Sonia as Savarkarite Hindu

Re-reading Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva recently, one came across a passage that grapples with the definition of a Hindu. While ...

Re-reading Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva recently, one came across a passage that grapples with the definition of a Hindu. While most Hindus are easy to identify for the writer, ‘‘One case… seems to offer some real difficulty.’’

‘‘Is, for example, Sister Nivedita a Hindu?’’ Savarkar asks of the English disciple of Swami Vivekananda. ‘‘If ever an exception proves the rule, it does so here. Our patriotic and noble-minded sister had adopted our land from Sindhu to the seas as her Fatherland. She truly loved it as such, and had our nation been free, we would have been the first to bestow the right of citizenship on such loving souls. So the first essential may, to some extent, be said to hold good in her case.

‘‘The second essential of common blood of Hindu parentage must, nevertheless and necessarily, be absent in such cases as these. The sacrament of marriage with a Hindu, which really fuses, and is universally admitted to do so, two beings into one, may be said to remove this disqualification. But although this second essential failed either way to hold good in her (Sister Nivedita’s) case, the third important qualification of Hindutva did entitle her to be recognised as a Hindu. For she had adopted our culture and come to adore our land as her Holyland. She felt she was a Hindu, and that is, apart from all technicalities, the real and the most important test.

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‘‘But we must not forget that we have to determine the essentials of Hindutva in the sense in which the word is actually used by an overwhelming majority of people. And therefore we must say that any convert of non-Hindu parentage of Hindutva can be a Hindu, if bona fide he or she adopts our land as his or her country and marries a Hindu, thus coming to love our land as a real Fatherland, and adopts our culture and thus adopts our land as the Punyabhu. The children of such a union as that would, other things being equal, be most emphatically Hindus. We are not authorised to go further.’’

The above assessment conforms with the Congress’s official position on Sonia Gandhi. Sections of the Sangh family, on the other hand, disagree. They believe Rajiv Gandhi’s wife and children are somehow not 100 per cent Hindu.

Does this then make the Congress more Savarkarite than the BJP? It is a conundrum for both parties to sort out.

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