Savarkar and Nazi collaboration

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Savarkar and Nazi collaboration

 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written a book on the strange case of a

French-Greek lady who converted to Hinduism and later went on to work

for the neo-Nazi cause, Maximiani Portas a.k.a. Savitri Devi. The

book is generally of high scholarly quality and full of interesting

detail, but when it comes to Indian politics, the author is woefully

misinformed by his less than impartisan sources. He squarely places

himself outside the scholarly community and inside the Indian Marxist

propaganda machine by asserting the following howler: "After the

German invasion of Prague in March 1939, Indian opinion on Germany

polarized sharply into two camps: those who would be loyal to Britain

in the event of a war between Britain and Germany and those who would

not. The Hindu Mahasabha adopted a particularly strong pro-German

position, assuming a close congruence between the Aryan cult of

Nazism and Hindu nationalism." (Hitler's Priestess, New York

University Press 1998, p.66)

 

To say that, faced with the choice of being loyal to Britain in her

war with Germany, the Hindu Mahasabha took "a particularly strong pro-

German position", is the diametrical opposite of the truth. It is

quite simply a lie. I am not saying that it is Goodrick-Clarke's lie,

he may naively have copied it from partisan sources, of which there

is no dearth in Indian academe nor in the Indian Studies departments

in the West. But if he had done his research well, he could not have

failed to come across one of the central facts of World War 2 in

India: that the Hindu Mahasabha actively campaigned to recruit Hindu

young men into the British war effort. Congress activists used to

scold HMS president V.D. Savarkar as a "recruiting officer", for it

was Congress which refused to stand by the British, at least until

1944.

 

If one is inclined towards fascism, and one has the good fortune to

live at the very moment of fascism's apogee, it seems logical that

one would seize the opportunity and join hands with fascism while the

time is right. Conversely, if one has the opportunity to join hands

with fascism but refrains from doing so, this is a strong indication

that one is not that "fascist" after all. Many Hindu leaders and

thinkers were sufficiently aware of the world situation in the second

quarter of the twentieth century; what was their position vis-a-vis

the Axis powers?

 

For their own reasons, Hindu and Muslim masses were very enthusiastic

about Hitler. The Muslim League frequently compared its own plan of

Partition with the Partition which Germany imposed on Czechoslovakia

(the ethnic reunification of the Sudeten Germans with the Reich

Germans was in fact deemed logical and fair by most observers,

including Savarkar, though in contrast with the League he did not

support the imperialistic methods used by Germany). Congress leftist

Subhash Chandra Bose formed Indian battalions in the German and later

in the Japanese army. The Congress leadership was utterly confused

and took just about every possible position in succession or even at

the same time.

 

In these conditions, the foremost Hindu leader of the time,

Swatantryaveer Savarkar, refused to support the Axis and advocated a

massive enlistment of Hindus in the British army. The point is proven

even by the very nadir of the Hindu Mahasabha's history, viz. the

murder of Mahatma Gandhi by its activist Nathuram Godse: of the seven

conspirators, three had served in the British-Indian Army during the

war. Savarkar calculated that massive Hindu enlistment in the war

effort would provide a winning combination in the war. And indeed, in

the successful retreat from Dunkirk and in the British victories in

North Africa and Iraq, Indian troops played a decisive role. It would

earn the Hindus the gratitude of the British, or at least their

respect. And if not that, it would instill the beginnings of fear in

the minds of the British rulers: it would offer military training and

experience to the Hindus, on a scale where the British could not hope

to contain an eventual rebellion in the ranks. After the war, even

without having to organize an army of their own, they would find

themselves in a position where the British could not refuse them

their independence.

 

It is in this context that in 1940, Savarkar launched his

slogan: "Hinduize all politics, militarize Hindudom." This slogan is

nowadays often quoted out of context to impute to Savarkar a fascist-

like fas-cination with "war for war's sake". But it meant nothing of

the kind. He wanted Hindus to get military experience for a specific

purpose, viz. that after the war, England would find a vast number of

combat-ready Indian troops before her. More than a preparation for

war, this combat-readiness was the right preparation for a peaceful

showdown, in which the British would be made to understand that

fighting was useless, that the Indian march to independence had

become unstoppable.

 

This much has to be said in favour of Savarkar's strategy: it worked.

It is a matter of solid history that the new military equation of

1945 was one of the decisive considerations in Britain's decision to

decolonize India. With the military experience and capability now

possessed by vast numbers of Indians, a British reassertion of

colonial authority would have required an immeasurable investment of

troops and money of which a war-weary Britain was no longer capable.

 

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Savarkar's collaboration with

the British against the Axis was opportunistic. He was not in favour

of any foreign power, be it Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Japan

or Germany. He simply chose the course of action that seemed the most

useful for the Hindu nation. But the point is: he could have opted

for collaboration with the Axis, he could have calculated that a

Hindu-Japanese combine would be unbeatable, he could even have given

his ideological support to the Axis, but he did not. The foremost

Hindutva ideologue, president of what was then the foremost political

Hindu organization, supported the Allied war effort against the Axis.

 

It must also be noted that Savarkar never went as far in his

cooperation with the British as the Communists who supported the

British (after they became a Soviet ally in 1941) by betraying

Congress "Quit India" activists to them. While the Communists were

Soviet loyalists who saw Indian opponents to the war effort as simply

their enemies, Savarkar was an Indian patriot who differed with the

Gandhian patriots (as with Bose) regarding the means but agreed with

them on the goal, viz. India's independence, and therefore left them

to their own designs without interfering.