Aeon has an article on Veer Savarkar by journalist Mihir Dalal. It is lazy and ignorant.
To understand Narendra Modi’s India,
you must understand how and why 'educationally backward castes' have been taking power not just in the Provinces but also, after 2014, at the Centre. This is an on-going process stretching back six decades.
it is instructive to grasp the ideas of the Hindu Right’s greatest ideologue,
No it isn't. First the Muslim League was created. Then came the Hindu Mahasabha as a reaction. It helped launch the political careers of Mahatma Gandhi and Motilal Nehru both of whom were specially selected as ambassadors to the Muslims of Bombay Presidency and U.P respectively. The Muslim League chose Jinnah as its spokesman and a deal between the two parties was made in Lucknow. But the Hindus had conceded too much to the Muslims and thus the alliance was bound to breakdown.
Though the Mahasabha had some respected leaders, it was Congress which was the muscular Hindu party pushing for high-caste hegemony over the entire sub-continent. Savarkar, a revolutionary, belatedly tried to climb on the Mahasabha bandwagon but failed to make a mark because he wasn't religious himself. Still, because he had spent a lot of time being tortured in jail and thus had superior patriotic credentials, he was quite useful to the Mahasabha at a time when atheistic Communism was becoming increasingly attractive to young intellectuals. Savarkar's point was simple. Before you can have class war, you have to have some basic industrial development. The only type of warfare India would witness would be religious. But India was too poor to afford much warfare. If Hindus had no material incentive to hang together they would hang separately. There was a 'collective action problem' which only some sort of secularized version of religion could solve. After all, Ataturk was both a 'Ghazi' (victorious Islamic general) as well as a secularizing modernizer. Savarkar thought India needed something similar but it didn't really. The Brits had bequeathed India a good enough Army and 'steel frame' of a Civil Service. Congress had more Hindu religiosity than Savarkar. Since, unlike Rajaji, there was no economic dimension to Savarkar's thinking, his ideology had little to recommend it. Still, after Atal became PM, some journalists started babbling about Savarkar's ideology.
and the world of British colonial India in which they emerged,
Britain had begun the transfer of power. That's why caste and creed suddenly became important. The Great War signaled the end of the age of Empires. The question for India was whether it would be a loose federation (the alternative the Brits favored) or else get partitioned like Ireland along religious lines.
and the historical feebleness of the present regime.
Modi's regime isn't feeble. Maybe this guy wrote this shite back in 2013 and hasn't bothered to edit it before submitting it to Aeon.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a polymath who read law in London, enjoyed Shakespeare, admired the Bible, wrote important historical works, and became an accomplished poet and playwright.
Savarkar's elder brother was inspired by rebels against the Raj like Vasudev Balwant Phadke & revolutionaries like the Chapekar brothers. Vinayak was more academic and received financial support to attend college from his father-in-law. He received a scholarship to study in London from Shyamji Krishna Varma, who published the Indian Sociologist and who was a disciple of 'Harbhat Pendse'- i.e. Herbert Spencer.
His lifelong obsession was politics.
He was a revolutionary who, like his elder brother, was sentenced to the cellular jail in the Andamans. After release, he was a marginal figure but useful to the Mahasabha as living breathing revolutionary. His elder brother helped start the RSS which developed a separate identity.
Savarkar was close to Nathuram Godse- Gandhi's assassin- and, I suppose, this lead to a revival of interest in him because a generation indoctrinated in 'Nehru-Gandhi' ideology rebelled against it and turned to Savarkar and Ambedkar rather than the Marxists who had too visibly fucked up all over the world. But the political revival of the BJP had to do with traditional Hindu religiosity- Advani's Rath Yatra- not the ravings of an agnostic.
Savarkar took up political activity in his teens and became a cherished anti-British revolutionary.
Cherished by whom? I suppose this illiterate cretin means 'hardened'.
While serving a long prison sentence for inciting violence against the British, he transformed into a Hindu supremacist bent on dominating Indian Muslims.
No. Once Gandhi surrendered unilaterally in 1922, it was obvious that Muslims would want an Islamic State. But Gandhi was offering Ram Rajya and was genuinely religious. Moreover, Savarkar was Chitpavan and might want the revival of Peshwa led Maratha power which was anathema to the rest of India. Thus Congress remained the muscular arm of Hinduism- more particularly its para-military wing the Congress Seva dal set up by Dr. Hardikar. His college friend, Dr. Hegdewar was a member. He set up the RSS as a 'non-political' copy of the Seva dal when the latter was banned. Later, the RSS helped Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, when he left the Mahasabha, to set up the Jan Sangh which morphed into the current ruling party.
His pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva (1923), written secretively in jail, remains the most influential work of Hindu nationalism.
It is shit. Nobody reads it. The plain fact is, Hindus- even deracinated Anglophone Hindus like me- read about Hinduism either in our mother tongue or in Hindi. Our own Swamies and Acharyas know how to talk to us about our own Faith using the words our own parents and preceptors would use. The other thing is that Hindus write bollocks when they write in English on any non-STEM subject.
In this and subsequent works, he called for Hindus, hopelessly divided by caste, to come together as one homogeneous community and reclaim their ancient homeland from those he considered outsiders, primarily the Muslims.
Everybody had been saying this for ever. It is easy to say. We must unite, regardless of gender, species or a liking for Taylor Swift to fight for the right to bite off the heads of the fucking leprechauns currently occupying Iyerland.
Savarkar advocated violence against Muslims
in self-defence- sure. The Moplah uprising had shaken the Hindus. Tagore was telling them that they must not repeat the mistakes of the past. Give the Muslims or the Christians an inch and they will fuck you in the ass and slit your throat. Gandhi, it must be said, thought Punjabis (regardless of creed) and Muslims would get together to conquer the cowardly Hindus. However, thanks to the magic of the Ahimsa fairy, they might not deprive them of their anal cherries. Still, it would be very naughty of the Brits to fuck off before handing over the Army to the INC. Savarkar, being a Maratha, didn't think Hindus were cowardly. The problem was Hindus hated Chitpavans (in the manner they would come to hate Kauls) because they hadn't liked paying the Maratha 'Chauth'.
as the principal means to bind antagonistic lower and upper castes, writing:
'Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.'
The only reason India coheres as a nation state is that Hindus, though hating each other with a passion, fear the salami tactics of the Muslims and the Marxists and anybody else who might want to fuck us in the ass. It is better to hang together than to hang apart.
Savarkar has proven prescient if not prescriptive. Over the past four decades, the Hindu Right’s violence against Muslims has indeed helped Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to cement a degree of Hindu political unity long considered unattainable.
Gandhi said Congress slaughtered innocent Muslims in Bihar. It was under Nehru, not Atal or Modi, that millions of Muslims were ethnically cleansed. Had Indira stuck to killing Pakistanis rather than trying to chop off the goolies of all and sundry in the name of population control, she could have made herself Empress of India. The only reason she didn't take this road is because, in India, monarchs tend to get killed by their sons or nephews. In any case, assassination tempers autocracy. Three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed and Congress got a sympathy vote every time. There's a reason Rahul works so hard to make his party unelectable.
Some of Savarkar’s views on Hindus and their religion embarrass the Right.
No. The whole point about belonging to the Right is that you don't have to pretend to have read shit.
An agnostic, Savarkar declared that Hindutva – his construction of Hindu nationalism – was bigger than Hinduism, the actual religion of the Hindus.
He merely said that the essence of Hinduism- i.e. that which would be true of it in all possible worlds- would encompass many not considered to fall under Hindu customary law by Indian courts.
Later in life, he railed against Hindus and urged them to become more like Muslims (or his perception of them). Writing about Muslims in the medieval period allegedly raping and converting Hindu women any chance they got, Savarkar characterised it as ‘an effective method of increasing the Muslim population’ unlike the ‘suicidal Hindu idea of chivalry’ of treating the enemy’s women with respect.
