Here is a scrutiny of Arun Shourie’s scrutiny called The New Icon: Savarkar And The Facts.
If the reader agrees with Shourie, s/he has to, inevitably, agree with the following:
A. Saving Hinduism from Hindutva is what India needs the most.
B. Tit-for-tat is the wrong policy.
C. Bal Gangadhar Tilak or Subhas Chandra Bose is not worthy of the respect they usually enjoy.
D. Tipu Sultan was a good ruler.
E. Eating red meat (including beef) is for the welfare of the world.
Let me explain each of them.
A. Saving Hinduism from Hindutva is what India needs the most.
This is the conclusion of the book and sort of aligned with its overall analysis.
The first word was constructed by our colonizers, who wanted the Indians to only do “inner-directed search” called Hinduism. The second word was developed by Bengali Hindus during the time of their cultural culmination, who wanted to pursue a civilizational understanding of state and social policy in the modern era.
For the colonizers and their believers, such as Shourie, Hindus should leave all socio-political understanding to the West.
Moreover, Shourie himself is skeptical of religions [1], which essentially means he is skeptical of Hinduism too. He maintained that Buddhism is the religion he found the best [2]. In that case, saving Hinduism could not be his agenda at all.
B. Tit-for-tat is the wrong policy.
Shourie has criticized [3] Savarkar when he essentially argued for this policy against the aggressors. This idea, for Shourie, is Hindutva and worthy of condemnation.
This notion of Shourie goes against the scientific understanding we have gained through Game Theory that Tit-for-tat emerges as the best strategy in the long run [4].
C. Bal Gangadhar Tilak or Subhas Chandra Bose is not worthy of the respect they usually enjoy.
To dispel any possible ambiguity, let me categorically say that Shourie never said it, but if we take his argument to the logical consequences, that is what comes out.
The revolutionaries like Savarkar and Tilak did write mercy petitions because they never believed in the British imposed morality on Indians. They saw these petitions as strategies to get out of prison so that they could gainfully use the opportunity for their own country.
Shourie uses the petitions and their language as the lens to detect dichotomy in them. From that lens, Tilak
(and many prominent revolutionaries) would also lose respect for writing to the British.
Similarly, Subhas Bose also occasionally mentioned Hitler in a positive note along with Gandhi and Lenin in his work The Indian Struggle. Of course, he worked with the Axis powers against the British Raj. If Savarkar could be criticized for his occasional positive statement about Hitler (I mind you that all these were written before the Holocaust and all became public knowledge), Bose would have to be criticized, like Audrey Truschke did.
D. Tipu Sultan was a good ruler.
Shourie criticized Savarkar for calling Tipu a savage. For Shourie, Tipu “ran an efficient state apparatus” and “one of the very few who defeated the British” without mentioning anything about Tipu’s extreme Hinduphobia as covered in many works, most recently in Vikram Sampath’s work [5].
E. Eating red meat (including beef) is for the welfare of the world.
Shourie applauded the stance of rationalist Savarkar to remove the taboo of beef eating among the Hindus and mocked the followers of Savarkar for not following him.
Savarkar invoked scientific reasoning, not tradition, to make a decision on food. Of course, science has been making strides since Savarkar wrote it. To solve the problem of sustainability, science [6] considers a decrease in red meat consumption a real necessity. If a population is not used to this habit, unambiguously it is a good thing to not introduce an unsustainable practice to them.
Since the book attempts to uncover the flaws in Savarkar’s character, it definitely unearths any possible weakness, such as his pride (which could be construed as arrogance by the critic). But even this is not nothing new; the old biography of Dhananjay Keer has discussed it.
Personally, I feel that Shourie should have undergone this scrutiny before being part of a cabinet that has restored Savarkar’s legacy in 2003. In that case, nobody could have criticized him for writing this book. At any rate, this book adds nothing to the arguments of left-liberal critics of Savarkar.
BookReview #18
Last time, I discussed Two Centuries of Silence by Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub at https://x.com/kausikgy/status/1888791586949193918
References
- https://business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/a-few-god-men-117051901616_1.html
- https://dailyo.in/politics/arun-shourie-hindu-right-wing-emergency-modi-rss-17870
- Section: A Revolutionary Fashions a State, The New Icon: Savarkar And The Facts, Arun Shourie, Penguin, 2025.
- A good description here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
- Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum (1760–1799), Penguin, 2024.
- A comprehensive review is available in the American documentary Cowspiracy, available here.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @kausikgy on February 20, 2025, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
