Savarkar - Great Patriot Or Rank Traitor? (Praful Bidwai) Navhind Times, 9 September 2004

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Great Patriot Or Rank Traitor?
by Praful Bidwai

THE controversy triggered off by the Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar’s instructions to remove a plaque bearing Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s poetry from a sculpture at the Andaman Islands’ Cellular Jail threatens to turn into a political campaign.

The Shiv Sena is certainly converting it into a chauvinistic agitation and lending it a macho edge by asking its supporters to hit Mr Aiyar’s effigy with shoes. The BJP leaders, including Mr L K Advani, have joined the chorus condemning Mr Aiyar. The Congress, which faces elections in Maharashtra, has disassociated itself from Mr Aiyar. And Savarkar’s descendants have accused the sangh parivar of ‘exploiting’ his name for electoral gains.

In the interests of rationality and sobriety, it’s imperative to take a cool, dispassionate, objective look at the whole affair, and in particular, Savarkar’s role as the originator of Hindutva and the two-nation theory. Was ‘Veer Savarkar’, as his admirers call him, a ‘great patriot’? Or was he a compromised leader, who collaborated with British rule? What was his agenda? The Andamans sculpture was the brainchild of Mr Aiyar’s predecessor Ram Naik, financed by a public oil company. Named ‘Freedom Torch’, it commemorates the Independence movement with quotations from Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and Madanlal Dhingra (a Savarkar disciple). Missing from it conspicuously was the movement’s greatest leader, Mahatma Gandhi.

Mr Aiyar had Savarkar’s poem replaced with a Gandhi quotation. It’s hard to fault this on principle, although it’s open to question on tactical grounds. The symbolic plaque issue must be put in context. The sangh parivar has been desperately trying to elevate Savarkar to the status of the topmost icons of the freedom struggle — on a par with Gandhi and Nehru, although Savarkar is, to put it mildly, a super-controversial figure, unacceptable to many Indians.

The NDA, disdainful of this opinion, renamed Port Blair airport after Savarkar, installed his portrait in Parliament’s Central Hall, named parks after him and had the Lok Sabha Secretariat issue a booklet glorifying him. The parivar pretends that Savarkar was a misunderstood, but a great and ‘normal’, nationalist.

In a banal sense, Savarkar was indeed a patriot: he loved his country. (Didn’t Hitler?) But that was his Hindu motherland, not plural India. Four questions arise. Can Savarkar be considered a legitimate part of the freedom struggle? What did Independence mean for him? Did he hate Gandhiji to the point of plotting his assassination? And is his Hindutva compatible with the Constitutional idea of pluralism, secularism and tolerance? The young Savarkar was fired by Hindu-nationalist zeal. He got involved with Abhinav Bharat, a secret society which believed in killing British officials. Savarkar inspired and ordered Dhingra to murder William Wylie, of the India office. When charged with sedition and abetment to murder, Savarkar gave himself up to police and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1911.

By the end of that very year, he had already petitioned for clemency, promising to “serve the government in any capacity they like — where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the government.” This petition was abject and craven. Most Andaman detainees couldn’t have even thought of making such pleas.

Savarkar made similar petitions and loyalty pledges — in 1913, 1914, 1917, 1920 and 1925. In 1924, he was released after acknowledging that: “I had a fair trial and just sentence. I heartily abhor methods of violence resorted to in days gone by, and I fell myself duty-bound to uphold Law and the Constitution to the best of my powers and am willing to make the (highly unpopular Montagu-Chelmsford) reform a success.” The condition was that he won’t engage in political activity for five years.

Soon thereafter, Savarkar gave his blessings to the formation of the RSS, but never joined it. More important, he never participated in mass agitations and other campaigns of the freedom struggle, preferring instead to pour venom upon Muslims. In 1923, his pioneering invention crystallised: the two-nation theory.

Soon after the World War broke out, Savarkar again pledged loyalty to the Viceroy (Linlithgow), offering friendship between ‘Hinduism and Great Britain’. Savarkar was then president of the Hindu Mahasabha, which like the RSS, played no role in the anti-colonial mobilisation. So what did ‘freedom’ mean to Savarkar and his acolytes? They were driven by hatred of ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’. One Savarkar disciple V G Gogate, for instance, made an attempt on the life of Ernest Hotson, acting governor of Bombay, out of ‘personal hatred’ — because Hotson was given that post ‘in preference to an Indian’!