This was fucking hilarious. As the Mahatma said, the Hindu Prince, just as much as the Muslim Prince, would send his goons to abduct any attractive girl you might have under your roof. He would also very kindly relieve you of your worldly possessions- not to mention your life. There's a reason Indians preferred British rule. Viceroy Sahib did not want to add your wife or daughter to his harem.
He wrote disparagingly about cow worship and other Hindu practices, and refused to discharge the funeral rites for his devout Hindu wife.
Nor were any such rites performed for him by his son. Membership of a particular jati (endogamous sub-caste) may involve orthopraxy, but Savarkar subscribed to Hindutva.
Although Savarkar’s Hindutva helped inspire the launch of the BJP’s parent organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a century ago,
S.P Mukherji wanted the Hindu Mahasabha to drop 'Hindu' from its name after Partition. When this did not happen, the RSS- which had a different ethos- helped Mukherji create the Jan Sangh.
he was disdainful of its decision to avoid direct political participation. ‘The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing anything,’ he reportedly said.
Indira's epitaph on Savarkar was more interesting. She said his death, in 1966, "removes from our midst a great figure of contemporary India. His name was a byword for daring and patriotism. Mr Savarkar was cast in the mould of a classical revolutionary and countless people drew inspiration from him.”
Until Modi became prime minister in 2014, Savarkar was known to few Indians, and those few knew him as a minor freedom-fighter.
Atal had banged on about him in poetic style.
Since then, the BJP-RSS have placed Savarkar at the centre of their efforts to rewrite Indian history from a Hindu supremacist perspective.
No. Vivekananda is important. Savarkar isn't. Why? Vivekananda was a Swamy- i.e. a Hindu godman. Also it is good fun to get the libtards to read Savarkar. It was like how being a member of the CPM released you from the obligation to read Marxist Leninist shite. The 'useful idiots' in academia and journalism were welcome to plumb the depths of that cloaca.
Today’s BJP positions Savarkar as a nationalist icon on a par with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, if not greater.
Because he was a revolutionary. He didn't queue up meekly to go to jail. Still, the politics of the bomb and the revolver ended with the assassination of the Archduke. Savarkar was right about Islam but everybody knew that Hindu India would not have been able to conquer and keep Muslim majority areas in the West. In 1947, about one third of the Army was Muslim. They could have done a deal with the Princes and the Sikhs and confined Congress to a moth eaten India.
If Savarkar’s ‘repeated warnings against the Congress’s appeasement politics’ had been heeded, India could have avoided Partition, the separation of Pakistan from India, writes Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief.
Everybody writes nonsense of this sort. Congress says 'but for Jinnah there would have been no Partition'. The Commies say that if only the entire upper class had been killed the proles and the peasants would have created a Utopia. My own position is that Liaquat Ali Khan and Sardar Patel should have taken turns bumming each other. If Lord Mountbatten expressed a desire to get in on the action, they should have politely but firmly told him to try his luck with the Mahatma.
In fact, this invocation of Savarkar disguises a much more complicated history that the Right is desperate to suppress.
History doesn't matter in the slightest. Why suppress it? What we want is Bridgerton.
Savarkar was born in 1883 to a Brahmin family near Nashik, a city in western India. In the first part of Vikram Sampath’s extensive, hagiographical biography of 2019, Savarkar is presented as a child prodigy who loved reading and lapped up Hindu epics, books, newspapers and political journals in Marathi – his mother tongue – and English. A newspaper ran one of his Marathi poems when he was 12; another published an article of his on Hindu culture.
He was more academically gifted than his elder brother but there was an atheistic strain to him which had no appeal to Indians.
The second of four siblings, Savarkar lost his mother to cholera when he was nine, and his father to the plague seven years later. Still in his teens, he formed a secret society of young revolutionaries against the British.
His elder brother founded it.
According to Sampath, he found the constitutional methods of the Indian National Congress – an organisation gently pushing local interests – unappealing,
His elder brother had met Tilak- a leader of the 'Garam dal'- in prison. The 'hot-heads' were prevailing against the moderates. Young revolutionaries in Bengal and Maharashtra as well as Arya Samajis from Punjab and Theosophists from Madras were the idols of the rising generation. By 1917, it was obvious to all that the age of Empires was over. The Brits needed to accelerate the pace and scope of reform so that India could defend itself. During the Great War, Japanese ships were helping the Brits in the Mediterranean. It was obvious that Britannia couldn't rule all the fucking waves in the world. Sadly, Churchill was too stupid to understand the threat. When he was Chancellor, he took a shilling off Income Tax rather than spend it on the Royal Navy. Even that would not have been enough. India, Australia, and South Africa needed to have their own ship-yards and blue water naval deterrent.
and instead drew inspiration from the few revolutionaries who assassinated British officials.
He belonged to one such group of revolutionaries
Savarkar would give speeches on historic nationalist movements to his secret society and extol the 19th-century European nationalist revolutionaries Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, who exercised considerable influence on his thought. After his marriage to a Brahmin girl was arranged by his uncle, Savarkar enrolled in college in 1902 for a major in the arts. He studied widely, reading Sanskrit and Greek classics, English poetry, international history and biographies of revolutionaries.
Which is why he wrote stupid shite. But then everybody did back then. Aurobindo was an even bigger windbag but he turned to religion and became a Godman with a successful Ashram run by a nice French lady who got him to give up brandy and cigars.
After graduation, Savarkar moved to London to read law
He was recruited by Shyamji Krishna Varma who founded India House for Indian students.
but also to continue his political activity in the enemy’s bastion. He stayed at a boarding house for Indian students, where he met many co-conspirators, not a few of whom he helped to radicalise.
Everyone knew that India House existed for no other purpose. The Brits were keeping an eye on it. They warned the parents of any student who showed an inclination to move in those circles.
Abhinav Bharat, Savarkar’s secret organisation, would smuggle arms and bomb-manuals to India; in 1909, the group assassinated William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, an aide to the Secretary of State for India, in London. Savarkar had already worried the British enough that, by the time he arrived in London in 1906, they had put him under surveillance. In 1910, he was arrested and deported to India to be tried. By this time, India had endured British colonial rule for more than a century. Colonial narratives greatly influenced the worldviews of Savarkar and other Indian nationalists.
No. The nationalists rejected Imperial narratives- whether those of the Tzar or the King Emperor or the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans.
How could a vast nation like India be conquered by a distant island a fraction of its size and population?
Disraeli had said it wasn't conquered. The E.I.C expanded because Indians preferred to live under its jurisdiction. If the traditional way of inheriting property involves sticking a knife in your Uncle and you notice your sons and nephews are sharpening their daggers, the British method of doing things doesn't seem so bad.
The big problem in India is that everybody preferred the Brits to rule by Indians of a different creed or caste or region.
Over a 70-year period starting in the 1750s, the British East India Company defeated both European and local rivals and turned the Mughal dynasty that had ruled India for more than 200 years into its puppet.
The Mughals were already puppets of the Marathas.
Britain’s barbaric traders carried out their conquest through loot and rapacity,
No. Britain's calculating Merchants diversified into exporting 'invisibles' to India- defence, law and order, basic infrastructure maintenance. The departure of the Brits did mean a few million got looted, raped, killed or ethnically cleansed. But for the vast majority, there was a smooth transfer of power.
while its scribes, missionaries and historians provided the moral justifications by portraying India as a degenerate civilisation that British rule might redeem.
Moral justifications did not matter. Either the Empire was profitable or necessary for homeland defence or else it was jettisoned.
Some European thinkers, Orientalists and Romantics valorised ancient Hindu India as the cradle of civilisation, but they too lamented its decay.
So what? Nobody cared. The plain fact is the growing Indian middle class could afford a political class. There was money for the revolutionary as well as the Gandhian nutjob. Spending time in jail might secure your financial and social advancement in an inheritable manner.
