Category: History

Indrajit Gupta, India’s Longest-Serving MP and First Communist Home Minister

Gupta earned the moniker ‘father of the house’, both for the length of his tenure and for his ability to broker resolutions.

This article is part of a series by The Wire titled ‘The Early Parliamentarians’, exploring the lives and work of post-independence MPs who have largely been forgotten. The series looks at the institutions they helped create, the enduring ideas they left behind and the contributions they made to nation building.

A long 37 years in parliament earned Indrajit Gupta the moniker “father of the house”. February 20 marks the 24th death anniversary of communist leader and veteran parliamentarian. He was elected to the Lok Sabha 11 times, making him independent India’s longest serving parliamentarian.

Gupta received the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award in 1992 and was the first communist home minister of India. But in many ways he was surprisingly shy – as a young man, he was in love with a woman named Suraiya but could not quite get himself to propose. He finally married Suraiya when he was 62; he had to wait 40 years until her first marriage with photographer Ahmed Ali (father of socialite Nafisa Ali) was legally dissolved.

As an opposition stalwart and the leader of the Communist Party of India, Gupta’s speeches in the Lok Sabha were marked by force, with moderation and criticism within reason, which earned him the admiration of even his political opponents.

As home minister during the United Front Government (1996-98), he was blunt about the government’s failures and raised many eyebrows among the treasury benches with his frank observations. When he was home minister and the BJP was the main opposition party, his favourite sentence when meeting the more vocal opposition members after a stormy day was, “If I were in the opposition I wouldn’t have done what you did.” His stature as the oldest member raised him to the position of pro-tem speaker in 1991, 1996, 1998 and 1999.

It is noteworthy that Gupta became the first communist to hold the powerful post of Union home minister in 1996. This was a dramatic reversal of roles, as the home ministry had banned the Communist Party thrice since independence, leading to many of its members, including Gupta, being jailed or forced underground for long periods.

According to CPI(M) veteran parliamentarian late Rupchand Pal:

“Whenever the House was in disorder of some sort, whatever the dimension of the disorder, every section of the House looked to “the Father” sitting in the corner of the front bench facing the Chair… Ultimately, the baritone voice in quality English “the Father” spoke out. And the House found a solution. The House was again in order, following a brief discussion in the Hon’ble Speaker’s Chamber and, of course, in the presence of the ‘Father’. It was a long innings spanning decades for “the Father” in Parliament, starting from 1960 and continuing till his death.”

Born on March 18, 1919 to a family of distinguished civil servants, Gupta chose to serve the nation rather than opt for the civil services as a career. After his schooling in Shimla, he graduated from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, in 1937 and then left for a higher education in England where he joined the King’s College and Cambridge University. Attracted to the communist movement during his student days in Britain, he returned to India in October 1940 after obtaining a degree in economics.

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Gupta was a member of the enlightened Brahmo Samaj and related to B.C. Roy, one of West Bengal’s most charismatic chief ministers. So, on returning to India and becoming a trade union leader in Bengal’s jute mills, he had to undergo a “declassification”.

As a committed activist of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Gupta went underground for one and a half years in 1948-50 and suffered imprisonment in 1953 and 1959 and then again in 1969. But these hardships did not deter him in any way; on the contrary, he remained devoted to the party, involving himself with the grassroots workers and the trade union movement. In the years that followed, he represented and articulated the voice of the Communist Party in the parliament.

According to his old buddy and former chief minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu:

“Indrajit Gupta was a few years younger than me. I met him in England after 1936 when he was a student in Cambridge. Those were stirring times with reaction and fascism on the march. The political ferment attracted particularly the student community, including the Indians in a big way. We organised the Indian Student’s Federation and Majlis’s in London, Cambridge and Oxford and participated in political debates and propagated the cause of freedom for India and helped Shri Krishna Menon’s India League in its propaganda work. Some of us, including Indrajit Gupta and myself, joined the Communist Party as whole-timers in 1940. I remember how to avoid arrest we stayed together in the underground dens for quite some time. After the split in the party Indrajit remained in the CPI and I joined the CPI(M). Both of us were working in the Trade Union Movement. Like a true communist he engaged himself in parliamentary and extra parliamentary activities. Even when the party split, we did not put up a candidate against him and helped him to win.”

In 1964, when the party split over the China issue, Gupta was among the 35 members of the National Council who swore allegiance to the parent organisation led by S.A. Dange. In fact, he drafted the main resolution of the Dange loyalists. He hated Dange’s pro-Congress policy, especially after the Emergency, but never challenged it outside the party forum.

Gupta was elected to the Lok Sabha in a by-election from West Bengal in 1960 and remained a member until his death except for the period 1977-1979. The CPI was defeated in the 1977 general election for supporting Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule.

In 1968, Gupta was elected the secretary of the National Council of the CPI. He was then elected deputy general secretary of the party in 1988. Finally, he was made general secretary of the CPI in 1990. He held the office for six years until 1996.

An active trade unionist, he had earlier been general secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress. He was vice-president of the World Federation of Trade Unions and was elected its president in 1998. Though born in a well-to-do family, with a number of family members having served as civil servants both before and after freedom, Gupta found himself drawn towards fighting for the downtrodden and exploited masses. He chose to identify himself with the working class.

The issues that affected the lives of ordinary citizens always found an echo in Gupta’s speeches, both in parliament and outside. He spoke passionately for workers’ rights, minimum wages, trade union rights, etc. He repeatedly brought up the plight of jute mill workers, tobacco plantation workers and agricultural labourers in the Lok Sabha. The rise in prices of essential commodities too was a recurring theme for him. The drought situation, food scarcity, ineffectiveness of the public distribution system, the crisis in the educational system, infrastructural inadequacy in the health sector, the difficulties faced by paramilitary forces, etc. were subjects close to his heart.

Gupta was a vocal champion of the cause of gender equality and was at the forefront to demand action to have specific and concrete schemes and legislative and administrative measures for the empowerment of women. He spoke with passion and sensitivity when issues concerning women came up before parliament. When the Lok Sabha was considering a resolution on measures to put an end to economic and social injustice to women, he advocated the reservation of 15% seats for women in Parliament, as far back as in 1975. At the same time, he had also consistently called for a struggle against the centuries’ old irrational prejudices which belonged to an obsolete, feudal society and stressed on a campaign for removing adult illiteracy among women, mainly in the rural areas. In his 37 years as a Lok Sabha member, he stood for principles and deep commitment to values.

Gupta had to his credit two publications, ‘Capital and Labour in the Jute Industry’ and ‘For self-reliance in national defence’. His grassroots experience, incisive intellect and brilliant oratory skills helped him reach out to all sections of people, who found him accessible despite his high standing in public life. In fact, even as the Union home minister, he preferred to live in his two-room flat in the Western Court in New Delhi rather than shift to a spacious bungalow that was his legitimate due.

Gupta died of cancer in Kolkata on February 20, 2001 at the age of 82. Even after his death, leaders from across party lines paid tribute and remembered him fondly.

On his death, then President K.R. Narayanan paid homage to this outstanding parliamentarian by saying:

“A brilliant and veteran parliamentarian and a true leader of the people, Shri Indrajit Gupta remained at the vanguard of the Communist movement in our country and fought for the rights and freedoms of the people, especially the underprivileged, till the very end of his life. He enriched parliamentary proceedings and debates with his passionate espousal of public cause, his eloquent oratory and subtle and penetrating wit. In his long and eventful public life, marked by disarming Gandhian simplicity, democratic outlook and deep commitment to values, uncompromising integrity and honesty, Shri Gupta earned the affection and respect of all people who came into contact with him, cutting across the political parties and ideologies.”

According to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Gupta was a “towering personality” whose “life was like an open book”.

On December 5, 2006, a statue of Gupta was unveiled in the Parliament House by then Vice-President of India Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

Qurban Ali is a trilingual journalist who has covered some of modern India’s major political, social and economic developments. He has a keen interest in India’s freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the socialist movement in the country.

Ukraine Not Invited to Its Own Peace Talks, History Full of Such Events

This is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders without the input of the people who live there.

Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.

A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.

But this is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders or spheres of influence without the input of the people who live there.

