Reviews

This book doesn’t delve into anything that is new. However, the author is quite lucid in his narration of facts and the detailed interviewing resorted to by the author is appreciable. The fact that the killers of the Mahatma were indeed fanatics and believed in the cult of violence born out of sheer hatred, terming Bhagat Singh as a terrorist is not accepted. The author would've done a great service to himself had he read Bhagat Singh's own writings instead of depending on the second hand information on him. However, the book overall is a good work and ought to be read by all who are nterested in understanding the gruesome incident of assassination of the Father of our Nation.  

Th 2019 edition of this book has been published with photographs, some documents, etc. While this is good to see, the way in which the book has been formatted is awful! Basically, there is a newspaper cutting/picture inserted after every 3-4 pages of text throughout the book. As a result, it is very distracting to read and irritating. The images should have been presented all in one spot or two spots in the middle of the book and not scattered like this after every 2-3 pages.
But besides this, more importantly, this book is written with a pro-Gandhi bias. Although I appreciate that the original author has interviewed many people for this book, there are some falsities in it such as that Gandhi's fasts "worked" and communal tensions between Hindus-Muslims almost vanished. This is untrue and in fact, people of those times were highly discontented with Gandhi and his repeated fasting-to-death blackmail strategy towards the Nehru government as can be verified from several contemporary Partition accounts of India.
Secondly, the author repeatedly calls Nathuram and others as "sick" and "fanatics" which once again is a gross exaggeration. In fact, he also calls Bhagat Singh as the "leader of the terrorists" in this book which is also false. In reality, whether one agrees with their methods or not, these people were patriots and revolutionaries for India's freedom and betterment.
Overall, things like these make this book very mediocre at best and if the Gandhi bias had been avoided, it would have turned out to be a more factual book.