Holding out for a hero

A jejune magazine article informed us Savarkar was a Chitpavan Brahmin, part of a community that seemingly specialised in ‘‘ideologues … of Hindu nationalism’’. One of them was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, accused of introducing ‘‘primordial” Hindu imagery into public discourse.

It is the sort of sweeping, breathtaking assessment that leaves you gasping. In one sentence, an entire community has been written off as ‘‘tainted’’ by the parameters of contemporary political correctness. In one phrase, the great Tilak has been disowned, handed over to Acharya Dharmendra and the VHP.

A decade and a half after the tempestuous secularism/pseudo-secularism debate, are we back to square one? Does it take one half-won election to have all those discredited leftists and professional time-servers come crawling out of the woodwork?

Why does Savarkar evoke such passion? He was a thinking man’s Hindu, a prodigious mind, an author of repute. His Hindutva (1923) is a persuasive and remarkably evocative document.

As such, to the liberal rabble, he is flesh-and-blood refutation of the charge that Hindutva lacks an intellectual tradition. Hence the fervent desire to destroy him, efface him, erase his memory.

To see Savarkar minus his context is to do disservice to not just him, but to India. The Poona Brahmins, contrary to what conventional wisdom may be, were among modern India’s early elites, along with, for instance, the Parsis of Bombay, the Banglo-Indian bhadralok of Calcutta. These are not groups to be scoffed at; they shaped the consciousness that evolved into Indian nationalism. They are our founding fathers.

Yet, it is also true that they were marginalised by Gandhi’s mass politics. By the early 20th century, they moved away from the Congress, seeking reference points to the left or the right, in conservatism or socialism. Bengal saw a tension between both strands before the left won. In Maharashtra, Savarkar, influenced more by Mazzini than Marx, went the other way.

The big black mark against Savarkar is that he was implicated — though acquitted — in the Gandhi murder case. Even if Savarkar was not directly involved, it is a fair argument that the Hindu political opinion of the times, shaped by the likes of Savarkar, both fed on and fed an antipathy to the Mahatma.

If you listen to today’s television debates — or read the ghastly chapter on Savarkar in Freedom at Midnight, packed with cheap shots that mar an otherwise readable book — you would imagine the build-up to the Mahatma’s murder was an open-and-shut, black-and-white affair.

It wasn’t; and making Savarkar the scapegoat won’t make it so. The contrasting pulls of Gandhi and Savarkar, of Hindu as saint-exemplar and Hindu as warrior-ideal were at their most extreme at Partition.

Speak to Punjabis or north Indians of a particular generation and they will tell you Gandhi was considered irrelevant after Partition. When they saw him making friendly gestures towards Pakistan in the midst of bloodletting, they hated him.

Yet the moment the Mahatma was killed, the fury was spent, it was Hindu extremism that stood in the dock. The very segments so critical of the Mahatma were numbed by his murder. His death was point of closure for the mad frenzy of Partition.

India moved on, developing a collective amnesia about its turbulent, violent birth as a free nation. Gandhi’s politics died at Partition; the Congress killed his ethics at Independence and, by the mid-1950s, junked, perhaps correctly, his economics too. The RSS sought to repackage itself, divorce its Hindu politics from the Mahatma’s death.

For all concerned, Savarkar became the convenient fall guy — the man you could blame everything on.

Savarkar loved India as much as Gandhi or Nehru did. His idea of India was different — some would say more organic and inspirational — but his credentials should never have been in question. What sort of society is it that mocks its heroes?

It is pertinent to draw an analogy with the United States. The first big ideological debate in American politics was between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. It led to the first contested (as opposed to unanimous) presidential election in 1800, where Jefferson took on Hamilton-backed John Adams.

At stake were two very different visions of America. Hamilton was pro-business, he wanted to preserve freedom but rebuild ties with Britain in the interests of trade. Jefferson distrusted London, was taken up by the rhetoric of Revolution-era Paris.

In a sense, the Hamilton-Jefferson split anticipated the Republican-Democrat divide of our age. Yet do today’s Republicans ask voters to shun Democrats simply because Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice-president, killed Hamilton in a duel?

Isn’t that what Mani Shankar Aiyar and Arjun Singh do when they link the BJP to the Mahatma’s death?

Admittedly the comparison may be overstated. Eighteenth century politics in the US and that in India 150 years later were chalk and cheese. Even so, the larger point remains.

Hamilton and Jefferson are both American heroes. Can’t Gandhi and Savarkar share space in the Indian pantheon?