This attitude was in sharp contrast to, say, Gandhiji’s. For Gandhiji, the freedom struggle was anti-imperialist, against colonial rule; it wasn’t against ‘foreigners’ or the British. He argued in Hind Swaraj: “It’s not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianised, we can accommodate them.” For Savarkar, the purpose and goal of freedom was to establish Hindu rashtra and Hindu-padpatshahi (Hindu overlordship or hegemony). For Gandhi, Nehru, or for that matter, the Left, the goal was to establish a modern, plural, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, democratic India. The two notions are totally irreconcilable.

Savarkar’s patriotism flowed from an obsessive territorial nationalism, in which the Hindus alone can be legitimate citizens of India by virtue of convergence between their pitrabhu (fatherland) and punyabhu (holy land). “Muslims and Christians cannot be incorporated into Hindutva because their holy land is in far-off Arabia or Palestine. Their names and outlook smack of a foreign origin”. Savarkar defined India as stretching from the Indus River to the Himalayas in the North and East and to the sea in the West and South. By contrast, Gandhiji was rooted in the notion of a community of citizens bonded across religious and ethnic divides by a common endeavour to create a composite culture and a democratic order.

Savarkar’s was a brilliant mind, but one obsessed with violence, revenge, retribution and bloodshed. Savarkar wrote: “So long as that divine age has not arrived — bloodshed, and revenge cannot be purely sinful — [They] have often been instruments created by nature to root out injustice and introduce an era of justice.” Savarkar in his Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History advocates that Hindu conquerors should have raped Muslim rulers’ women. He admonishes Shivaji for not doing so.

Little wonder Savarkar passionately hated Gandhiji, the apostle of non-violence, peace and harmonious co-existence between Hindus and Muslims. Savarkar mentored and inspired Nathuram Godse — who was devoted to his ideology and his personality. Godse wrote to Savarkar: “Since you were released — a divine fire has kindled in the minds of those groups who profess that Hindustan is for the Hindus”. After Savarkar became Mahasabha president, Godse expressed ‘confidence’ that the ‘hope will materialise into a reality’.

Savarkar not only helped Godse with ideas and funds. Their collusive relationship was pivotal to Gandhiji’s assassination. As Sardar Patel puts it: “It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that (hatched) the conspiracy (to assassinate Gandhiji) and saw it through”.

Savarkar escaped conviction for a technical reason: the testimony of a critical approver (Digamber Badge) could not be independently corroborated. But Justice G D Khosla, who wrote the judgment of the Simla High Court, confirmed the conspiracy, with Savarkar’s involvement. Later, the Justice J L Kapur commission of inquiry also recorded: “All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.” Savarkar’s role in the assassination includes encouraging and introducing an arms dealer to the assassins and their collaborators, goading them to commit the crime, prior knowledge of two assassination attempts (of January 20 and 30, 1948), detailed planning, and blessing the assassins: Yashaswi hovun ya (be successful and return).

Savarkar is a great national hero for the likes of Mr Bal Thackeray, as is Nathuram Godse. On May 16, 1991, Mr Thackeray said: “We are proud of Nathuram. He saved the country from a second partition.” But how should we regard him? Savarkar had his differences with the RSS. But he pioneered the two-nation theory. And he fathered Hindutva, which the RSS carried forward through the Jana Sangh and the BJP.

Savarkar was not religious. He was against superstition, cow-worship and yajnas. But that didn’t prevent him from joining hands with rank obscurantists. Savarkar was fanatical in his devotion to ‘political’ Hinduism, as distinct from ‘religious’ Hinduness. He was extremely intolerant of cultural pluralism and democratic secularism.

Savarkar’s views can have no place in any constitutional scheme based on an inclusive, non-ethnic conception of citizenship and of equal rights irrespective of religion. Savarkar didn’t represent movements and ideas that grew into the Great Project that India embraced at Independence, which is still developing: to build a culturally rich, heterogeneous society unified by a commitment to democracy and people’s empowerment. Savarkar was no ‘Veer’ (hero) and must not be glorified. He and his ideological-political legacy are best left where they belong: in the dustbin of history.