Gandhi vs Savarkar

THE 58TH DEATH ANNIVERSARY of Vinayak Damodar ‘Veer’ Savarkar came and went rather quietly on February 26. Savarkar gave up his life on this day in 1966 at the age of 82. Some have disputed his honorific ‘Veer’ or brave, but how he died was certainly befitting of this sobriquet.

From February 1, he renounced not only medicines but also food and, finally, even water. What is more, he coined, with his customary literary acumen, a new word for such a deliberate embrace of death. He called it atmaarpan as opposed to atmahatya—not suicide, but self-proffering. He explained his position in an article called ‘Atmahatya Nahi Atmaarpan’, arguing that after one’s ability to serve society ceases, one need not passively await one’s end. Instead, hastening, even embracing extinction is much better. The traditional Jain way of fasting to death, similar to Savarkar’s chosen method, is called Sallekhana. It has been practised for thousands of years.

Savarkar’s death was neither mourned nor observed by Maharashtra’s then-Congress cabinet. No one came to pay homage to the hero of the freedom struggle. The question of Central government leaders or Cabinet members showing up at the funeral or last rites did not even arise. Just a month earlier, on January 24, Indira Gandhi had assumed the prime ministership of the country. Her predecessor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had tragically and, somewhat mysteriously, died in Tashkent on January 11. Before that, Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, who served for 16 years and 286 days, passed away on May 27, 1962. None of them, nor other Congress netas, had cared much for Savarkar or his legacy.

It is an irony of history that Savarkar has exacted sweet revenge on his detractors and critics. After a long hibernation, he has been resurrected in augmented glory. Today’s India counts him as one of our great heroes. What is more, Hindutva, the ideology that he promulgated and propagated, is now all but India’s, some would go so far as to say, official, state religion. How times change! Savarkar is no longer the prophet crying in the wilderness; he is the nation’s (un)anointed ideologue.

Move over Mahatma Gandhi. Yes, no longer considered a Mahatma, Gandhi has been turned into the arch-villain of the new Hindutva historians and intellectuals. He is blamed for everything bad in our society, from the Partition to the emasculation of Hindus. It is very frequent to find his statements and writings—and they extend over some 100 volumes—misquoted or twisted out of context to demonise him. He is made out to be the enemy of Hindus and the Hindu Rashtra in the making.

What, according to the Gandhi haters, is his greatest sin? It is, though no one dares state it, non-violence. Non-violence, which is an inadequate, if not inaccurate, translation of ahimsa. Ahimsa more appropriately means non-injury or, even better, harmlessness. The renouncing of the intention to hurt or harm others. In all Sanatani traditions, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh, it is exalted above other virtues. In Jaina dharma, it is considered the highest and, therefore, the one non-negotiable virtue and cardinal pillar of the ethical life.

But Hindutva has made righteous violence its watchword. Righteous, of course, is the key to any justification of violence, as in the Bhagavad Gita itself. For Gandhi, no violence was, is, or can be righteous. He therefore reinterpreted even Krishna’s exhortation to Arjuna to destroy the Kauravas as a call to root out one’s inner enemies.

Gandhi believed that he had reinstated the supremacy of non-violence in our times, so beautifully embodied in the dictum ahimsaparamodharma—the supreme dharma is ahimsa. Why is it supreme? Because, according to Gandhi, it is superior, not weaker, in all respects to violence. More effective, both in the short and the long term. It transforms both the perpetrator of violence and the non-violent resistor. Its scope and practice are limitless for it can be used both in daily life on ordinary occasions and at the national, even international levels. But Gandhi, alas, could not prevent the bloodbath of the Partition. In anguish, he admitted his failure in his last days. His non-violence, he admitted, had failed.

Savarkar and Gandhi were old adversaries. They had met in 1909 in India House, the home of Indian revolutionaries in Highgate, founded by the redoubtable Shyamji Krishna Varma. There, Savarkar, one of the greatest early revolutionaries, advocated the violent overthrow of British colonial rule. He influenced, some would say indoctrinated, the young “terrorist” Madan Lal Dhingra to assassinate William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, head of the colonial secret police. Wyllie was not only a friend of Dhingra’s father but was also sniffing out the revolutionaries who had become members of Savarkar’s secret society, Abhinav Bharat.

Not yet 26, Dhingra was swiftly tried, sentenced, and dispatched to the gallows on August 17, 1909. This was an unconscionable age for a young and talented man to die. Was his life cut short by an ideology, which however courageous, was doomed to fail? The empire would not end, Gandhi believed, without the moral force of a mass uprising, no matter how many young bravehearts offered their blood as a libation to the cause of freedom. Dhingra’s peroration before the hangman’s noose closed around his neck is worth remembering: “I believe that a nation unwillingly held down by foreign bayonets is in a perpetual state of war. Since open battle is rendered impossible, I attacked by surprise . . . since cannon could not be had I drew forth and fired a revolver . . . Neither rich nor able, a poor son like myself can offer nothing but his blood.”

Gandhi and Savarkar, both patriots, differed radically on how India should win its freedom. Scholars like Anthony J Parel have suggested that Gandhi’s handbook of non-violent revolution, Hind Swaraj, composed in 1909 aboard the S.S. Kildonen Castle, was a riposte to Savarkar’s revolutionary methods. Incidentally, the latter’s First War of Independence was also published the same year. One might even argue that the unfinished dispute between Gandhi and Savarkar was brought to a deadly resolution 50 years later, when Nathuram Godse, another of Savarkar’s chelas or acolytes, executed Gandhi on January 30, 1949.

Did the cult of the revolver triumph over that of the spinning wheel? Perhaps. Savarkar, dead and cremated, has been resurrected with unprecedented magnitude, if not magnificence. Gandhi assassinated only once, has been slain over and over again by those who hate him. But, let alone dying quietly, he refuses quite to quit, let alone die. I have shown this at some length in The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (2015), now available in a Hindi version: Mahatma Gandhi: Mrityu evam Punarutthan.

Gandhi continues to haunt the body politic as Sarojini Naidu, in her rousing obituary of February 1, 1949, on All India Radio prophesied: “My father, do not rest. Do not allow us to rest. Keep us to our pledge. Give us strength to fulfil our promise, your heirs, your descendants, your stewards, the guardians of your dreams, the fulfillers of India’s destiny. You, whose life was so powerful, make it so powerful in your death, far from mortality you have passed mortality by a supreme martyrdom in the cause most dear to you.” Today, Prashant Kishor, trying to vitalise an anti-BJP front in Bihar, has the Mahatma as mascot. Because he knows that the people of India have neither forgotten nor turned their backs on Gandhi. Kishor has the uncanny idea that only Gandhi, the cancelled Mahatma and no longer the father of the nation, can be harnessed to counter ‘Mahatma’ Modi.

The quarrel between Gandhi and Savarkar may not yet be concluded. Just as those between him and Ambedkar or Jawaharlal, or for that matter, Jinnah, are also far from finished. But what both he and Savarkar, despite all their differences, had in common is the art of dying deliberately. To invoke the eloquent testimony of one who chose Savarkar over Gandhi in offering the supreme, albeit untimely, sacrifice of his life, “The only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die, and the only way to teach it is by dying alone.” The famous last words of Madanlal Dhingra, of course.

Both Gandhi and Savarkar had learnt how to die for India, that is Bharat. Each demonstrated it in his unique way by dying bravely and dying alone. But we, their heirs, howsoever we might differ from one another, must learn the art of living, not dying, let alone killing one another, for our country.

deathsfreedom fighterMahatma GandhiVinayak Damodar ‘Veer’ Savarkar