16-10-2021 The Asian Independent

www.theasianindependent.co.uk
NEWS
16-10-2021 to 31-10-2021
19
Gandhi in a New Avatar : Advisor
to Savarkar on Mercy petitions
The Indian Express, 13 October
2021, tells us that Shri Rajnath Singh,
the Indian Defence Minister, has
claimed that “A lot of falsehood was
spread against Savarkar. It was repeatedly
said that he filed multiple mercy
petitions before the British government.
The truth is he did not file these petitions
for his release. Generally, a prisoner
has the right to file a mercy petition.
Mahatma Gandhi had asked that you
file a mercy petition. It was on Gandhi’s
suggestion that he filed a mercy petition.
And Mahatma Gandhi had
appealed that Savarkar ji should be
released. He had said the way we are
running movement for freedom peacefully,
so would Savarkar.”. He also said
that “You can have differences of opinion,
but to see him condescendingly is
not right. The act of demeaning his
national contribution will not be tolerated”.
(Note the threat. Setting up Godse
temples and hero-worshipping him can
be tolerated but no criticism of
Savarkar!)
What are the facts?
Rajnath Singh’s statement is presumably
based on documents pertaining to
the year 1920: a letter from ND
Savarkar, brother of VD Savarkar and
Ganesh Savarkar, to Gandhiji,
Gandhiji’s reply, and an article in Young
India by Gandhiji.
The facts are somewhat at variance
with the claim made by Rajnath Singh.
The first mercy petition was filed nine
years earlier by Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar in 1911 itself, within six
months of his conviction, and numerous
other petitions followed in subsequent
years, without any evidence or claim of
it being at Gandhiji’s suggestion! To
quote from one such petition, submitted
personally to the Home Member, Sir
Reginald Craddock, when he visited the
Andamans jail in 1913, for his release,
offering to be loyal to the British
Government:
“If the Government in their manifold
beneficence and mercy release me, I for
one cannot but be the strongest advocate
of constitutional progress and loyalty to
the English government which is the
foremost condition of that progress. 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. The Mighty
alone can afford to be merciful and
therefore where else can the prodigal
son return but to the parental doors of
the Government?”
Further, as testified by GS Khoparde,
a Savarkar supporter’s question in the
Imperial Legislative Council on March
22, 1920, “Mr Savarkar and his brother
had once in 1915 and at another time in
1918 submitted petitions to Government
stating that they would, during the continuance
of war, serve the Empire by
enlisting in the Army, if released, and
would, after the passing of the Reforms
Bill, try to make the Act a success and
would stand by law and order". In his
reply, the Home Member, Sir William
Vincent, confirmed that: "Two petitions
were received from Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar - one in 1914 and another in
1917, through the Superintendent, Port
Blair. In the former, he offered his services
to the Government during the war
in any capacity and prayed that a general
amnesty be granted to all political
prisoners. The second petition was confined
to the latter proposal”.
Thus, it is very clear that Savarkar
had submitted numerous petitions
between 1911 and 1920, without any
advice or prompting from Gandhi,.
offering loyalty to the British government,
and expressing his willingness to
serve them in any capacity. Therefore
the Defence Minister’s statement that
Savarkar did not file mercy petitions but
did so only on the advice of the
Mahatma is not borne out by the actual
historical record.
So where does Gandhiji come into
the story? Only in 1920, when N D
Savarkar, the younger brother of the two
Savarkar brothers who were in jail,
wrote to Gandhiji seeking his advice
when he found that the list of prisoners
being released under the Royal
Proclamation of Clemency by the
British did not include the names of the
brothers. Gandhiji replied saying it was
difficult to give advice but suggested
that he might draft a brief petition. In
addition, he wrote an article in Young
India on 26 May 1920, titled Savarkar
Brothers, where he refers to the Royal
Proclamation of Clemency and notes
that while many other political prisoners
had been released under this but the
Savarkar brothers were not.
He says “Both the brothers have
declared their political opinions and
both have stated that they do not entertain
any revolutionary ideas and that if
they were set free they would like to
work under the Reform Act…”
(Government of India Act of 1919)
“They both state unequivocally that
they do not desire independence from
the British connection. On the contrary,
they feel that India’s destiny can be best
worked out in association with the
British.”
