Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966

by Vikram Sampath

Bihar Government’s order banning Mahasabha session has created wave of deep resentment throughout India. It is considered and rightly considered great insult to Hindu community that Hindus forming over 90% population in Bihar should not be allowed to hold Mahasabha session. In Madras, Muslim League session was allowed and Hindus were asked to keep indoors although forming 95% of the population. This apparently savours [sic] of invidious distinction and partiality.

To this Savarkar retorted that the example of Canada was a wrong equivalence since the units there were already distinct and they were being called upon during the Durham Mission to decide on whether they wished to forge themselves into an organic state, federal or otherwise. But in the case of India, the states were already welded into one central unit. ‘The question before us today,’ he said, ‘is not to form out of separate and independent States or constituents a new nation or a federation or a confederation. India is already a Unitarian State.’

A temporary ally, but a dangerous friend; Anti-Muslim but equally Anti-British; Is anti-Gandhi because opposed to Gandhi’s non-violence for internal politics; Believes in individual killing and guerilla warfare.

On the issue of Gandhi and his non-violence, Savarkar was respectful of the Mahatma but mentioned, ‘If a fast is so effective, why doesn’t Churchill fast against Hitler? What would Hitler say?’48 Not waiting for Treanor to gather much of his thoughts, he answered it himself, ‘He’d say something rude.’ Savarkar was clear in his head that it was permanent national interests that guided any country’s foreign policy. ‘The world is run by self-interest, not the Bible. What is your self-interest in India?’ Again answering it for Treanor, he hypothesized that India was a strategic fighting base for America now and in the future since it would be a while before the world settled down to normality and having Indian goodwill was a smart thing to do for the USA. ‘So why not oblige India? You will need her some day!’49 he quipped.

The Hindus cannot think of the Hindus in Kashmir as cut off and apart from Hindudom as a whole, just as the Kashmir Moslems feel themselves inseparably connected with Islam outside Kashmir and even outside India and do not fail at times to call upon these outside Moslems to help them, at times even in their treacherous designs to capture the Hindu State and annex it to their airy ambitions of a Pakistani Federation.

The anxiety was further exacerbated by the vacillating stands often taken by Gandhi and the Congress on the whole issue of Pakistan since the time it was vaguely mooted in the Lahore Resolution in 1940. In the Harijan of 4 May 1940, he had said: ‘I would any day prefer Muslim rule to British rule . . . the partition proposal had altered the face of the Hindu-Muslim problem . . . Pakistan cannot be worse than foreign domination.’62 His earlier statements were vague at best where he had said: ‘As a man of non-violence, I cannot forcibly resist the proposed partition if the Muslims of India really insist upon it . . . but I can never be a willing party to the vivisection.’63 On another occasion, he had declared in a rather emotional manner: ‘Vivisect me before you vivisect India.’64 But in the wake of no negotiations with the League or the government on the matter or even a public admonishment of the Pakistan scheme, the Congress and Gandhi were giving mixed signals on their acquiescence.

From the very beginning C. Rajagopalachari informed the Congress Working Committee at Delhi, that it [was] no use prolonging negotiations with Cripps. The proposals should be accepted and worked out. The Gandhi Group never allowed him to see Cripps. According to Dr. Subbaroyan, the whole affair was sabotaged by the Gandhi Group. They made a fool of Jawaharlal who never knows his own mind, and is not prepared to oppose the wishes of the majority of the Working Committee for fear of losing popularity. Dr. Subbaroyan thinks that Jawaharlal’s love of popularity plays the most important part in his political life. The Gandhi Group had no intention of accepting the Cripps’ proposals.

The years 1943 and 1944 saw one of the most horrendous famines in Bengal. India’s foodgrains were exported to Ceylon and to other war fronts, European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere so that food supplies could be kept ready in cases of prolonged hostilities, as also post-war scenario. Britain conveniently turned down offers of American and Canadian food aid and even as millions were starving in India, their food was snatched away from them. Lord Leopold Amery mentioned in the House of Commons of the death of close to three million people due to starvation in the famine.24 By the time the famine ended another million had been added to the death toll in Bengal.

