SAHMAT continues to grow because all of us contribute to it all the time.
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust
c/o 36 Pt. Ravi Shankar Shukla Lane
New Delhi-110001
Email: sahmat8@yahoo.com
Tel-23381276/23070787
Dear friends,
After a lock-down period of one and a half years, SAHMAT has started functioning, observing complete Covid protocol.The office is opening six days a week. You may recall that the lock-down came when our exhibition constitution at 70 was on at Jawahar Bhawan and a couple of lectures by Rajeev Dhavan and Sanjay Hegde were held and the remaining lectures had to be cancelled.
During the lock-down period we published the following books:
‘Constitution at 70’
‘We the People’
‘Dukh Likha Jana Chahiye’-(Hindi) (nq%[k fy[kk tkuk pkfg;s)
‘Kisano ke Liye jeene marne ka sawal’-(Hindi)-Prabhat Patnaik
‘A Matter of Survival of the Peasantry’-Prabhat Patnaik
‘The Attempt of Imperialism to Destroy Food Securiy in India’-Utsa Patnaik
We also organized a successful webinar with Social Scientist & Tulika on “In Defence of History’ on the occasion of the 90th birthday of our Chairman Prof. Irfan Habib.
Safdar Memorial on January 1, 2021 had to be held online.
We now have mounted an exhibition ‘India is not lost’ which showcases the work that we had done to observe various events of the National Movement. The exhibition is on at Jawahar Bhavan, R.P.Road since October 2, 2021. If the situation permits we can have a lecture series, music performances, etc coinciding with the exhibition. In mid-November we will have to take a call on the organization of the Safdar Memorial on January 1, 2022.
During this period we have kept all our colleagues on full emoluments.
We are approaching you with the request to find some time to visit the exhibition at Jawahar Bhawan.
Please contribute to meet the expenses for the smooth running of SAHMAT and plan future programmes.
Donations to SAHMAT are exempt under Section 80 G of the Income Tax Act.
SAHMAT continues to grow because all of us contribute to it all the time.
Sohail Hashmi
M.K.Raina
Ram Rahman
Gandhi in a New Avatar: Advisor to
Savarkar on Mercy petitions
Mridula Mukherjee
Aditya Mukherjee
Sucheta Mahajan
The
Indian Express, 13 October 2021, tells us that Shri Rajnath Singh, the Indian
Defence Minister, has claimed that “A
lot of falsehood was spread against Savarkar. It was repeatedly said that he
filed multiple mercy petitions before the British government. The truth is he
did not file these petitions for his release. Generally a prisoner has right to
file a mercy petition. Mahatma Gandhi had asked that you file a mercy petition.
It was on Gandhi’s suggestion that he filed a mercy petition. And Mahatma Gandhi
had appealed that Savarkar ji should be released. He had said the way we are
running movement for freedom peacefully, so would Savarkar.”. He also said that
“You can have differences of opinion, but to see him condescendingly is not
right. The act of demeaning his national contribution will not be tolerated”.
(Note the threat. Setting up Godse temples and hero worshipping him can be
tolerated but no criticism of Savarkar!)
What
are the facts?
Rajnath
Singh’s statement is presumably based on documents pertaining to the year 1920:
a letter from ND Savarkar, brother of VD Savarkar and Ganesh Savarkar, to Gandhiji,
Gandhiji’s reply, and an article in Young India by Gandhiji.
The facts are somewhat at variance with the claim made by
Rajnath Singh. The first mercy petition
was filed nine years earlier by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1911 itself, within
six months of his conviction, and numerous other petitions followed in
subsequent years, without any evidence or claim of it being at Gandhiji’s suggestion!
To quote from one such petition, submitted personally to the Home Member, Sir
Reginald Craddock, when he visited the Andamans jail in 1913, for his release,
offering to be loyal to the British Government:
“If the Government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the strongest advocate of constitutional
progress and loyalty to the English government
which is the foremost
condition of that progress. I am ready to serve the Government in
any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct
would be. The Mighty alone can afford to be
merciful and therefore
where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental
doors of the Government?”
