"Veer" Savarkar As Benedict Arnold - How Indian History Should View A Revolutionary-Turned-Collaborator

During the American War of Independence, a man by the name of Benedict Arnold fought on the side of the fledgeling United States. Arnold won some key battles against British forces, and was injured in the foot at the Battle of Quebec. He was promoted to the rank of Major-General in recognition of his many contributions.

Later on, however, as a result of perceived slights at the hands of his superiors, Arnold turned traitor and attempted to hand over his command of West Point to the British. He failed in that attempt, but escaped to British lines and fought against his former compatriots thereafter.

How does the US remember Benedict Arnold today? How does an often comically over-patriotic nation handle the memory of a man who was both patriot and traitor?

There is no statue erected in honour of Benedict Arnold. Arnold is remembered in the US today by the Boot Memorial.

The Boot Memorial in Saratoga National Park, New York

The Boot Memorial honours the injury that Arnold suffered in the cause of American Independence, but does not mention him by name because he turned traitor later.

In India today, the legacy of a man called Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, is being fiercely debated.

VD Savarkar fought for Indian Independence against the British. Unlike Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, he did not choose the path of non-violent, passive resistance and non-cooperation. He believed in violent revolution, so when he was captured by the British in connection with a suspected conspiracy, he received a severe sentence. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison in the infamously harsh Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean.

While in the Andamans, Savarkar wrote numerous mercy petitions to the British, and was finally released after serving just 10 years of his 50 year sentence.

After his return to the Indian mainland as a free man, Savarkar was as good as his word and never again worked against the British. What he did do was work against the Indian National Congress, which suited the British very well indeed.

Gandhi and the Congress aimed to secure Hindu-Muslim unity, and to work towards Indian independence from the British as a undivided political entity. Savarkar, on the other hand, worked to unify the "Hindu nation" against the Muslims, and eventually became the President of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha. In this, he effectively took the same side as Jinnah, who also believed in the "Two-Nation Theory" that Hindus and Muslims were separate "nations" and could not share a single state. The actions of Jinnah and Savarkar thus deepened the divide between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, Jinnah's Muslim League and Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha became unlikely coalition partners in many provincial governments when the Congress resigned from those governments to protest certain actions of the British.

Savarkar's writings acquired a distinctly fascist tone, and he became more interested in the "independence of the Hindu nation" from Muslims and Christians than with the independence of India from British rule. He turned from being a revolutionary into a collaborator. His being a collaborator is clear from  the fact that he got into no more trouble with the British authorities. The trouble he was giving to the Congress played right into the hands of the British.

How must India remember Savarkar today? The Hindu right-wing insists on calling him "Veer" (brave) Savarkar, but there is little that smacks of bravery in the grovelling letters he wrote to the British during his incarceration in the Andamans. India certainly needs to acknowledge his early contributions to the freedom struggle which earned him his prison sentence, but this acknowledgement must be tempered by the knowledge of his subsequent betrayal of that freedom struggle and his actions that favoured the British.

India needs to erect a monument in honour of Savarkar's early contributions, but this monument should not acknowledge him by name on account of his later actions as a collaborator. Only word of mouth should associate him with the monument, just like Benedict Arnold is only unofficially associated with the Boot Memorial.

"Why Were Gandhi And Nehru Not Sent To The Andamans Like Savarkar? Were They British Stooges?"

Right-wing ideology never fails to amaze me. It robs even educated people of the ability to see obvious facts or apply simple logic to situations. One of my friends with right-wing sympathies asked me the following question:

Why were Gandhi and Nehru never sent to the Andaman[s]? No answers from liberals yet... British stooges?

I found this question absurd, because the historical facts have been so clearly explained to generations of Indian students in their textbooks, yet this person could not see the answer that was staring him in the face.

Nehru with Gandhi - hated by the Hindu right-wing even more than by the British, but does that make them stooges?

I'm sure there are many more like him who have bought into right-wing propaganda, so I decided to take his question at face value and answer it seriously.

"Very simple answer - Gandhi and Nehru were lawyers who understood how the British system worked. All said and done, the British Empire operated on the basis of codified law. It was not arbitrary.

If you proclaimed that you wanted revolution and intended to bring down the government, then the punishment would be severe, e.g., 50 years in the Andamans, which is what Savarkar initially got (before he became a stooge and was released early).

If you killed someone or committed an act of terrorism, then it would attract the death penalty. That's what happened to Chandrasekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh.