Such high-handed power politics rarely ends well for those affected, as these seven historical examples show.

1. The Scramble for Africa

In the winter of 1884–85, German leader Otto von Bismarck invited the powers of Europe to Berlin for a conference to formalise the division of the entire African continent among them. Not a single African was present at the conference that would come to be known as “The Scramble for Africa”.

Among other things, the conference led to the creation of the Congo Free State under Belgian control, the site of colonial atrocities that killed millions.

Germany also established the colony of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where the first genocide of the 20th century was later perpetrated against its colonised peoples.

How the boundaries of Africa changed after the Berlin conference.Wikimedia Commons/Somebody500

How the boundaries of Africa changed after the Berlin conference. Wikimedia Commons/Somebody500

2. The Tripartite Convention

It wasn’t just Africa that was divided up this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced an agreement on the Samoans to split their islands between the two powers.

This was despite the Samoans expressing a desire for either self-rule or a confederation of Pacific states with Hawai’i.

As “compensation” for missing out in Samoa, Britain received uncontested primacy over Tonga.

German Samoa came under the rule of New Zealand after the first world war and remained a territory until 1962. American Samoa (in addition to several other Pacific islands) remain US territories to this day.

3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement

As the first world war was well under way, British and French representatives sat down to agree how they’d divide up the Ottoman Empire after it was over. As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.

Together, England’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot redrew the Middle East’s borders in line with their nations’ interests.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement ran counter to commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from Turkish rule.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement also ran counter to promises Britain made in the Balfour Declaration to back Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.

The agreement became the wellspring of decades of conflict and colonial misrule in the Middle East, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.

Map showing the areas of control and influence in the Middle East agreed upon between the British and French. The National Archives (UK)/Wikimedia Commons

4. The Munich Agreement

In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the Munich Agreement.

The leaders sought to prevent the spread of war throughout Europe after Hitler’s Nazis had fomented an uprising and began attacking the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did this under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting.

The meeting is still seen by many as the “Munich Betrayal” – a classic example of a failed appeasement of a belligerent power in the false hope of staving off war.

5. The Évian Conference

In 1938, 32 countries met in Évian-les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.

Before the conference started, Britain and the US had agreed not to put pressure on one another to lift the quota of Jews they would accept in either the US or British Palestine.

While Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representatives of the Jewish people were permitted to take part in the negotiations.

The attendees largely failed to come to an agreement on accepting Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were unable to leave before Nazism reached its genocidal nadir in the Holocaust.

6. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear his major stumbling block was the Soviet Union. His answer was to sign a disingenuous non-aggression treaty with the USSR.

The treaty, named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), ensured the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also carved up Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland and take its own share of Polish territory.

Unsurprisingly, some in Eastern Europe view the current US-Russia talks over Ukraine’s future as a revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided the smaller nations of Europe between large powers in the second world war.

7. The Yalta Conference

With the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. This meeting came to be known as the Yalta Conference.

Alongside the Potsdam Conference several months later, Yalta created the political architecture that would lead to the Cold War division of Europe.

At Yalta, the “big three” decided on the division of Germany, while Stalin was also offered a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.

This took the form of a series of politically controlled buffer states in Eastern Europe, a model some believe Putin is aiming to emulate today in eastern and southeastern Europe.The Conversation

Matt Fitzpatrick, Professor in International History, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Acharya Narendra Deva Fought to Make Socialism Integral to the Freedom Struggle

On his 69th death anniversary, remembering Acharya Narendra Deva’s contribution to India’s socialist movement and freedom struggle, his literary work on Buddhism, and more.

This article is part of a series by The Wire titled ‘The Early Parliamentarians’, exploring the lives and work of post-independence MPs who have largely been forgotten. The series looks at the institutions they helped create, the enduring ideas they left behind and the contributions they made to nation building.

February 19 marks the 69th death anniversary of great socialist leader, Acharya Narendra Deva. The day after his death in 1956, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in the Rajya Sabha:

“The death of Acharya Narendra Deva is something much bigger for many of us and, I think, for the country than just the passing away of an important person. He was a man of rare distinction – distinction in many fields, rare in spirit, rare in mind and intellect, rare in integrity of mind and otherwise. Only his body failed him. I do not know if there is any person present here in this House who was associated with him for a longer period than I was. Over 40 years ago we came together and we shared innumerable experiences together in the dust and heat of the struggle for independence and in the long silence of prison life where we spent. …There is the public sense of loss and there is the private sense of loss and a feeling that somebody of rare distinction has gone and it will be very difficult to find his likes again.”

Early life

A doyen of the Indian socialist movement, a scholar and teacher, an educationist and an ardent nationalist, Marxist and freedom fighter, Deva was born on October 31, 1889, at Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to a middle-class Hindu Khatri family from Sialkot in Punjab (now in Pakistan) but living in Faizabad.

After an early education in Sanskrit, Deva joined Muir Central College, Allahabad, in 1906. While there, he read Prince Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Mutual Aid, A.K. Coomaraswamy’s Essays in National Idealism, stories by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli’s The Theory of the State, and Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini in six volumes. He also read a lot of nihilist literature from Russia.

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After graduating, he went on to Queens College Banaras for a masters in Sanskrit under Dr Arthur Venis and Professor Harry Norman, both of whom left a deep impression on his mind.

He also studied Pali, Prakrit, German and French. He had an MA degree by 1913 and an LLB by 1915.

Deva was being slowly drawn into the politics of Lal-Bal-Pal. As a result, he took a vow of swadeshi. During the non-cooperation movement in 1920-21, he quit he practice of law and joined the Kashi Vidyapeeth. In 1926 he was appointed the principal, and it was from this time that ‘Acharya’ became a permanent prefix to his name.

Deva had followed the Russian Revolution and subsequent events with great interest, but it was only after he came to the Kashi Vidyapeeth that he took up the study of scientific socialism or Marxism, as it was called, in all seriousness. Another subject in which he was deeply interested was Buddhist Philosophy and he continued to study and teach it whenever he got the opportunity. From 1921 onwards until he left the Congress party in 1948, he was a member of the UPCC and also the AICC.

Imagining a socialist future

A group within the Congress comprising Nehru, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Zakir Husain and others was unhappy with the traditional Congress line. They formed the Independence for India League to press the Congress to adopt independence as its goal. The League established its branches in various provinces. Deva did not seem hopeful about the League’s future. In spite of the shortcomings he pointed out, the League was effective. Its opposition to Dominion Status made some dent in the Congress policy.

The Congress in Calcutta in December 1928 passed a resolution that if within a year the British government did not grant Dominion Status, it would pass a resolution demanding complete independence at its next session. This it did in Lahore in 1929. It also passed a resolution launching a struggle to achieve complete independence. India was in revolt. Deva played a leading role in organising the people for the coming struggle. He moved from place to place, explaining the meaning of ‘complete independence’ and propagating the use of the spinning wheel as a symbol of swadeshi.

After the Second Session of the Indian Round Table Conference held in September 1931 failed to find a solution and M.K. Gandhi returned empty-handed, no-rent campaigns had begun in the UP. Deva joined the campaign. He was arrested on October 16, 1932 and sent to Banaras District Jail, from where he was released in June 1933.

In 1926, Deva drew up a socialist agrarian programme with Sampurnanada under the aegis of the UP Congress Committee (UPCC) and sent it to the All India Congress Committee (AICC). Nehru got the AICC to accept this programme in 1929. At the1931, the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress set ‘socialist pattern of development’ as the goal for India. Nehru, who drafted the Karachi resolution, writes in his autobiography that its origins were in the UPCC resolution of 1929.

Deva was one of the leading theorists and founder of the Congress Socialist Party in India in 1934, the party of which Jayaprakash Narayan was the first general secretary. Deva remained one of the party’s top leaders for as long as he lived. His democratic socialism renounced violent means as a matter of principle and embraced satyagraha as a revolutionary tactic.

Delivering the first presidential address at the foundation conference of the CSP on May 17, 1934 in Patna, Deva said: 

“Socialism has come to stay in this country and is daily gaining strength and prestige inside the Congress as well as in the country. The social foundation of this new school of thought which has appeared within the Congress is the democratic intelligentsia.  Outside the Congress among its adherents are representatives of workers and to a much smaller extent peasants who constitute the real revolutionary elements of an anti-imperialist struggle. As a matter of fact the working class is the vanguard while the peasants and the intelligentsia are only its auxiliaries.”

