BJP’s Pragya Thakur called Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse a patriot, then retracted under pressure. But it wasn’t the first attempt to legitimise him.
In this excerpt from his book 'Why I Am A Hindu', Congress MP Shashi Tharoor explains Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's vision of Hindutva and how it was closely linked with nationalism.
Armani built a multibillion-dollar global brand from something as simple as an unstructured jacket, and broke down the walls between formal and casual.
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Savarkar was sent to Andaman jail for being a part of what was called the India House Group, which believed in an armed rebellion against the British. From the jail he sent two letters of apology to ruling authorities seeking pardon. He was not only pardoned but also allocated a regular stipend by the British for nearly 40 years of his life. Thus he remained a total nonentity in the struggle for India’s freedom for a major part of his life. A commonsensical observation would be that he caved in, or compromised.
The BJP is painfully aware of this embarrassing truth. They recently tried to whitewash it by erecting an enjoined single-piece statue of Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in a Delhi college. Now they want to whitewash Savarkar’s past nationwide by giving him a Bharat Ratna. It is totally unjustified. If Bharat had such “ratnas”, we would still be under the British rule.
Savarkar was sent to Andaman jail for being a part of what was called the India House Group, which believed in an armed rebellion against the British. From the jail he sent two letters of apology to ruling authorities seeking pardon. He was not only pardoned but also allocated a regular stipend by the British for nearly 40 years of his life. Thus he remained a total nonentity in the struggle for India’s freedom for a major part of his life. A commonsensical observation would be that he caved in, or compromised.
The BJP is painfully aware of this embarrassing truth. They recently tried to whitewash it by erecting an enjoined single-piece statue of Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in a Delhi college. Now they want to whitewash Savarkar’s past nationwide by giving him a Bharat Ratna. It is totally unjustified. If Bharat had such “ratnas”, we would still be under the British rule.