Celebrating Savarkar during Gandhi’s 150th anniversary

By Aijaz Zaka Syed Whatever you may think of the BJP and its extended Parivar, they have a sordid sense of humour.  At a time when India and the world are celebrating the 150 th  birth anniversary of Gandhi, the governing party has promised to confer the country’s highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, on his bitterest critic and the mastermind of his assassination.
Bharat Ratna to Savarkar Within days of singing paeans to Gandhi at various events, Prime Minister Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah and other BJP leaders have had the audacity to demand the Bharat Ratna for someone who plotted the Mahatma’s assassination. Indeed, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the leader of Hindu Mahasabha was one of the eight people who were tried for the Gandhi killing.  He, however, managed to escape the noose for “lack of corroborating evidence.” Savarkar was arrested on February 5, 1948 – six days after Gandhi’s assassination – and was charged as a co-conspirator. On February 27, 1948, Home Minister Patel wrote to Prime Minister Nehru: “I have kept myself almost in daily touch with the progress of the investigation regarding Bapu’s assassination case. It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha — directly under Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through” (Sardar Patel Correspondence 1945-50, Vol 6).
In 1965, the Jeevan Kapur Commission that probed the Gandhi assassination also concluded that there had been extensive interactions between Savarkar and Nathuram Godse, the man who gunned down the Mahatma on January 30, 1948 in Delhi, before the assassination.
Commission’s report The report noted, “All this shows that people who were subsequently involved in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi were all congregating sometime or the other at Savarkar Sadan and sometimes had long interviews with Savarkar. It is significant that Apte and Godse visited him both before the bomb was thrown and also before the murder was committed and on each occasion, they had long interviews. All the facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.”