Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has been attacked in the contemporary political discourse for his articulation of Hindutva. Without understanding his views in totality and actions in entirety, one cannot understand the meaning of being Veer Savarkar, writes renowned historian Prof. Raghuvendra Tanwar in this series titled ‘Savarkar and the Incomplete Narrative of Independence Struggle’.
Savarkar and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army had ideological differences yet both Bhagat Singh and Savarkar had earnest regard and respect for each other. When Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutta undertook a prolonged hunger strike, Savarkar appealed to them to end the strike. He believed that if anything untoward was to happen to them, it would cost India, dear. We must remember that it was Bhagat Singh who arranged the publication of Savarkar’s proscribed classic India’s First War of Independence in Lahore.
Differences between Nehru & Gandhi
The year 1957 was the centenary of the great anti-British uprising. Savarkar had come to Delhi (May 12, 1957) for the first time as a free citizen in free India. He was taken to the venue in a huge procession through parts of old Delhi. Interestingly the organisers had approached Prime Minister Nehru to attend the function. Nehru is said to have politely declined saying that he had respect for Savarkar, who was a brave man, a great man, but he had his differences with Savarkar and therefore it would be embarrassing for both—him and Savarkar to speak from the same stage. Savarkar was not surprised by the Prime Minister’s reaction.
Many years later (2004) a Congress Minister travelled to the Cellular Jail and while making a public scene ordered the removal of a commemoration plate that had been placed in honour of Savarkar by the Atal Behari Vajpayee government a few years earlier. In this sense, the Congress and its historians have had a long aversion to Savarkar. Having started with Jawaharlal Nehru himself it has continued to date. The result has been hugely consequential.
For Savarkar, the Congress and its key leaders had committed a mistake for which they could not be forgiven. Permitting India’s Partition was something that should never have happened. He even suggested that one day in a year should be set apart as ‘Partition Day’. Not surprisingly he believed that a reunion of the two countries should remain an objective. The objective of ‘Akhand Hindustan’ remained with him to his last day. He viewed the Partition of India as parting a ‘kick’ given by the British.
A day after the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution (1940) Savarkar was in Madras (Chennai). His first comment was: ‘We will not tolerate and will oppose with all our might the Muslim idea of dividing India’. He even warned Gandhi ji asking him not to encourage Jinnah by way of appeasement. Savarkar was the first leader to warn that the Indian National Congress would someday concede Pakistan even though it appeared in public perception to be standing up to the Muslim League.
Another very serious difference that remained between Nehru and Savarkar was fundamental in nature. This difference was publicly explained by Savarkar in the address that he gave on the 100th anniversary of the Uprising of 1857. A huge public function was organised at Ramlila Grounds in New Delhi to mark the historic day. Savarkar noted that the conceding of the creation of Pakistan would not resolve communal issues, in fact, things were bound to get more complicated. Savarkar said slogans of ‘peace and non-violence’ were misplaced in such troubled times (the 1950 decade) and warned how it was dangerous for India to fall back in the context of military prowess. He also called for the youth to come forward and join the armed forces.
Savarkar also raised an interesting issue when he shared his surprise to see how the government was focusing and spending huge amounts on giving incentives to cultural activities such as dance and music but completely over sighting the country’s defence requirements. He was proved dead right within two years. India was made to face an embarrassing situation in 1962 by the Chinese invasion.
Savarkar was also perhaps the most outspoken leader of the time to condemn the political approach of appeasing communities particularly the minorities for electoral gains. Contentious and controversial perhaps, but Savarkar’s views on the Congress come out rather plainly in an address he gave at a function of the Hindu Mahasabha. The Hindu Outlook reported the speech:
“After Independence is there any necessity for the Hindu Mahasabha to exist as an organization and take part in shaping the destiny of the nation? …Definitely Yes! …to protect Hindudom and its honour and to work hard with determination and courage to restore ‘Akhand Bharat—undivided India …protect the Hindus even with the greatest of goodwill towards the Congress friends… Congressmen were now anxious to get Muslim votes. Congress would be a danger to the Hindus… In spite of all good people like Sardar Patel and P.D. Tandon, congressman, Savarkar said were now driven to depend on Muslim votes…”
When Savarkar learnt of the death of Madan Mohan Malaviya, in his tribute he said: “I mourn the death of Malaviya ji the grandfather of our Nation… the message which he delivered with his last breath – to rise and resist heroically every anti-Hindu aggression…”
The differences between Savarkar on the one hand and Gandhi and Nehru on the other are deep and essentially policy-based. The Congress, in particular, the Nehrurian part, has seen Savarkar as the father of Hindutava – the man who sought to divide the country on communal grounds. This was how Nehru always thought of Savarkar. Interestingly this is the precise charge that Savarkar held against the Congress. It was the Congress, Savarkar believed that initiated the first move to divide India on the basis of religion. Nehru described Savarkar’s concept of a Hindu state as communal and medieval. He also warned that those who sought to establish such a ‘state’ would face the fate of Hitler and Mussolini.
