Hindu separatism

Hopes and fears of V D Savarkar

Not everyone can become the leader of a community, organization or a nation. Many aspire but few deserve or are recognized as leaders. Leadership requires identification of challenges, organization of a platform to confront the challenges, creating awareness about the issues and presenting workable solutions of those issues to the led. Equally important is how a leader conducts his affairs through words and deeds. The images, symbols, jargon and the use of history and philosophy are tools that must be effectively employed by a leader to successfully communicate his ideas and vision to stir the followers into action.

In our neighborhood, India is ruled by the Hindu nationalists. There is a tradition of strong leadership among them. Had it not been so, the Indian Congress party that ruled India for a greater part since independence in 1947 would have continued its dominance. The present Hindu nationalist leaders, prominent among which are the incumbent Indian premier Narendra Modi, L K Advani, Atal B Vajpayee, etc are a continuation of its old leadership that laid the foundation of Hindu nationalism about a century ago. The present Hindu nationalist leaders have built upon the legacy and vision of their founding leaders. One such founding leader was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who headed the first all-India Hindu communal party, the Hindu Mahasabha. He lived an eventful life and his speeches and statements serve in understanding the ambitions, hopes and fears of the Hindu nationalists. What a leader says has significance for his followers but some sayings become historic than others just as Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Dr Mohammad Iqbal said and wrote a lot but Iqbal’s Allahabad address of 1930 and Jinnah’s presidential speech at the Muslim League’s annual session at Lahore in 1940 have become historic for their timeless content. In somewhat similar way, Savarkar’s presidential speech at the 1938 session of the Hindu Mahasabha helps in understanding the Hindu nationalism in his own words.

Although the Hindu Mahasabha was formed during World War I, it looks as if after a political struggle of over two decades, it was not able to make the Hindus conscious of their state of affairs in pre-partitioned India. The Hindus were about three-fourths of the population yet Savarkar still felt that they were ‘beset’ by dangers on all sides because they were in a “deadly swoon of self-forgetfulness” due to which they suffered ‘dreadful calamities’ from Peshawar to Rameshwar every day. He felt that they could get out of this state but the path to struggle was marked with “unavoidable valleys of bitter disappointment and valorous death.” To achieve glory, he asked all the Hindus to get together under the ‘Pan-Hindu’ banner of Hindu Mahasabha so as to assert their Hindu identity whose assertion at the time was looked upon “an act of high treason in Hindusthan”.

Savarkar tried to impress upon the Hindus that as a community they had not realized their due potential but put the blame for their ‘pathetic plight’ on others – the British, who were the rulers and the minorities, particularly the Muslims. He took the British to task for deliberately depriving “the Hindus of the political predominance which was their due as the overwhelming majority in India by denying them representation in proportion to their population” while giving more power to the Muslims, Christians and other European minorities through a system of weightages, preferences securities and separate electorate. He particularly cried foul play by the British to “crush the Hindus economically” through the introduction of discriminatory laws such as the Land Alienation Act and the reservation of jobs in the government services for the Muslims in Bengal more than their due share. He insisted that the Hindus were a martial race but the British wilfully ignored their potential by curtailing Hindu recruitment in the army and the police and preferred the Muslims over them.

Savarkar alleged that the Muslims were an overbearing minority who indulged in religious and racial persecution of the Hindus particularly in the Muslim ruled princely states of Hyderabad and Bhopal in the same way as the Hindus were persecuted in the days of the Muslim emperors Aurangzeb Alamgir and Alauddin Khilji hundreds of years ago. He also referred to the Hindu-Muslim riots in Malabar and Kohat as “the bloody orgies to which the Hindus were subjected by the Muslim fanatics.” The allegations did not stop there. In this speech, he made a specific reference to the Muslims living in the north-western tribal areas, who, he accused committed “unnamable atrocities on the Hindu people there with a set purpose of exterminating the Kafir in that region. Only the Hindu merchants are looted. Only the Hindus are massacred and only the Hindu women and children are kidnapped and held to ransom or converted perforce to Islam.” After giving reference of some particular areas and incidents, he alleged that such brutalities were inflicted by the Muslims upon the Hindus “from Malabar to Peshawar, from Sindh to Assam and year in and year out.”

In this way, he tried to construct a Hindu nationalist narrative. One aspect of this narrative was to remind the Hindus that they had become a dead nation although their past in the days of Chandragupta or Vikramaditya or the Peshwas was ‘mightier’ and ‘resplendent’. The second aspect was to induce a feeling among the Hindus to take on the non-Hindus because if Hindus could be victorious against them in the ancient past, they could be victorious again provided “if we but dare we are sure to win; for, even today, we possess the power, the volcanic fire within us… Rouse it confidently – and it shall burst forth like the column of the sacrificial Fire which led the Aryan Patriarchs of our Hindu Race from victory to victory.”

Savarkar’s narrative was peculiar in several ways. To instigate the Hindus to violent actions, they were told that they were being wronged by ‘the Other’. This ‘Other’ was personified as the Muslim community. Like all extremists who see things only in black or white, he condemned the entire Muslim community as the wrong-doer. With broad strokes, he painted the then Hindustan as a battleground between the Hindus and the Muslims. Instead of making efforts to integrate the two communities, he raised the cry of Hindu separatism. This separatism was dangerous because it fuelled hatred and violence against the Muslims while completely ignoring the positive contribution of the Muslims in the evolution of the Indian society for the past centuries. The tolerant and pragmatic Muslim rulers of the subcontinent were deliberately ignored and the few against whom the Hindus had grievances were magnified. This Hindu narrative was negative because it put emphasis on negativity i.e. division, differences, suspicions, distrust, conflict and confrontation. When such negativity is propagated as a mission by a leader, it does affect the minds of the prejudiced and the vulnerable. As a ten-year old child, Savarkar started his career in communal politics by throwing rocks at a village mosque along with some of his school fellows and years later was involved in the training and sheltering of Indian terrorists in London. It was this advocacy of hate and violence that spurred a Hindu nationalist member of Hindu Mahasabha to assassinate, Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian ‘Mahatma’ in 1948. A worrying fact is that the supporters and successors of Savarkar have assumed power in India, today.