7/31/2019 Awards And Portraits
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Proposals for Awards & Portraits : Some Questions
By Anil Nauriya
There have been uncontradicted reports in a section of the press
that V.D. Savarkar and
Shyamaprasad Mookerjee are being considered for the award of
Bharat Ratna. The proposal ismisconceived.
It is perhaps not very widely known that Savarkar had sent two
mercy petitions to the colonial
government from the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. The petition
dated November 14, 1913,which refers also to Savarkar's earlier
petition of 1911, is reprinted in R.C. Majumdar's Penal
Settlement in Andamans'. The petition assures the British
regime: "Now no man having the
good of India and humanity at heart will blindly step on the
thorny paths which in the excited
and hopeless situation of India in 1906-1907 beguiled us from
the path of peace and progress.Therefore if the Government in their
manifold beneficence and mercy release me I for one
cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress
and loyalty to the Englishgovernment which is the foremost
condition of that progress.''
And Savarkar never broke this promise to the Imperial
government. It is this that explains
much of his subsequent politics. At the time of the Quit India
movement of 1942, Savarkar, as
president of the Hindu Mahasabha, "called on the Hindus to give
no support to the movement''(see Amba Prasad, The Indian Revolt of
1942).
No "jewel'' of the Indian nation, the later Savarkar fully
subscribed to the two-nation theory. Inhis presidential address to
the Hindu Mahasabha in December 1939, Savarkar declared: "We
Hindus are a nation by ourselves ... we Hindus are marked out as
an abiding Nation byourselves'' (see Indian Annual Register, 1939,
Vol II). In and after August 1942, thousands of
Indians -- Muslims, Hindus and others -- were in detention.
Several Indians, including Muslims
and Dalits, had even faced British bullets. After all this had
gone on for about a year, Savarkarissued another statement. He
said: "For the last 30 years we have been accustomed to theideology
of geographical unity of India and the Congress has been the
strongest advocate of
that unity but suddenly the Muslim minority, which has been
asking one concession after
another, has after the Communal Award, come forward with the
claim that it is a separate
nation. I have no quarrel with Mr Jinnah's two-nation theory.
We, Hindus, are a nation byourselves and it is a historical fact
that Hindus and Muslims are two nations'' (Indian Annual
Register, 1943, Vol II).
This politics of hate, division and communal polarisation was
acquiesced in and even
substantially continued by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. An insight
into this is available from an
incident recorded by Pyarelal in his account of January 30,
1948, the day Mahatma Gandhi was
assassinated. Pyarelal had been sent by Gandhi to Mookerjee with
a message and reported backto Gandhi on January 30. This is how
Pyarelal describes the incident: "On the previous day he
had sent me to Dr Rajendra Prasad to inquire about his health,
and with a message to DrShyama Prasad Mookerjee, who was at that
time a minister of the Central Cabinet, to bring to
his attention the activities of a Hindu Mahasabha worker who had
been delivering highly
inflammatory speeches containing incitement to assassination of
some Congress leaders. Could
not Dr Mookerjee, as the Hindu Mahasabha leader, use his
authority to put a curb on such wild
