Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In 1910, Savarkar was arrested and ordered to be extradited to India for his connections with the
revolutionary group India House.
in prison, Savarkar wrote several mercy petitions to the British, pleading for a release in return
for serving the British interests.
Savarkar endorsed the idea of India as a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) and opposed to the Quit
India struggle in 1942, calling it a "Quit India but keep your army" movement. He became a fierce
critic of the Indian National Congress and its acceptance of India's partition.
While emphasising the need for patriotic and social unity of all Hindu communities, he
described Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism as one and the same. He outlined his
vision of a "Hindu Rashtra" (Hindu Nation) as "Akhand Bharat" (United India), purportedly
stretching across the entire Indian subcontinent.
Savarkar has praised the growth of Germany during the Fascist and Nazi rule; In his 1949
book, Hindu Rashtra Darshan, Savarkar wrote "Nazism proved undeniably the savior of
Germany". Savarkar often compared Germany's German majority and Jewish minority as
analogous to India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority,though Savarkar never mentioned the
persecution of Jews in Germany. Savarkar never said that he was a proponent of murder and
genocide against minorities, and instead desired peaceful assimilation. [73] Savarkar condemned
both German Jews and the Indian Muslims for their supposed inability to assimilate. [74] In 1938,
he wrote, "if we Hindus in India grow stronger in time, these Moslem friends of the league type
will have to play the part of German Jews."
Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar had asked his followers to stop Hindu Raj becoming a reality at all costs.
Discrimination against dalits in Gujarat occurs routinely -- in housing, in education, and even in death.
When Naresh Solanki's two-and-a-half-year-old nephew died in 2001, the grieving family from Hooda village in
Palanpur block of Banaskantha district buried the child in the community burial ground. No sooner had they
reached home than they heard that a member of the Patel community from the village had exhumed the body
with a tractor. The powerful Patels had encroached on some part of the land next to the burial ground and were
offended by the burial.
If dead dalits have no dignity in a ‘Hindu rashtra’, neither do the living, and this in the state capital of Ahmedabad.
It is the common experience of dalits living here that if they approach an upper caste builder for housing, they are
either directly discouraged or tacitly denied. It is immaterial if the dalit is economically well-off.
There are around 3,255 non-grant schools in the state according to the website of the Gujarat State Secondary
and Higher Secondary Education Board. Almost all of them violate the statutory provisions of the Education Act,
1972, when it comes to hiring teachers from the scheduled communities. There are consequently only a handful
of teachers from the scheduled communities in all these schools
It needs to be emphasised here that all over Gujarat one finds thousands and thousands of boards put up at
prominent places by one of the affiliates of the Sangh Parivar saying ‘You are entering this or that locality of
Hindu Rashtra’. This is completely illegal and an open proclamation of secession from the rest of society.
At this juncture one thinks of Ambedkar’s prognosis vis-a-vis Hindu Rajya. In his book Pakistan or Partition of
India written before the partition of India, he clearly prophesises: “If Hindu Raj becomes a reality then it would be
the greatest menace to this country. Whatever Hindus may say, actually it does not make a difference that
Hinduism is a danger to Independence, Equality and Brotherhood. Thus it is an enemy of democracy. We should
make all-out efforts to stop Hindu Raj from becoming a reality.” (page 358).
Hindutva
M.S. Golwalkar, the influential second chief of the
RSS, told Amul’s Verghese Kurien that the cow protection issue was
for him a means of uniting the people. It was politics, not faith.