 his brother Gopal told Frontline that all the Godse brothers had been in it and that Nathuram’s denial in court was to protect the organisation, which was in deep trouble.

he did not leave the RSSGopal Godse on his brother, <i>Frontline</i>, January 1994

The journalist Dhirendra K. Jha has argued from RSS records that Godse stayed linked to it; the RSS has always said he left. In August 2026, in a Pune court, Savarkar’s grandnephew Satyaki Savarkar, a grandson of Gopal Godse, said under cross-examination that both brothers were active RSS members. An RSS worker’s defamation case against Rahul Gandhi over a 2014 speech blaming the RSS for the murder was still being heard in Bhiwandi as we wrote.

In October 1964 Gopal Godse, Karkare and Madanlal walked free. At a celebration for them in Pune on 12 November, G.V. Ketkar, a grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, said Nathuram had told him months ahead of his plan to kill Gandhi. Parliament erupted.

After a first inquiry under G.S. Pathak, a retired Supreme Court judge, Jivanlal Kapur, took over on 21 November 1966. He heard 101 witnesses, Morarji Desai and Nagarvala among them, and reported on 30 September 1969.

Kapur found that Ketkar had known of the danger in advance. He confirmed the police failures. And he heard what the trial court never did: statements by Savarkar’s bodyguard, Appa Kasar, and secretary, Gajanan Damle, recorded in March 1948 and never produced at trial, about visits by Godse and Apte to Savarkar in January. Taken together, he wrote, the facts pointed only to a conspiracy to murder ‘by Savarkar and his group’.

Savarkar had died in 1966 and could not answer. In 2018 the Supreme Court noted this was a commission’s observation and could not overturn his acquittal. In law Savarkar is innocent. In history the question is open.

On the RSS, Kapur wrote that it was anti-Gandhian in ideology, but that its anti-Gandhism did not seem to go to the extent of personally harming Mahatma Gandhi. He recorded the view of R.N. Banerjee, the Home Secretary in 1948, that the RSS as such were not responsible for the murder. It was the Hindu Rashtra Dal circle of Savarkar’s followers, he found, from whom the conspirators came.

For decades few in India said Godse’s name without shame. That has changed.

The Hindu Mahasabha has marked 30 January as ‘Shaurya Divas’, a day of valour. In 2017 it installed a bust of Godse in a ‘temple’ in its Gwalior office, which the authorities had removed. On 30 January 2019 a Mahasabha leader, Pooja Shakun Pandey, was filmed in Aligarh firing an air pistol at an effigy of Gandhi before it was burned; she and her husband were arrested within a week. In January 2021 a ‘Godse study centre’ in Gwalior was shut by the district administration within days of opening.

In May 2019 Pragya Singh Thakur, the BJP’s candidate in Bhopal and then an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case (a special court acquitted her in July 2025), called Godse a patriot. Under pressure from her party she apologised. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he would never forgive her in his heart. She won, made a similar remark in the Lok Sabha that November and apologised again.

Godse’s admirers call him a patriot who gave his life for an undivided India. His critics, the BJP’s own leaders among them, see nothing patriotic in shooting an old man at prayer.

On publishing Godse’s words, India has chosen openness. In 2017 the Information Commissioner, M. Sridhar Acharyulu, ordered the statement put online.

we cannot refuse disclosure or circulation of his opinionInformation Commissioner M. Sridhar Acharyulu, 2017

The record is clear on what happened. A group of men from one political world, the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar’s circle, planned for weeks to kill a 78-year-old man. When their first attempt failed, the police were handed a name, a town and a newspaper, and still did not stop them. That is a failure of the state, and the Kapur Commission said so.

The record is also clear that Gandhi chose his risks. He refused searches at his prayers. He fasted for Delhi’s Muslims in a city full of Hindu and Sikh refugees who had lost everything, and he did it knowing how that looked to them. Their grief was real. So was the courage of a man who would not trade one community’s safety for another’s anger.

What is not settled is how far the blame travels beyond the men in the dock: to Savarkar, acquitted; to the RSS, banned and then allowed back; to the politics of hate Patel described. Weigh the evidence yourself.

One thing should not be in doubt. Gandhi’s own sons asked that his killers be allowed to live. Whatever one thinks of Gandhi, there is nothing brave in shooting an unarmed old man on his way to prayer.