Hindu identity as a political tool

Savarkar: A Contested Legacy (1924-66)

Author: Vikram Sampath

Publisher: Penguin Viking

Pages:691

Price: Rs 1,000

Throughout the freedom movement the Congress wanted to include the Muslims in the fight against the British. But the British managed to foil that attempt.

So after the Muslim League swore ever-lasting allegiance to the British, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the subject of this biography — volume 2 — concluded that the Muslims could not be trusted politically.

He started propounding the Hindu cause even more forcefully than he had been doing till then. He said that unless the Hindus asserted themselves as a political force — just as the Muslims had done after 1906— they would be unable to control their destiny. That assessment proved incorrect.

In Volume 1 the author had described how Savarkar forged the notion of Hindu identity and unity as a political tool, and even weapon. He called it Hindutva. It was different from Hinduism, he said.

Given the British divide and rule policies, Savarkar the social reformer in due course became Savarkar the political revolutionary. His ideology was Hindutva. He had no patience with the constitutional means being advocated by the Congress. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, even Gandhiji lost faith in constitutionalism.

The British locked up Savarkar intermittently between 1911 and 1937. He was also lodged in the inhuman cellular jail in the Andamans for a long time and made to suffer.

India for Hindus: This volume covers the second part of his life, from 1924 till his death in 1966. It is meticulously researched. There are 12 detail-filled chapters, two long appendices, 46 pages of “Notes” and a 30-page bibliography.

In the two chapters on Savarkar’s trial and his twilight years we get to learn a lot of things we did not know. He emerges as an ideologue and a nationalist, no different from other such ideologues and nationalists of the time.

Together the two volumes seek to restore balance in the way Savarkar has been portrayed because, says the author, “The demonisation [of Savarkar] is so absolutist in nature that there hardly seems to be any trace of positive virtue that his opponents can find in him”.  That conclusion certainly rings true.

But in some places, Vikram  Sampath goes overboard, as when he says: “In terms of contrast, while Savarkar stood for modernity and science, separation of ritualistic religion from politics, militarisation and dismantling the caste system, Gandhi spoke in terms of faith, religion and ahimsa, approved of the caste system in principle, and had not much time or appetite for science…it is perhaps Savarkar’s vision of India that is fructifying and Gandhi’s. Yet, he is the one icon and the tragic anti-hero of Indian history…”

After his final release from prison in the late 1930s, Savarkar tried very hard to create an alternative to the Congress. In this endeavour, says Dr Sampath, he failed. “His party came a cropper in the 1946 election and was soon to disintegrate into political irrelevance.”

This suggests that in 1946 the vast majority of Hindus preferred the Congress’s way of opposing the Muslim League, which was explicitly a Muslim party, than Savarkar’s of demonising the Muslims.  

The BJP is learning that lesson now, albeit very slowly; around 200 million Muslim Indians can’t be excluded from the political process and political power.

Biographies as political history: Dr Sampath goes into a huge amount of detail that are the stuff of a good biography. The lay reader must, however, wonder from time to time about the method of narrating political history via biographies.

One question is whether a biographer looks at the evidence before arriving at a conclusion or does he look for the evidence after he or she has already reached a conclusion and then arranges it all suitably as a good lawyer would.

The evidence against Savarkar was reviewed by the courts. It is narrated in this book by Dr Sampath and it leads him to two broad conclusions.

One, that Savarkar was not involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhiji; and two, that this insistence, that he was involved, was at the instance of the Congress even after he had been acquitted. It was all political, suggests the author but doesn’t really say why, considering that in his own words Savarkar’s party has become “irrelevant”.

That Savarkar met Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte a few times in mid-January 1948 is not in question. But was there enough evidence to hold Savarkar as a co-conspirator?

It’s impossible to tell because no one really knows what transpired at that meeting. During his trial, Savarkar stayed aloof from Godse and Apte. So in the end it all boils down to what you believe. That’s the problem with conspiracy theories about a crime or an injustice put forth by both perpetrators and victims.