Deva fondly remembered Nehru, who was in jail at the time, and said Nehru had inspired them to found the CSP within the Congress party:

“Friends, we are founding today the first cells of the socialist movement within the Congress in the absence of our great leader, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, our task has become extremely difficult. We do not know how long we shall remain deprived of his valuable advice, guidance and leadership. I am sure he will hail with delight the birth of this new party within the Congress and that he will be watching our progress with keen interest from behind the prison bars. Let his great example stimulate and inspire us during the period of his incarceration and let us march forward with the assurance that the cause we represent will triumph in the end.”

From the beginning of his public life, Deva had taken a keen interest in the problems of the kisans (peasants). On April 11, 1936, representatives of kisan organisations met in Lucknow. Thus was founded the All India Kisan Sabha.

Deva was a Marxist, but he did not believe that only the workers could be the vanguard of a revolution. In a country like India, he believed that the peasants could also play a revolutionary role. Mao Tse-tung also held similar views.

In 1936, Nehru invited Deva to be member of the Congress Working Committee and he continued there up to 1938. Deva was also elected the president of the UPCC the same year, a position he continued to hold till January 1938. In 1937, he was elected to the UP Legislative Assembly but, despite great pressure, refused to join the cabinet as the CSP was not in favour of such participation.

Deva was an eloquent speaker and spoke against communalism which had plagued Indian politics and finally led to the partition of the country. He favoured not only the protection of minorities but also wanted the majority community to make them feel justly – and generously – treated.

Also read: How the Princely State of Aundh and its Raja Took Surya Namaskar to the World

During the AICC meeting in Bombay on August 7-8, 1942, when Gandhi moved the ‘Quit India’ resolution and gave the slogan of “Do or Die”, Deva also spoke. Gandhi and the members of the CWC were arrested in the wee hours of August 9, 1942. Gandhi and his entourage were kept in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona, and CWC members in the Ahmednagar Fort. Deva was in detention at Ahmednagar till 1945, along with Nehru, Maulana Azad and others.

During his detention, Deva devoted himself to literary work. He translated Abhidharmakosa, an important work on Sarvastivada, which he had begun in the Banaras District Jail in 1932-33, from Poussin’s French version into Hindi. This was his magnum opus, published after his death is his monumental work on Buddhist religion and philosophy in Hindi entitled Bauddha Dharma-Darshan, running into 616 pages. He also helped Nehru with his book The Discovery of India.

Breaking from the Congress

In 1948, after independence, the Socialist Party decided to secede from the Congress. Deva and 11 other members of his party resigned from their seats in the UP assembly, to which they had been elected on Congress tickets, arguing that they no longer had a moral right over these seats.

While resigning on March 30, 1948, Deva made a memorable speech in the UP assembly. He said:

“Separation is always painful and sad. Our separation from the Congress has been no less painful to us. But in the lives of institutions and individuals there are moments when they have to give up their dearest possessions for the sake of those ideals and objectives which they cherish. We are leaving today our ancestral house with a sad and a heavy heart, but we are not relinquishing our claim to our inheritance. It is not material goods to which we advance our claim. This treasure consists of ideals and noble objectives…. We have no false pride in us; we know our limitations and we are conscious of our shortcomings. All that we want to say is that we shall try to prove ourselves worthy of our heritage…. We shall always try to avoid personal attacks and will not enter into any such controversy. We shall always be guided by Mahatma Ji’s teachings.”

Thus ended his more than three-decade relationship with the Congress. Deva and 11 others who had resigned from the assembly contested the by-elections caused by their resignations. The elections were held in June-July 1948. The Congress was determined, from the beginning of the election campaign, to somehow to defeat the socialists.

Much against his will, the Congress had put up Baba Raghavdas, a prominent Congressman from Gorakhpur, to oppose Deva. It was believed at the time that Raghavdas’s religious affiliations, no his political standing, led to his nomination from Ayodhya. Deva was depicted as an atheist and anti-religion. It was alleged that leaflets entitled ‘Rama-Ravana Samvad’ were distributed among the voters and there were also posters to the effect that to defeat ‘Ravana-roopee’ Deva, the people should vote for ‘Rama-Roopee’ Raghavdas.

Deva kept his cool at the time, but years later reacted to the Congress’s actions:

“Was it not said against me in the 1948 by-election that I was an atheist and that on this ground the elector should not vote for me? Was it not highly improper to do so, especially when it was claimed that ours was a secular state? I derive malicious pleasure from the fact that the gentleman who said this has the misfortune to adorn in his old age the durbar of a non-believer, of one who is neither pious in the religious sense of the word nor God-fearing. Was it not said that both Sanskrit language and Indian culture stood in grave peril if I was returned by the electorate? Was it not said, again, that I had betrayed the Congress by leaving it at a critical juncture in its life’s history? Was this the speech of a democrat or of a demagogue of the worst type? Was not Gandhijis spirit invoked and Ramchandra’s help solicited to secure my defeat? Did not a prominent Congress worker make women voters take oath in a temple to vote against me? Did not a prominent Congress leader take the cards from many of my women voters and send them away by falsely telling them that they would be placed in the ballot box?”

Deva lost the election by a margin of 1,312 votes. Raghavdas got 5,392 votes and Deva polled 4,080.

In April 1952, Deva was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. He was re-elected in April 1954 for a six-year term. His desire to shape centres of higher learning, and pressure from friends and authorities, finally made him accept the vice-chancellorship of Lucknow University in October 1947.

A nationalist Marxist

Deva was a staunch Marxist, but his Marxism was not a set of rigid formulations. It was to him a method of analysing and studying social phenomena which can yield widely differing conclusions depending on the environment.

To him Marx was a great democrat and a great humanist, and the way his teachings were being distorted and misapplied by his communist followers was a matter of great sorrow and disappointment.

Also read: Upholding the Idea of India: Remembering M.A. Ayyangar

Deva’s specific contributions to the socialist movement in India can be summed as follows. In the first place, he helped to make it an integral part of the national struggle for freedom. Second, he realised from the very beginning that no socialist movement could succeed in India without the active participation of the peasantry, and in all policy statements and programmes formulated by him land reforms were given their due importance. Third, he never tired of emphasising that socialism was not merely an economic issue but a great cultural movement.

Deva advocated the abolition of poverty and exploitation not just through his belief in the Marxist materialist dialectic, but especially on moral and humanistic grounds. Furthermore, he insisted that “without political democracy social democracy was a sham”.

He represented a rare synthesis of certain qualities which would ordinarily appear to be incompatible. He was an ardent believer in a national identity and integration despite being a Marxist.  He was deeply interested in ancient Indian history and culture. On the question of language, he said “those who desired to speak in Hindustani should be permitted to do so”. In fact, he himself spoke in elegant Hindustani in the UP assembly.

Deva passed away at Perundurai, Erode in Tamil Nadu on February 19, 1956.

Qurban Ali is a trilingual journalist who has covered some of modern India’s major political, social and economic developments. He has a keen interest in India’s freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the socialist movement in the country.

How Valentine’s Day Was Transformed by the Industrial Revolution

When we think of Valentine’s Day, industrial processes do not come to mind. Yet they were essential to the holiday’s history.

When we think of Valentine’s Day, chubby Cupids, hearts and roses generally come to mind, not industrial processes like mass production and the division of labor. Yet the latter were essential to the holiday’s history.

As a historian researching material culture and emotions, I’m aware of the important role the exchange of manufactured greeting cards played in the 19th-century version of Valentine’s Day.

At the beginning of that century, Britons produced most of their valentines by hand. By the 1850s, however, manufactured cards had replaced those previously made by individuals at home. By the 1860s, more than 1 million cards were in circulation in London alone.

The British journalist and playwright Andrew Halliday was fascinated by these cards, especially one popular card that featured a lady and gentleman walking arm-in-arm up a pathway toward a church.