It was impossible as the Rt. Hon. Sreenivasa Shastriji said, for a genuine Indian nationalist to remain tongue-tied while the integrity of our Motherland and Holy land was being openly sold at auction.

Dhananjay Keer notes with disappointment that during these crucial elections, even the larger saffron family such as the Arya Samaj or the RSS did not stand by the Mahasabha.

But at this critical juncture, Nehru’s conduct ruined any last hopes of peaceful settlement. As historian R.C. Majumdar notes: Unfortunately at this critical moment, when a peaceful settlement of India’s future was almost within sight, it was upset by some indiscreet utterances of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1937, his outright rejection of Jinnah’s offer of Congress-League Coalition Ministry ruined the last chance of a Hindu-Muslim agreement. His observations in 1946 destroyed the last chance—though a remote one—of a united India.

Mountbatten was appointed as a successor to Wavell from March 1947. Interestingly, before his departure for India, Mountbatten called on Churchill. He recounts this meeting and Churchill’s parting advice to him: ‘I’m sorry that you should perform this grievous duty . . . I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but I’ll tell you one thing—whatever arrangements you may make, you must see that you don’t harm a hair on the head of a single Muslim.’

In a speech at a prayer meeting on 6 April 1947, Gandhi said: We should dispassionately think where we are drifting. Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives. None should fear death. Birth and death are inevitable for every human being. Why should we then rejoice or grieve? If we die with a smile we shall enter into a new life, we shall be ushering in a new India.

Elaborating on the inevitability of a vivisection, given the historical differences between the communities, the series of political developments related to communal politics and the flip-flop statements of the Congress leaders, in particular, Majumdar sums up: This was emphasized by the separate electorate, originally devised by Minto, but later accepted by the Congress. Since then, the Congress had, in practice if not in theory, recognized the two-nation theory propounded by Syed Ahmed in the 19th Century and Jinnah in the 20th. As far back as 1934 the Congress pledged itself to reject any scheme of solving communal problem vis-à-vis Indian constitution, which was not agreed to by the Muslims. In 1942, Gandhi wrote in the Harijan that if the vast majority of Muslims want to partition India they must have the partition; and in 1944 he actually carried on negotiations with Jinnah on this basis. In 1945 the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution that it could not think ‘of compelling the people in any territorial unit to remain in an Indian Union against their declared and establish will.’ The eminent Hindu leader Rajagopalachari actually suggested the idea of Pakistan as the only basis for a peaceful settlement of the Hindu-Muslim problem and even Nehru conceded the possibility of Pakistan in January 1946. Early in March 1947, the Working Committee of the Congress itself suggested the partition of the Panjab (and therefore also of) Bengal, on communal basis.

The arguments that Mountbatten put in favour of Partition were that the alternative would be a weak Central government with Muslim-majority provinces that could be up in rebellion and carnage ever so often, as was witnessed. The option to give up some land on both sides of the country and have the rest of India consolidate under a strong constitutional framework and a Central government was infinitely more practical and viable, according to him. This could possibly have been the dose of realism that none could ignore.

Mountbatten did have a tough time, like his predecessors, convincing Jinnah for any rational agreement. In exasperation he notes: ‘I regard Jinnah as a psychopathic case; in fact until I had met him I would not have thought it possible that a man with such a complete lack of administrative knowledge or sense of responsibility could achieve or hold down so powerful a position.’

To frustrate the vivisection of our Akhand Hindusthan, we must first vivisect their Pakistan. To this end, three immediate steps are imperative. The first, the creation of a Hindu province in West Bengal, the second the expulsion of Moslem trespassers from Assam at any cost, so as to sandwich and smother the Eastern Pakistan between the two Hindu provinces, the third, the creation of a Hindu-Sikh Province in East Punjab and to rejoin the contiguous Hindu districts in Sindh to the Bombay Presidency. Thus about ten large Hindu provinces will get consolidated into a strongly centralized government of Akhand Hindusthan and will enable it all the more effectively to re-annex the revolting Pakistani areas too in near future. But all this or any other jugglery will pale to help Hindudom if we do not emphatically declare and manfully act up to the rule that the Moslem minority in Hindu provinces be given the same treatment as is meted out to the Hindu minority in Moslem provinces. The very fact that Jinnahji, Gandhiji and his Shahid Sahib are perceptibly irritated by these proposals does in itself prove that they are most likely to benefit Hindudom and undermine Moslem designs. Consequently intense agitation and action should be resorted to by us forthwith to effect it all.

