Re Savarkar, Bakhle, Karnad, Modi

Readers of LRB may be as puzzled as I have over the years whenever it carries

 something about India; or economics. It is difficult to make out Raghu Karnad’s point (Raghu Karnad; Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle. Princeton, 501 pp., £38, April 2024

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/raghu-karnad/sacred-geography)  in his confusing review of Janaki Bakhle’s book Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle. Princeton, 501 pp., £38, April 2024, other than that he had to read it in secrecy (I confess I faced no threat).

But what does he want us to understand about his subject Savarkar, & his relevance today?

Just to make this simple:  a dozen years ago I wrote an essay about Savarkar (https://www.threeessays.com/product/fascism-essays-on-europe-and-india/) where I described how he began a movement to harness a national sense of defeat after the crushing of the 1857 Revolt to persuade many adherents of the various Indian religious persuasions that the British had collectively termed « Hindu » that their real oppressor was not the British who cleaned out India (I might add, to finance the Bank of England, the Industrial Revolution &, through the London bond market, the United States) but the Muslims among them, who should be now expelled or re-converted to Hinduism, even as Hindu India should ally itself as a junior partner of the British Empire. This obviously lunatic idea was of course in the tradition of the nineteenth century ethnic nationalisms upon which Savarkar patterned his ideology, reaching out as he encouraged his colleagues to do since he was under house arrest, to Mussolini, who provided them a long conducted tour of fascist establishments throughout Italy as a guide to how they should build their party, as the excellent scholarship of Marzia Casolari has described in detail.

I am vain enough to offer an extended quotation from that ancient paper:

 

« In prison he became persuaded that the enemy was not the British but the Muslims and accordingly won increasing privileges. Released from imprisonment to detention, he asked for and was paid a pension, and was permitted to conduct anti-Muslim propaganda. Released from detention by the provincial Congress Government, he headed the Mahasabha from 1937 to 1942, when it set out a programme to arm Hindus against Muslims by recruiting them to the Indian army, promoting military education, influencing the administration of the princelystates including their armies, gaining access to weaponry from their state forces to harass Muslims, obtaining arms licenses from sympathetic Congress ministers, attempting to set up a munitions factory at Gwalior in the expectation of support of the Darbars and the Birla industrial group, and exploring contacts with European fascists. None of this was discouraged by the British, who at the very same time suppressed anti-Nazi propaganda by left and liberal organizations. Despite its earlier praise for Mussolini and Hitler the Mahasabha hailed the proclamation of the new state of Israel in 1948 and promised it support. I shall argue that the Mahasabha pioneered what might be termed a subaltern fascism.

Savarkar’s exemplary conduct in jail won him favour. When World War One began, he protested his desire to serve the war effort and asked for amnesty:

 

The siding of Turkey with Germany as against England, roused all my suspicions about Pan-Islamism and I scented in that move a future danger to

India. I...feared that in this grim struggle between two mighty powers the Muslims in India might find their devil’s opportunity to invite the Muslim

hordes from the North to ravage India and to conquer it.

 

To combat this he proposed a new British union with her imperial subjects where, from Ireland to India,

an empire would emerge from the process, which can no longer be the British Empire. Until it assumed any other suitable name, it might well be called “The Aryan Empire”….

 

Accordingly, he promised that his releaseGeorge Lloyd, Governor of Bombay, later Lord Lloyd, an influential British imperialist who later administered Egypt, and a supporter of fascist movements in his subsequent political career, was persuaded not by Savarkar’s grand designs but by the use to which he could be put as a former revolutionary. Accordingly, the Government periodically reviewed his loyalty. Only its assurance ensured each improvement in his living conditions and successive reductions in his sentence.

To disarm any suspicion that may yet linger in the Government Quarters, the petitioner begs to solemnly pledge his word of honour that he shall cease

to take any part in politics whatever.

 

..He was released on 4th January 1924. He then published the lessons of his experience in the Andamans, which were that through his struggles he had managed to overcome every humiliation inflicted by the Muslim staff and prisoners, and persuaded the prison management to appoint him to run the key operations of the prison and subordinate the Muslims to him, thus creating ‘Hindu rule’.