It is to be noted that nowhere in
Gandhiji’s article is there an appeal for
Savarkar’s release, as stated by the
Defence minister. “Mahatma Gandhi
had appealed that Savarkar ji should be
released.” Gandhiji questions the government
decision not to release them as
they appear to pose no danger to “public
safety” or “danger to the state”, but
does not appeal to the British. Nor does
Gandhiji anywhere say in his article, as
claimed by the Defence Minister, that
“the way we are running movement for
freedom peacefully, so would
Savarkar.” On the contrary, Gandhiji is
emphasizing that the Savarkar brothers
do not want independence, and want to
work under the Reform Act.
There is a strange irony in this entire
episode. That Mahatma Gandhi is being
roped in to establish Savarkar’s nationalist
credentials, that too on such flimsy
grounds! The attempt is to create a picture
in the public mind that Gandhiji
and Savarkar had a close relationship, to
the extent that the latter took Gandhiji’s
advice on such crucial issues as mercy
petitions and that Gandhiji appealed for
his release. It is a clear attempt to try
and normalise Savarkar’s begging for
mercy when numerous other nationalists
refused to do so and Gandhiji even
demanded the severest punishment for
himself.
What are the facts, which we are
expected to forget?
In January 1948, when Gandhi was
assassinated, Savarkar was arrested as
he was suspected of being the mastermind
behind the conspiracy. Sardar
Patel, who was overseeing the whole
case as the Home Minister, being a fine
criminal lawyer, was personally convinced
of Savarkar’s guilt, otherwise, he
would not have agreed to put him up for
trial. He told the Prime Minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, in unambiguous
terms, ‘It was a fanatical wing of the
Hindu Mahasabha directly under
Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy
and saw it through'. (Durga Das, Sardar
Patel Correspondence, 1945–50, Vol.
VI, p. 56.)
In response to the Hindu
Mahasabha’s disclaimer, Patel wrote to
Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the Hindu
Mahasabha leader, on 6 May 1948:
“…we cannot shut our eyes to the
fact that an appreciable
number of the members of
the Mahasabha gloated
over the tragedy and distributed
sweets….
Further, militant communalism,
which was
preached until only a few months ago
by many spokesmen of the Mahasabha,
including men like Mahant Digbijoy
Nath, Prof. Ram Singh and Deshpande,
could not but be regarded as a danger to
public security. The same would apply
to the RSS, with the additional danger
inherent in an organization run in secret
on military or semi-military lines.”
(Sardar Patel Correspondence, Vol. VI,
p. 66.)
Patel further pointed out to Shyama
Prasad Mookerjee, ‘The activities of the
RSS constituted a clear threat to the
existence of Government and the state’.
(18 July 1948, Sardar Patel
Correspondence, Vol. 6, p. 323.)
The Chief Minister of Bombay, B.G.
Kher, explained the political situation in
Maharashtra to Patel, ‘The atmosphere
of hatred against the Congress and
Mahatma sought to be created by the
Hindu Mahasabha culminated in the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi at the
hands of a few Maharashtrians’. { B.G.
Kher to Patel, 26 May 1948, ibid., Vol.
VI, pp. 77–78.)
Savarkar was eventually not convicted
in the Gandhi Murder Trial due to a
technical point of criminal law: for lack
of independent evidence to corroborate
the testimony of the approver.
However, the Commission of Inquiry
set up in 1965 under Justice Jiwan Lal
Kapoor, a former judge of the Supreme
Court of India, got access to a lot of evidence
that was not available to the trial
judge. Two of Savarkar’s close associates,
A.P. Kasar and G.V. Damle, who
had not testified at the trial, spoke up
before the Kapur Commission, now that
Savarkar was dead, and corroborated
the approver’s statements. It is possible
that If they had testified at the trial,
Savarkar would have been proven
guilty. In fact, the Kapur Commission
came to a conclusion very similar to that
of Sardar Patel: ‘All these facts taken
Mridula Mukherjee
Aditya Mukherjee
Sucheta Mahajan
together were destructive of any theory
other than the conspiracy to murder by
Savarkar and his group’.( Report of
Commission of Inquiry into Conspiracy
to Murder Mahatma Gandhi, 1970,
p.303, para 25.106.)
Immediately after Gandhiji’s assassination,
the Government of India, with
Sardar Patel as Deputy Prime Minister
and Home Minister, banned the RSS
and put some 25,000 of its members in
jail. The Hindu Mahasabha chose to
dissolve itself when confronted with a
ban. Tainted by its link with Gandhiji’s
murder, the Hindu Mahasabha beat a
tactical retreat and Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee, its main leader, founded the
Bharatiya Jan Sangh in 1951. This was
to be the main political vehicle of Hindu
communal articulation from then
onwards, its frontline political party, till
it merged into the Janata Party after the
Emergency and then was replaced by
the BJP.