Several leaders especially from the Sind were angry about how the leadership had literally thrown the Hindus of the region to the wolves and no concrete thoughts had been spared on the plight or protection of the religious minorities, the Hindus and Sikhs in the proposed Pakistan. They were vaguely assuaged that ‘the Hindus in Pakistan need have no fear as there would be 45 millions of Muslims in India and if there was any oppression of Hindus in Pakistan, the Muslims in India would have to bear the consequences’.121 These were empty promises in private to dissenting intra-party voices. Finally, it was left to Gandhi to make a lengthy forty-minute speech urging all dissenters to accept the Partition proposal as there was no other feasible alternative.

They had indeed reached a consensus to replace the spinning wheel of Gandhi with the Chakra, which was called as that of Emperor Ashoka. Savarkar clarified this too through a public statement on 29 July that the wheel was not a creation of Ashoka. According to him, it was a ‘Dharma Chakra’ that had been set in motion during Buddha’s first sermon in Sarnath that later Ashoka adopted and it symbolized the valour of people like Chandragupta Maurya and Chanakya who drove foreign invaders away.

Firstly, because the state of Indian Union and the so-called Constituent Assembly are the creation of the British will and not of the free choice of our people ascertained by a national plebiscite and their ultimate sanction even today is the British bayonet and not the national consent or national strength. Secondly, the very mention of the Indian Union reminds us of the break-up of the Unity of India as a nation and a state, the vivisection of our Motherland, and the treacherous Congressite abetment of that crime. How can a genuine nationalist salute such a Flag adopted by such a party with no mandate from the nation as a national flag. No! The authoritative Flag of Hindusthan, our Motherland and Holyland, undivided and indivisible from the Indus to the Seas, can be no other than the Bhagva with the Kundalini and the Kripan inscribed on it to deliver expressly the message of the very Being of our Race! It is not made to order but it is self-evolved with the evolution of our National Being. It mirrors the whole panorama of our Hindu History, is actually worshipped by millions on millions of Hindus and is already flying from the summits of the Himalayas to the Southern Seas. Other Party Flags will be tolerated, some may even be respected in corresponding courtesy but Hindudom at any rate can loyally salute no other Flag but this pan-Hindu Dhwaja, this Bhagva flag as its national standard.

Pandit Nehru says that they accepted Pakistan to avoid bloodshed. But this is wrong. This will not help to avoid bloodshed. On the contrary, they will again use threats of bloodshed in order to press their additional demands. If you do not stop them, there would come about 14 Pakistans. They will demand Mayostan near Alwar, in the South they will demand Moplastan in Kerala and in Hyderabad they will demand Nizamistan. Their demands will have to be crushed by the policy of reciprocity. For that purpose, the Hindus irrespective of political party must unite and consolidate their strength.

But the haste with which the entire transfer of power and the mass migration of people across borders was executed unleashed a mayhem of communal violence and murders. ‘6,00,000 dead, 14,000,000 driven from their homes, 1,00,000 young girls kidnapped by both sides, forcibly converted or sold on the auction block,’ said an official report of the times.

He questioned Nehru’s diktat that the people should not take law into their hands, at a time when thousands and thousands of Hindus and Sikhs were ‘faced by an imminent danger of being massacred in cold blood, looted, burnt alive, forcibly converted, in short, of being exterminated as a racial and National Being by the most barbarous attacks of an organized, dangerously armed and fanatically hostile foe’.

Defending themselves, their lives, property and faith became more important for the refugees, especially when the state and its police and armed forces were nowhere in sight to stand up for them or protect them.

He warned the Indian government against the slogans that were being raised such as ‘Haske liya hai Pakistan, Maarke lenge Hindustan’133 (We have effortlessly taken Pakistan, we will kill and usurp India) and urged the government to wa...