Further, as testified by GS Khoparde, a Savarkar
supporter’s question in the Imperial Legislative Council on March 22, 1920, “Mr
Savarkar and his brother had once in 1915 and at another time in 1918 submitted
petitions to Government stating that they would, during the continuance of war,
serve the Empire by enlisting in the Army, if released, and would, after the
passing of the Reforms Bill, try to make the Act a success and would stand by
law and order". In his reply, the Home Member, Sir William Vincent,
confirmed that : "Two petitions were received from Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar - one in 1914 and another in 1917, through the Superintendent, Port
Blair. In the former he offered his services to Government during the war in
any capacity and prayed that a general amnesty be granted to all political
prisoners. The second petition was confined to the latter proposal”.
Thus, it is very clear that Savarkar had
submitted numerous petitions between 1911 and 1920, without any advice or prompting
from Gandhi,. offering loyalty to the British government, and
expressing his willingness to serve them in any capacity. Therefore the Defence Minister’s statement that
Savarkar did not file mercy petitions but did so only on the advice of the
Mahatma is not borne out by the actual historical record.
So where does Gandhiji come into the story? Only in 1920, when N D Savarkar, the younger
brother of the two Savarkar brothers who were in jail, wrote to Gandhiji
seeking his advice, when he found that the list of prisoners being released
under the Royal Proclamation of Clemency by the British did not include the
names of the brothers. Gandhiji replied saying it was difficult to give advice
but suggested that he might draft a brief petition. In addition, he wrote an
article in Young India on 26 May 1920, titled Savarkar Brothers, where he refers to
the Royal Proclamation of Clemency and notes that while many other political
prisoners had been released under this but the Savarkar brothers were not.
He says “Both the brothers have
declared their political opinions and both have stated that they do not
entertain any revolutionary ideas and that if they were set free they would
like to work under the Reform Act…” (Government of India Act of 1919) “They
both state unequivocally that they do not desire independence from the British
connection. On the contrary they feel that India’s destiny can be best worked
out in association with the British.”
It is to be noted that nowhere in Gandhiji’s
article is there an appeal for Savarkar’s release, as stated by the Defence
minister.
“Mahatma Gandhi had appealed that Savarkar ji should be released.” Gandhiji questions the government decision not
to release them as they appear to pose no danger to “public safety” or “danger
to the state”, but does not appeal to the British. Nor does Gandhiji anywhere
say in his article, as claimed by the Defence minister, that “the way we are running movement for
freedom peacefully, so would Savarkar.” On the contrary, Gandhiji is
emphasizing that the Savarkar brothers do not want independence, and want to
work under the Reform Act.
There is a strange irony in this entire
episode. That Mahatma Gandhi is being roped in to establish Savarkar’s
nationalist credentials, that too on such flimsy grounds! The attempt is to
create a picture in the public mind that Gandhiji and Savarkar had a close
relationship, to the extent that the latter took Gandhiji’s advice on such
crucial issues as mercy petitions and that Gandhiji appealed for his release. It
is a clear attempt to try and normalise Savarkar’s begging for mercy when
numerous other nationalists refused to do so and Gandhiji even demanded the severest
punishment for himself.
What are the facts, which we are expected to
forget?
In January 1948, when Gandhi was assassinated, Savarkar was arrested as he was suspected of being the mastermind
behind the conspiracy. Sardar Patel, who was overseeing the whole case as the Home Minister, being a fine criminal
lawyer, was personally convinced of Savarkar’s guilt, otherwise he would
not have agreed to put him up for trial.
He told the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in unambiguous terms, ‘It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through’. (Durga Das, Sardar Patel Correspondence, 1945–50, Vol. VI, p. 56.)
In response to the Hindu
Mahasabha’s disclaimer, Patel wrote to Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the Hindu Mahasabha leader, on 6 May 1948:
“…we cannot
shut our eyes to the fact that an appreciable number of the members of the Mahasabha gloated over the tragedy
and distributed sweets…. Further,
militant communalism, which was preached
until only a few months ago by many spokesmen
of the Mahasabha, including
men like Mahant Digbijoy
Nath, Prof. Ram Singh and Deshpande, could not but be regarded as a
danger to public security. The same would
apply to the RSS, with the additional danger inherent in an organization run in secret on military
or semi-military lines.” (Sardar Patel Correspondence, Vol. VI, p. 66.)