Halliday recalled watching in fascination as “the windows of small booksellers and stationers” filled with “highly-coloured” valentines, and contemplating “how and where” they “originated.” “Who draws the pictures?” he wondered. “Who writes the poetry?”

In 1864 he decided to find out.

Manufactured intimacy

Today Halliday is most often remembered for his writing on London beggars in a groundbreaking 1864 social survey, “London Labour and the London Poor.” However, throughout the 1860s he was a regular contributor to Charles Dickens’ popular journal “All the Year Round,” in which he entertained readers with essays addressing various facets of ordinary British daily existence, including family relations, travel, public services and popular entertainments.

In one essay for that journal – “Cupid’s Manufactory,” which was later reprinted in 1866 in the collection “Everyday Papers” – Halliday led his readers on a guided tour of one of London’s foremost card manufacturers.

Inside the premises of “Cupid and Co.,” they followed a “valentine step by step” from a “plain sheet of paper” to “that neat white box in which it is packed, with others of its kind, to be sent out to the trade.”

Touring ‘Cupid’s Manufactory’

“Cupid and Co.” was most likely the firm of Joseph Mansell, a lace-paper and stationary company that manufactured large numbers of valentines between the 1840s and 1860s – and also just happened to occupy the same address as “Mr. Cupid’s” in London’s Red Lion Square.

The processes Halliday described, however, were common to many British card manufacturers in the 1860s, and exemplified many industrial practices first introduced during the late 18th century, including the subdivision of tasks and the employment of women and child laborers.

Halliday moved through the rooms of “Cupid’s Manufactory,” describing the variety of processes by which various styles of cards were made for a range of different people and price points.

He noted how the card with the lady and gentleman on the path to the church began as a simple stamped card, in black and white – identical to one preserved today in the collections of the London Museum – priced at one penny.

A portion of these cards, however, then went on to a room where a group of young women were arranged along a bench, each with a different color of “liquid water-colour at her elbow.” Using stencils, one painted the “pale brown” pathway, then handed it to the woman next to her, who painted the “gentleman’s blue coat,” who then handed it to the next, who painted the “salmon-coloured church,” and so forth. It was much like a similar group of female workers depicted making valentines in the “Illustrated London News” in the 1870s.

These colored cards, Halliday noted, would be sold for “sixpence to half-a-crown.” A portion of these, however, were then sent on to another room, where another group of young women glued on feathers, lace-paper, bits of silk or velvet, or even gold leaf, creating even more ornate cards sometimes sold for 5 shillings and above.

All told, Halliday witnessed “about sixty hands” – mostly young women, but also “men and boys,” who worked 10 hours a day in every season of the year, making cards for Valentine’s Day.

Yet, it was on the top floor of the business that Halliday encountered the people who arguably fascinated him the most: the six artists who designed all the cards, and the poets who provided their text – most of whom actually worked offsite.

Here were the men responsible for manufacturing the actual sentiments the cards conveyed – and in the mid-19th century these encompassed a far wider range of emotions than the cards produced by Hallmark and others in the 21st century.

A spectrum of ‘manufactured emotions’

Many Victorians mailed cards not only to those with whom they were in love, but also to those they disliked or wished to mock or abuse. A whole subgenre of cards existed to belittle the members of certain trades, like tailors or draper’s assistants, or people who dressed out of fashion.

A Valentine's Day card with a man kneeling in front of a woman seated on an armchair, hugging her, within a lace-paper frame.

A Valentine’s Day card produced sometime between 1860 and 1880. © The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

Cards were specifically designed for discouraging suitors and for poking fun of the old or the unattractive. While some of these cards likely were exchanged as jokes between friends, the consensus among scholars is that many were absolutely intended to be sent as cruel insults.

Furthermore, unlike in the present day, in the 19th century those who received a Valentine were expected to send one in return, which meant there were also cards to discourage future attentions, recommend patience, express thanks, proclaim mutual admiration, or affirm love’s effusions.

Halliday noted the poet employed by “Cupid’s” had recently finished the text for a mean-spirited comic valentine featuring a gentleman admiring himself in a mirror:

Looking at thyself within the glass,
You appear lost in admiration;
You deceive yourself, and think, alas!
You are a wonder of creation.

This same author, however, had earlier completed the opposite kind of text for the card Halliday had previously highlighted, featuring the “lady and gentleman churchward-bound”:

“The path before me gladly would I trace,
With one who’s dearest to my constant heart,
To yonder church, the holy sacred place,
Where I my vows of Love would fain impart;
And in sweet wedlock’s bonds unite with thee,
Oh, then, how blest my life would ever be!”

These were very different texts by the very same man. And Halliday assured his readers “Cupid’s laureate” had authored many others in every imaginable style and sentiment, all year long, for “twopence a line.”

Halliday showed how a stranger was manufacturing expressions of emotions for the use of other strangers who paid money for them. In fact, he assured his readers that in the lead up to Valentine’s Day “Cupid’s” was “turning out two hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of valentines a week,” and that his business was “yearly on the increase.”

Halliday found this dynamic – the process of mass producing cards for profit to help people express their authentic emotions – both fascinating and bizarre. It was a practice he thought seemed like it ought to be “beneath the dignity of the age.”

And yet it thrived among the earnest Victorians, and it thrives still. Indeed, it remains a core feature of the modern holiday of Valentine’s Day.

This year, like in so many others, I will stand at a display of greeting cards, with many other strangers, as we all try to find that one card designed by someone else, mass-produced for profit, that will convey our sincere personal feelings for our friends and loved ones.The Conversation

Christopher Ferguson, Associate Professor of History, Auburn University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Modi Mentioned Savarkar’s ‘Courageous Escape’ in Marseille. Was It That?

Minister in the Vajpayee government Arun Shourie in his most recent book has called out this myth around Hindutva idol V.D. Savarkar.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi after landing in Marseille, France made a special mention of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He recalled what he termed Savarkar’s “courageous escape” from captivity.

He said on February 12:

“Landed in Marseille. In India’s quest for freedom, this city holds special significance. It was here that the great Veer Savarkar attempted a courageous escape. I also want to thank the people of Marseille and the French activists of that time who demanded that he not be handed over to British custody. The bravery of Veer Savarkar continues to inspire generations!”

But Arun Shourie, a senior minister in the first National Democratic Alliance government and author most recently of The New Icon: Savarkar And The Facts, which busts myths built around the founder of the Hindu Mahasabha and a once-accused in the case of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, has dismissed the story of Savarkar’s escape as pure invention.

‘No stormy seas’

He told Karan Thapar in The Interview for The Wire on January 28, 2025:

“You see, in December 1909, a magistrate in Nasik, a man called A.M.T. Jackson, was killed and the pistol with which he was killed was traced–was one of 20 that were smuggled into India and the British found that it was some Savarkar who was instrumental in smuggling them from Europe into India.

“So, Savarkar was arrested in London and was being brought back in a ship from London and it had berthed in the dock in Marseille on July 7, 1909.”

Shourie also told Thapar,

“What had happened was the ship was berthed; Savarkar one morning said ‘I need to go to the toilet’, he went there and from the porthole he jumped and then he said to have battled the stormy seas, he comes on to the shore, he runs, he’s caught by a French policeman, two policemen who were sent from Bombay to escort him back, also catch him and bring him back into the ship.”

Shourie says “the fact is that there were no stormy seas, it was a steam ship which had been berthed there for what is called coaling – putting coal into it, you don’t take coal in small boats to a ship far away.”

“It was right there and the distance was just 10 to 12 feet. And the two policemen–you see if Savarkar battled the great waves, then those two policemen would also have had to battle the great waves, nobody has even alleged that their clothes were wet, because they just ran down the gangway and joined the pursuit and caught him and brought him back on the same gangway.

“So, it was just 10 to 12 feet and this fact was actually published by the government of Bombay in 1956 in a collection of documents called ‘Documents Relating to the Freedom Movement of India’, but we don’t read, so the myth goes on and on.”

‘History is made up’

In a chapter in his book on Savarkar titled “History is Made up”, Shourie writes about what Modi has termed Savarkar’s “courageous escape”:

“The Magistrate at Nasik, A.M.T. Jackson had been shot to death in December 1909. The pistol that had been used to kill him was one of twenty that had been smuggled into India. Savarkar, then in England, was said to have been instrumental in arranging for the pistols to be smuggled.

