A GLARING OMISSION

What Arun Shourie's take on Savarkar fails to admit

- DHIRENDRA K JHA

THE QUESTION of political transfor-mation does not only beleaguer VD Savarkar, it turns out. In trying to answer this question apropos the Hindutva proponent in his recent book, The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts, Arun Shourie, a journalist and former member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, provokes a similar question about himself. His decimation of Savarkar in this meticulously researched book comes after decades of defending the Savarkarite imagination of state and power. But at no point in the book does he address his own transformation.

Shourie's silence on this vital question makes it difficult to read his book without qualms. The question is necessary to flag, as Savarkar's Hindutva is now the unofficial ideology of the Indian government and Shourie himself served its forces for decades as one of their leaders. Therefore, an explanation of what caused his disillusionment—if this is, in fact, the case—was essential to the book. Unlike standard biographies, The New Icon does not begin at the beginning and end at the end, instead taking episodic leaps back and forth across thematic concerns. The logical lines that Shourie pursues largely lead him to well-founded conclusions, although there are certain slips.

Perhaps the strongest part of the book, in terms of detail and sourcing, is the section that deals with a transformed Savarkar, after he became a British collaborator following his release from jail. Prior to that, while studying law in London, Savarkar had been fiercely anti-British. In 1911, he was arrested in a murder case, tried in India, handed a double life sentence and incarcerated in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He secured his release, in 1924, after writing a series of mercy petitions to the colonial authorities, making abject appeals and pledging loyalty, obedience and good behaviour in return for clemency. Months before his release from prison, he penned a slim book,