That's why Gandhi, Nehru, and other lawyers trained in British law (even Jinnah) were very careful not to provoke the British beyond a point. They created a lot of nuisance and clogged the system, preventing it from functioning, but always in a way that violated only minor laws. That's also why they didn't talk about revolution, but only "passive resistance", "civil disobedience" and "non-cooperation".

Even the famous Dandi March for which Gandhi went to jail was technically only a minor violation. He broke the Salt Law, which hardly called for exile to the Andamans under British Law.

The London-trained lawyer used a strategy of causing maximum possible disruption to the British Empire in India, through violations that were less serious under the law than violent revolution, and therefore did not attract severe penalties

Subhas Chandra Bose also largely operated within the law and only committed minor transgressions. He chose to escape from India when he was just under house arrest (he had not been sent to the Andamans or even to a jail within mainland India)."

I had to end it with a personal admonition.

"You see, it is all quite simple if you leave your right-wing conspiracy theories behind. You have also studied history, but your right-wing ideology prevents you from seeing these obvious facts or using simple logic."

Sterling Values Sold For Thirty Pieces

The news of Mahatma Gandhi's spinning wheel (charkha) being sold for 110,000 pounds at a Shropshire auction should not shock us. It is a sign of the times we live in. We are capable of putting a price tag on simplicity itself if it appeals to people, because clearly, there's a market for it.

The author of a literally homespun revolution is now a hot collector's item

It reminds me of that other anti-capitalist icon who has become the ultimate chic consumerist commodity - Che Guevara. He has done so much for capitalists since he died, since his face adorns millions of t-shirts sold around the world.

A most revolutionary idea in fashion

When Open Source software began to be known to the average IT person around the year 2000, many people were puzzled by the phenomenon. "How can anyone make money from it?" was the question. I wrote two articles ("Open Source-onomics" and "The Capitalist View of Open Source") to address these misconceptions.

There was a time when a movie's popularity used to be measured by how many weeks it ran in the theatres. No longer. Today, the measurement of popularity is money. In recent personal experience, I was saddened to see that most on-line news and reader commentary about a movie I liked (Krrish 3) was about how much money it had been able to gross (and how quickly) rather than how good it was.

As a society, we seem to be at that classic stage where we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing".

Tagore Trumps Gandhi - The Revolt Of Urban, Educated, Middle-Class India

The true India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its seven hundred thousand villages. If the villages perish, India will perish too.
- Mahatma Gandhi

That was a rather curious assertion by the Father of the Nation, and I'm increasingly certain he was way off the mark.

Let me explain.

There is a revolution going on in India right now, and it is easy to be distracted by the sound and thunder of the public protests into thinking that the protests are the revolution.

However, the real one is subtler. It is a quiet demographic revolution that has been brewing for at least a decade and a half. It is the story of how the urban, educated middle class found its voice and began to flex its muscles to assertively protect its own.

Three straws in the wind:

• The anti-corruption protests of August 2011, in the wake of the 2G spectrum auction scam and the Commonwealth Games scam, which mobilised tens of thousands of people;
• The freedom-of-speech protests of November 2012, in the wake of the arrest of two urban, educated, middle-class girls (for the crime of posting their criticism of a politician on Facebook), forcing the police into a humiliating backdown;
• The anti-rape protests of December 2012, in the wake of the gang rape of an urban, educated, middle-class girl by uneducated lower-class men, which is still playing itself out.

[The anti-corruption protest of 2011 had more of an all-middle-class flavour to it, with a sizeable representation from the lower middle class and the middle middle class. But the two protests of 2012 have both been predominantly upper middle class.]

Make no mistake about it. This is a class war with a new combatant - the middle class, specifically the well-educated, upper middle class. It's no longer the old, comfortably familiar socialistic battleground of rich-versus-poor, capitalist-pigs-versus-oppressed-proletariat. It's now us-versus-them, where "us" increasingly means everyone who can read this blog post, and "them" means those who threaten the freedoms and the way of life we take for granted.

Protesters gathering in Delhi - India's famously "burgeoning" middle class is no longer a bludgeoned class

The faces of the protesters tell the whole story - they're young, educated and English-speaking. This is a powerful segment of the Indian demographic that has not been seen unsheathed until the last couple of years.

The middle class has come together across the country, with social media playing a key organising role.