Under British colonialism, elite Hindus often accepted the British narratives for colonial rule.
No. Elite Hindus were compradors- like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore- who had actively solicited the extension of British power so as to keep the Muslims in check.
They were especially tortured by the question: how could a vast nation like India be conquered by a distant island a fraction of its size and population?
No. They only pretended not to know the answer to this question. For Hindus, it was that they didn't Maratha or Gurkha or Sikh rule unless the alternative was Muslim domination. The Brits were preferable to any indigenous alternative. On the other hand, if the Brits would hand over the Indian Army to Indian seditionists and the Royal Navy continued to protect Indian shores, then, sure, the 'Hindu elites' had no objection to moving into the Governor's mansions and earning fat salaries as Ministers.
Such musings about Indian or Hindu history furthered the development of Indian nationalism.
No. Japan's rise and rise put ideas into the heads of young Indians. Then they realized that they too would turn into elderly Indians without any fucking ideas in their bald heads.
By assuming that a ‘national’ Hindu-Indian identity had existed since time immemorial (it hadn’t),
Yes it had. Sadly, it was a bit shit.
elite Hindus felt driven to recover their Hindu-Indian identity in the present.
This was easily done. Discard your trousers and wrap a towel around your loins.
In fact, until British rule, people in the subcontinent hadn’t seen themselves as Hindu (or Muslim) in the modern sense.
Yes they had. That's why they didn't inter-marry or eat with each other. They wouldn't even drink water from the same pot.
They balanced various identities, including those of place, caste and family lineage; religion merely provided one among several, as the political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj and others have written.
Kaviraj is a Kommie kretin. Still, it is true that prior to the arrival of the British, Indians had no fixed gender identity. Sometimes they had dicks. At other times they had vaginas.
However, in the 19th century, some upper-caste Hindus, awed by the power of Britain’s military and industrial superiority, launched vigorous movements to ‘purify’ their religion and make it more like Christianity.
Anglican Christianity was cool with icons and religious statues. The Arya and Brahmo Samaj were iconoclastic in the Islamic manner.
They moved to cast off what they saw as the appendages dragging down Hinduism – the inegalitarian caste system,
Not the Tagore's version of the Brahmo Samaj which insisted on the superiority of Brahmins
the large diversity of gods, sects and practices – believing this reformation would make India great again.
No. The idea was that Reformation would reduce the incentive to convert to Christianity. The Brits were cool with this. The last thing they wanted was for Swaminathan to change his name to Samuel and start haranguing Smith and Jones about the Gospel on the Mount. Darkies are bad enough. Christianized darkies are the fucking pits.
British historical narratives portrayed Hindu-Muslim enmity as a fundamental, self-evident feature of Indian history.
Even worse, British historians opined that Indians either had dicks or vaginas, not both at different hours of the day.
In reality, religious pluralism and toleration – not fanatical religious hatred – had been the norm among people of various religions in South Asia.
Unless the Muslims of the Catholics forcibly converted the kaffirs or heathens.
In The Loss of Hindustan (2020), the historian Manan Asif Ahmed
a Pakistani nitwit
writes that, before British rule, many elite Hindus and Muslims had thought of Hindustan as a homeland not only of the Hindus, but of the ‘diverse communities of believers’ including Muslims and Christians.
This is what it could have been. Sadly Muslims think the only good kaffir is a dead kaffir. Islamic Monarchs may protect minorities. They get short shrift in Islamic Republics.
British colonialism constructed a different narrative, one in which Hindus had been subjugated in their home for 1,000 years by Muslim invaders.
No. The Hindus kept telling the Brits that the Muslims had fucked them in the ass. Could you kindly hold down the Muslim, so we can pick his pockets?
This distorted the South Asian experience of Hindustan into claims of immutable enmity between Hindus and Muslims.
This was Savarkar's initial claim. Hindus and Muslims kept cuddling and kissing. Then, evil Brits banned the practice and insisted that Indians get College degrees and work as clerks. If Mr. Swaminathan started kissing Mr. Sayyad in the office, District Magistrate Smythe would sentence both to jail. Worse yet, British judges were preventing Swaminathan & Sayyad from occasionally sporting a vagina instead of a dick. This was classic 'divide and rule'. Did you know Queen Victoria personally confiscated the vagina of the Maharaja of Cooch Nahin? Why don't our History textbooks tell us about atrocities of this sort.
The British census aggregated Hindus and Muslims across India into homogeneous groups and facilitated the creation of solidarity – and belligerence – among them.
Census also forced Indians to choose to have either vaginas or dicks, not both.
Towards the end of the 19th century, colonial influences combined with what the historian Christopher Bayly in 1998 called ‘old patriotisms’ to contribute to the invention of a pan-Indian Hindu nationality, and a more inchoate Muslim nationality.
To be frank, 'Indian Hindu nationality' was a reaction to the Muslim and Christian threat. As for 'Muslim nationality', it was a reaction to the incredible stupidity of the Hindus & their toothless Mahacrackpot.
Working in this legacy, Savarkar made his first lasting contribution to Indian politics in 1909, with the publication of a historical work, The Indian War of Independence of 1857.
Savarkar, being Maharashtrian, would naturally dilate on the greatness of Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi. The Chitpavans may have thought India would welcome a return of the rule of the Peshwas. At any rate, Brits of the period were constantly reminding all non-Chitpavans how shitty that rule had been. This was because they believed Gokhale and Tilak were actually working hand in glove.
In 1857, large numbers of Indian soldiers and gentry in northern and western India had risen under the banner of the fading Mughal dynasty in the largest armed uprising against the British Empire by a ruled people.
More Indians stayed faithful than rebelled.
British historians had played down this war as a ‘sepoy mutiny’, restricted to disgruntled soldiers rather than a polity – a view Savarkar set out to correct.
After being tortured by Muslim jailors, he lost his illusions about Hindu-Muslim unity.
In Hindutva and Violence (2021), an authoritative work on Savarkar, the historian Vinayak Chaturvedi shows that Savarkar was a master at reclaiming Indian history from the British by reading colonial records and works of scholarship ‘against the grain’.
i.e making shit up.
Drawing inspiration from the French and American revolutions as well as the ultranationalism of Mazzini, Savarkar reconstructed 1857 as the ‘first war’ for Indian independence. To this day, 1857 is understood as such in India.
What is understood is that smart people emigrate to somewhere still ruled by Whites
His passionate, romantic account glorified Indian war heroes with the intent of inspiring a revolution against the British.
The only problem with such a revolution was that the Brits might decide to slyly fuck off thus forcing Indians to emigrate to some place still ruled by Whites.
In the book, Savarkar introduced the central motif in his historical works: violence as mystical unifier.
War unifies. Violence does not. Join the Army. Don't stab Mummy.
He held that Hindus and Muslims had become united for the first time ever during the war through the means of violence.
Uniting to get rid of the Brits was all very well but what if the Brits actually fucked off? The means of violence would then be used by different types of Indians on different types of Indians.
The literal ‘shedding of [British] blood’ together had forged the Hindu-Muslim bond, as the political theorist Shruti Kapila characterises Savarkar’s idea in Violent Fraternity (2021).
Whereas Indians who fought for the Brits actually got paid. Fraternity is all very well but the assurance of a pension is what maintains regimental esprit de corps.
Savarkar’s conception of Hindu-Muslim history had been partly shaped by the long tradition of religiopolitical enmity against the Mughals in his homeland of Maharashtra, as the historian Prachi Deshpande shows in Creative Pasts (2007).
This is silly. The Mughal Emperor had been a Maratha puppet before the Brits defeated the Peshva and made him their pensioner.
But Savarkar, always the innovative thinker, borrowed only what suited his purposes.
