Savarkar – Myth and Reality
Savera
ON Independence Day this year, a social media post by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas caused outrage and revulsion across the country. Under the title ‘Happy Independence Day’ it depicted four faces – V D Savarkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Shaheed Bhagat Singh. At the bottom was the slogan – ‘Freedom was their gift/Shaping the future is our mission’. The outrage was understandable. Savarkar is well known to have repeatedly petitioned the British colonial government for clemency in the most craven terms while he was imprisoned in the Cellular Jail of Andaman Islands. Later, he was implicated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, acquitted by the court for lack of evidence, but held responsible by a Commission of Inquiry. Putting a British collaborator and a conspirator in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi on par with three of the best-known personalities of India’s glorious freedom struggle was a shocking travesty of history.
But this adulation of Savarkar, and a persistent attempt to install him as a prominent freedom fighter has been the Sangh Parivar’s long cherished endeavour. His portrait was installed in Parliament in 2003, during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led NDA government, as was the renaming of Port Blair airport as Veer Savarkar Airport. PM Modi and his ministers and leaders of BJP have regularly praised Savarkar. Only recently, on Savarkar’s birth anniversary, Modi called him a “true son of Mother India”. This Sangh Parivar admiration for Savarkar arises from the toxic and incendiary philosophy – the hostility towards Muslims – that Savarkar espoused, and which forms the basis of the ideology of RSS itself.
In view of this constant valorisation of Savarkar, eagerly helped along by sections of the mainstream media and social media, it is necessary to nail the lies about him, and to reiterate the truth.
The most important fact about Savarkar’s life is that there are two distinct phases. The first is before his imprisonment in Andaman and the second is after his release. In the first period he was another youth impatient with the mainstream national movement, aspiring for rapid decisive actions, like assassinations. He wrote a history of the First War of Independence (1857) and railed against caste divisions that plagued Hindu society. He joined a secret society called Mitra Mela and later, formed his own secret organisation Abhinav Bharat (‘New India’} which believed in violent methods to overthrow the British rulers.
THE EARLY YEARS
After graduating from Fergusson College in Pune, Savarkar went to London for studying law. He was influenced by ultra nationalist Italians like Mazzini and Garibaldi. In London, in 1909, he encouraged Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian student to kill William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, an aide to the Secretary of State for India. Dhingra was hanged by the British for this. Already under surveillance, Savarkar came under suspicion, but no concrete evidence could be found. Meanwhile, Savarkar’s brother Ganesh, an Abhinav Bharat member, was arrested in India for stockpiling bombs. He was sentenced to lifelong transportation. To retaliate against this, another member of Abhinav Bharat, Anant Kanhere shot dead the district magistrate of Nasik. Kanhere and others were arrested and various letters from Savarkar were found in their belongings, as also revolvers sent by him from London. The police sent a warrant of arrest by telegram to London where Savarkar surrendered on March 13, 1910. While being taken to India, he escaped when the ship was docked in Marseilles harbour. He was arrested and the case caused a much-celebrated uproar in France and England. Savarkar’s pleas were ultimately dismissed, and he was brought back to India, sentenced to 50 years in jail and packed off to the infamous prison on the Andaman Islands in 1911. It is this part of Savarkar’s life that is taught to school children and publicised as his contribution to the freedom struggle.
FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO BRITISH SUPPORTER
Almost immediately, Savarkar started petitioning the British rulers for clemency. His first petition of 1911 is now lost but finds mention in his second one, which was addressed to the Home Member of the Government of India, dated November 14, 1913. After recounting the problems he is facing in the jail, Savarkar writes at the end:
“Therefore if the Government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English Government which is the foremost condition of progress. As long as we are in jails there cannot be real happiness and joy in hundreds and thousands of homes of His Majesty’s loyal subjects in India, for blood is thicker than water; but if we be released the people will instinctively raise a shout of joy and gratitude to the Government, who knows how to forgive and correct, more than how to chastise and avenge. Moreover, my conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct would be. By keeping me in jail nothing can be got in comparison to what would be otherwise. The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government?”
The above is excerpted from the petition which is reproduced in prominent nationalist historian R C Majumdar’s book ‘Penal Settlements in Andamans’ published in 1975 by the Gazetteers Unit, in the then Department of Culture, Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, Government of India. The relevant pages of the book (pp.211-214) were recently circulated as annexures to the reply given by Prahlad Singh Patel, Minister (Independent Charge) of Culture & Tourism to an unstarred question in Lok Sabha on 23 March 2020.
Note the way Savarkar describes himself – “staunchest advocate of Constitutional progress” and “loyalty to English Government”. Also note that he is assuring that all his followers will “raise a shout with joy and gratitude” at his release from prison and it would “bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide”. He again reassures the brutal British rulers that he is “ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like”. He declares himself as the “prodigal son” returning to “parental doors of the Government”. In short, Savarkar is ready to sell his soul – and his followers too – to the colonial masters in return for their clemency.
As it transpired, Savarkar kept petitioning the British throughout till he was transferred to India in 1920 and incarcerated in Pune’s Yerawada Jail. Finally he was released in 1923 on the condition that he would remain confined to the coastal Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra and abjure any political activity.
During his long stay in Andaman Jail, Savarkar was put to hard labour, tortured and generally treated badly as were all prisoners in that infamous place. Others have described the horrifying conditions under which prisoners lived and often died. It appears that he wanted to get out – which is natural – but he was willing to bargain away his moral, ideological and nationalist self to get out, unlike hundreds of others freedom fighters who suffered at the hands of British jailers. Bhagat Singh of course is the brightest of these heroic men and women. He too adopted a course of violent protest in order to protest against the colonial rulers. He too was jailed along with his comrades. He too wrote many books, articles, pamphlets etc. But he always espoused the cause of all the exploited people in their struggle against the British. He never asked for pardon or release from jail. He was hanged in 1931 at the young age of 23 years.