When Hindu Sangathanist forces had warned of these dangers that lay ahead and contended that it was no time for celebration as we were ‘stranded on the top of a volcano already in eruption’,134 they were denounced as anti-nationals and tr...

Savarkar opined that this was a civilizational and cultural war to alter the core of Hindustan by a determined and aggressive force and warned of repeated and concerted attacks for which the new state of Pakistan was readying itself by militarily arming itself. Muslim-majority states within India, be they Hyderabad, Kashmir, Junagarh, etc., would rise in open ...

To ensure the safety, life and property of the Hindu–Sikh and other minorities in Pakistan, the Government of India must make it very clear that Muslims in India ‘shall receive the same treatment for better or for worse in kind and in scale that the Hindu-Sikh minority receives at the hands of the Moslem Government...

Savarkar took on Nehru’s repeated attacks on the Hindu Sangathanist leadership. Reacting to one of Nehru’s assertion that any attempt by Hindu Sangathanist leaders to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India would meet the same fate that Hitler and Mussolini met in Europe, Savarkar denounced his threats through a statement on 22 October 1947. As if the mere demand for a Hindu Raj constitutes a danger to his Government so much more imminent, impending, incalculably disastrous as to call for his immediate attention than the already established Moslem Raj in Pakistan where fanatical atrocities, arson, bloodshed and butchery have been the order of the day . . . Pusillanimous enough to tolerate these diabolical actions and threats on the part of the Moslems against his ‘Indian Union’ Pandit Nehru and his pseudo-nationalistic section in the Congress are delivering mock heroics against the Hindus and swearing that they will fight tooth and nail against those who demand a Hindu Raj.

He bitterly questioned the anathema that the Congress, and in particular Nehru, had with any reference to the ‘Hindu-ness’ of India or it being called Hindustan too, but willingly accepted, recognized and saluted a Pakistan that was explicitly theocratic even as many non-Muslim minorities tried to live within that country. Was it not the League of Nations prescription that all states and nations were to be called after the predominant majority community that lived there, he asked. ‘How is it then,’ questioned Savarkar, ‘that the very mention of the name Hindustan or the Hindu State alone takes your breath away as if you were smitten by a snake bite?’

Pakistani tribesmen began their invasion of Kashmir to merge the state into their country. The Indian government and its leaders, Nehru and Patel in particular, decided to withhold the payment of Rs 550 million to Pakistan that was decided as per the Partition agreement, as a condition for withdrawal from Kashmir and also not to use this money to buy arms against India in this skirmish. While Mountbatten termed this as a dishonourable act of the Indian Union, Gandhi began a fast unto death to coerce the government to stick to its commitments to Pakistan. In deference to his wishes, realpolitik was given a go-by and Pakistan was paid the promised amount, as also pledges made to the Muslim minorities in India, particularly in Delhi.

They found Gandhi’s stand of fasting for the cause of money to be paid to the enemy state of Pakistan as little short of treason and decided on an impulse that they had finally found the target for the retribution that they so earnestly sought. Gandhi had to be killed if the Hindus and India had to be saved, they surmised.

A lot of Gandhi’s actions of this time and the moral coercion he put on the Hindu and Sikh community angered particularly the refugees who had come in droves to take shelter in Delhi. They had been persecuted by Muslims back in their hometown and literally hounded out to India to save their lives. To witness Gandhi staking his own life for the protection of the same community that they desperately wanted to take revenge against and also getting the government to part with money to that country incensed the refugees. Several of them gathered in droves outside Birla House shouting loud, angry slogans against Gandhi, wishing him death and seeking revenge for blood with blood. Cries of ‘Marta hai toh marne do!’ (Let Gandhi die if he so wishes) rent the air around Birla House. The police would lathi-charge and disperse them, but a new batch would gather soon enough.

Sardar Patel himself in replying [to] provoking speeches of some Muslim leaders retorted ‘Sword shall be met with Sword.’

The end of the year saw the passing away of Sardar Patel. Thereafter, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who had quit the Nehru Cabinet opposing the pact with Liaquat Ali Khan, was agitating in Kashmir against the special status accorded to the state under Article 370 of the Constitution. He was strongly opposed to the concept of two prime ministers, two flags and two Constitutions within one country. The government arrested him and he died in prison under mysterious circumstances.