Sane people borrow only what suits their purpose. They don't ask for the loan of things they don't need or want. That is why Banks can make a profit by lending money rather than pieces of dog shit.
He wrote that, since Hindu kings had avenged centuries of Muslim oppression by defeating the Mughals in the 18th century, the ‘blot of slavery’ had been ‘wiped off’.
Sadly, the blot of having to pay chauth to the Marathas had not been forgotten.
Having re-established their ‘sovereignty’ at home, they could now fraternise with Muslims.
They could employ them to collect chauth
And finally, such was the power of the violence in 1857 that India now became ‘the united nation of the adherents of Islam as well as Hinduism’. Indian War and its author were admired across the political spectrum.
The Savarkar brothers were admired for their courage and patriotism. That is true enough. Still, the lesson of 1857 was that killing a few White women and kids would not lead to any desirable outcome. Brigadier Dyer would soon underline this point. Shortly thereafter, elected Punjabi Ministers would be begging the Brits for the 'smack of firm government'.
The book was the high point of Savarkar’s youth. Soon he lost his infant son to smallpox, and his elder brother was arrested for treason. In 1910, Savarkar himself was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Andamans, a brutal penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. He had become notorious on account of the violent activities of his secret society. But more than this, it was his ‘seditious’ writings with their potential to sow widespread disaffection that had threatened the British, the historian Janaki Bakhle wrote in 2010.
There was plenty of such seditious writing. What the Brits objected to was being shot at and killed.
Prison broke Savarkar.
No. He and his brother remained what they had been. However, after 1917, the Brits had committed to transferring more and more power to the Indians. Then, in 1919 the Afghan King attacked India believing that Muslims would side with him. Brigadier Dyer and other British officers easily routed the Afghans whose baggage trains were then looted by the Afridis and other war-like Frontier tribes. Still, it was clear that the departure of the Brits would leave India once again vulnerable to an Islamic invasion.
In his autobiography, Savarkar writes about frequently suffering from dysentery, lung disease and malaria. He was put in solitary confinement for months, and for eight years was denied permission to see his wife. The Irish jailor was sadistic, and Muslim warders were cruel to Hindus. Nearly driven to suicide, he filed mercy petitions, abjured revolution, and promised to serve the empire (the issue most debated about Savarkar today).
Revolutionaries considered it right and proper to pretend to have turned over a new leaf so as to be able to get out of jail so as to resume their underground activities.
The petitions were rejected but in the early 1920s Savarkar was moved to a less harsh prison in western India.
The Brits didn't want to be lenient to those who had plotted against British lives.
By then, Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress had revolutionised Indian politics.
Britain's Army Chief said the country did not have the military man-power to keep India, Egypt and Ireland. Indeed, it would be hard pressed to suppress a Bolshevik insurrection in the home island. Spontaneous unrest in Egypt forced Britain to accept a unilateral declaration of independence. In Ireland, the brutality of the 'Black & Tans' had caused a backlash. Churchill had to do a deal with Michael Collins. The assassination of the British Army Chief was a trigger for a horrible Civil War in the new State. India could have got what Ireland and Egypt got but Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in February 1922. Hindu Muslim unity dissolved. The Brits would dictate the pace and scope of reform. Meanwhile, Ataturk was winning against the Greeks and their British and French backers. The Bolsheviks were defeating the 'White' Armies. Indian politics had indeed been revolutionized just as politics elsewhere had been revolutionized. But, in India, the leader of the Revolution changed his mind, pleaded guilty to sedition, and went meekly off to jail.
His religiosity and asceticism attracted the masses to the independence movement, which had been limited to a tiny section of educated Indians.
How did the masses get to hear about Gandhi? Educated Indians got money from enterprising Indians and used that money to create organizations capable of reaching the masses. It was not the case that India was a real small place back then. The educated Indians numbered about 3. The masses, in total, numbered about 30. One day, a religious and ascetically inclined Indian became educated. The masses started nudging each other and saying 'fuck me! did you see that educated dude over there? He is totes religious and ascetic. I find that really attractive and want to get into politics. How about you?'
But, unusually, Gandhi emphasised nonviolence, ethical conduct, social reform and Hindu-Muslim unity as much as political independence.
Back then, the average educated Indian kept gassing on about why one should violently and immorally resist social reform. Thus, if a guy said 'hey, how about we all agree to stop spitting in public', the educated Indian advocated beating and sodomizing the fellow and then stealing his wallet. As for Hindu Muslim unity, the average educated Indian had a very strict 'stab first, ask questions later' policy. Gandhi was unusual in that he did not advocate the anal rape of those of other sects. 2
He also often upset fellow nationalists. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
Indian troops had helped defeat the Turks
some Indian Muslims launched a movement to compel the British to preserve the institution of the Islamic Caliphate, a symbol of international Muslim solidarity. Gandhi encouraged Hindus to join in, even though they had no stake in the cause.
Hindus agreed that France and Britain should not gain more colonies in the MENA. Gandhi went a bit over-board on the religious dimension to this. But he unilaterally surrendered just when Ataturk started to win. The Muslims realized he had just been leading them up the garden path.
Savarkar had met Gandhi, and had disdain for the man and his politics,
No. Gandhi was respected at that time because of his work in South Africa. Still, he was 15 years older than Savarkar and represented the 'Naram Dal' of Gokhale, whereas Savarkar was a Tilak man.
which seemed to him anachronistic and effeminate.
By the time Savarkar got out of prison, it was obvious that Gandhi's politics were crazy and useless. But so was Savarkar's. The Brits were on their way out. Neither chucking bombs nor sulking in jail would change the timetable. Gandhi's politics were superior to Savarkar's because Gandhi was getting plenty of money from industrialists. Savarkar remained poor. His property had been confiscated and he had to get by on a small detention allowance.
The Caliphate movement also triggered Savarkar’s fears about India being invaded again by Muslims.
Afghans had indeed invaded in 1919.
This wasn’t simply Islamophobia. Many elite Muslims resisted the slow democratisation unfolding through the colonial period, for fear of losing out to Hindus. They saw themselves as India’s historical rulers whose say in its affairs ‘could not be merely proportionate to their numbers’, as the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot writes in The Pakistan Paradox (2015), a history of Pakistan.
Muslims tended to dominate the land revenue administration in the Doab- as Nehru noticed. Their notables did better under dyarchy- e.g. Nawab of Chattari who briefly served as Governor and then as Premier of U.P.
Some Muslim leaders used the rhetoric of pan-Islamism and threats of violence to push their claims with the British. After the Caliphate movement, Savarkar felt that Indian War’s paean to a composite nationalism had been rejected by Indian Muslims because of their ‘divided love’ (the other interest being Muslims outside India); he reacted like a ‘spurned lover’, writes Bakhle in 2010.
No. The fellow had lost salience in Indian politics. Like Bal and Pal, he too raised the issue of 'divided loyalty' or, rather, accepted the fact that India would be partitioned on the basis of religion just like Ireland. Since the Indians didn't really want the British Umpire to fuck off, everybody pretended that there was some version of a united India which they alone could deliver. Gandhi's version consisted of everybody spinning cotton instead of fucking. Jinnah's version had an artificial Muslim dominated majority at the Center and a free hand for Muslims in provinces where they were in the majority. Nehru prevailed by pulling the trigger on Partition. Never again would Muslims count for anything in Hindu India. Congress, as the Mahacrackpot complained, had been proactive in killing innocent Muslims- ergo, it was the muscular Hindu party. Still, the RSS had helped in Hyderabad against the Razakars and over subsequent decades its reputation rose as its cadres where corrupt sociopaths.
