People's Democracy

  More on Savarkar

Hindutva’s Search for a National Leader

Nalini Taneja

THE problem with fascisms is they lack their own respectable nationalist icons; Hitlers and Mussolinis have enjoyed more notoriety than respect and love of their people. Present day right-wingers in Europe are trying hard to win national status; at best, however, Europeans in their bid to turn the tide of liberalism have latched on to conservatives who will abide by the political institutions built by the liberals. At the other end of the political spectrum, Lenin, Che Guevara, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela and Castro have been loved by the people even as ruling classes have hated them.

In India, Gandhi, Nehru, Bhagat Singh and a host of other leaders, many of them communists, have attained great status in people’s hearts. Not one among those whom the Indian people have revered does one find a communalist, a religious fanatic. This has been the frustration of right wingers for the last three quarters of a century.

APPROPRIATING NATIONAL LEADERS

Despite claiming to be the truly and only nationalists in the entire political spectrum the Indian  rightist are unable to produce a single name that is recognizably and acceptably of a national leader or freedom fighter. By turns they have tried to appropriate Bhagat Singh, Tagore, even Ambedkar, and approvingly eulogized some aspects of thoughts or actions of Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sardar Patel, Malviya and so on, but they never had a name they could say was theirs, of the RSS or Hindu Mahasabha, who possessed at any point of time a national stature. Even having murdered Gandhi, they could not kill Gandhi, and they had no Gandhi to show off as father of the nation.

The strategy of appropriation served them well in the years following Independence, in the aftermath of anger against them at Gandhi’s murder, when they needed to show their affiliations to recognized icons of India’s freedom struggle. As pointed out by the authors of Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, “No great Hindu figure has been wasted”. Deliberately avoiding the construction of a distinct, defined lineage for themselves in their bid to woo the Indian people, they promoted and pushed their own sectarian leaders only through and within the RSS shakhas. Their heroes remained only their heroes, and national leaders only in the eyes of their own cadres. For the rest they preferred “to establish a complex, constantly proliferating and sprawling kinship network” through appropriations of freedom fighters which excluded only the Muslim, the Christian and the ‘secularists’; or pseudo secularists as they increasingly began to call all secular Indians as they tried to appropriate the term for themselves by laying claim to ‘real secularism’.

POPULARISING SAVARKAR   AS A NATIONAL LEADER

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has, therefore, for long been "Veer" Savarkar in RSS folklore, if one were to go by the Vidya Bharti school texts, and the popular nomenclature of VD Savarkar assiduously popularised by the RSS in its shakhas. A few years ago they even tried to have his statue erected in Marseilles-- in "commemoration of his anti imperialist role" in the early 1920s. Thankfully a worldwide protest campaign through letters and e-mails to the French President and Mayor of Marseilles resulted in the plan being sabotaged. Their move to award a Bharat Ratna to the man similarly flopped, as it became known that the President was in no mood to co-operate on it. Obviously it would have been difficult to explain why Savarkar and not, say Bhagat Singh, or the thousands of heroes who uncompromisingly fought and sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the country should be conferred this highest award.

With state power in their control the Indian fascists now want to redraw the entire national movement in the image of their own past, present and projected future. It would seem the Indian freedom movement boasts of no names other than the little Savarkars and the Hedgewars, the Munjes and the Golwalkars reared in the RSS shakhas. The original Savarkar, who is easier to sell because of the follies of his youth, and who penned the outlines of Hindutva, must therefore be now transformed into a national icon.

To put it simply, having attained political power, they are now trying to replace Gandhi with his murderers. They are on a renaming spree, where streets, halls, stadia, institutions, libraries, museums, cultural academies, railway stations and airports will all be renamed until there remains little that is recognizable. In typical fascist style they wish to destroy popular memories of collective struggles, and recognizable landmarks that represent secular identity in order to create new symbols and landmarks that have little connection with historical experience. They wish to rewrite the cultural, architectural landscape of this country along with its history through renaming and revisions of syllabi, and they wish to create national icons out of their own sectarian and chavimistic leaders through this renaming and rewriting of history in schools and on the streets.

Names of landmarks that remind people of the British rule and the associated anti-imperialist struggle, of Muslim rulers and peers and cultural personalities that testify to our composite-pluralistic cultural heritage, of world personalities like Nelson Mandela and other non alignment movement leaders who signify the Indian people’s struggles as part of the oppressed nations’ struggle against the Imperialist world will all be renamed into fake symbols that serve only to fabricate history and collective experience—if they have their way. The renewed campaign to create a national leader out of VD Savarkar are part of this effort to distort national identity.

IDEOLOGUE OF HINDUTVA BETRAYS THE NATION

This explains the hysterical defense of VD Savarkar in the face of strong criticism by secular democratic Indians; their clutching at the straw, as it were, by reminding us that Savarkar had after all written the first defense of the 1857 War of Independence. Only, they fail to inform us that when he wrote this work he was NOT an advocate of Hindu communalism. Flushed with success they cannot stop themselves from also boasting that his was the seminal contribution in defining Hindutva.

The period spent in Andaman jail, which the RSS refers to again and again today to ‘commemorate his bravery’ was, in fact, utilised by the man in ideological preparation for undermining the unity of the nation in the face of the anti imperialist struggle, and to build bridges with the British. It is not overnight that he discovered that Muslims were the ‘real conquerors’ of the ‘Hindu nation’, and that religion constituted a necessary component of national identity.

The clemency petition that he wrote to secure his release from Andaman prison and to barter his release for unconditional support to the British against the Congress, the Muslims and the Communists, is well known, and has been extensively quoted by Anil Nauriya, two years ago in the Indian Express and by the Frontline, and more recently in the Times of India.  The People's Democracy has also carried articles on his betrayal (March 25, 2001, and May 12, 2002). His role subsequent to his release has also been exposed. But the fascists believe that their lie if repeated often enough will begin to sound true, and so they go on.