Savarkar asserted that all the reforms that the British brought in over different periods of time were in response to the violent outbursts and activities of revolutionaries—right from Vasudev Balwant Phadke down to the Naval Mutiny of 1946. He warned that efforts would be made to suppress that part of our history but the truth has a way of resurfacing itself. Savarkar expressed satisfaction at the fact that three-fourths of the country was liberated but the Sindhu on whose banks the sacred works of this nation were written remains occupied. Without the Sindhu, there could not be the Hindu, he opined.

He exhorted the youth to not take this hard-won freedom for granted and instead make greater sacrifices and work harder for the next ten years with a plan and vision to make their country strong and invincible. The nation’s defence had attracted no attention and this was not something to be proud of. Even Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini were defeated not by the power of peace and love or through chanting verses from the Bible or Dhammapada but by stronger nations that possessed superior arms, force and atom bombs, he said. After arming oneself sufficiently the country could choose to be non-aggressive and neutral, but doing so before that was foolish and suicidal. Preparing for world peace without military strength was pompous and useless according to Savarkar.

With the restrictions on his political activities ceasing, Savarkar began to be more vocal on various aspects of national and foreign policy and governance. He was particularly sceptical and critical of Nehru’s policy towards China. On 29 April 1954, India signed the Panchsheel or the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence with China. Four years earlier, China had invaded and occupied Tibet and India had remained silent. Writing about these in the Kesari on 26 January 1954, Savarkar said: When China, without even consulting India, invaded the buffer state of Tibet, India should at once have protested and demanded the fulfillment of rights and privileges as per her agreements and pacts entered into with Tibet. But our Indian Government was not able to do any such thing. We closed our eyes in the name of world peace and co-existence and did not even raise a finger against this invasion of Tibet. Neither did we help this buffer state of Tibet when her very existence was at stake. Why? The only reason that I visualize is our unpreparedness for such an eventuality and/or war . . . That is the reason why after swallowing the whole of Tibet the strong armies of China and Russia are now standing right on our borders in a state of complete preparedness and on the strength of the above, China is today openly playing the game of liquidating the remaining buffer states of Nepal and Bhutan . . . We have not been able to put before her an army which can match the strength of her armies...

Savarkar asked India to emulate the example of Israel that came into existence in May 1948 after almost a two-thousand-year struggle by the Jews for a homeland of their own. Israel, he said, ‘is besieged by their staunch enemies Arab nations. But this tiny nation has given military education to its men and women, procured weapons from Britain and U.S.A., established arm [sic] factories in their own nation, intelligently signed treaties and with foreign nations and raised its own strategic power to that extent that their enemy Arab nations would never dare to invade them.’16 He claimed that it was still not too late for India to wake up from its slumber and similarly increase her military and strategic strength as the world recognizes only that.

But as history makes itself amenable to be retold from varied perspectives, especially those of the victor, Savarkar’s attempt here was to establish that sense of pride in place of that of shame and apology about one’s past. As he states: How the histories written not only by foreign historians or those who are avowedly inimical to us, but even by our own people, ignore the glorious episodes of exceptional valour and monumental successes of the Hindus and in their stead, catalogue only the calamities that befell them and present them as the only true history of the Hindus, because they were never fearlessly written from the pure and simple Hindu standpoint . . . Generally speaking in all histories, especially in the history text-books used in schools, the writers invariably jump from an account of the Hunnish onslaught to the first successful Muslim campaign on Sindh, without writing even a line or two about the intervening long period of these hundred years or so. Next follow in quick succession the detailed narration [sic] of Muslim invasions one after another, so that a common reader, especially a pupil, catches an impression, which is very often carried even in his later life, that the history of the Hindus is nothing but a doleful tale of foreign subjugation and national defeats. Our enemies have publicized these false impressions as established facts all over the world for the last two or three centuries. For instance, a man like the late Dr. Ambedkar, burning with h...