He was arrested in England and was being taken back to India aboard the steamer, SS Morea. Two Englishmen and two Indian sepoys had been assigned to accompany him. The ship had started from Tilbury on 1 July 1910. It reached Marseilles on 7 July and was moored alongside the quay in the dock for ‘coaling’.

Around 6.15 the next morning, Savarkar had asked to be taken to the lavatory. He had jumped into the water through the porthole. He had got to the shore and started running. A French policeman saw him running and heard shouts from the ship. He thought that the man had stolen something or done some other wrong and was trying to escape.

In the meanwhile, the two Indian policemen ran down to chase him. Together, the French policeman and these two chased Savarkar, and caught him. The chase extended to about 200 yards.

Even the slightest reflection would have shown that the ship was not far out at sea.

A steamship, it had stopped for ‘coaling’ – it had stopped to replenish its stock of coal. Now, coal was not going to be carried in small boats to a ship far out at sea. The ship was berthed alongside the quay. The distance of the ship from land was ten to twelve feet.

Second, if Savarkar had battled the stormy waves, the two policemen from India would also have done so. Nobody has ever said that they did so. They ran down the gangway.

To see how they would actually have run down to the shore, we can go to YouTube again and ask to see Gandhi getting down in England for the Round Table Conferences. We see a gangway that has been extended from the ground to the ship, and Gandhiji walks down the walkway with a host of others. The two policemen would have run down a structure of this very kind. And taken Savarkar back on the same gangway.

Of course, the jump out of the porthole was a daring attempt at escape.

But swimming across the stormy ocean, battling waves..? Nor are the details difficult to access. They are in a report that was prepared at that very time by questioning the four policemen who had been deputed to escort Savarkar to India. And that account is available in a collection published not by some enemy of Hindutva in distant London but by the Government of Bombay!”

Shourie cites A History of The Freedom Movement in India, Collected from Bombay Government Records, Volume II, 1885-1920, Government Central Press, Bombay. 1958, pp. 448-50 in his footnotes as the source for this account.

Also read: Why Have Savarkar’s Mercy Petitions Attracted So Much Censure and Derision?

He writes that the myth of Savarkar’s ‘escape’ has been in large part due to a book published in 1926 by one Chitragupta, called Life of Barrister Savarkar.

“An entire chapter in The Life of Barrister Savarkar is devoted to the attempted escape from the SS Morea. And it has all the ingredients of the myth. The two Englishmen and two Indian sepoys who have been deputed to keep guard over him multiply: ten picked and armed officers and men and hundreds of European passengers guarded him. Even as he is trying to get through the porthole, the guard notices what is happening: The guard shouted, “Treachery”…

…Mr Savarkar had managed to slip half his body out of the porthole and jumped into the sea. Mr Savarkar heard a pistol shot, thought they were shooting at him and dived under the water … a number of persons including some officers of the steamer threw the drawbridge and landed on the shore. In the mean while Mr Savarkar was swimming for his very life, now diving, now riding the waves.

He reached the shore first, but to his dismay found a steep dock-wall facing him…. All this did not take a minute: just then the chase was on him… He was exhausted by the swimming and the scaling and the nervous strain of the marvellous venture. But he ran on. Not less than a mile the hunt continued..

Shourie continues in his book, 

“That they had thrown the drawbridge on to the land … that the chase had begun within a minute of Savarkar reaching the shore. Even the slightest reflection would have shown that, even by this pseudonymous Chitragupta’s account, the steamer was berthed next to the quay.

The two British officers and two Indian policemen assigned to guard over him become ten picked and armed officers and men and hundreds of European passengers guarded him.

Ten to twelve feet of water between the ship and the quay as against swimming for his very life, now diving, now riding the waves. About 200 yards as against ‘not less than a mile the hunt continued…’”

Life of Barrister Savarkar is supposedly the first biography of Savarkar in English, and very laudatory of him. A second edition was published by the Veer Savarkar Prakashan in 1987. 

The preface by the publisher, as per Arun Shourie, “suggests more than once that ‘Chitragupta was none other than Savarkar himself! That is the singular reason for attaching importance to what is said in the book. ‘Who was this “Chitragupta”, the author of “Life of Barrister Savarkar”, the editor-publisher Ravindra Vaman Ramdas asks, and answers, ‘[From] The pen-picture of Paris (it) appears that “Chitragupta” is none other than Veer Savarkar.”

Shourie has mentioned how the BJP’s first prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also wrote poems to eulogise this non-event in the controversial Hindutva leader’s life.

Savarkar’s three mercy petitions to the British, which eventually secured his conditional release from the prison at Andaman islands can be read here.

Sarojini Naidu: A Poet, Patriot and Pioneer

“No Indian could be loyal to the country and yet be narrow and sectarian in spirit,” she believed.

Today, February 13, marks the birth anniversary of Sarojini Naidu.

We record our homage and deep admiration for the womanhood of India who, in the hour of peril for the motherland forsook the shelter of their homes and, with unfailing courage and endurance, stood shoulder to shoulder with their men folk, in the frontline of India’s national army to share with them the sacrifices and triumphs of the struggle.    

– Congress resolution passed on January 26, 1931   

The history of the freedom movement is replete with the sacrifice, sagacity and courage of great men and women. This struggle which gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century threw up stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, C. Rajagopalachari, Dadabhai Naoroji, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai and many more.

But it was not a men’s movement. Many women played a proactive and prominent leadership role which became most visible when Annie Besant was elected President of Indian National Congress (INC) in 1916. However, it was the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi on the national scene and his unique method of mass mobilisation – the non-cooperation movement (1920), salt satyagraha (1930) and the Quit India Movement (1942) – that helped women discover themselves and play a leading role in the independence movement. One such woman was Sarojini Naidu, who rose through the ranks to become the president of INC in 1925 at the young age of 46. 

She was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her father, Aghorenath Chatterjee, originally from East Bengal, was a brilliant scientist as well as a poet in Urdu and Bengali. Her mother, Varda Sundari, was a renowned singer and wrote her own lyrics in Bengali. Sarojini passed the matriculation examination when she was only 12, standing first in the Madras presidency. However, her love for poetry came in the way of achieving any degree, despite being sent to London and Cambridge for higher studies. She wrote afterwards how she inherited the poetic instinct from her parents. “One day when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in Algebra; it wouldn’t come right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it down. From that day my poetic career began. At thirteen, I wrote a long poem, Lady of the Lake—1,300 lines in six days.”

Sarojini Chattopadhyaya (maiden name) married Govindarajulu Naidu in 1898 after returning from England and settled down in Hyderabad. The marriage became a landmark in social reform as inter-caste marriages were almost unknown at the time. Sarojini was deeply influenced by the Hindu-Islamic culture of her town and gave expression to it in her poems. Some of her collection of poems which took the English world by storm were The Golden Threshold, The Feather of the Dawn, Bird of Time and The Broken Wing. Few of her poems were also translated into French. Sarojini’s innate longing for the ‘rapture of song’ could not prevent her from being drawn into the social and political life of the country. 

It was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the leader of the moderates, who persuaded her to step out of her ivory tower. She met Gandhi and Nehru at the Lucknow session of the INC in 1916, and developed friendship with Rabindranath Tagore and C.F. Andrews. Earlier, at the INC session in Bombay (now Mumbai), Sarojini recited the following poem composed by her:

Awaken, O Mother! Thy children implore thee,

who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!

The night is a flush with a dream of the morrow,

why still dost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow?

Awaken and serve the woes that enthrall us,

and hallow our hands for the triumphs that call us.

Sarojini was deeply troubled by the rift between Hindu and Muslim communities. As much as Hindu culture she admired Islamic culture and Muslim way of life. At the 1916 Lucknow session of the INC, she played a notable role in bringing about cooperation between Congress and the Muslim league under the guidance of Lokmanya Tilak. Her friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Ali brothers made the Tilak’s task much easier.