Patel further pointed out to Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee, ‘The activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence
of Government and the state’. (18 July 1948, Sardar Patel Correspondence, Vol. 6, p. 323.)
The
Chief
Minister of Bombay, B.G. Kher, explained the political situation
in Maharashtra to Patel, ‘The atmosphere
of hatred against the Congress and Mahatma sought to be created by the Hindu Mahasabha culminated in the assassination
of Mahatma Gandhi at
the hands of a few Maharashtrians’.
{ B.G. Kher to Patel, 26
May 1948, ibid., Vol. VI, pp.
77–78.)
Savarkar was eventually not convicted in the
Gandhi Murder Trial
due to a technical point of criminal law:
for lack of independent evidence to corroborate the testimony of the approver.
However, the Commission of Inquiry
set up in 1965 under Justice Jiwan
Lal
Kapoor, a former judge of the Supreme
Court of India, got access to a lot of evidence
which was not available to the trial judge. Two of Savarkar’s close associates,
A.P. Kasar and G.V. Damle, who had not testified at the trial, spoke up
before the Kapur Commision, now that Savarkar was dead, and corroborated the approver’s statements. It is possible that If they had testified at the trial, Savarkar would have
been proven guilty. In fact, the Kapur Commission came to a conclusion
very similar to that of Sardar Patel: ‘All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group’.( Report of Commission
of Inquiry
into Conspiracy to Murder Mahatma Gandhi, 1970, p.303, para 25.106.)
Immediately after Gandhiji’s
assassination, the Government of India, with Sardar Patel as Deputy Prime
Minister and Home Minister, banned the RSS and put some 25,000 of its members
in jail. The Hindu Mahasabha chose to dissolve itself when confronted with a ban. Tainted
by its link with Gandhiji’s murder, the Hindu Mahasabha beat a tactical
retreat and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, its main
leader, founded the Bharatiya Jan Sangh in 1951.
This was to be the main political vehicle
of Hindu communal
articulation from then onwards, its frontline
political party, till it merged into the Janata Party after the
Emergency and then was replaced by the BJP.
It is indeed ironic that the political forces who lay claim to being the most ardent nationalists today played no role at all when the actual struggle for India’s freedom was being
fought. Savarkar, after his release
from prison in 1924, never took part in any anti-British politics. In fact, he
was the originator of the theory of Hindutva, which defined authentic Indians
as those whose fatherland and holy lands, pitribhumi and punyabhumi
, were in India, thereby excluding Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands
were outside India, from the fold. The Hindu Mahasabha also became increasingly loyalist
in the 1930s and 1940s. Though the loyalist tendency
was there earlier, initially
some of its leaders
participated in Congress-led movements.
But from 1937
onwards, when Savarkar became the President
and undisputed leader, they joined the Muslim
League
in competing for the crumbs thrown from
the Imperial table. The outbreak of the Second World War brought the differences with the nationalist forces out
into the open. While the Congress provincial ministries resigned in protest against the British Government’s decision
to
make India a party to the War without her consent, Hindu Mahasabha leaders offered cooperation to the British, and advocated that Indians participate in the war-effort and join the Army. Savarkar, as President of the Mahasabha, appealed
to Hindus ‘to participate in all war-efforts of the British Government’
and not to listen to “some fools” who “condemn” this policy ‘as cooperation with Imperialism’.(
Savarkar, Hindu
Rashtra Darshan, pp. 203ff.)
In private, Savarkar told the Viceroy in October
1939 that the Hindus
and the British should be friends and made an offer
that the Hindu Mahasabha would replace the Congress if the Congress ministries resigned
from office.( Linlithgow,
Viceroy, to Zetland, Secretary of State, 7 October
1939, Zetland Papers, Volume 18, Reel No. 6.)
In accordance
with this pro-British policy, when the Quit India movement was going on in 1942, and the entire nationalist Congress
leadership including Gandhiji was in jail, Shyama
Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu
Mahasabha was a minister in the Fazlul
Haq Ministry in Bengal. The Hindu Mahasabha also formed coalition
governments with the Muslim League in Sind and the NWFP. It is another matter that all this loyalism
could not get them
electoral success and they suffered a rout in the 1946 elections!