He postulated in depth the details of the various Islamic invasions, atrocities, plunder of lives, properties, modesty of women and of places of worship, and chided Hindus for lack of unity, a ‘perverted conception of virtues’25 and practices like the caste system that furthered the divisions amongst them. On these ‘perverted virtues’, he elaborated: Even while the Muslim demons were demolishing Hindu temples and breaking to pieces their holiest of idols like Somnath, they never wrecked their vengeance upon those wicked Muslims, even when they had golden opportunities to do so, nor did they ever take out a single brick from the walls of Masjids, because their religious teachers and priests preached the virtue of not inflicting pain on the offender: ‘Never pay the tormentor in his own coin but bear the torments meekly and be patient that God will punish him.’ The vilest of vices recorded in the catalogues of the religious texts could never have been more detrimental to the welfare of mankind, more harmful to the national interests, and so more detestable than such virtues as give rise to horrible atrocities and the greatest of sins. Naturally whoever cultivates, and lives up to such virtues thoughtlessly and foolishly and with slavish adherence to the religious texts, and also with fanatic obstinacy, is bound to perish individually and bring about disaster of the nation in which he lives. These qualities are not virtues; they are virtues distorted in the extreme. Whichever ...

Savarkar spoke about how the Islamic invasions were accompanied with large scale abduction, molestation and outraging of the modesty of Hindu women as a ‘religious duty.’27 However Hindu rulers stood by their own values of never touching the womenfolk of the captured, even if the defeated were the same Islamic hordes who heaped ignominy on their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. This trait was also lauded as being chivalrous. Giving an example, he said: Even now we proudly refer to the noble acts of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Chimaji Appa, when they honourably sent back the daughter-in-law of the Muslim Governor of Kalyan and the wife of the Portuguese governor of Bassein respectively. But is it not strange that, when they did so, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chimaji Appa should ever remember, the atrocities and the rapes and the molestation, perpetrated by Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Alla-ud-din Khilji and others, on thousands of Hindu ladies and girls like the princesses of Dahir, Kamaldevi, the wife of Karnaraj of Karnawati and her extremely beautiful daughter, Devaldevi. Did not the plaintive screams and pitiful lamentations of the millions of molested Hindu women which reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country, reach the ears of Shivaji Maharaj and Chimaji Appa? The souls of those millions of aggrieved women might have perhaps said, ‘Do not forget, O, Your Majesty, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and O! Your Excellency, Chimaji Appa, the unutte...

The above controversial illustration is often held against Savarkar as him having advocated the rape and molestation of Muslim women in contemporary India. The context in which this has been stated, albeit uncomfortable in the way it has been presented, makes it clear that this was not a prescription for current action but a hypothesis on what could possibly have been a better fate for the Hindu women if their menfolk had instilled similar fright in their opponents about the fate of their womenfolk in the event of a defeat. The same is explained further by him: Suppose, if from the earliest Muslim invasion of India, the Hindus also, whenever they were victors on the battlefields, had decided to pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin or punished them in some other ways, i.e., by conversion even with force, and then absorbed them in their fold, then? Then with this horrible apprehension at their heart they would have desisted from their evil designs against any Hindu lady. If they had taken such a fright in the first two or three centuries, millions and millions of luckless Hindu ladies would have been saved all their indignities, loss of their own religion, rapes, ravages and other unimaginable persecutions. Our woman-world would not have suffered such a tremendous numerical loss, which means their future progeny would not have been lost permanently to Hinduism and the Muslim population could not have thrived so audaciously. Without any increase in their womenfolk the Mus...

Savarkar also dwelt at length on the religious conversions and persecutions that the missionaries embarked on, especially in Goa under the Portuguese rule from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He quoted from several sources about the horrendous atrocities of St. Xavier and several other missionary heads against the local Hindus of Gomantak.

He rued the same lack of will of the Maratha forces who were part of the alliance that vanquished the despotic Tipu Sultan of Mysore who had wrecked havoc on people of other faiths. Though they had captured his kingdom and killed him, they made no attempts to reconvert those whom Tipu had forcibly converted or reclaim what had been lost during his tyrannical rule. When Tipu’s two sons were taken hostage by Lord Cornwallis, the Maratha general Haripant Phadke spoke of how kindly he had the two of them fed when they claimed they were hungry. This, according to Savarkar, was the eternal foolishness of the Hindus, who treated even their enemy who never had similar civility towards them, with the utmost concern due to their own misplaced virtue system.

