The truly heroic figure of Gandhi does not draw high praise from BJP
and RSS leaders. Savarkar
does. What was so heroic about him even if one were to accept his supporters'
claims at their face
value? Lofty nationalism? A noble vision? Unremitting sacrifice? Courage?
Intellectual gifts of a high
order? Nobility of character? Not one phase of his chequcred career
reflects any of these. Even
duriing the early nationalist phase in London, the record is a gravely
flawed one. Recently, while
inaugurating a park in New Delhi named after Savarkar and unveiling
his statue there, Advani
claimed that he was a great freedom fighter and revolutionary who was
sent to the Andamans for his
revolutionary activities. This is simply not true. Savarkar was
sent to Andaman on his conviction for
complicity in a brutal and wanton murder. He had narrowly escaped conviction
for another murder,
which he had instigated. In neither case did he hold the gun. He never
did in any of the cases of
murder in which he was involved. In each, he goaded the assassin, but
covered his own tracks
skillfully. This is a far cry from other revolutionaries, who were
never afraid to wield the gun when
needed.
A fair and definitive biography of Savarkar is yet to appear. The standard
work in English is
Dhananjay Keer's biography which often borders on hagiography. Savarkar
died on February 26,
1966 at the age of 83. Before the year was out, Dhanajay Keer published
a second edition under a
new title Veer Savarkar.' In his Preface to the second edition Keer
wrote, 'the valuable new
information and new facts I could get through research and through
a plethora of new material
which was kindly made available to me by Savarkar himself and through
his kind interviews, were
inserted at their proper places in historical sequences'. One wonders
whether Savarkar also
stipulated that they should be published only after his death. The
interval of sixteen years between the
two editions is inexplicable on any other assumption. It is noteworthy
that most of these additions
reflect poorly on Savarkar. For example, Keer leaves out a crucial
sentence which points towards
Savarkar's complicity in the murder of William Curzon Wylie by Madanlal
Dhingra in 1909, as well
as, later, in an attempted murder by V.G. Gogate in 1931. Curiously,
however, Keer also does not
mention in the this edition that Savarkar 'was not a believer in God'.
It is unlikely that Keer
discovered this after 1950. Clearly, this fact was suppressed for fear
of offending Savarkar's
orthodox Hindu followers. His suppression of these facts reflects poorly
on both the biographer and
his subject. Most damagingly, however, Keer suppressed in both editions
Savarkar's offer in
February 1948 to abjure politics in order to avert prosecution for
conspiracy to murder Gandhi. We
shall look at all that in some detail below; for the moment, let us
trace the evolution of Savarkar's
worldview and political career.
Savarkar was born on May 28, 1883 at Bhagul, a village near Nasik in
Maharashtra. He was a
Chitpavan brahman. When he was ten, he heard of communal riots in the
United Provinces and in
Mumbai. Keer records:
the news of the atrocities then perpetrated on the Hindus in the United
Provinces and Bombay fired
his blood and he resolved to avenge the woes and deaths of his co-religionists.
The boy Savarkar
led a batch of selected school-mates in a march upon the village mosque.
The battalion of these boys
showered stones upon it, shattered its windows and tiles and returned
victorious. This incident gives
the first hint of the heroic mettle Vinayak was made of and the key
to his future daring life and
leadership.
He had two brothers. Ganesh alias Babarao was the elder brother and
Narayan was the younger.
While at college he actively participated in a secret society Mitra
Mela, which was later renamed
Abhinav Bharat. Vinayak went to London to read tbr the Bar exams there.
Like other Indian
students of his time, he came into contact with awide range of political
figures, British and Indian. On
October 24, 1909 Gandhi presided over a Dasara Sammelan which Savarkar
addressed. He said,
'Hindus are the heart of Hindustan ....
Nevertheless, just as the beauty of the rainbow is not impaired but
enhanced by its varied hues, so
also Hindustan will appear all the more beautiful across the sky of
the future by assimilating all that is
best in the Muslim, Parsi,Jewish and other civilizations'.