Mumbai: In 2004, Congress’s Mani Shankar Aiyar, then a Union minister, spurred a political controversy by allegedly insulting Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and ordering the removal of a plaque installed in his honour at a memorial in Port Blair. Aiyar’s remarks made waves across the country, but most of all in Savarkar’s home state of Maharashtra.
Speaking to ThePrint, a senior Maharashtra Congress leader who was deputed in Mumbai to field questions over the controversy recalled how he had to stand by Aiyar’s actions, with a caveat: “We respect Savarkar as an individual, our opposition is to his ideology.”
Open criticism of Savarkar does not necessarily translate into political capital in Maharashtra where the Hindu Mahasabha leader is also known for his contribution to Marathi literature and culture, some Congress leaders told ThePrint.
This is perhaps why, when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made a statement about Savarkar during the Maharashtra leg of his Bharat Jodo Yatra, sources said the move took some in the party’s state unit by surprise. Gandhi’s comments, that mercy petitions Savarkar wrote to the British prove he was fearful of them, kicked off a political row similar to the one in 2004.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and both factions of the Shiv Sena — one now allied with the Congress — are squabbling over who holds Savarkar in higher regard, while the Congress is questioning his nationalist credentials. With nearly all political parties appropriating Savarkar in their own way, his political history is more nuanced than it seems at first.
Savarkar, historians and political observers say, was in conflict with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Moreover, while he was a friend of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray’s father Keshav Thackeray, popularly known as Prabodhankar, Savarkar was often the subject of criticism in Prabodhankar’s writings. And for all of Rahul Gandhi’s criticism, Indira Gandhi had issued a commemorative stamp in his honour and commissioned a documentary on Savarkar’s life.
“Like all personalities, V.D. Savarkar’s life has been caricatured for political gains. This is not a recent phenomenon,” Shraddha Kumbhojkar, head of the history department at Savitribai Phule Pune University, told ThePrint.
Kumbhojkar pointed out that in his autobiography Majhi Janmathep, Savarkar wrote that many in the Alipore jail would ask him about his famous escape from British captivity by jumping from the porthole of a ship at Marseilles, and that his contemporaries refused to accept his version when he told them that he didn’t have to swim for more than ten minutes. “So, the search for a romantic narrative has always influenced narratives about him (Savarkar),” she said.
“In more recent times, he has been perceived as a finished product, not as a person who evolved. Until 1907-08, for example, his opinions about Muslims were less hateful. Post-Andaman, he became a vehement Muslim hater, which is not perceived by political parties today. This distorts the understanding of history, and history is seen as if it’s supposed to serve the current dispensation,” explained Kumbhojkar.
Savarkar’s mercy petitions
On Tuesday, addressing a rally in Washim on the occasion of Birsa Munda’s birth anniversary, Rahul Gandhi hailed the tribal icon as Congress’s idol, and compared him to Savarkar. Savarkar wrote mercy petitions to the British and accepted pensions, while Birsa Munda embraced martyrdom, he said.
At a rally in Akola two days later, Gandhi quoted a letter which he claimed was a copy of one of Savarkar’s mercy petitions to the British that read: “I beg to remain sir your most obedient servant.”
“When he (Savarkar) signed this letter, what was the reason? It was fear. He was afraid of the British,” said the Congress MP from Wayanad.
Historians do not dispute the mercy petitions, but insist that they should be seen through the lens of that time and circumstance, and that such petitions were not uncommon.
Savarkar was tried and sentenced to 50 years in prison in December 1910.
Author Vaibhav Purandare, author of a biography on Savarkar titled, Savarkar – The True Story of the Father of Hindutva, told ThePrint: “I’m not taking a legal point of view at all, but statements made by a prisoner under extreme conditions of torture cannot be considered as a genuine testament of their thinking and feelings. Savarkar was given two consecutive life terms of 25 years each, and at Andamans, he was treated in the most inhuman and mediaeval ways.”
“He was kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time. He was given all kinds of inhuman punishments such as standing handcuffs, where he was chained to the wall, hands were extended above his head and tied to the wall, and he was made to stand there for 8-10 hours. He was not allowed to access the toilet and had to stand in his own filth,” he said, adding that other political prisoners held at Kala Pani wrote similar mercy petitions.
Purandare said the “pension” that Gandhi mentioned was an allowance that the British government gave prisoners as compensation for loss of livelihood. “People like Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi also got such allowances…When the British government decided to reduce the allowance, Bose had written a letter objecting to it,” he added.
However, Kumbhojkar said she didn’t know of any other political prisoners who made such appeals. “Like all colonial prisons, the cellular jail in Andaman was designed to break the person mentally and physically. Each prisoner there was treated with cruelty and unjust oppression. It is just that V.D. Savarkar survived to tell the tale,” she said.
Adding, “Whether the mercy petitions can be interpreted as his thoughts and feelings, it is the readers’ discretion. I will say that he indeed must have intended to secure release and hence was ready to accept restrictions on his liberty. His behaviour after the release clearly supports this, as he abided by his promise to not touch any political issues while he was in Ratnagiri.”
Savarkar was released from prison in 1924 on the condition that he would not leave Ratnagiri district and was kept under surveillance.Read more
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