In 'Hindutva', Savarkar
was seeking to appeal to the younger 'Jugantar' type generation which had been enthused by the Bolshevik revolution. This was an atheistic type of Hindu nationalism and was important back when young peeps thought Religion might be the opium of the masses whereas Marxism would deliver rapid economic growth. We no longer need any such shit. Religion is merely a service industry. It isn't a 'Giffen good' as an earlier age suspected. It actually has quite high income elasticity of demand.
applied the European framework of nationalism
which did not fucking exist. Europe had Kings and Emperors and Dukes and Archbishops. Prior to 1914, a German Prince might serve in the British Navy without ceasing to be German while the British King Emperor might be Colonel-in-Chief of a German regiment.
– that a nation needed a homogeneous community, a common culture, a long history – to the subcontinent.
This is Wilsonianism. Sadly, Woodrow's vision for Europe was fucked in the head. He destabilized the continent and made a second war inevitable. Self-determination is a recipe for disaster when applied to schizophrenic territories.
In western European nations and the United States, Christianity, race and language had offered the basis for a common history and identity (or so their nationalists claimed). But what could work for India?
Religion. Hindu India has held together well enough.
Hinduism, the religion of the majority, seemed unfit since it lacked a unifying mechanism of one book or church.
Which is why there isn't a Protestant India separated from an Orthodox India.
India’s resident Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and others also bitterly resented attempts to hitch an Indian nationality to Hinduism.
Muslims did. Jains were pro-Hindu. Buddhists didn't exist. Sikhs were confined to a small area. Christians could be just as separatist as Muslims but being slaughtered by the Army tends to damp their spirits.
Hinduism thus posed ‘the main obstacle’ in Savarkar’s quest for a big-tent Indian identity, as Kapila notes.
Kapila is a kretin. Savarkar only regained a little salience by banging the Hindu drum and pretending that his bunch of losers would have prevented Partition by holding Muslim majority Provinces by military force.
To resolve this conundrum, unlike religious nationalists, Savarkar strove to secularise Hindus – instead of Hindu scriptures, he chose as the foundation of his ideology the discipline of history, the paradigmatic secular form of the enlightened political thinker.
Savarkar and his brothers had 'street cred' as Chitpavan patriots. This was useful to the Mahasabha in so far as it was trying to compete with the Commies on University campuses. Just as being a Gandhian meant you could tell the Purohit to fuck off because you didn't have to bother with rites and rituals if you spun cotton, so too did being a Savarkarite mean being spared having to consume 'the five products of the cow'.
By turning to history, Savarkar wanted to show that followers of all religions born in India – Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism – owed allegiance to a common genealogy: Hindutva, or Hindu-ness.
This was already customary practice as well as the presumption made by the law- though from time to time legislation was introduced to make an exemption for a particular sect.
‘Hindutva is not a word but a history,’ Savarkar wrote in his pamphlet.
He was wrong. Hindutva is the 'tattva' or essence of Hinduism which was an intensional term with a well enough defined juristic 'extension'.
He also seized the chance to redefine who is a Hindu. Essentially anyone whose ‘fatherland’ and ‘holy land’ resided within the subcontinent qualified as Hindu, he concluded. Not only followers of Hinduism, but Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists counted as Hindus – a novel interpretation
No. This was the legal position. Savarkar was a barrister. He knew the decision in Bhagwan Koer v. J.C. Bose. “There were religious bodies in India, which had, at various periods, and under various circumstances, developed out of, or split off from the Hindu system, but whose members have nevertheless continued to live under Hindu Law. Of these, the Jains and the Sikhs are conspicuous examples. It appears to their lordship to be clear that.... term Hindu is used in same wide sense as in earlier enactments and includes Sikhs. If it be not so, then Sikhs were and are, in matters of inheritance, governed by the Succession Act, an Act based upon, and in the main embodying, the English law; it should not be suggested that such was the intention of the legislature.”
Muslims and Christians, however, were outsiders as their holy lands lay beyond India, he emphasized.
Christians had fought Crusades to get back their Holy land in Palestine- which Allenby had managed to do for the British Crown. During Khilafat, Muslims in India promised to lay down their lives to keep 'Al Jazirah' free of infidels. There was also 'Hijrat' when thousands of Indian Muslims quit 'dar ul harb' to migrate to Afghanistan- which didn't want them.
The influence of social evolutionism was clear. Hindus must remember that ‘great combinations are the order of the day,’ Savarkar wrote. ‘The League of Nations, the alliances of powers Pan-Islamism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Ethiopism, all little beings are seeking to get themselves incorporated into greater wholes, so as to be better-fitted for the struggle for existence and power.’
This is an echo of the 'Harbhat Pandse' of Savarkar's youth.
He theorised that Hindu identity had been formed chiefly through violence,
No. Like other Brahmins, Savarkar saw Hindu identity as being slow to adapt in that respect precisely because it greatly pre-dated the age of folk wanderings.
Chaturvedi notes, whether it was in the Islamic period that lasted more than a millennium starting in the 8th century or even earlier. In the long war with the Muslims, ‘our people became intensely conscious of ourselves as Hindus and were welded into a nation to an extent unknown in our history,’ Savarkar wrote in Hindutva.
Brahmins from other parts of India understood him to be saying 'Our Peshvas kicked ass. Chitpavans rule, the rest of you drool!' But, the plain fact is, the Maratha period had no greater religious significance for Hindus than Pindari predations had for Islam
Eloquently written with a clear sense of urgency, Hindutva became The Communist Manifesto of the Hindu Right.
Nonsense! Nobody gave a shit about it. But then nobody read Hind Swaraj either.
Soon after its publication, K B Hedgewar, a former Congress member
he remained a member of Congress. It was only a decade later on that the Mahasabha became an electoral rival of the INC
from Savarkar’s homeland, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925.
Savarkar's brothers were active participants
He conceived it as a sociocultural organisation that would transform the character of Hindus through indoctrination and paramilitary training, and make them masculine in order to defeat ‘outsiders’.
Hedgewar had helped his pal Hardikar set up the Congress Seva Dal. Their inspiration was the Bengali Revolutionary 'Anushilan Committees'. The RSS was set up as an 'over-ground' non-political auxillary of the Seva Dal. Incidentally, Nehru was an enthusiastic member of the Seva Dal. He vigorously defended the creation of this supposedly 'Black Shirt' type para-military organization.
Hedgewar thought RSS would stay away from direct politics. It would operate in the shadows to avoid backlash from the British, and build Hindu unity from the ground up to realise a Hindu nation in the future.
Why not say that Dr. Hardikar & Dr. Hedgewar were College pals who had the same agenda? Representative democracy meant beating people so as to alter electoral outcomes. The 1924 Delhi riots and the 1927 Nagpur weren't too different.
In 1924, Savarkar was released from prison after 13 years inside. Still banned from political activity and put under house arrest, he launched social-reform initiatives and became a prolific writer of plays, poetry, articles and historical works.
They weren't very good. Aurobindo, equally a revolutionary, had taken the spiritual route and was living very comfortably in his own Ashram. Savarkar, being a fucking atheist, eked out a miserable existence. It is his elder brother for whom we feel sympathy.
Despite opposition from orthodox Hindus, he campaigned aggressively against untouchability and in favour of intercaste dining and marriage. ‘A national foolishness’ that created ‘eternal conflict’ among Hindus, the caste system deserved ‘to be thrown in the dustbins of history,’ he wrote.
If the fellow hadn't suffered so much in prison, his head would have been kicked in.
His aim was to dissolve barriers enough for Hindus to realise political unity; caste discrimination, not caste itself, was his target.
In India, politicians only start babbling about caste and gender and Hindu-Muslim unity/enmity only once they have shown themselves to be utterly useless.
Despite Gandhi’s emergence, Savarkar still burned to become the leader of the Hindus. In his autobiographical works, blissfully free of modesty, Savarkar presented himself as a great Hindu in an ancient line of civilisational warriors. After his death, it emerged that one of his adulatory ‘biographies’ may have been authored by Savarkar himself.
Nothing wrong in that. Gandhi got Doakes to do his first biography. Obama's autobiography launched his political career.
