Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966

by Vikram Sampath

Savarkar remarked in exasperation that a man, who openly sought funds for the khadi initiative, was being delusional in assuming a lawyer would fight such an important case for free.

‘Gandhi was the best policeman the Britisher had in India.’

As Bose rued: ‘But the Mahatma who did not want to identify himself with the revolutionary prisoners, would not go so far and it naturally made a great difference when the Viceroy realized that the Mahatma would not break on that question.’

After the Delhi Pact, the reactionary Moslems had been somewhat overawed by the strength and power of the Congress and they were in a mood to come to terms with that body on a reasonable basis.

Hence, I will not join the Congress till it is dominated by its current perverse Muslim appeasement politics.

reports abounded that a prominent legislator Dr Abdul Jaffar Khan, elder brother of the famed ‘Frontier Gandhi’ or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, blatantly dismissed this incident as being inconsequential and that these girls should have been handed over to their abductors. At this preposterous statement, Congressmen had giggled away uncontrollably, according to Savarkar.

This was an act most suited for national-level eunuchs,

‘If the world will move towards the end of all religions, I too will stop advocating Hinduism, but till that day dawns, I will continue to advocate my religion.’

This is a unique ceremony as people of different ideologies have gathered together to welcome me. I will try my best to fulfill your expectation of working towards the national good. I have had a lot of ups and downs in my life and I am used to facing difficulties. If communists are asking for a religion-less society, I would support them, but I cannot accept injustice heaped on only one religion in the name of equality. I would urge the Congress to not deny the rights of a particular community while giving special privileges to another. I do not expect the Congress to turn into Hindu Mahasabha, but it should not turn into an outfit that treats Hindus unfairly in order to safeguard the interests of other communities.

Religion in politics is a recipe for disaster and I will fight to remove that and ensure equality for all—not just have the Hindu community bear the albatross of these discriminatory terms and conditions, but create a common benchmark.

Just having governments in a few provinces gave the Congress a false sense of satisfaction of having achieved the goal, he opined.

Yet, he cautioned that there might well be a day when this same Congress that is so steeped in Muslim appeasement and its leader Gandhi might decide to scrap this song in case some members of the Muslim community oppose the Hindu iconography in the verses.

He argued that it was not important whether Japan, which conquered China, was right or wrong. The world took care of its own countries and India must not count on help from any other country.

‘all our countrymen to whatever religion or sect or race they belong are treated with perfect equality and none allowed to dominate others or is deprived of his just and equal rights of free citizenship as long as everyone discharges the common obligations and duties which one owes to the Indian Nation as a whole’.

The root cause of this failure was the Congress’s failure to understand that in the formation of a nation state, religious, racial, cultural and historical affinities count more than mere territorial unity or a common habitat.

Diagnosing this alleged antipathy of the Muslims, he elaborated: The Moslems in general and Indian Moslems in particular have not as yet grown out of the historical stage, of intense religiosity and the theological concept of state. Their theology and theocratical [sic] politics divide the human world into two groups only—The Moslem land and the enemy land. All lands which are either entirely inhabited by the Moslems or are ruled over by the Moslems are Moslem lands. All lands, which are mostly inhabited by non-Moslem power are enemy lands and no faithful Moslem is allowed to bear any loyalty to them and is called upon to do everything in his power by policy or force or fraud to convert the non-Moslem there to Moslem faith, to bring about its political conquest by a Moslem power. It is no good quoting sentences here or there from Moslem theological books to prove the contrary. Read the whole book to know its trend. And again it is not with books that we are concerned here but with the followers of the book and how they translate them in practice. You will then see that the whole Moslem history and their daily actions are framed on the design I have outlined above. Consequently, a territorial patriotism is a word unknown to the Moslem—nay is tabooed, unless in connection with a Moslem territory. Afghans can be patriots for Afghanisthan is a Moslem territory today. But an Indian Moslem if he is a real Moslem—and they are intensely religious as a people—cannot faithfully bear...

an accurate analysis

Elaborating on the accusation made on the Hindu Mahasabha of being a communal organization and a mirror image of the Muslim League, he said: The fact is that Nationalism and Communalism are in themselves either equally justifiable and humane or not. Nationalism when it is aggressive is as immoral in human relation as is Communalism when it tries to suppress the equitable rights of other communities and tries to usurp all to itself. But when Communalism is only defensive, it is as justifiable and humane as an equitable Nationalism itself. The Hindu nationalists do not aim to usurp what belongs to others. Therefore, even if they be called Hindu communalists they are justifiably so and are about the only real Indian Nationalist. For, a real and justifiable Indian Nationalism must be equitable to all communities that compose the Indian Nation. But for the same reason the Moslems alone are communalists in an unjustifiable, anti-national and treacherous sense of the term. For it is they who want to usurp to themselves all that belongs to others. The Indian National Congress only condemns itself as an anti-national body when it calls in the same breath the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League as bodies equally communal in the reprehensible or treacherous sense of that term. Consequently if to defend the just and equitable rights of Hindus in their own land is communalism then we are communalists par excellence and glory in being the most devoted Hindu communalists which to us me...

