Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar’s grandnephew Satyaki Savarkar has told a Pune court that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi portrayed Savarkar as an “extreme hater of Muslims” in a 2023 speech in London.
During cross-examination in the defamation case filed against Gandhi, his lawyer Milind Pawar asked Satyaki to identify the exact words in Gandhi’s speech that allegedly harmed Savarkar’s reputation.
Satyaki cited Gandhi’s statement that “Savarkar had written in a book that he and five to six friends had assaulted a Muslim youth and derived pleasure from the act”.
"By these words, Savarkar was portrayed as an extreme hater of Muslims and as a mob lyncher. Savarkar never hated Muslims. Rather, in his writings, he showed the ways and means for their progress," he claimed.
Satyaki has alleged that Gandhi falsely attributed the account of an assault on a Muslim youth to Savarkar, maintaining that no such incident appears in the Hindutva ideologue’s writings.
During Tuesday’s proceedings, Pawar also submitted a 2004 video interview of Satyaki’s grandfather Gopal Godse, along with its transcript. Gopal Godse, the younger brother of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse and a co-conspirator in the assassination, purportedly acknowledged in the interview that Nathuram was an RSS member.
(With inputs from PTI)