The ethics of war, which demanded that a charioteer must fight with another charioteer only, the sword should meet another sword alone, that the armed warrior ought not to fight with an unarmed one, till he has been armed equally, that a fallen, senseless warrior was never to be attacked till he had regained consciousness etc. etc., was perhaps quite suitable for the ancient times before Mahabharat. For both the contending parties obeyed the same set of rules: both worshipped the same ethics of war. The Pandavas themselves had violated, at the instance of Lord Krishna, many of these chivalrous rules of war! But the Hindus of these middle ages forgot the lesson taught by the Bhagwat Geeta [sic], of giving due consideration to the time, place and person or persons concerned while obeying these rules of war. They on their own part kept on fighting the diabolic Muslim ways of war with the same old—originally sane and civilized but now outmoded and so highly suicidal tactics in war.

Q: What are the factors, which contributed to the liberation of our country? A: There are many factors, which contributed to the freedom of Bharat. It is wrong to imagine that Congress alone won Independence for Hindusthan. It is equally absurd to think that non-cooperation, Charkha and the 1942 ‘Quit India Movement’ were sorely responsible for the withdrawal of the British power from our country. There were other dynamic and compelling forces, which finally determined the issue of freedom. First, Indian politics was carried to the Army, on whom the British depended entirely to hold down Hindusthan; Second, there was a revolt of the Royal Indian Navy and a threat by the Air Force; third, the valiant role of Netaji Subhas Bose and the I.N.A.; four, the War of Independence in 1857, which shook the British; Five, the terrific sacrifices made by thousands of revolutionaries and patriots in the ranks of the Congress, other groups and parties. So, freedom came with blood, sweat and tears of countless men and women of Hindusthan.

Q: Did Gandhiji and other Congress leaders persuade you at any time to join the Congress? If they did, why did you not join the Congress? A: I have never believed in Gandhiji’s doctrine of Non-Violence. Absolute non-violence is not only sinful but immoral. This doctrine of non-violence benumbed the revolutionary fervor, softened the limbs and hearts of the Hindus, and stiffened the bones of enemies. The lambs resolved to lead a vegetarian life but the wolves were not concerned with their pious resolution. Revolt, bloodshed and revenge have often been instruments created by nature to root out injustice. I felt I could not join the Congress because of my fundamental differences with the Congress on their methods, policies and programme. The Hindu Mahasabha would have joined the Congress in the 1942 movement if the Congress had solemnly guaranteed that it would irrevocably stand by the unity and integrity of India and that the Congress would not make any pact with the anti-national Muslim League. The people now know that our dream of a free, independent, Akhand Hindusthan was systematically sabotaged by Congress leadership.

Q: Some think that you believe in a Hindu Nation because you are a fanatic communalist. What have you to say about it? A: Let us get this thing straight. People have a wrong notion of a Hindu Nation and about communalism. A Hindu means a person who regards this land of Bharatvarsha from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland and holy land—the land of origin of his religion and the cradle of his faith. Therefore, the followers of Vedism [sic], Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and all hill tribes are Hindus. The Parsees, amongst the other minorities, are by race, religion, language and culture, almost akin to the Hindus. The Christians and Jews could be politically assimilated with the Hindus. Around this life-centre moves Hindutva—not a religious dogma or creed but the thoughts and activities of the whole being of the Hindu race. The problem of the minority is that of only one minority—the Muslim minority. A Hindu nation, therefore, is a group of people bound together by ties of common religion and culture, common history and traditions, common literature, occupying a territory of geographical unity and aspiring to form a political unit. Therefore, in Hindusthan, the Hindus are a nation.

Q: Do you think in an atomic age, militarization of the country is essential? A: Yes, I have always maintained two things: Hinduize politics and militarize the nation. If you are strong, you can even show the shoe as Khrushchev did at the United Nations Assembly. But if you are weak, your fate will be in the hands of a powerful aggressor.