NEW DELHI LETTER

The British, Russian, German, Australian ambassadors and other members of the foreign delegation, about 40 people, knew where they were going, on November 25, when Indian officials took them to Port Blair in Andaman-and-Nicobar, in preparation for the G20 , where India has been president for a year?

As the start of a “diplomatic briefing”, the Indian hosts paid a visit to the former colonial prison Port Blair, where the British kept criminals and political prisoners. The delegation was taken to the cell, turned into a memorial. That’s where crouching for a decade, from 1911 to 1921, one of the most controversial figures in Indian history, a Hindu nationalist icon, a bogeyman to supporters of a diverse and pluralistic India. The mere mention of his name has become highly flammable in India today and is stirring fire in the Modi camp.

“Fascist Ideology”

This is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. From the Port Blair Penitentiary wrote the detainee Hindutva essence published in 1923, a favorite work of the Indian far right. He is the designer of“Hinduism”defined by one scholar, historian Audrey Truschke, a professor at Rutgers University, as “a fascist ideology advocating Hindu supremacy, especially over Muslims” and which “The ultimate goal is to transform India from a secular state into an ethnonationalist state, dubbed ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (the nation of Hindus)”.

As Audrey Truschke reminds us, “VD Savarkar spoke of India as a motherland and shared with the Nazis the purity of bloodline. Savarkar and others consider Hitler’s treatment of the Jews a useful model for dealing with India’s Muslim minority..

India’s G20 Sherpas didn’t beat around the bush about the direction of the Savarkar cell visit. “We started our journey from Andaman because there is an unknown fighter imprisoned in this prison. It is important that this story is told to all the foreigners and the ambassadors and major international organizations and all the guests.” said Shri Amitabh Kant outside the Port Blair jail.

Challenging real historian narratives

The G20 is an unexpected opportunity for the Modi government to promote its own vision of history, its own icon, and to challenge the narratives of true historians. For years, Hindu nationalists tried to elevate a figure other than Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi, who were the most famous. “freedom fighter”, who fought against the British colonialists, for the independence of India, costing him many years in prison, but became a member of Congress, the major independence party. Savarkar, though he went through a revolution in his youth against the British – for which he was imprisoned – is much more ambiguous.

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