It is indeed ironic that the political
forces who lay claim to being the most
ardent nationalists today
played no role at all
when the actual struggle
for India’s freedom was
being fought. Savarkar,
after his release from
prison in 1924, never
took part in any anti-British politics. In
fact, he was the originator of the theory
of Hindutva, which defined authentic
Indians as those whose fatherland and
holy lands, pitribhumi and punyabhumi
, were in India, thereby excluding
Muslims and Christians, whose holy
lands were outside India, from the fold.
The Hindu Mahasabha also became
increasingly loyalist in the 1930s and
1940s. Though the loyalist tendency
was there earlier, initially some of its
leaders participated in Congress-led
movements. But from 1937 onwards,
when Savarkar became the President
and undisputed leader, they joined the
Muslim League in competing for the
crumbs thrown from the Imperial table.
The outbreak of the Second World War
brought the differences with the nationalist
forces out into the open. While the
Congress provincial ministries resigned
in protest against the British
Government’s decision to make India a
party to the War without her consent,
Hindu Mahasabha leaders offered cooperation
to the British, and advocated that
Indians participate in the war-effort and
join the Army. Savarkar, as President of
the Mahasabha, appealed to Hindus ‘to
participate in all war-efforts of the
British Government’ and not to listen to
“some fools” who “condemn” this policy
‘as cooperation with Imperialism’.(
Savarkar, Hindu Rashtra Darshan, pp.
203ff.)
In private, Savarkar told the Viceroy
in October 1939 that the Hindus and the
British should be friends and made an
offer that the Hindu Mahasabha would
replace the Congress if the Congress
ministries resigned from office.(
Linlithgow, Viceroy, to Zetland,
Secretary of State, 7 October 1939,
Zetland Papers, Volume 18, Reel No.
6.)
In accordance with this pro-British
policy, when the Quit India movement
was going on in 1942, and the entire
nationalist Congress leadership including
Gandhiji was in jail, Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha
was a minister in the Fazlul Haq
Ministry in Bengal. The Hindu
Mahasabha also formed coalition governments
with the Muslim League in
Sind and the NWFP. It is another matter
that all this loyalism could not get them
electoral success and they suffered a
rout in the 1946 elections!
The RSS too, as an organisation did
not participate in any of the major battles
for freedom from colonial rule. The
RSS was founded in 1925, and apart
from the Simon Commission Boycott in
1928, at least two major movements, the
Civil Disobedience Movement of
1930–34 and the Quit India Movement
of 1942 were launched by the Congress
after that date. In none of these did the
RSS play any part. Hedgewar, the
founder of the RSS did go to jail in his
individual capacity in 1930, but he kept
the organisation and its members away
from the Civil Disobedience movement.
The government was very clear that it
had nothing to fear from the RSS. A
Home Department note on the RSS
reported that, ‘At meetings of the Sangh
during the Congress disturbances
(1942), speakers urged the members to
keep aloof from the Congress movement
and these instructions were generally
observed’.
It is of course legitimate to ask why
there was a silence on Savarkar in the
RSS and Jan Sangh-BJP camp for over
four or five decades after Gandhiji’s
murder. Was it because it was politically
suicidal to mention Savarkar as he
was associated in the public mind with
Gandhiji’s murder, and now that much
time had lapsed, it could be assumed
that public memory was short and
Savarkar could now be resurrected?
Also, with the new public emphasis on
‘Hindutva’ as part of the new aggressive
phase, it was difficult to ignore the original
creator of the concept. Further, for a
party claiming to be ‘nationalist,’ it is a
little embarrassing not to have any freedom
fighters to show. Therefore, in a
desperate effort to discover nationalist
icons, Savarkar was sought to be cast in
that mould.
A nationalist veil is drawn over
Savarkar’s communalism by remembering
him as Krantiveer, the Andamans
revolutionary. That Savarkar shamed
the revolutionaries by repeatedly asking
for pardon in the Andamans and that he
never took part in any nationalist activity
after his release as he had promised to
the British government, was sought to
be forgotten. And in 2003, when the
BJP-led NDA government was in
power, despite considerable opposition,
Savarkar’s portrait was installed in the
parliament. One would imagine that
even if there is a whiff of suspicion
about Savarkar this should not have
happened. And now the latest: an effort
to legitimize Savarkar by normalizing
his embarassing mercy petitions as
being sanctioned by the Mahatma! The
aim is also to project a close and friendly
relationship between the two, and
thus hide the fact that they had nothing
in common. See on Page 20