Dead men can’t speak. Which is a pity considering that a man who died decades ago is being plucked out for the sole purpose of starting and fuelling a political scrap. In the past, realpolitik-ians pretending to be ideologues have egged on their foot soldiers to fight over the ownership of the legacies of greats.
National icons belonging to the nation at large have not been spared. If it has been Shivaji, Swami Vivekananda, Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose in the past, it now seems to be Veer Savarkar’s turn to get sucked into a war of political branding.
The ideological spat between the Congress-led ‘secular’ forces and the BJP-led ‘Hindu nationalists’ is known to us all. But to tag this difference of opinions on to figures from our nation’s history highlights how low political debate can get in our country.
One still hasn’t quite fathomed why Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar aired his ‘personal’ views and decided to remove the plaque carrying Savarkar’s poems from the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. Surely, the minister gains nothing from his own effigies being slapped courtesy Shiv Sainik footwear. With the Maharashtra assembly polls round the corner, the ‘Savarkar issue’ has even made Congressmen in the state wary of being seen too close to their own party in Delhi. Whatever one’s views may be on Savarkar, he has been in the pantheon of India’s honoured freedom fighters long enough to not be dragged into a mudfight.