In his 84th year, Arun Shourie, India’s preeminent public intellectual, has written the most important book of his life. The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts, set to be released on January 31, is nearly as explosive an exposé as his 1997 work Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar, and the Facts Which Have Been Erased. But there is a crucial difference. For reasons that have little to do with the merit of his earlier book, scholars and politicians alike feared to endorse Shourie’s facts and arguments, because B R Ambedkar has now become a demigod immune to any criticism. V D Savarkar does not enjoy any such socio-political protective shield. Hence, in terms of its influence on the national discourse, Shourie’s new book is sure to outperform all his previous ones.
Savarkar’s admirers are already incensed. The book’s release, previously set for January 30, had to be postponed by a day. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, as the book shows convincingly, is inseparably linked to the core of Savarkar’s ideology. In his statement to the trial court, Savarkar made several claims that he had nothing to do with his close associate Nathuram Godse’s crime. Shourie shows how these were “completely fabricated” — “not a syllable survives scrutiny”.
Story continues below this ad
No reader can accuse Shourie of bias. Unlike many critics of Savarkar, he has not been a lifelong foe of the BJP and the RSS. He was, after all, a star minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. He gives Savarkar due credit for his spirited campaign against untouchability in Hindu society. Savarkar’s bold and unorthodox views on cow protection are elaborately highlighted. His superlative account, The Indian War of Independence of 1857, published in 1909, is unsurpassed in extolling the spirit of Hindu-Muslim unity that animated Indians’ common struggle against British rule at the time.
But these are not the reasons for which Savarkar (1883-1966) has become the “new icon” of the Hindu Right. Indeed, today his admirers would like to suppress his views on cows and Hindu-Muslim unity in 1857. What has made him the greatest Hindu hero after 2014 is that he provides ideological and inspirational fuel to anti-Muslim hatred, which has come to energise the support base of the new BJP and sustain it in power. This base equates Indian patriotism with aggressive Hindu supremacism, of the kind Savarkar advocated all through his life after his release from Andaman’s Cellular Jail, where he had been incarcerated for a decade (1911-21). No RSS leader — not even K B Hedgewar, its founder, or M S Golwalkar, its longest-serving chief — offers more incendiary support to polarising Hindu nationalism than Savarkar.
Shourie in this book is at his best as a fearless iconoclast. He punctures the widely-held belief that Savarkar was a towering revolutionary leader of India’s freedom movement. After dissecting his nine mercy petitions, in which he pledged loyalty to the British if he was released from prison, Shourie conclusively shows how Savarkar, from 1921 until 1947, “did what he had pledged to do ─ that is, to be of service to the British”. He did so in two ways. At a time when the broadest and strongest national unity was needed to defeat the mighty colonial empire, he contributed to the division of the freedom movement both socially and politically. Social unity was fractured by projecting Muslims as the real enemy, not the British. Political unity was weakened by targeting the Congress at every turn as the real enemy, not the British. “He hurled pejoratives at Gandhiji”, calling him “a walking plague”, Shourie writes. “He poured scorn at the Quit India movement.” Unlike Subhas Chandra Bose, “he supported the British in their war effort”.
Story continues below this ad
Of course, Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha was not alone in this game. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League played an even more coercive, and consequential, role in ultimately partitioning India, which was in any case a strategic goal of the British. But Savarkar, like the Muslim League, had his own “two-nation theory — a theory that was so convenient for the British”. “Savarkar began advancing this unbridgeable separateness [between Hindus and Muslims] much before Jinnah alighted on the same thesis.”
An admirer of Mussolini and Hitler, Savarkar was against democracy and advocated a one-man government. He was a votary of Hindu eugenics for promoting, under state control, “healthy, strong and handsome progeny”. In Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, a book he completed in his 80th year, he said that Islam and Christianity “can never be described as tolerant of other religions”. Hence, his prescription: “In respect of these intolerant foreign religions”, use “extremely enraged intolerance”, “retaliate [to] their atrocities with super-atrocious reprisals”, “meet cruelty with super-cruel blows”, “violence with extreme violence”. Saying the Hindus had “a perverted idea of woman-chivalry”, he even scolded Shivaji for being lenient towards Muslim women. Hence, Shourie’s warning: In fighting the Islamic State through Savarkar’s “Hindutva State”, what will actually be established is “An Islamic State in saffron”.
Shourie lists some of the “consequences of the hatred that Savarkar espouses”, which are already visible. His “ideology provides a rationalisation to the neighbourhood bully as much as it does to the bureaucrat and judge. Pull out the truck driver and kill him; overturn the little basket of a helpless, poor bangle-seller and beat him up; frighten schoolgirls; beat up couples to deter ‘love-jihad’; insist that people boycott shops owned by or employing Muslims; demand that Muslim tenants move out; bulldoze houses… Values erased. Norms gone. The fist is all. Soon the terror spreads to Hindus — those who speak up against such bulldozer treatment of citizens, those who raise any question about the one decreed version of faith…Society and state get bogged down in such issues. The essential tasks are neglected…The state and society are left in the grip of worse and worse scoundrels…Again, look at what Pakistani institutions and people have been preoccupied with since it declared itself to be an ‘Islamic State’ and the ditch into which it has descended as a result.”
most read
What compelled Shourie to write this risky book? Its last page provides the answer. India is currently locked in a future-defining struggle between Hinduism and Hindutva. “The essence of Hinduism is the inner-directed search. Hindutva, by contrast, is a project to capture, dominate, retain, twist and turn the state. For the inner-directed search, adherence to truth, humility, service, ethical conduct in general are the sine qua non. Hindutva, by contrast, shouts by all means that we capture and dominate the state, that we subjugate society by all means ─ falsehood and force, intimidation and cruelty, deceit and bribery ─ in a word whatever is ‘necessary’, which, in practice, means whatever the Leader, indeed the Leader of the moment fancies. No surprise, therefore, that the moment a religion is dragooned and made an instrument in the pursuit of the state and its purposes, it gets devoured ─ look at what has happened to the Christianity of Jesus, look at what has happened to Islam of the Sufis.”
“And so, my plea,” Shourie passionately concludes: “Save Hinduism from Hindutva.”
The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