he took a dig at the Congress remembering Hindus and their votes only during elections: Next election when they come to your Hindu doors to beg for votes tell them in all honesty and humility ‘Sirs Congressmen you are Indian Nationalists; but I am a Hindu and this is a Hindu Electorate? Then how can you accept a vote so tainted by communalism? Please go to a truly “Indian Nationalist electorate”, to beg for votes wherever you may find it; and if you find it nowhere in the world today please wait till a pure and simple and truly “Indian electorate”, comes into being!’ Do you think you will find a dozen Congress candidates honest enough to do so? None, none!

On 1 August 1939, Savarkar spoke at a public meeting organized at Tilak Smarak Mandir in Poona. In his speech, he talked about the three different schools of thought prevalent in the Congress, led by three different leaders—Gandhi, Subhas Bose and Manabendranath Roy—and how it is different from the school of thought of the Hindu Mahasabha. He said: In today’s Congress, there are three schools of thought . . . Gandhian school of thought has truth and non-violence as its key ideas. But Gandhian non-violence is inimical to Hindutva. Hindu philosophy says violence for violence sake is bad, but violence is permissible to destroy evil and protect the good, and such violence is good conduct. But Gandhian thought makes no such distinction. They believe in non-violence under all conditions. Second school of thought is led by Subhas Bose and the Forward Bloc. His policies and means used are similar to our thought process and we could work together on certain issues, but even they are obsessed with this mirage of Hindu-Muslim unity. The third school of thought is of Manvendranath (sic) Roy and that is not acceptable to us at all. They believe in the policy of active Muslim appeasement. The Hindu Mahasabha has the interests of Hindus in mind always.

Rash Behari Bose also expressed his deep apprehensions about whether this will indeed materialize, given that ‘the British Empire’s biggest supporter in India, Mahatma Gandhi, was strongly opposed to such a move’.118

Ambedkar’s fears were shared even by British educationalist and member of the Council of India, who had served as the director of the University of London Institute in Paris, Theodore Morrison, whom he quotes as having said way back in 1899: The views held by the Mahomedans (certainly the most aggressive and truculent of the peoples of India) are alone sufficient to prevent the establishment of an independent Indian Government. Were the Afghan to descend from the North upon an autonomous India, the Mahomedans, instead of uniting with the Sikhs and the Hindus to repel him, would be drawn by all the ties of kinship and religion to join his flag.

Between end-October and the middle of November 1939 all the Congress ministries resigned in protest. This was a huge strategic blunder on their part as it lost its bargaining power with the government. As long as its ministries were in office, Linlithgow could not afford to ignore a party that governed eight out of the eleven British Indian provinces.

That the Congress had to stress on the need for Hindu–Muslim unity as a goal in itself showed that this unity was lacking and needed to be achieved (after all they had no Hindu–Christian or Hindu–Parsi unity goals).

He attacked the viceroy’s speeches to this effect and quoted the instance of Hitler who when asked to vacate Poland by Chamberlain said that he would do so when Britain decided to vacate India.

‘Hinduize all politics and militarize Hindudom.’

His attention was drawn to Pandit Nehru’s statement regarding the Muslim influx in Assam that migrations are inevitable since nature hates vacuum. Savarkar retorted that Pandit Nehru was neither a philosopher nor a scientist and did not know that nature also abhors poisonous gases!

British reports summarize what they term as Congress’s frustration in poetic flourish by comparing it to a Persian proverb: ‘I will not eat it myself, nor will I give it to someone else to eat, but I will let it rot, so that I can throw it to the dogs.’

The case of the Communists of India was a curious one. The secret correspondences exchanged between P.C. Joshi, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Sir Reginald Maxwell, the home member of the Government of India, make it clear that they ‘acted as stooges and spies of the British Government, and helped them against their own countrymen fighting for freedom’.

He also declared that P.C. Joshi and a few designated senior politburo members had been ‘in touch with the Army Intelligence and supplied the C.I.D. chiefs with such information as they would require against nationalist workers who were connected with the 1942 struggle or against persons who had come to India on behalf of the Azad Hind Government of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’.

Joshi’s letters revealed how ‘unconditional help’ was being offered to the government to fight the underground workers and Bose’s Indian National Army soldiers, and how the CPI received financial aid from the government and had a secret pact with the League to undermine the Congress activity in several ways.

Savarkar maintained that while he agreed with the ‘Quit India’ slogan if it implied independence in the truest sense, but he found its interpretation by Gandhi as being ‘wholly inadequate and unsatisfactory

Being a bitter opponent of Gandhi and his ways, Savarkar dismissed the movement as a ridiculous jail-seeking programme that was not about ‘Quit India’ but ‘Split India’.