 

CHAPTER X Miniature Hindu Raj. When I stepped into the Andamans there was in it, in prison and outside, what one may rightly call, Pathan Raj. Dressed in brief authority, the Pathan dominated the scene. It was overthrown, as I have described in this story, by the time that my stay in the prison had come nearly to an end. The Pathan Raj was gone and Hindu Raj had taken its place...The capital of that Raj was the oil-depot of the prison and as I have already mentioned before, I was its foreman and therefore the monarch of that Raj...The oil-depot being the main source of income for the Silver Jail, the man in charge of it was a person of great importance... every one connected with the oil-depot from top to bottom was a Mussalman, and mostly a Pathan...The wiliest, the intensely selfish, the most cunning and the most wicked person in the prison was often chosen for the job. During my seven to eight years of prison-life, an array of such men had adorned the seat. Now, in my ninth year, the seat had come to me. All the Mussulman tindals, petty officers and warders who had still remained in that jail, were full of fear that I was appointed to that office. The demi-god presiding over the oil-depot could only be propitiated by offerings in gold and silver. If the prisoner desired not to be ground down in the oil-mill of that place, they had perforce to propitiate its deity...Every single tindal began to approach me from now onwards with bated breath and in whispering humbleness.

 

Now this seems a singular preoccupation: the warders and supposedly favoured Muslim prisoners in that remote jail may indeed have been oppressors but they were also poor men facing unattractive conditions. To triumph over them may seem like a strange achievement to record. It is stranger still that it has been so widely commended, for this is legend even for many on the Left. Savarkar had written a history of 1857 where he had spoken favourably of jihad against the British, and Hindu-Muslim unity against a common oppressor. That very Government still ran India at the time Mazhi janmathep was published in 1927. Thereafter, as leader of the Abhinav Bharat Society he had led a terrorist conspiracy. Earlier he had a grand world-view, visualising Indian independence in the context of anarchist struggles and of the Risorgimento. Now all this is reduced to tyranny over a Pathan watchman at an oil-mill in Port Blair!

I think we can see the same world-view in his subsequent career, as he came to see mastery over Muslims in India as the single important political question, one that justified perpetuating British rule and postponing Independence. Indeed Savarkar was so transformed by his incarceration that he renounced entirely his earlier, moresecular nationalism where he had approvingly employed the moresecular nationalism where he had approvingly employed the term jihad to describe how Indian Muslims took up arms against the East India Company. By blending these two phases of Savarkar’s evolution, his earlier nationalism and the later culture of hatred of Muslims, the Savarkar scholar Bakhle, among others, has obscured the extent of the change that took place in Savarkar’s thinking whilst at Port Blair. She speaks of Savarkar’s arrest bythe police of an ‘independent India he had fought for all his life’. Yet he fought for independent India until he was incarcerated, but not, as the record shows, thereafter. Savarkar concerned himself now especially with what he claimed was the most ancient subordination of India, namely its invasion and subsequent rule by Muslim sovereigns. This demanded the abandoning of unmanly attributes and a return to ancient warrior virtues celebrated in the Vedas. It also demanded dealing with the threat of the Muslim presence in India as the perpetual enemy within, the outsider inside.

 Concluding, I argued that

 As it became clear that the Mahasabha, unlike the Congress and the Muslim League, would not determine future constitutional arrangements for India, it(the Sabha) came to focus on the Hindu lobby in the Congress and the Princely states to be able to gain access to weaponry and state forces, for pogroms in 1946–48 that would change demographies. But the Mahasabha and RSS also had to wait till the Raj departed, so that they would no longer be in the subservient position of collaborators. After Independence, and for decades, they concentrated on building a mass base as a sense of crisis deepened throughout the country. The Mahasabha’s successor party the BJP can now play the game of anti-politicsallying with authoritarians such as Anna Hazare who claim to be above party politics, and portraying corruption as an inevitable outcome of liberal democracy.

At the same time, in the years after Independence they have gained a great measure of respectability by participating in the common culture of national security that embraces all the major parliamentary parties, who also accept a variety of coercive acts performed on Indians. The demonisation of different communities in turn, and the insidious culture of national security, have been adopted by both the Hindu Right and the Congress, sometimes with the tacit approval of the Communist parties. Just as Congress hoodlums conducted the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the army, police and paramilitary organizations have been responsible for atrocities in Punjab and Kashmir, even as the Sanghactively supported these and the Communists simply averted their eyes. The attribution of magical powers to communities in order to demonize them is in fact closely related to the worldwide secular religion of “national security”, that demands the coercive extortion of information and massacres in the name of a collective, for both pathologies identify a threat from the outsider within. »

 

So this fascist programme already well laid out by the 1930s, has guided the political parties he inspired to ultimately develop the Indian authoritarian regime of today presided over by Narendra Modi that rejoices in its role as Trump’s agency in the subcontinent & as scourge of Islam. Was I wrong? 

So what is it that Bakhle or Karnad have to tell us that is of any use?