Read Your Savarkar Right

But the harder they try to sanitise Savarkar’s past, the more facts seem to escape the mythology surrounding him. For example, the startling but little-known detail of Savarkar’s first conviction in 1908, in which he was imprisoned for four months for the attempted rape of a British woman named Margaret Lawrence. Savarkar even confessed to the crime, it has been pointed out on Marathi social media.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, in his SAVARKAR SANS PROPAGANDA Read Your Savarkar Right Marathi social media is awash with references to Savarkar calling himself ‘Veer’, consuming beef, getting convicted for attempted rape and mocking ‘cow worship’ as intellectual bankruptcy book Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, Savarkar advocated rape of ‘enemy women’ (a reference, in its context, to Muslim women). In the same book, he also labelled Chhatrapati Shivaji a fool for honourably returning to her family the captured daughter-in-law of the Adilshahi governor of Kalyan, without violating her.

After he was sentenced to two 50-year jail terms in 1910, more skeletons tumbled out. Savarkar apparently did not join other political prisoners in protesting ‘the third degree’ or inhuman conditions in jails, nor did he join other prisoners in the indefinite fasts. According to some accounts, he was spared hard labour and was allowed to work as an assistant to prison officials and in the library

He wrote as many as five letters of apology seeking clemency and assuring the British empire of his loyalty. He promised to serve the interests of the British after his release from prison and when Subhash Chandra Bose was leading the Indian National Army against the British, Savarkar was busy helping the British recruit Indians into the British army to defeat ‘the enemies of the British’, meaning those fighting for the liberation of India.