She wrote that Lucknow sessions of INC and Muslim League marked a new era and inaugurated new standards in the history of modern Indian affairs. Hindu-Muslim unity became a passion in Sarojini’s life mission. Addressing the seventh All India Women’s Conference, she declared: “No Indian could be loyal to the country and yet be narrow and sectarian in spirit… No matter whether it was temple or mosque, church or fire shrine, let them transcend the barriers that divide man from the man.”

In July 1919, Sarojini went to England as a member of the deputation of the All India Home Rule League, where she pleaded for the rights of women. In 1924, Sarojini visited Kenya, South Africa and East Africa as a Congress delegate and inspired Indian settlers in these colonies to fight for their rights non-violently.

In 1925, she was elected president of INC, inspiring women to join public life. She was the second woman president of INC after Annie Besant, but the first one of Indian origin. In her presidential address, Sarojini declared, “No sacrifice is too heavy, no struggle too great, no martyrdom too terrible, that enables us to redeem our Mother from the unspeakable dishonour of her bondage….in the battle for liberty, fear is the one unforgivable treachery and despair the one unforgivable sin.”

Sarojini took a leading part in the salt satyagraha of 1930 and was sent to jail. In 1931, she accompanied Gandhi to London for the Second Round Table Conference. She was imprisoned for the third time during the Quit India Movement and was put in the Aga Khan Palace along with Gandhi. After India became independent, she became the first woman to be appointed as a governor. On March 2, 1949, she breathed her last at the Lucknow Raj Bhawan. 

Mourning her death, Sardar Patel, then deputy prime minister and home minister, recalled her great contribution in the freedom struggle and said, “She represented in her person the grim determination and the heavy sacrifices of Indian womanhood. She strode the stage like a heroine and never wavered in her faith in India’s destiny and in the ultimate success of that miraculous weapon (nonviolence) which was Bapu’s gift to India.” 

Nehru, in his homage, said, “Here was a person of great brilliance – vital and vivid. Here was a person with so many gifts, but above all some gifts which made her unique. She infused artistry and poetry into our national struggle…she represented in herself a rich culture into which flowed various currents which have made Indian culture as great as it is.”  

Naidu desired that her epitaph should be: “She loved the youth of India”. Perhaps it may be more fitting to say of her that the youth of India loved her. Nevertheless, this would be an inadequate epitaph according to her biographer C.D. Narasimhaiah: “For not only the youth of India but everybody in India loved her – and was charmed by her.” 

Praveen Davar is a columnist and author of Freedom Struggle and Beyond.

Only by Purging his Nehruphobia Can Modi Grow up

The author whose book Modi recently cited in Lok Sabha to point to Nehru’s “failure” is in fact someone who offers a nuanced picture of the first prime minister.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi while replying to the discussion on motion of thanks for President’s Address to the budget session displayed another instance of his proclivity to denigrate India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He did so by telling leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi he should read a book JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War in which, he falsely claimed, author Bruce Reidel gave details of what games Nehru played in the name of foreign policy at the time of the 1962 Chinese aggression towards India. 

He described Reidel as a foreign policy scholar of the USA when he was, in fact, a former CIA official and advisor to several US presidents. Reidel also served as a senior fellow and was director of the Brookings Intelligence Project for 30 years after his retirement. Modi made a deliberate decision to disregard Reidel’s description of Nehru in the book as a great leader. Reidel lauded the deft manner in which he handled the crisis caused by China initiating the war on India and in its aftermath, by summoning support from American president J.F. Kennedy, Britain and other countries. 

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War by Bruce Reidel.

In fact the author whose book Modi cited in Lok Sabha to point to Nehru’s “failure” is in fact someone who offers a nuanced picture of the first prime minister. His account is tempered with appreciation for Nehru’s role as a leader of the non-aligned movement, of which he was one of the key founders.

In 2015, in a discussion on this book with Tom Putnam, director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Reidel acknowledged that India under Nehru faced humiliation because of the losses suffered by it on account of Chinese aggression. He quoted Kennedy who, among others, said that the US government was not strictly anti-communist, recognised that the world was not black and white, and thought India was probably at the single-most important place, and its leader Nehru, even though not a fellow traveler, was not naive and had the stature of a great leader. 

Reidel referred to a letter Nehru wrote to Kennedy in November of 1962, asking him to send 250 combat aircraft and other necessary military support to deal with Chinese incursion deep into Indian territory and a possible Pakistan design to attack India. 

Reidel wrote that Kennedy on the advice of John Kenneth Galbraith ordered an American aircraft carrier battle group to sail into the Bay of Bengal as a sign of American support for India. He also tripled the size of the air flow and hundreds of tons of equipment were flown to India. 

He also revealed that in 1963, much after the Chinese side declared unilateral ceasefire and withdrew from some territories of India, the United States carried out, with the assistance of the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Royal Australian Air Force, an air exercise in India, which was exactly what Nehru had requested in that letter in November. In other words, he said, Kennedy decided to at least send a message that the USA would come to the defence of India in the event of a future Chinese invasion.

What Modi did in parliament amounted to a complete distortion of the contents of the book which Times of India noted had painted a nuanced portrait of Nehru, depicting both his visionary ideals and the strategic miscalculations that contributed to India’s unpreparedness for the 1962 war. 

Modi negated this nuanced picture of Nehru in Reidel’s book by simply misinterpreting it.

By now it is clear that Modi’s agony is multiplied if world leaders say anything positive about Nehru. In July 2024 when he was visiting Austria, he spoke yet again about the prevalence of despondency, despair and hopelessness in India till 2014 and how the situation changed for the better only after he and his party, BJP, got the mandate that year to rule the country. In his presence the Austrian Chancellor Nehammer acknowledged how Nehru played a key role in 1954 in restoring his country’s freedom and sovereignty.

Modi who in Austria ignored Nehru’s phenomenal contribution to that country is now committing the same offence in deliberately omitting a nuanced picture of Nehru in Reidel’s book. Only by purging his Nehruphobia can Modi grow up. 

S.N. Sahu served as officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan.

Why Have Savarkar’s Mercy Petitions Attracted So Much Censure and Derision?

Savarkar himself did not seem to have been comfortable with the fact that he had submitted the petitions. He certainly did not own up to them.

Excerpted with permission from The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts by Arun Shourie.

Without a shred of doubt, incarceration in the Cellular Jail in Andamans was an ordeal of the worst kind. The dungeon-like cells. The solitary confinement. The anaemic food. The cruel warders and jailor, and the extreme maltreatment by them. The beatings. The all-too-frequent caning. The daily abuse and humiliation. The punishments: the already scanty ration cut to starvation level; being placed in chains and handcuffs for six months at a time; being made to stand for two weeks at a time with iron fetters on one’s legs and around one’s feet; being locked in a cage. Like others, Savarkar was subjected to them—solitary confinement, to stand for a week with handcuffs; chain-fetters; crossbar fetters . . . ‘work’, diabolically designed to break the prisoner—pounding coir, extracting oil as the bullock does by pushing the shaft round and round the ‘oil mill’ to the point one fainted yoked to the ‘mill’ . . . Many died of exhaustion, from hunger and malnutrition, from overwork, from chronic dysentery, tuberculosis, asthma, phthisis, malaria and unbearable pain. Some went mad. Chakraborty was to recall that on the average three inmates committed suicide every month. About 400 of the prisoners were hanged or shot. Worse than even these, was the daily abuse, the sheer helplessness to which one was driven. And there was no appeal—the perpetrators were the judges. Savarkar’s health broke down. He spent almost a year and a half in the jail’s hospital. Even as he was dissuading others from committing suicide, at one point, he says, he himself thought of killing himself. That someone should do everything that he could to get out of the place is perfectly understandable.

The New Icon

Arun Shourie
The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts
Penguin Random House India, 2025

Why then have the petitions attracted so much censure and derision?

The first, of course, is the contrast with what Bhagat Singh and others said as they faced execution. Recall Ram Prasad Bismil mounting the gallows with Bismil Azimabadi’s Sarfaroshi ki tammana ab hamaare dil mein hai on his lips.

The second is the halo that has been stuck around Savarkar. When people read the petitions, they naturally wonder whether a ‘Veer’ would plead in this way.

Also read: Is Savarkar a Gujarati Writer?