THE HINDUTVA IDEOLOGUE EMERGES
During his years in Yerawada jail and then in Ratnagiri district, Savarkar wrote prolifically – plays, essays, poems, etc – but the criticism of the British rulers was missing, as was the ambition to throw them out. His book ‘Hindutva’ was published in 1923 under a pseudonym, ‘Maratha’. In it we see the emerging ideology of Hindutva which term he prefers to use, decrying the use of Hinduism as a foreign word. It is here that some of the seminal ideas of Savarkar get concretised. He interprets Indian history as a long war between Muslim and Hindus. It is during this war that “our people became intensely conscious of ourselves as Hindus and were welded into a nation to an extent unknown in our history,” as he puts it. His European ultra nationalist ideas are manifested as a Hindu nation striving for coming into its own. He argued that Hindus were bound together by common blood, and that Hindus were united “by the tie of a common heritage we pay to our great civilization – our Hindu culture”. He asserts that Hindus and Muslims are two nations and that these can never live together. He also glorified violence – against Muslims in particular – as a means of unifying and realising the Hindu identity. This book, later expanded in 1928 to “Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu?” became the ideological source to an array of people including the RSS founder K B Hedgewar. The second sarsanghchalak of RSS M S Golwalkar borrowed heavily from these ideas in his writings.
In 1937, his confinement to Ratnagiri was rescinded and he became president of the Hindu Mahasabha. It was under his guidance that the Mahasabha became soft on the British, participated in the governments in Central Provinces and Bengal to please them, and later encouraged Hindus to join the British Army to fight in the Second World War, on the plea that Hindus would get much needed training in use of firearms. He ensured that the Mahasabha not only kept out of the Quit India movement but helped the British suppress it. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Mahasabha (who later founded the Bharatiya Jan Sangh) was a minister in the Fazlul Haq ministry in Bengal during the Quit India movement. In NWFP and Sind, the Mahasabha allied with the Muslim League to form ministries. This was the new Savarkar: a Hindutva fanatic, and a British collaborator.
MAHATMA’S ASSASSINATION
Savarkar was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948. Home Minister Sardar Patel wrote to Prime Minister Nehru, “It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that (hatched) the conspiracy and saw it through’. (Durga Das, Sardar Patel Correspondence, 1945–50, Vol. VI, p. 56)
Later, Patel wrote to Mookerjee, “…we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that an appreciable number of the members of the Mahasabha gloated over the tragedy and distributed sweets…. Further, militant communalism, which was preached until only a few months ago by many spokesmen of the Mahasabha, including men like Mahant Digbijoy Nath, Prof. Ram Singh and Deshpande, could not but be regarded as a danger to public security. The same would apply to the RSS, with the additional danger inherent in an organisation run in secret on military or semi-military lines.” (ibid., Vol. VI, p. 66.)
Talking about Maharashtra, the Chief Minister of Bombay, B G Kher, wrote to Patel, “The atmosphere of hatred against the Congress and Mahatma sought to be created by the Hindu Mahasabha culminated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi at the hands of a few Maharashtrians’. (ibid., Vol. VI, pp. 77–78.)
Although Savarkar was not convicted in the Gandhi Murder Trial due to lack of independent evidence to corroborate the testimony of the approver, the Commission of Inquiry set up in 1965 under Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor, heard testimony from two of Savarkar’s close associates, A P Kasar and G V Damle, who had not testified at the trial. They corroborated the approver’s statements. The Commission came to a conclusion very similar to that of Sardar Patel: “All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group” (Report of Commission of Inquiry into Conspiracy to Murder Mahatma Gandhi, 1970, p.303, para 25.106)
“SIX GLORIOUS EPOCHS”
Despite his acquittal, Savarkar was irredeemably tainted by the Gandh assassination. The Hindu Mahasabha dissolved itself. He had distanced himself from the other conspirators in the trial itself, perhaps fearing another incarceration. He spent his last years in obscurity, working on his magnum opus ‘Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History’. It was published in 1963, just three years before he committed suicide by giving up food and water.
The six epochs refer to periods when the Hindu nation freed itself from “shackles of foreign domination”. The book is a bitter and vicious diatribe against “foreign” faiths but also mordantly critical of what Savarkar thinks as gentle and laid back Hindu society that allowed itself to be enslaved. Savarkar castigates Hindu rulers and armies for not raping the vanquished Muslim women, not carrying out massacres of Muslims, not destroying their mosques, etc. He talks of the glory of a few heroic men and women who took this path and presses for the adoption of a similar path to reignite the Hindu nation’s glory.
A terrifying and barbarian morality is laid out by Savarkar in this book: what is virtuous or not is to be determined by whether it is good for Hindu nation or not. Thus raping Muslim women and accepting them in one’s fold is good because it helps increase Hindu population. In fact, even today, RSS cadres justify Savarkar’s actions by saying that he did not betray Hindus.
In this book lies the sum and substance of Savarkar’s thinking, which continues to heavily influence the Hindutva Brigade of today. The revival of the Hindu nation, the establishment of a glorious Akhand Bharat ruled by Hindu precepts, the warrior like demeanour and the example of a superior race are all dreams that germinate from Savarkar. His life and works have no connection to the spirit of the freedom struggle, or to its various strands because he was actually on the other side – with the British – for most of his life. And, he was also against the Constitution’s spirit of secularism, communal amity and democracy.
