The Hindu : Affront to the founding principles

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 27, 2003

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Affront to the founding principles

BY INSTALLING A portrait of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in the Central Hall of Parliament, alongside those of some of the valiant fighters against British colonialism, the BJP-led NDA Government has tried to push forward its notion of nationalism that militates against the pluralist foundations of Indian nationhood. Savarkar, after all, remains the icon of the Hindu Rashtra project which is at the core of the Sangh Parivar's political agenda. It was for this very reason that Savarkar too was accused of having played a role in the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. Savarkar's thoughts on nationalism as expressed in his book `Hindutva' were clearly opposed to the struggle against the British rule that had already matured into a mass movement drawing into its fold all sections of the Indian people. In this sense, it was offensive to the founding principles of the Indian nation. It was these founding principles, a pluralist spirit and a firm commitment to the Constitutional principle of the rule of law, that are sought to be challenged in the symbolic installation of the portrait of an icon of the political project for a Hindu nation. Placing his portrait in the Central Hall of Parliament, amidst those of men who underwent privations for the sake of freedom, will also be seen as mocking the glorious legacy of the freedom struggle for this very reason.

The reasons for the BJP's fascination for Savarkar (and not for any one of the hundreds of fighters who spent a major part of their lives in the cellular jail in the Andamans) are not far to seek. Savarkar, after all, devoted the rest of his life to work on ideas that distorted the nationalist thought process based on pluralist and democratic principles that guided the struggle against British colonialism under Mahatma Gandhi. Savarkar's thoughts, presented in book form in 1923 (Hindutva), provided the conceptual framework on which K.B. Hedgewar founded the RSS in 1925. While Savarkar himself stayed out of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha (of which he became the president in 1937) had maintained an organic unity with the Sangh throughout the period and stayed out of the agitations conducted by the Indian National Congress against the colonial set-up. Savarkar had even advocated partition in 1937 (even before Jinnah did in 1940) in his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha session. While the RSS stayed out of the individual Civil Disobedience movement carried out by the Congress during 1940-41 as well as the Quit India movement since August 1942, the Hindu Mahasabha's leading light, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, had even served as Finance Minister in Fazl ul Haq's Cabinet in the Bengal Presidency until February 1943. The ideological framework for this came from their identification of nationalism as a cultural notion as opposed to the egalitarian, democratic and pluralist foundations on which the national movement was built. The foundations for this distortion were laid by Savarkar on which Hedgewar and M.S. Golwalkar built the RSS later on. It is this aspect that draws the BJP and its associates in the NDA (the Shiv Sena in particular) to embark upon a project to re-invent Savarkar as a national hero.

Be that as it may, the location of the portrait — facing that of Mahatma Gandhi — adds further to the irony. The particular spot where Savarkar's portrait has been placed may not have been chosen by design. But then, seen against the background of the systematic manner in which the BJP-led Government has gone about its agenda (the far-reaching changes in the curriculum brought about by its men in the various academic bodies) to distort history, the spot chosen to install Savarkar's portrait does point to a design to deride the pluralist legacy of the nationalist project, in the making of which Gandhi played a central role. The Hindutva project, initiated by Savarkar and fashioned by Golwalkar into a political agenda, militated in essence as it does today against the strongly pluralist and secular constitutional framework of independent India. The enthusiasm to project Savarkar as a national hero, even if it means treating historical facts with contempt, is another regrettable feature of this backward-looking agenda.

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