In 1937, after he was allowed to re-enter politics at the age of 54, Savarkar assumed the presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha, a former wing of the Indian National Congress that broke out as a militant Hindu party. Anxious to stay away from prison, he greatly tempered his anti-British stance.
The Brits actually were handing over power. Either the Indians could run provinces on their own or they would have to admit they needed the Brits to stay on. Nehru, as Congress President, outflanked the Mahasabha by denying Premierships to Muslims, telling Jinnah to fuck off, and refusing to do a deal with Fazlul Haq in Bengal. This meant that the Mahasabha could have a role there. Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was quite a catch for the Mahasabha. By contrast, its Ministers in Sindh and NWF were nonentities. Mukherjee's quitting of the Mahasabha was the final nail in its coffin. Savarkar, like Ambedkar, was a shit politician. Intellectuals often are.
Instead, he took aim at his two obsessions: Gandhi and the Muslims.
That's why we remember him. Muslims really were the enemy and Gandhi really was utterly shit.
But Savarkar, whose strengths lay in literary writing and polemics, lacked the energy and vision to mount a serious challenge against the Congress.
The only reason the Mahasabha tolerated him was because he and his brother had spent such a long time in prison.
His health had never fully recovered from the prison ordeal, and help from the RSS was inconsistent. Even though its members sometimes participated in Congress-led campaigns against the British, the RSS as an institution largely stayed out of the independence movement. RSS leaders and Savarkar were ambiguous about the Congress-led struggle partly because of their hatred of Gandhi’s politics of nonviolence and his pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity.
Congress was a professional outfit which had been created by British Civil Servants as the Raj's residuary legatee. If India became a loose federation, the Mahasabha might be a rival to the Congress just as the League could be a rival to Zamindar Parties (like the Unionists in Punjab) or tenant Parties (like that of Fazl ul Haq in Bengal).
Flailing around on the periphery of power, Savarkar could only lash out at Gandhi’s ‘appeasement’ of Muslims.
But Nehru, as head of Congress in 1937, had taken a tough line. His idea was to take Congress to the Left so as to attract the lower caste Muslim masses.
When in the 1930s the Muslim League began to demand a separate nation carved out of India for Muslims, he was appalled (as were other Hindu politicians including Gandhi and Nehru, although for different reasons). Desperate to avoid conceding land to Muslims, Savarkar called for one secular state with equal rights for everyone, where minorities would be free to practise their religion. But he revealed his hand by accusing Muslims of anti-Indian activities; meanwhile, on the ground, his party stoked communal polarisation and organised violence against Muslims.
So did Congress as the Mahacrackpot acknowledged. To be fair, one could say this was retaliatory in nature.
Unlike Gandhi, Savarkar agreed with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, that Hindus and Muslims constituted ‘two nations’; but, obsessed with establishing Hindu supremacy, he opposed the creation of Pakistan.
Because he wanted to be able to blame Congress for Partition. But getting rid of Muslim majority provinces was a good idea. Nehru deserved credit for pulling the trigger on this.
Savarkar and other Hindu extremists blamed Gandhi for the bloody Partition of 1947, the division of India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India overseen by the British.
Nope. The Radcliffe award was announced after the transfer of power. An independent India and Pakistan oversaw that blood boltered shambles.
They were incensed by the fast the old man undertook to compel India to give money owed to Pakistan. In 1948, Nathuram Godse, one of Savarkar’s acolytes, assassinated Gandhi. Savarkar’s reputation was irredeemably stained.
Actually, it was the only positive achievement he had to his credit.
He was put on trial for allegedly conspiring to murder Gandhi. His fear of returning to prison was so intense that in court he distanced himself from Godse, who was hurt by his mentor’s ‘calculated, demonstrative non-association’.
Most people who write about Savarkar are only to happy to implicate themselves in Capital cases. If jailed and tortured, they don't beg for pardon. They laugh and say 'you call this torture? Why haven't you shoved a red hot poker up my arse? Do that, and then maybe I'll take you seriously.'
After his acquittal, Savarkar withdrew from politics and spent the rest of his life in anonymity.
No. He continued to publish silly articles- telling vegetarians to sack up and eat some meat already- and would get a bit of publicity now and then. The Jan Sangh, however, had begun to do well on its own. Atal was a good orator and he was backed up by Advani, who was fluent in English and quite a good organizer. However, its political rise depended on either right wing stalwarts like Rajaji or Socialists like Lohia, and, a little later, JP. I suppose Deen Dayal Upadhyaya supplied some sort of wishy washy 'ideology' which bridged that hiatus valde deflendum. Sadly Upadhyaya fell off a train and died. Not falling off trains is a vital political skill. Mind it kindly.
In the first three decades after independence, the Indian National Congress dominated Indian politics. Drawing on the legacy of the freedom struggle, Nehru and his successors attempted to cultivate a secular democratic culture. In this period, the Hindu Right struggled politically even as the RSS multiplied its presence across India. Godse had been an RSS member and the organisation was widely seen as culpable in the murder.
India needed assassins who would kill people surnamed Gandhi from time to time. We might even have to import them from Ceylon.
Banned for 18 months after the assassination and fighting for its survival, the RSS was compelled to enter politics directly. It decided to people a new Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, with its members. The safeguard turned into a permanent feature, as the allure of political power proved to be too seductive.
Back in the Forties and Fifties, 'joining politics' or 'doing social work' did not necessarily mean that you were a gangster who wanted to get even richer through corrupt practices. It is perfectly natural for a patriotic organization to seek to form a patriotic political formation just as it is perfectly natural for a labour organization to seek to form a political party which will represent the interests of Trade Union members.
In 1963, Savarkar – hobbled by old age and ailments – published his final historical treatise, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. The ‘glorious epochs’ referred to those eras when civilisational warriors freed the Hindu nation ‘from the shackles of foreign domination’. In this ambitious work, Savarkar excavates a triumphant Hindu will to power in history so as to furnish a guide to establishing a Hindu nation. He spends a majority of the book on the Hindu-Muslim encounter, which he characterises as an ‘epic war’ that lasted more than a millennium.
India would fight Pakistan in '65 and '71. Later there was the Kargil war.
Savarkar essentially prescribed ‘permanent’ war for Hindus within their homeland
But it was Pakistan which ensured this outcome.
Six Glorious Epochs is striking for its vicious polemic – against Hinduism, Buddhism and, most of all, against Hindus. Reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s hatred of Christianity and lay people, Savarkar rants at the ‘perverted sense of virtues’ of the Hindus, like nonviolence, religious tolerance and ethical conduct in war. Hindus, according to Savarkar, had been corrupted by Buddhism and its nonviolent creed (like Christianity-corrupted Roman culture in Nietzsche’s telling). He writes that nonviolence ‘emasculates human beings’ and that it ‘should at times be killed by cruel violence!’ Savarkar castigates past Hindu rulers for their ‘suicidal’ practices; he moans that they did not massacre Muslims en masse after winning battles, avoided raping Muslim women, refrained from enacting forcible conversions, and did not destroy mosques. According to him, this is precisely what Muslims did to Hindus, an attitude he praises as ‘highly pious and thoroughly sound’ in war. But their ‘perverted sense of virtues’ had made Hindus ‘slovenly and imbecile, and insensible to all sorts of shameful humiliation’.
Tagore said something similar forty years previously. The plain fact is that Islamic law had made jihad 'incentive compatible'- in other words there was a direct reward for ethnic cleansing, forcible conversion etc. Hinduism lacked any such thing. That is why, during the Great Calcutta Killings, Hindu goons stopped killing Muslims. If you don't get paid, what is the fucking point of shedding blood? If you drive away the local Muslims but refugees from Sindh, or worse yet, East Bengal, take over their property, what have you gained? So long as Muslims paid off locals, they would not permit refugees from seizing 'Evacuee' property.