Bangalore

Hyderabad

Mumbai

Kolkata

The anti-corruption protests of 2011 did have political leadership, although not from any mainstream political party, but the two protests of 2012 have been seemingly leaderless even as they have been well organised, doubtless much to the fear of the establishment. A political leader can be arrested, but who can arrest Twitter? The rich may control the means of production, but the middle class controls the means of information, and is now wielding it as a weapon. The infamous apathy of the middle class seems to have ended too, mainly because of the rise of a new and assertive younger generation that feels outrage at the threats to it and simultaneously senses its own strength to meet those threats.

In this new war, the lower class is in fact at a hopeless structural disadvantage in spite of its outward appearance of fearsome lumpen lawlessness.

The November arrests of the two girls who posted on Facebook began much like any such event in the past, although subsequent events turned out to be a nasty surprise to the political establishment. A political party known more for its street goons than for its governance pressurised a pliant police force to arrest the girls, on the pretext of their having "hurt religious sentiments" (although the political leader they had criticised was not the head of any religious order). As the middle class responded with vocal outrage, the police were forced into humiliating retreat. The magistrate who issued the arrest warrant was transferred, as were the junior police officers who made the arrest. The police dropped the case, and the girls, initially shaken and scared into deactivating their Facebook accounts, are now back online (well, at least one of them). That was the first public defeat for the lumpen classes at the hands of the middle class. [An earlier defeat was not so public. The same political party quietly decided to drop its annual reign of terror against couples on Valentine's Day in 2012 as it realised how electorally unpopular it had become among "Westernised" youth.]

Until recently, growing up middle class in India meant learning to mind one's own business and avoid tangling with goons, politicians or the police. The significance of the revolution lies in the growing realisation that others must now be wary of tangling with the middle class.

We've arrived.

The latest incident, the savage gang rape in Delhi can be seen as a expression of uneducated lower-class male rage. Ironically for a rape, I believe it symbolises impotence. The reasons are not far to seek. The pecking order has been altered to the disadvantage of uneducated lower-class males. Large numbers of women, traditionally their inferiors on account of gender, are now their visible superiors on account of education and upward class mobility. The disadvantaged underclass male is lashing out in frustration and wounded chauvinistic pride.

But as we are witnessing, such blind fury is ultimately short-sighted, because when the victim is one of the middle class, she has vastly superior means at her disposal to return such an attack with the ferocity of the state apparatus, hitherto only the weapon of the rich and powerful. The assaulted girl was a physiotherapy student, not an illiterate villager. She is "one of us", and the scale of the turnout at the protest rallies testifies to this. [It is instructive to note that even in the days after the Delhi rape, there have been assaults on poor, uneducated women living in less urban parts of the country. Those reports, although remarked upon, have not provoked a similar reaction in terms of protests, because those women are not of "us".]

It could reasonably be concluded from this that the current protests are just the middle class looking out for its own. While this may well be true, there is a fundamental difference between the "vested interests" of the middle class compared to those of the traditionally powerful or the historically oppressed. The middle class is not flexing its muscle in a bid to either oppress another group or to seek compensatory entitlements. What the middle class has always wanted is a free and meritocratic society. And therefore, in spite of protests like these being about the concerns of one group, their benefits will ultimately flow to all, including the most disadvantaged in the most remote parts of the country.

A fair and egalitarian India that safeguards every citizen's rights will come about only gradually, and through the intermediate tier of smaller towns, where much of tomorrow's educated youth will come from. Urbanisation brings with it the awareness of civil rights, and even if the immediately visible effect of urbanisation is increased strife, such turbulence is inevitably associated with the move to a fairer social order. India's much-romanticised villages are in fact the hotbed of casteism, sexism and every kind of pre-modern prejudice. [Google "khap pachayat ruling" for evidence.] Contrary to what Gandhi believed, India's salvation lies in the speed with which the country urbanises and leaves its village mentality behind.

Returning to the perpetrators of the heinous gang rape, it will not be entirely surprising if the 6 arrested men receive a much harsher punishment than usual. The pressure from the middle class for the death penalty could conceivably harden the law, which currently only specifies 12 years of rigorous imprisonment for rape. This will be an interesting legal development to watch.

The pressure to stiffen the law is enormous - students in Kashmir

Hell hath no fury...

When the middle class shouts loudly enough, it may just get what it wants

Gandhi was wrong, after all. India is urbanising, and it is not perishing as a result. On the contrary, it is becoming more conscious of its rights and hence more civilised. In the words of one of Gandhi's contemporaries,

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore's dream is coming true as India awakens to a more assertively egalitarian society. And this is not through any purported virtue of Gandhi's villages but through the battles won by India's urban, educated middle class.