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The Prodigal Son
It is hard for anybody who subscribes to a Congress ideology ? or even, to basic secularism ? to venerate Veer Savarkar, writes Vir Sanghvi in Counterpoint.
I was ten years old and living in Bombay when Veer Savarkar died in 1966. It is possible that I was too young to note the national mourning, if any did occur, but my recollection is that he died a quiet death, far away from the headlines. To be sure, there were some who missed him. And there were the usual condolence messages (many of which are now being quoted as character certificates), but by 1966, when he was 83, Savarkar was living a low-profile existence in Shivaji Park, far from the mainstream of Indian politics.
Even then, the obituary writers did mention that he had been charged in the Mahatma Gandhi assassination case and that though Savarkar had been acquitted, Nathuram Godse (who was hanged for the murder) was often described as a ‘Savarkarite’. Others referred to the report of the Commission of Inquiry set up to look into the conspiracy behind Gandhiji’s assassination, which took a more negative view of Savarkar’s role.
For many years after that, little was heard of Savarkar — at least in the mainstream media. If he was mentioned at all, this took the form of the usual platitudes about freedom fighters who were jailed by the Brits. So, I was startled by the way in which Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre portrayed him in the best-selling Freedom At Midnight. I remember thinking then that Collins and Lapierre had gone too far — Savarkar’s sexual preferences were his own business and it was wrong to have caricatured him as a comic-opera villain in the book.