The Hindu will to power was manifest only in a few ‘heroic men and women warriors’;
who created Kingdoms and founded dynasties- or died trying
the rest suffered from the Savarkarist version of false consciousness. He was clear that, in order to realise their latent Hindu-ness, Hindus would have to relinquish the values they held dear.
Pretended to hold dear. It isn't really true that Hindus weep copiously because of all the bacteria their actions kill.
Savarkar essentially prescribed ‘permanent’ war for Hindus within their homeland, as Kapila and Chaturvedi both note.
That certainly seems to be the Pak Army's strategy.
Written in the aftermath of Partition, Gandhi’s martyrdom, the unrelenting dominance of the Congress and Savarkar’s own disgrace, his bitterness in Six Glorious Epochs is a giveaway: the lover first spurned by the Muslims had been rejected by his Hindus too. In 1966, the ailing Savarkar died by suicide, aged 82.
The guy was in a lot of pain. He stopped eating and died. Boo hoo.
In 1975, the prime minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, suspended democracy and imposed authoritarian rule, which later drew great public anger. Within two years, the Indian National Congress
which she had split
was voted out of power for the first time and a makeshift grouping of parties that included
the Old Congress Party and the 'Congress for Democracy' and
the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh formed the union government. The Congress soon bounced back but its dominance had ended.
No. The Dynasty bounced back. Assassination is what tempered its autocracy.
In the 1980s, the erstwhile Jana Sangh, now reinvented as the BJP,
it had merged with the Janata party which had split on the question of 'dual membership' of the RSs
spearheaded the Rama Temple movement that permanently changed Indian politics. Riding an old myth, the BJP and its allies claimed that a mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya had been built by 16th-century Islamic invaders over the ruins of a Rama temple at the deity’s alleged birthplace.
This was true enough. That's why the Bench awarded the site to the deity.
The desecration of his birthplace was a living symbol of Hindu India’s historical oppression by Muslims, the BJP thundered, as it feverishly mobilised the masses to restore the temple.
Advani's genius was to get ordinary people to donate a brick for tne new temple. In other words, he was providing a religious service thus creating value. Muslim violence helped the 'Sangh Parivar' as did Al Qaida's atrocities.
Worshipped devoutly by hundreds of millions of Hindus, Rama proved to be irresistible: in 1992, the mosque fell to a Hindu mob. The BJP went from winning just two seats out of more than 500 in 1984,
It had done very well in 1977 and quite respectably in 1980. It was bound to bounce back. VP Singh thought that 'Mandal' (i.e. reservations for OBCs) would snooker the BJP and there was a notion that 'Mandir' (i.e. the Ram Temple) was the BJP's response. The truth is simpler. Muslim violence drove Islamophobia throughout the world from the Nineties onward.
In 1987, Art Malik, playing an Afghan war-lord, is James Bond's friend. Muslims are good peeps who fight on our side. But, by 1994, they are crazy jihadis. Malik is the villain in 'True Lies'. It takes Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis to take him down. It is some years since I saw that film. My memory is that Art Malik is using Islamic super-powers to beat the fuck out of Arnie. Jamie Lee Curtis lifts her skirt to display a hairy pussy. Hairy pussies are the kryptonite of the Jihadi. Malik's eyes burn up. Arnie can then throw him off a skyscraper before collapsing a whole bunch of skyscrapers on him. Still, Malik, manages to crawl out of the debris. Jamie Lee lifts her skirt again but Malik says 'Allah has burnt the eyes out of my skull! Your hairy pussy has no power against me! Die, infidel scum1'
Jamie Lee Curtis says 'isn't there something you are forgetting?'. 'No!' replies Malik, 'I never had a sense of smell and thus your stinky pussy poses no threat to me.' Jamie then says 'but you can still hear- right?' and proceeds to queef prodigioously. This cause Malik's skull to explode. Disney doesn't make movies like that any more. Shame.
to the head of the ruling coalition by 1998. Since 2014, Modi, who played a minor role in the Rama temple campaign, has dominated Indian politics.
Because he dominated Gujarat politics, since 2001, to very good effect.
The Rama temple evangelism was manufactured by an insurgent BJP primed to knock over the decrepit ancien régime of the Congress.
Nonsense! After Rajiv was blown to pieces, the BJP rivals were caste based 'Samajwadi' parties save in Gujarat where Patels- originally an agriculturist class- backed the smarter type of BJP politician. Ultimately, it was the thuggery and incompetence of Samajwadi parties which enabled the BJP to rise in the Doab. As for Congress, had Rahul not been a moon-calf, it would have won big in 2014.
It is the same former insurgent – now a dominant but deeply insecure incumbent, haunted by its discreditable past
there is nothing discreditable in a Hindu party being anti-Muslim. It may not be polite to say so but that is the truth of the matter.
– that orchestrates the Savarkar propaganda.
Nobody bothers with that lunatic. Savarkar is almost as stupid as Ambedkar but only because he was less well educated and outside the political mainstream.
Both campaigns share a common feature: the Right’s felt need to locate its legitimacy in history.
History is just a story you make up. Legitimacy merely means that one has acquired authority by legal means- e.g. winning elections.
The BJP has carried on Savarkar’s legacy of turning to history instead of Hindu religious texts for validation.
No. It has carried on Nehru's legacy of getting fucking elected time after time. Let us see whether Modi can win as many General Elections as the Pundit. Incidentally, no Hindu monarch or other ruler has ever used 'religious texts for validation'. Why? This is because if you can't kill your rival, then you don't have any fucking validation. The other dude has stuck a knife in you and you are screaming and shitting yourself. Then you die. Sad.
It’s not the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita, the greatest Hindu scriptures, that ordained the BJP’s rule, but the civilisational history of the Hindus that did.
Fuck off! Modi knows that booth management is all that ultimately matters. Your people have to knock on doors to get out the vote.
Positing an unbroken chain stretching back thousands of years, the BJP-RSS present themselves as the guardians of the great Hindu civilisation, successors to iconic kings like Chandragupta Maurya (reign c322-298 BCE), Prithviraj Chauhan (c1178-92) and Shivaji (1674-80).
Whereas Mahamta Gandhi often pretended to be a Chinese dude who grew up in Canada. He didn't drone on about the Gita and Ramayana. On the contrary, he posited an unbroken chain stretching back from himself to Can-Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge.
The significance of their success in appropriating Indian history cannot be overstated.
The Left did appropriate Indian history on University campuses. Nobody gave a fucking fuck. History doesn't matter in the slightest.
The appropriation allows for the exclusionary politics of the BJP-RSS to subsume, even replace, religious belief.
Just as your appropriation of male gender allows for the exclusionary politics of the Penal System- not to mention the fact that you aren't allowed to use the Lady's loo.
For example, the inauguration of the Rama temple by Modi this January,
was entirely the result of a Supreme Court decision which awarded title to the temple deity rather than the shebait. It must be said, Yogi and Amit did a good job in enabling the Temple to come up so quickly.
one of the biggest events in modern Indian history, incited a national frenzy among Hindus.
Modi was a superb 'jajman'
But the spectacle wasn’t mainly a celebration of Rama bhakti (religious devotion).
Yes it was- for Hindus.
It was about a politically united Hindu community declaring its pre-eminence in its homeland.
That happened in 1947. Sadly, this did involve the killing of a lot of innocent Muslims- many of whom were highly educated or otherwise talented. Still, Congress wasn't taking any chances. It eliminated its rivals when it could not coopt them.
If the BJP-RSS have worked very hard to make history – admittedly, partly a colonial one – their strength, it is also their weakness.
Nope. History doesn't matter in the slightest. Fifty years ago there were some cretins who misunderstood Marx's theory of history to mean that the teaching of history could change the 'substructure'. This was mere magical thinking. I
The RSS is hypersensitive to its shaming non-participation in India’s freedom movement.
