Widely respected public intellectual, former editor, economist and a minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government, Arun Shourie has painted a not-so-flattering picture of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) in his latest book, The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts. From revealing his status as a man who regarded the cow as just another useful animal, like a buffalo, horse or a dog, to Savarkar excluding Gandhi’s name from those responsible for India’s Independence, Mr. Shourie turns to what Savarkar said and wrote to profile the Hindutva ideologue. Edited excerpts from an interview:
What could be the reasons for this right-wing zeal to impart retrospective glory to Savarkar?
There are two or three reasons. The first is the general project to erase Gandhi because Gandhi is a great inconvenience to them. His emphasis on truth, non-violence, looking for commonalities between religions, all these are an anathema to them.
Secondly, they are short of heroes. They have to snatch at anybody. One day it is Subhas Chandra Bose but that becomes a problem because Bose was a fundamentalist in his secularism. You can’t have Bhagat Singh either because he was a Marxist and an atheist. And the third thing is that they are conscious of the fact that they were not a part of the freedom struggle. So the idea is to just shout that so and so was a great freedom fighter, and make him your hero. By proxy, you become a part of the independence movement. They are confident that nobody would actually know the facts about Savarkar, nobody would have read his writings. Therefore, they can bask in his glory.
I can only go by what the publisher of a book from Savarkar Sadan says. And he says that Chitragupt was almost without doubt Savarkar himself. I’ve quoted some of those passages which show that Savarkar actually is talking in the first person, writing as Chitragupt. But the person who has really done a lot on this, who has given many more reasons, is writer Vinayak Chaturvedi, a professor in an American university.
One is looking beyond the mercy petitions to the actual correspondence and the record of meetings with Lord Linlithgow. They show how Savarkar was, as Linlithgow said, ‘begging’. ‘He begged me’, these are the words that Linlithgow used in reporting what transpired between him and Savarkar to the Secretary of State for India in London. These documents should have been procured from the India Office library. My good friend, Sanjay Suri, who was the chief reporter of The Indian Express when I was at the paper, found these correspondence. I have included them in the book. They should be known.
This was [also] the time when Savarkar claimed Bose was acting as [per] his instruction. He says he had told Bose that you come from Burma and the soldiers that I will put in the army, they will refuse to fire on your people, they will fire on the British officers. When Bose and the INA came through Burma, far from the Indian people rising against the British, even the Hindu Mahasabha members didn’t do it. His (Savarkar’s) own people were actually joining the British at that time.
The second is actually what you said about cows and idol worship and worship of the nine planets and all that – he makes great fun of the rituals. All that is available in his writings, in his collected works.
Absolutely. That’s why I put it in the first chapter. Those embracing him, those lauding him as the hero will have to first get over that hurdle.
We don’t know. Politicians in India are very confident about people’s illiteracy. So maybe the demand will come one day. There is a technology in this. They do it step by step. You just fly a kite. Then see how many people salute it. And then fly a second kite and fly a third kite. And then everybody starts seeing the kite as the normal place. This is how these are always done, as you will see. Like you start a civil code in Uttarakhand. Keep talking about it. Now it becomes a part of general discourse.
You must understand that Savarkar also said that Hitler and Tojo played a certain role in India’s independence rather than Gandhi. He said that these are the only two who helped us. And he’s all the time claiming, in his recollection of what he told Bose, that Germany will attack from the Afghanistan side and Japan will come from the east. But in the Second World War, where is the assault from Germany over land? But he lauds Hitler and Tojo. And that is after Hitler had kept even Bose waiting for a year to give him an appointment, that too only for a photo opportunity. Then he packed him off in a submarine to Japan.
Absolutely. And many times. I have devoted a lot of time and space in the book to his idea of how history should be read and how it should be presented. For instance, when he writes about 1857, he says that Hindus and Muslims may have fought each other in the past but now we must show that they worked together. And the book (which Savarkar wrote) is a celebration of everybody working together against the British. That book was written in 1907-08. But in 15 years, his view of what is required is the opposite. Therefore, when he writes ‘Hindutva’ in 1923, it is designed to separate Muslims and Hindus. Everybody excluded, only Hindus here. The purpose had changed. And he says this explicitly in his book, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History.
Predictably not, because he was obsessed with Gandhi, and people looking up to him as the great symbol of embodying everything good that is there in Hinduism. Then Savarkar is the one who’s talking of Hindutva, Hindutva, Hindutva.
Exactly. They want to raise him to the same level as Gandhi, and actually supersede him. He is a sort of a rubber to erase Gandhi. I have highlighted an interesting proposition in the book. There is no record of any instance in which Savarkar is working for the national freedom movement. You can find a lot of things of Jinnah before 1937-38, Jinnah working for Hindu-Muslim unity. He’s the ambassador for Hindu-Muslim unity, as Sarojini Naidu called him. You can find many instances of Jinnah working for the freedom of the whole of India. But you cannot find an instance of Savarkar working for the freedom of all of India. Except when he’s a young boy in England. And that is on his own telling.
Yes. And he says that in a statement on oath in the trial in which he is the co-accused for the assassination of Gandhi. He said, ‘How is this possible? We were friends. We lived together as friends in India House in London’. It is a complete lie. In 1908, Gandhi was not in England. He was in South Africa. In 1907, he was not there. In 1906, he was sent by the South African Indians to represent their case to the British politicians. And he comes there with a person called Haji. The two of them go to India House for one night. One night only. There was no question of living together as friends. And Gandhi does not return to England till August 1914. And (meanwhile) Savarkar had already been shipped to India in 1910.
