The Eternal Hero        

In February 1965 the Mauritian Minister for Local govt Shri S V Dayal met S. Kumar Narendra, editor of Veer Arjun, a Delhi daily sponsored a fund and handed over a cheque of Rs 51,000 to S. In Auguts 1965 S health took a turn for the worse but he felt better by September. When he heard about the Indian decision to retaliate the Pakistan invasion by entering Lahore he was happy.

S always said that the best way to win a war was to carry the war into the enemy’s land. Is the Indian govt listening?

In September 1965 he released a third part of S’s autobiography under the title Shatruchya Shibirat. The book deals with the political conditions of India and the views of his contemporaries when he went to London.

When Shastri went to Tashkent S expressed the fear that he would be forced back to take back Indian troops. He said that Pakistan’s inhuman and barbarous acts such as kidnapping and raping of Indian women would not stop unless we gave them tit for tat. Is Atalji listening! S was unhappy to learn about Shastri’s death.

S now decided to fast unto death starting 2/2/1966. He had water in between. Eventually at 11.10 a.m. on 26/2/1966 he passed away at the age of 83. The doctors were surprised that he never suffered the pangs of dehydration.

Glowing tributes were paid by one and all but ironically no Minister of the State was present to pay homage to S, one of the greatest revolutionaries produced by India. His funeral procession took six hours to reach Chandanwadi with atleast 50,000 people part of the procession.

Said S some 25 years earlier –

“If you wish, O Hindus, to prosper as a great and glorious Hindu nation under the sun, and you well have a claim on it, that State must be established under the Hindu Flag. This dream would be realized during this or the coming generation. If it is not realized, I may be styled as a daydreamer, but if it comes true, I would stand forth as its prophet. I am bequeathing this legacy to you”.

So end my tribute to the forgotten hero Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a man who has been forgotten by his countrymen, a man whose sacrifice and unselfish love for Bharat is unparalleled in recent history, a man who was so multi-faceted that he could give you a complex, a social reformer, poet, historian, orator. So many qualities in one body. Bhagwan , surely, took a lot of pains to make him. What must have been S’s karmas in his previous birth that enabled to lead such an eventful life? Let us also learn from his shortcomings. At work or on a political plane we need to build organizations and have good public relations if we wish to see our vision come true.