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| Godse plot to kill Gandhi was known |
October 26, 2015, NewsCrunch
An alert administration could have probably saved Gandhi from his assassin Godse's bullets.
There had been five earlier attempts on Gandhi's life. One of them by Godse himself, whose planned knife attack, had been thwarted when a policeman, who was trying to control the crowd, had pushed him away.
Ten days before Gandhi's death, Godse's friends had died while detonating a bomb. Godse's Mumbai host and partner-in-crime Narayan Apte was under constant surveillance by the intelligence agencies which knew that both had left for Delhi.
The Sunday Guardian states, quoting ICS officer Astad Dinshaw Gorwala, that the British knew about Godse's plan to kill Gandhi, but did nothing to stop it.
It has been noted elsewhere that despite Independence, the administration in the early years remained in the hands of the British-appointed officers, who were in the effective control of Lord Mountbatten India’s Governor-General.
A British police officer told Gorwala that instructions had come from the highest levels of British authorities asking police to ignore the developing plot. The British also reportedly tried to cover up that the assassins had been under surveillance.
Gorwala himself offered two theories on why the Britsh sat on the threat to Gandhi. One, they failed to take it seriously and take effective measures to protect Gandhi. Two, they made a cold-blooded calculation and allowed the assassination to happen as they did not like the then Home Minister Vallabhai Patel and wanted to cut him to size.
There was considerable heat on Patel after Gandhi's murder. The young socialist leader Jayaprakash Narain accused Patel of being criminally negligent. Patel tendered his resignation, which was rejected by Nehru.