The Week India – June 30, 2019

70 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019

In a cruel irony, when the head of the Arya

Samaj and a revered associate of both Gandhi

and Savarkar—Swami Shraddhanand— was

murdered by a Muslim bigot, Abdul Rashid, in

1926, Gandhi refused to condemn Rashid and

called him his “dear brother”. Savarkar had

then severely condemned and even mocked

him in his writings: “It is the hallmark of a

saintly Mahatma to say the blood that shed

the ‘Hindu blood,’ that too of a saint, is that of

my own sibling.... You never defended Dyer. Is

not a European a brother, too?”

But Gandhi’s “nonviolent” adherents, how-

ever, had no such qualms. Since Nathuram

Godse was a Maharashtrian Brahmin, what

followed was a large-scale massacre of Brah-

mins across Maharashtra—again a fact well

concealed since independence. Savarkar’s

own younger brother Narayanrao was griev-

ously injured in these riots and eventually suc-

cumbed. Savarkar was discredited forever and

despite the acquittal, the taint stayed on. Th e

two decades following Gandhi’s assassination

were spent by Savarkar in near isolation before

he ended his own life by refusing food, water

and medication in 1966.

In terms of contrasts, while Savarkar stood

for modernity and science, separation of ritu-

alistic religion from politics, militarisation and

dismantling the caste system, Gandhi spoke in

terms of faith and religion, ahimsa, approved of

the caste system in principle and had no time

or appetite for science.

With economic liberalisation, the Pokhran

nuclear tests, our space conquests and rapid

urbanisation instead of gram swaraj—not to

speak, of course, of the ascendant political right

in India today that claims its ideological lineage

from him—it is Savarkar’s vision of India that

is fructifying and not Gandhi’s. Yet, one is the

Father of the Nation and the other is always

insinuated as his murderer by implication. Like

the diagonally opposite directions that their

portraits are placed in Parliament, Gandhi and

Savarkar will continue to remain the two irrec-

oncilable poles of Indian history.

CURIOUS

MIND

Gandhi observ-

ing a hookworm

cell through a

microscope at

Sumati Morarjee’s

residence at Juhu

Beach, Bombay, in

1944

DINODIA