Nehru: The Quintessential Democrat

Meticulous about attending Parliament and listening silently to attacks on him, Nehru was a model of parliamentary decorum

- Mani Shankar Aiyar

THE only time Mahatma Gandhi and Savarkar met was when in 1910 they clashed at a meeting in London over the true meaning of the Bhagavad Gita. Whereas Savarkar treated the Mahabharat literally as a war in which the Hindu realised himself "in violence" (ref. Vinayak Chaturvedi, the foremost Savarkar biographer), the Mahatma took the epic metaphorically, particularly the Bhagavad Gita, as a poetic metaphor for the struggle between good and evil.

While they never met again, Gandhi steadfastly refused to answer the bile in Savarkar's repeated excoriation of Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence and Satyagraha. In the political field, after Savarkar became the President of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1938, Savarkar's repeated humiliation on the political battlefield at Gandhi ji's hands was total. India rejected Savarkar's Hindutva till his dying breath.

But the current saffron forces cannot afford to continue the vicious attacks on him as Gandhi ji remains a revered figure in the Indian consciousness. So, they turn their guns on Gandhi ji's handpicked successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, handpicked precisely because Gandhi saw in Nehru an equally impassioned champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, Gandhi ji's highest goal.

Readers are invited to please note that although Gandhi ji was a most devoted Ram bhakt, he never even mentioned the Ram Janmabhoomi or the need to "liberate" it from a 500-year-old mosque. Indeed, Gandhi went further in ordering Sikh and Hindu refugees at the height of the communal madness in AugustSeptember 1947 to immediately return to the minority community all mosques, dargahs and Muslim shrines captured by our refugees as places of dwelling. He sought religious harmony not in avenging himself on "one thousand years of slavery" but in recognising that all religious paths lead to the same goal of spiritual salvation.