But it perhaps shocked him too to see the anti-Congress edifice within the Mahasabha crumbling after August 1942. The calls to boycott the Congress programme were ignored and several provincial leaders as well as activists of the Mahasabha participated eagerly in the upsurge following the arrest of Gandhi and other leaders.

N.C. Chatterjee, one of Savarkar’s close colleagues in the Mahasabha, vented his frustration in a letter to Moonje: The entire Hindu population is with Gandhiji and his movement and if anybody wants to oppose it, he will be absolutely finished and hounded out of public life. The unfortunate statement of Veer Savarkar [opposing Quit India] made our position rather difficult in Bengal. It is rather amusing to find that Mr. Jinnah wants the Mussalmans not to join the Congress movement and Mr. Savarkar wants the Hindus not to join the same. Even when the Congress movement has made a great stir and it shows that it has got thousands of adherents.

Rejecting the very need to concede to Muslim demands for Pakistan, Savarkar wondered whether this should be done at all, especially with the hallowed view of gaining their goodwill. And if creating this amity was indeed the motivation, what guarantee was there that after getting their pound of flesh, the new state of Pakistan would maintain friendship and peace with its parent country and not covet more and more territory from it? Today, being weak, they were threatening a civil war to get their demands through.

So long as we continue to be so cowardly as to yield to any preposterous demand on the part of the Moslems to keep up the show of unity and so terribly afraid of Moslems’ discontent as to allow even the integrity of our Motherland to get broken up into pieces, is it not more likely that this very financial and economical starvation of these would-be Moslem states may goad them on to encroach once more on our Hindu provinces and instigated by the religious fanaticism, which is so inflammable in the frontier tribes even now and urged on by the ideal of a Pathanistan under the lead of the organized forces of the Ameer, may threaten to invade you if you do not handover to them the remaining parts of the Punjab right up to Delhi to make them financially and economically self-supporting?

Poverty and bankruptcy could well heighten the fanaticism further and lead to systematic attacks on India’s national security and sovereignty, Savarkar theorized.

It termed it as an anti-British body that was also the ‘Hindu answer to the Khaksars’—the violent Muslim tribes of the NWFP and Punjab.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in the Jaipur state where, as Savarkar had apprehended earlier, the alleged acts of the new dewan, Sir Mirza Ismail, in demolishing temples for town planning but leaving mosques untouched, or the stifling of Hindi and Nagari script to give preference to Urdu caused popular unrest.

Narayanrao Savarkar addressed a public meeting in Miraj on 30 August and held that the very idea of Pakistan originated when Gandhi began the Khilafat agitation in 1919.

a spirit of challenge but in happiness! In that void where nothing from the past or future remains, where all thirst is quenched, where only silence prevails after all worldly events, greed, anger, relations are quelled, where the Self also vanishes, into such a void, O Karma Veer, merge yourself with a sense of complete fulfillment.74

‘The League of Nations,’ he claimed, ‘which represented the wisdom of almost all prominent nations of the world has laid down that no minority should be allowed any concession so as to enable it to claim equality with the “National majority” which in fact forms the Nation.77

Any pact between the Congress and the League giving the Moselm minority of twenty two percent seats in the legislatures or administration equal with the Hindu majority of seventy five per cent is outrageously undemocratic.

The League secured all the thirty-two seats in the Central Assembly and even defeated the Congress’s Muslim candidates. In the provincial legislatures the League won a massive 427 out of 507 seats.87 It was a timely needed shot in the arm for Jinnah at such a crucial juncture of the subcontinent’s history. 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.

Let it be said to the credit of the small per cent of those defenders of the Hindu Nation from these two organizations that they did help the Hindu candidates far-sightedly enough, but let it also be recorded that the majority from these two great institutions of Hindu hope and faith kept culpable neutrality over such a life and death struggle in which the Hindu Nation was involved, while the majority of them were reported to have voted for the Congress.88

In this enterprise Subhash Bose took his inspiration from Sawarkar’s [sic] book on Indian War of Independence of 1857. In one of his speeches Subhash Bose has freely admitted this. He also distributed copies of this book freely amongst all the army personnel. He named one of his regiments as Rani of Jhansi regiment and he borrowed the slogan Chalo Delhi from the Indian soldiers in Meerut who marched on Delhi from there on the 10th May of 1857.

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.

Gandhi, while still making statements of Partition happening only over his dead body, quietly acquiesced and that alarmed many as to why he did not stick to his guns and force a fast unto death that he had earlier done for several smaller issues. Nehru himself admitted later that he and the Congress would have been adamant against Partition if Gandhi had strictly prevailed upon them.

In a message he asked the Hindus to not despair, as ‘a glorious future awaits the Hindus—if only they do not betray themselves!’