Do dynasties have credibility to question Savarkar’s patriotic valour?

Defiant Rahul says his fight will continue,” writes a leading English daily in its front page headline two days after a Surat court found Rahul Gandhi’s GE-2019 election rally remark in Karnataka against the Modi’ surname defamatory and got him convicted. This was followed by the Lok Sabha Secretariat’s disqualification of him from his Parliament membership as per the law of the land, which had been applied in several cases before and validated by the Supreme Court in related cases in the past.

Rahul Gandhi also ruled out the possibility of an apology, saying, “My name isn’t Savarkar. My name is Gandhi. I won’t apologize.”

Here, it is necessary to mention what The Hindustan Times wrote on May 10, 2020, under the headline, “Rahul Gandhi’s unconditional apology to the SC in the Rafale contempt case, requests the top court to drop proceedings.” The above reminder clears up the assumption that the Grand Old Party’s first family scion is habituated to making defamatory remarks (for vested interests) and, when caught, apologizes. Why did Rahul apologize in this case? Is it to save himself from punishment? In the present case, too, his apology may not be ruled out.

But who does not know Veer Savarkar was imprisoned for his unparallel valiant fight for the nation’s freedom and that the government preferred to apologize to free him from 14-year-long inhuman solitary confinement in the dreaded Cellular Jail in Andaman (infamously called Kalapani) in a room smaller than a bathroom for nationalist work rather than soiling his life in jail? After Savarkar’s release, top leaders of several national parties, including the now Gandhi family-owned Congress Party, invited him to join their parties, and many top leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi and the founder of the so-called secular vanguard Communist Party of India, M. Roy, felicitated him. If Rahul Gandhi has not read the reverences Veer Savarkar received from the above-listed icons, he is advised to read at least what his own grandma Indira Gandhi wrote about the revolutionary freedom fighter. In her letter dated May 20, 1980, Indira Gandhi wrote, “Veer Savarkar’s daring defiance of the British Government has its own importance in the annals of our freedom movement. I wish success to the plans to celebrate the birth centenary of the remarkable son of India.”

And what kind of political credibility does Rahul Gandhi have except his birth to a political family responsible for the undemocratic hijack of the newly independent country’s first PMship from Sardar Patel, for keeping the country backward in every field for several decades post-independence, dislodging the largest numbers of elected state governments, spoiling the judiciary’s image, which led to the now-in-force undemocratic collegiums system, the imposition of draconian national emergencies, engineering the dreaded Kashmir and Punjab crises, facilitating the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, allowing Union Carbide gas leak accusing Anderson to leave the country in a government helicopter, and hundreds of unprecedented scams, starting with the Nehru era’s Jeep Scam to the now exposed National Herald scam?

But the mute question is: Why does Rahul Gandhi indulge in this kind of abusive politics? And again, it is not that he is alone in indulging with liberty in this kind of activity in Indian politics. There are many such politicians in almost all political parties, many of them even holding constitutional positions. Certainly, this is not what India, the largest democracy in the world, which is celebrating Amritkaal of her independence, expects from senior politicians, and certainly not from the leader and party that respectively claim all the credits for getting the country’s independence (self-interpreted) to justify the dynasty rule.

Post-Surat court conviction, Rahul Gandhi has earned strong support from opposition parties, including mostly the regional parties; many of them are also ruling parties in some states; and one or two national parties, now reduced to occasional visibility in newspaper reports, on the street with red flags, and in some varsity campuses, which can be safely branded as ‘sign-board parties’, the verbatim invented by former Odisha Chief Minister late Biju Patnaik for Jan Sangh, the present ruling party’s early avatar. There are some common threads among these newly-found Rahul well-wishers and the Congress Party. During the early days of post-independence, all national parties survived sloganeering against the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty-headed Central Government’s so-called Western-tilted economic policies, diplomacies, dynasty politics, and corruption, while the regional parties came into existence mostly in the 1980s and 1990s fighting Nehru-Gandhi’s corruption and dynasty politics. But tragedy is: majority of these parties are now found most corrupts and dynasties owned in equal terms with Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Some of these parties’ leaders are now convicted and charged by the courts for corruption, and that too while they were in power. And all of them suffered electoral rejections because of corruption and bad governance. It is a different matter that India’s political dynamics have got them elected time and again.

Pre-GE-2014, these regional parties and ‘sign-board’ national parties, along with the BJP, were squarely responsible for the present miserable state of the Congress Party. And many of these regional parties are in a direct fight with Congress in their respective regional domains now, which they are not ready to sacrifice, although Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan tweeted, “The hasty decision to disqualify @Rahul Gandhi as a member of the Lok Sabha is yet another episode in @BJP4India’s authoritarian rampage against Indian democracy.”, Former UP CM Akhilesh Yadav tweeted, “Political challenges do not end with the hijacking of the membership of Parliament. The biggest movements are won on the street, not in Parliament,” WB CM Mamata Banarjee tweeted, “In PM Modi’s New India, opposition leaders have become the prime target of the BJP! While BJP leaders with criminal antecedents are inducted into the cabinet, opposition leaders are disqualified for their speeches.” Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal tweeted, “It is not just a fight of the Congress or Rahul Gandhi. It’s a fight of the entire opposition,” Telengana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao tweeted, “Sri Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification is an attack on democratic principles and constitutional values in India. It reflects the autocratic and egoistic personality of Sr. Narendra Modi,”, Tamilnadu MK Stalin tweeted, “This intimidating tone sends a message that even the leader of the national party does not have the right to express his opinion.” NCP leader Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule tweeted, “Totally disappointing. First PP Mohammed Faizal, Now @RahulGandhi,” and former Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray tweeted, “This is the murder of democracy. All agencies are under pressure. This is the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. The battle only needs a direction now.”

It means all the opposition parties are united to save their undemocratic dynasty politics and want the rationalization of corruption as an integral part of Indian politics, supporting Rahul Gandhi’s diatribe against Veer Savarkar, whom the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party reveres. Do Indian voters agree with this disdain when they celebrate Amrit Kaal? Should the great patriot Veer Savarkar’s valour be humiliated by the people who signed a secret MoU with the dreaded enemy of the country and defame the country’s democratic governance in the West, which balkanized the country before being kicked out of the country they looted, caused unprecedented famines, and destroyed the native culture during their two centuries of rule to keep the region ever boiling in order to retain their supremacy in the world of politics forever?