In the end, history didn’t quite play out in the way Savarkar and his confederates theorised. Nehru proved perfectly stable, the Hindutva cause was damaged after Gandhi’s murder, while Sardar Patel integrated most principalities with the carrot of money and status and the stick of armed intervention. Despite obituaries and shrill prophecies of danger, India became a secular democracy, and not a Hindu rashtra. And, in perhaps what might have caused the father of Hindutva to recoil in horror, it was not the Nepali dynasty of Savarkar’s ‘academical’ premise that soared to power in New Delhi.
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