Last week, in Bombay, Rahul Gandhi flashed a clemency letter V D Savarkar wrote to the British from the Andaman cellular jail. Although Rahul, unlike the other five-star leaders of this country, has evolved to find a way to break out, in this instance, he seemed to have regressed into points system politics. It has only served to alienate the fluid Hindu vote (for which the fight is on) and to sow confusion among political partners like the Shiv Sena, a party already finding it hard to hold on to its nativist politics.
In any case, Rahul is only partially right about his chosen target of ridicule. This note is about that before we return to Rahul Gandhi.
From mid-1911 to 1924, V D Savarkar was in Andaman cellular jail for anti-British activities. Out of touch with an India he helped to boil over, he was suddenly nowhere in the picture. And no one seemed to care either. He consulted, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he had a love-hate and then hate-hate relationship (as did Subhas Chandra Bose, and Dr B R Ambedkar); not because Gandhi’s vision for India, which was essentially ‘the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing’ as Eliot said in another context, but, as a visionary leader, Gandhi ‘knew’ of the end before he began. And only he knew.
You could not win with Gandhi because, in his mind, he had decided he had died long ago, long before Godse shot him, and had come back as a soul to occupy his body for a historical purpose. So he could give up his body again and again, which in a way Rahul Gandhi is discovering: he is putting the body back into politics. Gandhi’s righteousness could provoke resentment in any exceptionally gifted compatriot. V D Savarkar was one.
Even before Gandhi arrived in India in 1915 from South Africa, Savarkar was already living the anti-colonial war. Before the first decade of the last century had ended, he had researched and written the first Indian account of the Mutiny of 1857 (The First War of Independence).
He saw the event not as the limited revolt of the sepoys on account of the cartridges greased by the fat of cows and pigs as the British would have it, but also as a historic uprising that had its origin in social and political causes. We will only observe in passing that the two members of the animal kingdom, then as now, continue to define Indian politics.
Savarkar’s pioneering book, first written in Marathi, then assumed many furtive guises before it could be printed in English, which got him into trouble, along with his other activities, all of which were nothing if not patriotic.
In London, where he went to study the law with the support of a scholarship at the instance of Lokmanya Tilak, he fomented discussions and conspiracies against the British.
He actively helped Madan Lal Dhingra to assassinate W H Wylie, who, for long in India, represented British interests in many important capacities before returning to England. The British held that Savarkar supplied the gun used in the killing to Dhingra. They also thought Savarkar, back home, had a hand in the killing of the Nashik collector, A M T Jackson, shot on the eve of his departure to Bombay on a promotion.
The British arrested him and imported him to India. Midway, Savarkar jumped ship and swam to the French shores. He was caught and then sent to India after a series of Anglo-French pleasantries. These are all acts of a brave patriot, not of a coward.
In Andaman, it was possible for Savarkar to feel this was the end. Desperate, Savarkar wrote many clemency petitions, and finally, the British moved him to the less hostile Ratnagiri jail in 1921.
It is at this exilic stage in his career, to an extent passively engineered by the seemingly fair Indian leadership, and pregnant Gandhian silences which only Nehru could telepathically access, Savarkar shifted his emphasis from a kind of nationalist terrorist to an unabashedly militant exponent of Hindutva.
There was also the British condition for release that Savarkar should eschew politics. This, too, would have encouraged him to wear the cloak of religion to wield the dagger of anti-colonial politics. Early in January 1924, he was released from jail but was confined to Ratnagiri district. In real earnest, his Hindu Sangathan activities began around this time. Savarkar was free to move about in India only after 1937.
By this time, the freedom movement had changed the complexion completely. And Savarkar had become just another ‘also ran’. He had too much vigour and energy to allow himself to be completely crushed by the Gandhi-Nehru juggernaut.
Later, in the second of the 1940s, in the Kapur Commission hearings, which ended in Godse’s hanging, he was implicated as a conspirator in the Gandhi assassination but was acquitted.
If you listened to Godse’s statement in court (available on YouTube), he makes it clear that the plan and execution were his alone, despite the meetings he did have with Savarkar.
Had the Congress party leadership been more inclusive at the time, the Hindu question Savarkar came to champion would not have devolved to reach the present stage. In the decades since his death in 1966, India has moved closer to the dreams of Savarkar.
But who induced that dangerous sleep in him? Perhaps it is too late for such discussions. But to hold up a clemency letter of a man in dire straits and to deny him his due is the stuff of brownies.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B