Ahistoricity of Savarkar’s Rehabilitation Project
An aggressive campaign to rehabilitate VD Savarkar (1883-1966) as great Indian freedom fighters is under way. He is being touted as a legendary Indian nationalist, freedom fighter who spent 50 years in the Cellular Jail [CJ]. Multiple mercy petitions of his are hailed as a ruse to secure freedom in order to work for uprooting the British rule, last but not the least, he is glorified as a rationalist who fought against the Untouchability. Let us compare these claims with the writings of Savarkar and records of his activities available in the archives of the Hindu Mahasabha in order to know the truth. Savarkar’s journey from Indian nationalist to Hindu nationalist It is true that Savarkar penned THE INDIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 1857 in 1907 in which he glorified the joint struggle of Hindus and Muslims in the 1857 rebellion. In this tome, proscribed by the British rulers, he underscored the fact that Hindus and Muslims “were both children of the soil of Hindusthan. Their names were different, but they were all children of the same Mother; India, therefore, being the common mother of these two, they were brothers by blood”. He went to the extent of praising the Jihadi spirit Moulvi Ahmed Shah in the liberation war of 1857. “The great and saintly Ahmed Shah had woven fine and cleverly the webs of the Jehad—the War of Independence—through every corner of Lucknow and Agra.” However, Savarkar’s incarceration at the CJ brought a fundamental change in his idea of India. His first official biographer, Dhananjay Keer corroborated the fact that while leaving the Cellular, he gave this mantra: “One God, one country, one goal, one race, one life, one language” which was later concretized as Hindutva. The reason for discarding commitment to an all-inclusive India and turning Islamophobic was provided by Savarkar himself: “A large number of the wicked warders consisted of Mussalmans…And the prisoners under them were mostly Hindus. The Hindu prisoners were persecuted…” It will be interesting to know that Savarkar was the only one at Cellular Jail who presented the persecution at the hands of the warders…