The Savarkars did hard time. That's good enough. After about 1921, there was no 'freedom struggle'. There was an open door but nobody could go through it because everybody wanted to be the first to go through it. In this context some people put in a bit of jail time in between writing books or making speeches while other people got rich off government contracts or corrupt deals like the Mody-Lee agreement.
(This is what Congress party members meant when they called Right-wing leaders ‘anti-national’, which, now, unsurprisingly, is one of the Right’s favourite labels for its critics.)
No. Congress said that Vajpayee was a CIA agent. That's why, when Atal became FM in '77, he went running to Moscow and kept swigging Vodka there till the Soviets told their slaves in India that the guy was kosher. On the other hand, Buta Singh persecuted various Gandhian NGOs by claiming they were CIA fronts.
There is no escaping the fact that Indian independence came under Gandhi using Gandhian methods,
No. Everybody got Independence when the US pulled the financial plug on the British Empire. That game simply wasn't worth the candle. Gandhi's achievement was to prevent India getting the same deal as Ireland in 1922. But, if Hindus were stupid enough to follow Gandhi then they were incapable of feeding or defending themselves and thus could not be given independence. Indeed, in 1939, just after War was declared, Gandhi said that if the Brits left without handing over the Army to Congress, the Hindus would be fucked over by Muslims and Punjabis.
and the Hindutva antipathy for Gandhi and his methods is hard to hide,
those methods involved collecting lots of money and then pissing it against the war. One might as well support Mahesh Yogi's 'Natural Law party'. Yogic levitation will spread 'peace rays' and prevent war and violent crime.
indeed central to their formation and history. The Right cannot fundamentally alter public perception of these facts all at once. Savarkar is the one figure who cannot be claimed by the Congress and who has genuine links with the anti-British struggle.
Savarkar was in the Garam Dal tradition within Congress. Gandhi and Nehru were in the Naram Dal. Before the Great War it was the latter who went to jail. After it, the latter would form an orderly queue to put in a bit of jail time and thus burnish their credentials. For many, there was a healthy financial and reputational return on jail time for sedition. Sadly, the returns were negative for those who did hard time for treason or waging war on the King Emperor.
His revolutionary past and later marginalisation yield a counterfactual interpretation that can cover somewhat for the Right’s embarrassing absence.
This is stupid shit. Indians want to emigrate to places ruled by Whites- though Dubai is increasingly attractive because of lower tax rates.
In the Right’s telling, Savarkar was sidelined by Gandhi and Nehru while the Hindu polity foolishly rejected Hindutva – Partition was the calamitous outcome of these two decisions.
It was calamitous for the one third of sub-continental Muslims who lived in Hindu majority areas. Kaffirs in Muslim majority areas would have been slaughtered in any case.
If Hindus had chosen Savarkar’s (and the RSS’s) macho Hindutva over Gandhi’s ‘Muslim appeasement’, they would have reigned supreme in undivided India, it is implied.
This is foolish. It is obvious that if Hindus wanted to rule over Muslims, they would need to build up their military power. But that costs money and involves hardship. Why not pose as a Swamy or Mahatma or Boddhisattva instead?
The icon of Savarkar thus reminds Hindus:
not to go in for assassinations or other such terrorist activities. The thing is counter-productive.
without Hindutva, India’s national security is perennially under threat.
Which doesn't matter if your main concern is food security- which was the case under Nehru
Only by heeding ‘the man who could have prevented Partition’ can you secure Hindu India,
as opposed to Sonia's India
especially when Islamic terrorism is perceived as a threat
this dude perceives Islamic terrorism as an invitation to a Birthday Party
, and Muslims constitute 14 per cent of India’s population.
it was about ten percent in 1950.
Muslims oppressed Hindus for centuries and won a nation for themselves by expropriating Hindu territory – why shouldn’t Hindus become masters in whatever was left of their own ancient homeland?
India has ejected Muslims in the past and may do so in the future. But why get rid of hardworking, productive, people? It is a different matter that particular communities might get rid of 'outsiders'.
Gandhi had dedicated his life to fighting such realpolitik, a struggle carried on by Nehru after independence.
Yet the biggest massacre and ethnic cleansing of Muslims took place when Gandhi was alive and Nehru was the fucking Prime Minister! Their own struggles succeeded because the one got to be called 'Father of the Nation' while the other founded a fucking Dynasty.
Hindutva now, however, enjoys wide legitimacy among Hindus of all castes. The BJP won about 37 per cent of the votes cast in the last national election of 2019, but that number greatly understates the public’s approval of Hindutva. Rival parties can criticise the BJP, but they dare not oppose Hindutva.
This is also the reason so few American politicians say 'Whitey be debil' or 'all males must be castrated'.
The self-professed secular Congress party, for instance, tends to respond to the BJP’s Savarkar propaganda by questioning his lack of machismo for filing mercy petitions with the British, instead of contesting his Hindu supremacism lest it be seen as anti-Hindu.
I suppose this was written before Congress decided to boycott the Ram Temple inauguration. Going into the 2024 general election, they do appear to be doubling down on an 'anti-Sanatan Dharma' (i.e. anti High Caste Hindu) platform favored by Chief Minister Stalin and, it seems, Kharge's son. There may be some method to this madness. After all, if Akhilesh is allying with Rahul, there must be some caste equation angle to this.
As BJP and RSS leaders have brought Savarkar to prominence in Indian politics and thought, a cult of Gandhi’s assassin Godse has flourished among party loyalists. In recent years, statues and even temples dedicated to Godse have cropped up, while Gandhi memorials are defaced.
But this doesn't seem to have any impact on voters. My feeling is that Modi gains by being seen as religious and this has a halo effect beneficial to his party. That's why his party played up his underwater 'darshan' in Dwarka. Every district in India has one or two 'teerths' and PM Modi turning up for a Temple inauguration would greatly help attract funds for the proper development of such pilgrimage sites.
On the other hand what BJP is betting is last mile delivery to 'labhartis' through the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra. The hope is this will also motivate the booth level workers. If people feel their voluntary work is actually helping the poor, then they become more effective. More importantly, some may be encouraged to join politics full time. Without this type of 'new blood', a party is bound to stagnate.
As resurrected Hindutva icons, they stand in death as they did in life: Savarkar, the guru, behind the pulpit; Godse, the disciple, on the streets.
But it is Netaji Bose whom Modi is promoting as an alternative to Gandhi & Nehru. This dovetails with the Agniveer scheme. Let us see if the BJP succeeds in increasing the employability of Indian youth while creating a vast reserve or territorial army.
Savarkar would have thought that India’s Hindus today are finally being cured of what he hated as their perverted virtues of nonviolence, tolerance and respect for adversaries.
No. He was against vegetarianism and going to temples and so forth. Like many followers of Spencer, who thought Religion would die away as Scientific education spread, Savarkar would have been appalled by a world where Church attendance is rising and the internet is helping billions of people to grow strong in Faith, Hope and Charity.
Savarkar had no problem with peaceful co-existence. He regained some salience in Indian politics by warning that Muslims would ethnically cleanse kaffir minorities in the sub continent just as they had elsewhere. But this wasn't exactly news and, when push came to shove, Gandhi and Nehru were happy enough to preside over ethnic cleansing of Muslims and armed conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. On balance, Savarkar was less religious than the dynasty- whose funerals and weddings are conducted according to Vedic rites- and his conception of Indian Nationalism was more secular in the European sense. Unlike Sonia, who said in 2002 that, if the Bench permitted, she would build the Ram Temple with the aid of the Shankaracharya who had performed her 'Grha Pravesh' ritual when she moved house. I suppose Savarkar would have refused any such ritual and demanded that money raised to build the temple be spent on Defense Research. For this reason, though we may admire his fiery patriotism and literary gifts, we find it difficult to warm to him as a person.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment