I had deliberately refrained from writing anything on Veer Savarkar for a simple reason: Sri Dhananjay Keer's timeless masterpiece on Bharatavarsha's sacred Swatantryaveer has set the bar so impossibly high that one realises one's own smallness. Akin to all immortal classics, whatever we write on Veer Savarkar is at best an annotation of Veer Savarkar: Savarakar and His Times.
Yet, on the occasion of his auspicious birthday it should ideally be the bounden duty of every Hindu anywhere in the world to not only remember him but take inspiration from and sustain a blazing legacy that outlasts several lifetimes.
If we were to capture the entire essence of Veer Savarkar's bequest to Bharatavarsha in a single line it is this: his life and work demonstrated that a single individual armed with nothing but an uncompromising conviction in the sanctity and grandeur of his civilisation can wage a simultaneous war against a threefold imperialism of the oppressive colonial British, the residual belligerence of the medieval Muslim tyranny and the compassionate dictatorship of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
The fact that the British considered Veer Savarkar as their Enemy Number One, hunted him down, imprisoned and tortured him is unsurprising although unforgivable. But what excuse did Mohandas Gandhi and his emasculated Congress cultists have to persecute Veer Savarkar in a manner worse than even the British?
The answer lies in that precise word: emasculation. After usurping the supreme power of the Congress, Gandhi systematically sidelined every voice that merely questioned his decisions, and in the Khilafat Jihad, he found the perfect opportunity to round up all his loyalists in the Congress and ground their manhood into fine dust. The masses of that period were largely innocent and too naive to understand the fact that Gandhi converted and used the Congress party as his personal laboratory to conduct diabolical "experiments" in "truth," non-violence, and celibacy. R.C. Majumdar incisively observes how "even the achievement of Indian independence was secondary" to Gandhi and how he regarded the Congress Party as some kind of "World Peace Society."
Arguably, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the first and the greatest PR success stories of his time. Think about the fact that whenever the West writes about India in even a mildly appreciative manner, it finds no one except Gandhi.
It was in this impotent public climate that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar defiantly radiated the heroic flames of Kshatra, fought a multi-pronged battle against every force that sought to oppose or weaken the sacred civilisational inheritance of Bharatavarsha. What Savarkar unleashed was not revolution but resistance and reclamation. By the sheer force of his personality. As a result, men joined Veer Savarkar and jackals joined the Gandhian Congress.
In one of his historic speeches at Karnavati in 1937, he thundered:
Let the Hindus realize that the real cause of this mischief is nothing else but the hankering of the Hindus after the Willow-the Wisp of a Hindu-Moslem unity. The day we gave the Mohammedans to understand that Swaraj could not be won unless and until the Mohammedans obliged the Hindus by making a common cause with them, that day we rendered an honourable unity impossible. When an overwhelming majority in a country goes on its knees before a minority so antagonistic as the Mohammedans...it would be a wonder if a minor community...does not hasten the doom of the major community and aim to establish their own political suzerainty in the land.
And followed it up with a sledgehammer-like climax, explicitly telling the Muslim community
if you come, with you; if you don't without you; and if you oppose, in spite of you - the Hindus will continue to fight for their National Freedom.
This then is the other fundamental reason the Congress hated and continues to hate Veer Savarkar with unparalleled viciousness: naked fear. Fear that Savarkar's courage might weaken Gandhi's phoney sainthood and compel the masses to give the real fight that Gandhi had successfully conned them into avoiding.
Even worse, Veer Savarkar distinguished himself as the most learned, trenchant and truthful denouncer of the fake saint and his spurious experiments with Hindu lives. Here is a sample.
Owing to the Gandhist lead the Congress had neglected the question of fostering military strength of our people, to such an extent that even the wordy resolutions which the Congress used to pass while it was under the lead of...Moderates but who in this particular respect were more Extremists and far-sighted than this spineless school of Gandhist non-resisters, [demanded] the repeal of the Arms Act and Indianization of the Army, were tabooed for the last twenty years under Gandhiji’s pressure on the Congress platform.
Hundreds of written pages and countless speeches of such delicious Gandhian surgery obviously angered the pious egomaniac: how dare Veer Savarkar cut open and dissect my most favourite personal pathologies? Here are Savarkar's words on Gandhi's full-time pathology. Gandhih
While the Khilafat was on his brain, in a reply he gave to the correspondent of the Daily Express, London, Gandhiji disclosed his plan of converting the Afghans from fanatical turbulance into a peaceful citizenship thus, 'I would introduce the spinning wheel amongst the Afghan tribes also and then that will prevent them from attacking Indian territory. I feel the tribesmen are in their own way God-fearing people.' Yes, 'in their own way' : That is the trouble. For, we can clearly discern their own way of God fearingness in the ghastly light of Hindu habitations set on fire throughout the frontier line from Sindh to Kashmere...And the spinning wheel to persuade them from attacking India! How many centuries after, Sir ? And what are we Hindus to do in the meanwhile ? To garrison the frontiers with hosts of Hindu damsels with the charm of the spinning wheel in their hands-as Gandhiji has suggested quite seriously at one of the sittings of the Round Table Conference ?