Third, Savarkar himself did not seem to have been comfortable with the fact that he had submitted the petitions. He certainly did not own up to them. In the letters that he wrote to his family, and in his copious My Transportation for Life, he does mention the sort of grounds on which he has asked the Government to reduce his sentence, to transfer him back to a jail on the mainland, to give him a chance to work in constitutional ways. But in those accounts, it is as if an equal is talking to equals, almost as if a Barrister is arguing in court. There is none of the beseeching that we have encountered above. No hint that he has offered to be of service to the Government in whatever capacity they deem fit. No hint of the conditions he has told the Government he is ready to accept.

Next, there is the reaction of his own associates and admirers when they heard that he had accepted conditions for being released.

…

Then there is the image of an uncompromising, fiery, ready-for-death image that Savarkar himself had built of himself. His autobiography, his newsletters from England, his My Transportation for Life, his Samagra, the pseudonymous Life of Barrister Savarkar are all full of passages that lead one to think of him as one prepared to run any risk, to face any hardship, to stare death in its face, to die. A little volume can be filled with those passages.

Also read: Sanatan Dharma: An Ideology or the Entire Hindu Community?

Savarkar and his friends have set up the Mitra Mandal, a fledgling group that it will be said gave birth to revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations. Savarkar and his friends think much of their secret meetings. They feel that they are sowing the seeds of mass upheaval. And, therefore, are under the constant watch of the Government and its agents. Queen Victoria has died. Some of Savarkar’s friends, he says, urge that they hold a memorial meeting and pass a condolence resolution so as to allay suspicion about them and their activities. Savarkar as good as scolds them:

“Our country alone is our Emperor. We do not know any other Emperor. This is a golden opportunity to show that there is at least one institution that will proclaim this radiant truth. We should not become afraid ourselves and lose this opportunity. If this organisation is closed down for this reason, we will have to take its life to have been successful. Whenever it wants, the British Government jails even those who write with great circumspection. Then, why should we not speak the truth? Let us unfurl that resplendent emblem of independence openly. Even if we are able to do so for a moment and in the next moment we are killed by a bullet, no reason to worry. Because the cremation pyre of persons who die thus sends out sparks, and the palaces of foreign rulers are reduced to ashes in the fire that these sparks light. Those who say that those who make such attempts are hanged, well let them say what they will. We also know that much. The hanging of Chapekar gave birth to us, our hanging will give birth to others, and this lineage shall remain intact. …”

In another typical piece, we have him proclaim once again that there is no way to attain independence other than armed revolution. We have to break the weapons and power of the enemy by better weapons and greater power, he says. In no case in history, has independence been won except by triumphing in a violent, armed fight. If people are not up to this, he says, then they cannot have freedom. This is as unalterable a law as laws of nature.

…

It is from such passages—and even the ones of which the preceding are a summary, much longer and more colourful—that his image of a revolutionary was embossed on people’s minds. Naturally, when the contents of the petitions burst into view, many were nonplussed.

How the Princely State of Aundh and its Raja Took Surya Namaskar to the World

The Surya Namaskar was understood by its chief proponent, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi, to be a physical practice within a discourse emerging from an elite martial tradition of yoga as both psychophysical technique and political strategy.

Excerpt adapted from The Yoga of Power by Sunila S. Kalé and Christian Lee Novetzke, published by Columbia University Press and Penguin India.

A monumental sculpture greets those who arrive at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. Bronze figures arrayed in a spiral depict each position of the Surya Namaskar, a series of movements that is one of the signature sequences of modern yoga. This sculpture, completed in 2011 during the government led by Manmohan Singh of the Indian National Congress party, transmits to the visitor—especially the foreign one—a visual presentation of political soft power. It stands as a reminder to all who pass by that yoga traditions, and especially the Surya Namaskar, are of Indian origin, a point of pride for the Indian nation. The location of this sculpture, at the international gateway to India’s national capital, is apt because the Surya Namaskar has long existed within the worlds of politics and power…

Book cover of The Yoga of Power

Sunila S. Kalé and Christian Lee Novetzke
The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India
Cambridge University Press and Penguin India, 2025

We argue that the Surya Namaskar was understood by its chief proponent, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi (1868–1951, hereafter “the Raja”), to be a physical practice within a discourse emerging from an elite martial tradition of yoga as both psychophysical technique and political strategy, a way to claim sovereignty through the governance of the self amid the liminal freedoms afforded by indirect rule. The importance of the Surya Namaskar as a practice of sovereignty began with the actual psychophysical exercise but radiated outward and ultimately reverberated through Aundh’s political, educational, economic, social, and penal domains.

Aundh and its Raja

It is known by some but not often noted that the place that played an important role in introducing the world to the Surya Namaskar was also one where there were early models of universal suffrage, a liberal democratic constitution, an independent judiciary, and the open-concept prison. Located 150 kilometers southeast of Pune in western India, the Princely State of Aundh was made up of a scant seventy-two villages, a small territory of roughly five hundred square miles that was dispersed in twenty-four discontinuous patches across the modern districts of Satara and Sangli in Maharashtra and Vijayapura in northern Karnataka…

[The Raja] was also the architect of a series of reforms that we suggest are emblematic of yoga as political practice. These included incorporating Surya Namaskar training throughout Aundh, reforms to the educational system, administrative and judicial devolution, initiatives to achieve economic self-sufficiency, and penal reform. The pinnacle of Aundh’s political reforms was the Raja’s abdication of his royal privileges in favor of a constitutional democracy in 1938–1939, eight years ahead of India’s declaration of independence from British rule and more than a decade before India’s own democratic constitution would come into effect in 1951. He also played a leading role in social, educational, political, and cultural reform movements outside Aundh. For example, he was the first major patron of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s project to compose a critical edition of the Mahābhārata, for which he also painted illustrations and commissioned art from other artists. Although he was a Brahman by birth, he was critical of religious and caste practices that discriminated against women and nonelite castes alike and that, in his view, were responsible for social decline; he did not strictly obey the norm common for men of his community of wearing the sacred thread, either. In many senses, he can be considered an example of a “Brahmin double,” someone who, by virtue of his caste and gender position, could afford to mount criticisms of the very structures that upheld his authority. These various political, social, and ethical stances informed how he deployed his practice of the Surya Namaskar to speak to and effect his political positions…

Yoga on Film

Around 1928, the Raja created a silent film of just under eleven minutes on the practice of the Surya Namaskar. He either showed the film himself or arranged screenings of the film throughout British and Princely India as well as during his travels abroad. The film, entitled Surya Namaskar in both English and Hindi, is attributed to the Raja and has bilingual placards in English and Hindi that are interspersed with moving images of people performing the Surya Namaskar sequence. Given the great importance the Raja placed on performing and converting others to the practice of Surya Namaskars and the high cost of making a film almost a century ago, we consider each element of the film to be a deliberate choice on the part of the Raja and those close to him.

After a few introductory placards, the first images of the film show the Raja emerging from his palace in full regalia, with a turban on his head and a sword hanging at his side. In the next scenes, the Raja is shorn of all regalia, wears shorts with a bare chest, and performs several rounds of the Surya Namaskar sequence of movements. Although the Raja was a Brahmin, as were so many of the princes of the fragmented Maratha Confederacy throughout western India, he does not wear a sacred thread, nor does his son, who appears in subsequent frames. Neither wears any other marker of religion or caste, in keeping with the Raja’s broader social reform commitments. This contrasts with other photographs of the Raja from this time, in which he does wear a sacred thread, and is also a notable difference from the yoga teacher Krishnamacharya in Mysore, who first appears in a film performing yoga in 1938, with a prominent sacred thread across his chest and a vertical Hindu Vaishnava mark (ṭiḷak) on his forehead.

Stills from a film on the origins of the Surya Namaskar

Stills of the Raja from his film, Surya Namaskar, 1928.

The form of the Surya Namaskar depicted in the 1928 film is a swift, flowing movement with a pause only at the first and last positions (which are the same), with the downward dog position occurring in the middle. While the term vinyāsa is not used by the Raja, as far as we can tell, the idea of a flowing set of movements or steps is clearly evident in the way the Raja and others demonstrate the Surya Namaskar in this film. Alongside the Surya Namaskar, the Raja’s son, Apa Pant, also demonstrates the classic haṭha yoga technique of naulī, which involves manipulating the stomach and intestines through a dynamic movement of the abdominal muscles. In addition, the Raja and everyone else who performs the Surya Namaskar in the film can be seen speaking before beginning each new sequence. They are likely chanting the mantras that the Raja felt were integral to the practice and about which he writes in all his books, another key aspect of many forms of psychophysical yoga.

