The Hindu : 'Savarkar didn't share goals of Independence'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 26, 2003

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'Savarkar didn't share goals of Independence'

By Anjali Mody

Vishwa Nath Mathur, freedom fighter, and historian, Bipan Chandra, addressing a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday. — Photo: Anu Pushkarna

NEW DELHI FEB. 25. The President will unveil tomorrow in the Central Hall of Parliament a portrait of the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, alongside those of men and women honoured for their part in India's Independence movement.

On February 27, 1948, almost 55 years to the day, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the then Deputy Prime Minister, in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru on his scrutiny of the investigation into the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, said: "It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that (hatched) the conspiracy and saw it through."

Savarkar was never convicted but, said lawyer Anil Nauriya, it was not for lack of evidence. Digamber Badge, one of the conspirators, had turned approver and in his statement clearly implicated Savarkar. But, because of the rules of evidence at the time this was not considered sufficient to obtain a conviction.

However, the Commission of Inquiry into the plot to assassinate Gandhi, which completed its report in 1969, showed that Savarkar had been placed under surveillance prior to the assassination. The crime reports relating to this reveal the close contact that the assassins, Nathuram Godse and the other conspirators had with him, particularly in the days preceding January 30, 1948.

Mr. Nauriya also pointed to the undertaking given by Savarkar to the Government of India, while the investigation into the assassination of Gandhi was being conducted. Savarkar, who pleaded ill-health, said "Consequently in order to disarm all suspicion .... I wish to express my willingness to give an undertaking to the Government that I shall refrain from taking part in any communal or political activity for any period the Government may require in case I am released on that condition."

Besides this, the case against placing Savarkar alongside India's nationalist heroes is made by historian Prof. Bipan Chandra. He said that Savarkar had a history of repeated and abject pleas for clemency, including to the British authorities, while imprisoned in the cellular jail in Port Blair, for his early revolutionary activity. In one letter sent in 1911, the year of his incarceration, he wrote, "if the Government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the British Government which is the foremost condition of that progress."

Prof. Chandra said the difference between the revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, also incarcerated in the cellular jail in Port Blair, and Savarkar was something that had to be considered, as those whose portraits hung in the Parliament's Central Hall were there because their lives inspired a freedom struggle and were role models for every generation.

Bhagat Singh, who had ceased to support individual acts of terrorism by the time of his incarceration, was asked why he did not give a call to young people to abjure such means. Prof. Chandra said that Bhagat Singh's explanation was that if, at that stage, he had done so it would have been read as a plea to the British to reduce the death sentence he faced and diminish the cause that he had fought for.

Savarkar on the other hand assured his jailers (in a petition dated November 14, 1913) that his "conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad, who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct would be."

Mr. Nauriya, further pointed out that Savarkar did not share the goals of the Independence movement. His statement, to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1939, repeated in 1943 (published in the Indian Annual register, Volume 10 of 1943) was: "I have no quarrel with Mr. Jinnah's two nation theory. We Hindus are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations."

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