Savarkar wondered whether conceding a separate state based on religion was more communal or opposing such a state was more communal. Savarkar rejoined also by noting that Nehru did not even know what the Hindu state of which he was so critical would actually be. He also charged Nehru for conceding the communal demand of an Islamic state. Savarkar also reminded Nehru that when the revolutionaries had started their war against the British, ‘Gandhi was politically in the cradle and Nehru was not even politically born.’ To Savarkar there was no way that the sacrifices of the revolutionaries could be compared with other freedom fighters:
“The revolutionaries had faced bullets and embraced the noose, and their struggles and sacrifices ‘were worth more than the sum of the Gandhians’ sacrifices’, he declared, adding that such people could not possibly be scared of ‘Pandit Nehru’s paper raj’. When Gopal Godse, in the Red Fort prison, asked Savarkar about Nehru donning the lawyer’s garb to defend Subhas Bose’s aides in the Indian National Army trials, Savarkar told the youngster that Nehru had done that because of the extraordinary outpouring of public sentiment over the issue just before the 1946 elections, in which the Congress was seeking the votes of nationalist Indians. ‘How could he have lost the chance to show that the slogan “Jai Hind” was actually his own and that Bose’s efforts to free India were in fact under his leadership! If the wind is in favour of the revolutionaries, these hypocrites will also claim Bhagat Singh’s plans against the British as their own,’ Savarkar said. Savarkar sounded bitter, and his intense dislike of Nehru was transparent.”
With Gandhi too, Savarkar had serious political differences. One of the main issues was the Partition of India and the manner in which the idea was conceded. He was bitter also for the manner in which the role and the importance of the revolutionaries was sidetracked. In a more basic way, he disagreed in principle with Gandhi’s way of guiding and leading the movement for freedom. When some Gandhi’s followers started a Kasturba Memorial Fund and large sums of money naturally flowed in, Savarkar noted: “If Kasturba were to be thus honoured, what about the women whose husbands had been hanged or transported for life? Many of them had not even had the chance to meet their husbands in prison before they had died. So many of the women had ‘silently and unknown …died a martyr’s death’, and so many had suffered lifelong imprisonment and ‘even faced death’. The suffering of ‘Shrimati Kasturba’ was ‘insignificant relatively”, Savarkar maintained, “but had the Congress kept ‘even a list of addresses’ of martyrs’ wives? Third, if a fund were to be set up at all, it would have to be for all these sacrificing women, and its distribution overseen by an all-party committee so that the money was handed out ‘with no party bias.” But then, he noted caustically, “the Congress and ‘Gandhiji in particular’ had ‘condemned vociferously’ the martyred husbands, sons and brothers of these women, simply because they were revolutionaries, as ‘murderers, anarchists, as a curse, as a blot on Indian culture and Ahimsa-Charkha politics”. The women sufferers were “consequently not thought worthy of even grateful recognition”. This list of women certainly included, for Savarkar, his older brother’s wife, who had died when he and Babarao were in the Cellular Jail, though he did not name her in his statement. But she was not the only ‘mother figure’ for him on that hallowed list. He said, advancing his fourth argument, “Has the Congress said a single word in commemoration of the heroic Madam Cama who championed the cause of Indian independence publicly when the Congress could not dare even to claim Home Rule and Gandhiji was dancing to the tune of the British Imperial Anthem and prided himself on his hearty loyalty to the chains that bound Mother India!”
In sum, therefore Savarkar was by far the most influential opponent of the Indian National Congress and its leadership mainly Jawaharlal Nehru. He was equally opposed to Gandhi’s philosophy of guiding the struggle for freedom as also his style of work. To Savarkar, the price paid for freedom in the form of position is wound that in India will never heal.
Interestingly on Savarkar’s death, Indira Gandhi the daughter of Savarkar’s biggest political and ideological opponent who was then Prime Minister paid a glowing tribute to Savarkar: “…his death removes from our midst a great figure of contemporary India …a byword for patriotism and daring …cast in the mould of a classical revolutionary …countless people drew inspiration from him…”
Last Days
It may come as a surprise to leaders of our present times that Savarkar had lived a life of spartan and limited means and in the last years of his life he was not financially comfortable. The Government of Maharashtra in fact had to provide his family a monthly stipend of Rs.300/- per month from October 1964 onwards. Most of his property confiscated by the British (1910-1911) had not been returned until the time of his death (1966). So much so that the young Atal Behari Vajpayee, then a Member of Parliament (1962) had to strongly urge the government to return his property.
Savarkar had written his Will sometime in 1964. On his death, (26 February 1966) parts of the Will were made public by The Tribune. Here too his complete rationalist process of thought comes forth. He noted instructions that no one was to close his business or cause a hartal or cause inconvenience to people to mourn his death. He gave instructions to be cremated in an electric crematorium without any fuss and rituals. At most some Vedic Mantras could be recited. He said there was to be no ‘Pind Daan’ and his body was to be transported for cremation in motor transport in a process as simple as possible. Such was this man.
Source: Organiser