The RSS
too, as an organisation did not participate in any of the major battles for freedom from colonial rule. The RSS was founded in 1925, and apart from the Simon Commission
Boycott in 1928, at least two major movements, the Civil Disobedience Movement
of 1930–34 and the Quit India Movement of 1942 were launched by the Congress after that date.
In none of these did the RSS play any part. Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS did go to jail in his individual capacity in 1930, but he kept the organisation and its members away from the
Civil Disobedience movement. The government was very
clear that it had
nothing to fear from the RSS. A Home Department note on the RSS reported that, ‘At meetings of the Sangh during the Congress disturbances (1942), speakers urged the members
to keep aloof from the Congress movement and these instructions were generally observed’.
It is of course legitimate to ask why there was a silence on Savarkar in the RSS and Jan Sangh-BJP camp for over four
or five decades after Gandhiji’s murder. Was it because it was politically suicidal to mention
Savarkar as he was associated in the public mind with Gandhiji’s murder, and now that much time had
lapsed, it could be assumed that public memory was short and Savarkar could now be resurrected? Also, with the new public emphasis on ‘Hindutva’ as part of the new aggressive
phase, it was difficult to ignore the original
creator of the concept. Further, for a party claiming
to be ‘nationalist,’ it is a little embarrassing not to have any freedom fighters to show. Therefore, in a desperate
effort to discover nationalist icons,
Savarkar was sought to be
cast in that mould.
A nationalist veil is drawn over Savarkar’s communalism by remembering him as Krantiveer, the
Andamans revolutionary. That Savarkar shamed the revolutionaries by repeatedly asking for pardon in
the Andamans and that he never took part in any nationalist activity after his release as he had promised to the British
government, was sought to be forgotten.
And in 2003, when the BJP-led NDA government was in power, despite considerable
opposition, Savarkar’s portrait was installed in the parliament. One would imagine that even if there is
a whiff of suspicion about Savarkar this should not have
happened. And now the latest: an
effort to legitimize Savarkar by normalizing his embarassing mercy petitions as
being sanctioned by the Mahatma! The aim is also to project a close and friendly
relationship between the two, and thus hide the fact that they had nothing in
common. Savarkar as the ideologue of Hindutva and leader of the Hindu Mahasabha
was a consistent and vehement critic of Gandhiji, especially of his
non-violence and inclusive attitude towards the Muslims. There could not be a
sharper contrast between their formulations of who India belongs to. Savarkar clearly
says that “India must be a Hindu land, reserved for the Hindus”. He unambiguously asserts that Hindus should be “masters in our own house, Hindusthan, the land of the Hindus”.
(Hindu Rashtra Darshan, pp 92, 63). Gandhiji, on the other hand, in his famous speech in Bombay in August 1942 where
he gave the call for ‘Quit India’, declared unequivocally: “Those Hindus who, like Dr. Moonje and Shri Savarkar, believe in the
doctrine of the sword may seek to keep the Mussalmans under Hindu domination. I
do not represent that section. I represent the Congress. The Congress
does not believe in the domination of any group or any community. It believes in
democracy which includes in its orbit Muslims, Hindus,
Christians, Parsis, Jews—every one of the communities inhabiting this vast
country….Millions of Mussalmans in this country come from Hindu stock. How
can their homeland be any other than India?”
One cannot
help thinking what a contrast there is between Savarkar
and his men, and
revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh who prided themselves on never asking
for clemency, choosing to suffer all punishment, including death. In fact from the very early days Indian
nationalists had evolved
the practice of bravely accepting responsibility for committing anti-British acts, face trials, using the trials for
further propagation of nationalist goals
and
then willingly accept
imprisonment, exile or even death as
punishment.
It is pertinent to
note that Savarkar’s habit of petitioning the government for release from
internment and making offers of good behaviour did not end with his release
from British jails in 1924. Within three weeks of his arrest in connection with Gandhiji’s murder, on 22 February 1948, he made a representation to the Police Commissioner from Arthur Road Prison expressing his ‘willingness to give an undertaking to the Government that … [he would] refrain from taking part in any communal
or political public
activity for any period
the Government may require in case I am released on
that condition’. Even the most brilliant advocate would find it
difficult to prove that this too was on Gandhiji’s advice, unless of course so
strong was the bond between the two that the atheist Savarkar could claim
communion with Gandhiji’s spirit!
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