Long story short, the dark opaqueness of Gandhian cowardice was quite obviously scared of admitting even a single redeeming ray of Veer Savarkar's illuminating Kshatra with predictable tragic consequences for Hindus and a Bharatavarsha which was spliced into two. Doubtless, Gandhi ranks highest among the Congress nation-wreckers who went down on their knees before Jinnah.
But the dark chapter for Hindus actually began after independence under Nawab Nehru, the combined embodiment of the worst traits of Islamic tyranny, British imperialism and Communist totalitarianism. The story is well-known but what is not well-known is the twisted relationship that Gandhi and Nehru shared. It was a relationship tainted by an element of perverse licentiousness. Nehru negated every single "ideal" Gandhi prized. Gandhi claimed that "the saddest day of my life" was having an erection when he had crossed 70...it was his body's natural revolt against his unholy experiments with celibacy. And his favourite disciple Nehru was an epic philanderer. While Gandhi's insistence on truth, personal integrity and redemption are well known, he turned a blind eye to Nehru whose tolerance of corruption is legendary.
These are the people who got us freedom? Quite the contrary. Objectively speaking, the Indian freedom was achieved by an infinite combination of several forces. In the end, the British didn't actually "give" us freedom. They were just happy to dump India to its own devices and decamped as soon as they could. But some of the most decisive forces that propelled their exit was the Naval mutiny at Bombay and Subash Bose's INA. And Veer Savarkar who by the 1940s had transformed into a renewed headache for them.
Even an adversely inclined critic like Prof. Coupland, a member of the ‘Cripps Mission’ has remarked in his recent booklet- The Hindu Mahasabha is a militant organisation of Hindus which has been growing fast in membership and influence.’
That was Veer Savarkar's statement on 31 July 1943 from his office at Savarkar Sadan, Bombay. It was also his statement of resignation as President of the Hindu Mahasabha, a position he was unanimously elected to for six consecutive times. What follows is even more revealing of the Congress fear of this intrepid Kshatriya in modern times.
The Hindu Militarization movement received a fillip and all attempts to Congressify the Hindu Mahasabha were brought to naught to the great chagrin of the Congress stalwarts as Mr. Rajagopalachariar who publicly bewailed.
Small wonder that the Gandhian Congress went out of his way to try and indict Veer Savarkar for the assassination of an alleged saint. A spirited, magnanimous and selfless warrior of Bharatavarsha humiliated after "independence" for the "crime" of fighting the real, civilisational struggle that the Congress had abandoned and fed to the visceral mouths of the parasitic wolf pack called the Muslim League.
Let it be said that Veer Savarkar's trial for Mohandas Gandhi's assassination ranks as a Congress-inflicted crime against Hindu civilisational memory.
What followed his trial was even worse than the trial itself. The seven-decade-long demonisation of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar inaugurated by Nehru, the alleged freedom fighter who was "jailed" in five-star properties, enjoying pristine views of the Himalayas and writing reams of copious nonsense to himself and his sister and daughter while Veer Savarkar suffered inhuman torture round the clock in the savage Andaman prison.
Long decades of incredible physical ardour, pain, and torture had taken its toll on Veer Savarkar's health by the late 1930s. He began falling ill quite frequently. Yet, his commitment to Sanatana Bharatvarsha remained as strong if not stronger. In those years, he could barely move out of his home, yet here's a measure of his unsullied appeal and mass popularity.
Citing ill-health, Savarkar tendered his resignation as the HMS President in 1940. It was overwhelmingly rejected by the Hindu community nationwide. Bowing to their goodwill, he attended and addressed the HMS session at Madurai from a stretcher.
His final resignation came in December 1943 and recommended a successor who had to be elected unanimously.
On August 1, 1944, Veer Savarkar sent a telegram to Dharamveer Bhopatkar, Chairman of the Reception Committee to welcome his successor.
I join you in welcoming Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerji. Hindudom is indebted to him so much for his monumental services and his recent condemnation of Provincial self-determination to secede from the Central Government and his determination to oppose Indian vivisection that I for one wish that the crown of thorns of the Presidentship of the Hindu Mahasabha, the highest honour that Hindudom can offer be bestowed on him next year.
We suppose the year was a fortuitous beginning. From 1944 to 2014.
What can the Sanatana society offer to Veer Savarkar on his 137th birthday? It is a debt we can't ever repay but can only transform into an inspiration as countless folks have done and continue to do.
Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, like his beloved Bharatavarsha, is akin to two of her divine creations. The Himalayas and the Hindu Mahasagara. One stands before both...and silence, not words is the involuntary response that swells up from within us.
Postscript
And we in Karnataka have a spineless "Hindu" government that garners votes using Veer Savarkar as a sick bait. So sissy that it is scared to name something as mundane as a flyover in Veer Savarkar's honour. And a badly decimated Congress party headed by a foreign woman is not even in power.
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