Stills from a film on the origins of the Surya Namaskar

Stills from the Surya Namaskar film.

The word “yoga” does not appear in English or Hindi in the film; instead, the Surya Namaskar is described as an “exercise” in English and vyāyām in Hindi. As we will see, however, the Raja makes no distinction between yoga and exercise/vyāyām in his writing in English, Marathi, or Hindi, and yoga is described as both exercise and vyāyām in these languages in India as well. Likewise, the placards for the Surya Namaskar sculpture in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi that we mention at the start of the chapter describe the Surya Namaskar in Hindi as both yoga and vyāyām. There is here perhaps an echo of the association between yoga and vyāyāma that we explore in the Arthaśāstra in chapter 2. Later in this chapter, we dwell extensively on the Raja’s choice of words to describe his practice, especially when addressing an English audience.

A gender balance appears important in the film. Following the demonstration of Surya Namaskar and naulī by the Raja’s son, the Raja’s wife, the Ranisaheb, performs the Surya Namaskar in a nine-yard sari (the men are in shorts). This way of draping a sari was common throughout western India at the time (and still is in many parts of the region) and, unlike the five-yard draping method, makes it possible for a woman to perform the Surya Namaskar properly, with legs spread apart rather than always kept together. After the Ranisaheb’s demonstration, the film shows the five princesses of Aundh performing the Surya Namaskar in synchronized sequence, following which the youngest members of the Raja’s household are shown making a brave and disorderly attempt to perform the sequence under the watchful tutelage of the Raja and later the Rani, who enters the scene to assist.

The next two scenes capture groups of schoolchildren performing Surya Namaskar. The film notes that requiring students to practice the Surya Namaskar is “one of many reforms introduced by the Chiefsahib in his State,” suggesting again that the Surya Namaskar was a component of other social and political reforms undertaken by the Raja. It appears that boys and girls practiced separately because they were likely divided by gender in schools generally; one last placard emphasizes that “school girls are taught” the Surya Namaskar as well.

The film ends with a rather chaotic family montage as the Raja tries to arrange his children and grandchildren for a family photo. This final scene emphasizes the very personal nature of the Surya Namaskar practice for the Raja and his family and its rootedness in the genealogy of his own political lineage, and the opening of this lineage to the general public.

Sunila S. Kalé is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her books include Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development (2014).

Christian Lee Novetzke is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. His books include The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Columbia, 2016).

Upholding the Idea of India: Remembering M.A. Ayyangar

If we do not remember the struggles of people like Ayyangar, we might forget that many of these victories, especially democratic freedoms guaranteed to each and every citizen, have been hard won.

On the February 4, every year, floral tributes are paid to M.A. Ayyangar at the Lok Sabha. This year marks his 134th birth anniversary, which continues to be attended in strong numbers by several parliamentarians – regardless of which party they belong to.

Ayyangar was a statesman, a vocal parliamentarian and my great grandfather.

Before India’s independence, he was a freedom fighter, along with Mahatma Gandhi and others at the forefront of the independence movement. At the helm of India’s birth as a secular, democratic republic, he spent much of his life cementing democratic institutions in a fledgling new nation.

Born in 1891 in Tiruchanur in Andhra Pradesh (in the erstwhile Madras Presidency), he went on to train as a lawyer. Pushed into political life by his mentor, his journey saw him being appointed the speaker of the Lok Sabha in 1962, and later, the governor of Bihar. He, along with several others, served on the drafting committee of the new constitution of a newly independent India.

Ayyangar stood staunchly for democratic values, independence of the judiciary and freedom of speech – all crucial safeguards that protect the country from autocratic rule. As a member of the constituent assembly, he co-wrote the preamble of the constitution which laid out its founding values – sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic.

His life truly embodied this idea of India.

Despite being a firm democrat, he accepted his elder son’s communist-socialist ideology. In their home, diverse views were welcome and accepted – and they learned to respectfully disagree with one another.

Secularism and deep respect for all diversities, whether religion, caste, language or political leanings were values by which he lived.  While studying Political Science and Law, my grandmother met and married my grandfather – a union between a Punjabi from the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of undivided India, and a Tamil Ayyangar from the Madras Presidency. This, at a time when inter-cultural marriages were still extremely rare.  My mother- his granddaughter, went on to marry a Parsi, and I am the product of this amalgamation of religions, languages and regional specificities. 

These diverse influences have woven in seamlessly together, and formed my own passion for a secular and democratic India, which has become a cornerstone of my own identity. Growing up, our families celebrated every festival, regardless of caste, creed or religion, and all were given equal respect.

Ayyangar was also a constitutionalist, strongly believing in the rule of law and the importance of the state to ensure rights of the most marginalised. He pushed for Harijan entry into temples and also led several efforts against untouchability in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, having the added mantle of being the president of Mahatma Gandhi’s Harijan Sevak Sangh. 

Also read: Why Gandhi’s 1915 Kumbh Mela Reflections Matter in 2025

One might argue as to why we need to look into the past when independent India looks so different today from the India of over seventy-five years ago? How can Ayyangar’s thoughts and actions apply to the world of post-Mandal, post-coalition politics, when the rise of sweeping majoritarianism has captured Indians at home and a cheering diaspora abroad?

The answer is simple: if we do not preserve democracy and democratic institutions – the foundations upon which our country is built will erode.

My own research led me to the dusty tomes of the Lok Sabha parliamentary debates, which uncovered battles that were fought for the betterment of the people – and a caveat comes to mind. “Progress” or “Vikaas” is not linear and there is no one pre-determined pathway to it – if we forget our history, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

If we do not remember the struggles of people like Ayyangar, we might forget that many of these victories, especially democratic freedoms guaranteed to each and every citizen, have been hard won. Many countries with independence movements like India have seen democratic freedoms backslide soon after their independence, and many former colonies have had a highly tumultuous relationship with democratic freedoms. Not many countries in South and Southeast Asia have had a relatively uninterrupted spell of successive elected governments – so it is more important than ever to ensure that institutions like the Election Commission and judiciary remain independent and that civil liberties are not stifled.

But there is another reason to remember.

As an academic myself, I have taught students across India and Germany to focus on the’ theory of knowledge’ – as an act of active citizenship. To tell fact from fiction and to discover the provenance of information is all the more important now in a world of increasing fake news, AI-generated and WhatsApp driven misinformation.

Stalwarts such as Ayyangar were known to speak out loud and clear in favour of reason over ideology. He argued for the fundamental rights of arrested and detained persons, for the independence of the Supreme Court as ‘the watchdog of democracy’ and the regulation of appointment of the judges, their salaries and tenure of office – ‘so that the executive may have little or nothing to do with their functioning’ – in his own words. People both feared and respected his voice that was clear but pointed, sharp but a voice of reason with a sense of humor.  Whether you agreed with him or not – his voice rang true as motivated by the good of the nation as a whole and its most vulnerable, and not driven by party whips or personal interests. 

Ayyangar’s intense debating and oratory skills made him as much an exemplar for a statesman as he was an ardent supporter of freedom of speech. His manners revealed a strong belief in the parliamentary tradition of peaceful debate and exchange. There was no place in his vocabulary for derogatory terms for those who disagreed with him, quite unlike today where India is currently ranked a paltry 159 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index.

Ayyangar’s struggle was precisely to think critically on the basis of logic and respect for the law. Keeping Ayyangar’s memory alive is then to remember the founding values of the idea of an India. 

The idea of an India where every citizen’s political and economic freedoms are respected and protected. Where democratic institutions are not undermined and there is freedom to dissent peacefully without repercussion.

And that indeed is an idea worth fighting for.

Feroza Sanjana is a political analyst and academic. Previously, she has been an expert advisor on South Asian politics to the European Union. She was a Visiting Professor in Political Science at Freie University Berlin and a Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University, California.