History has a mischievous sense of humour. It
delights in placing unlikely ingredients into the same political kitchen and
watching later generations argue about the recipe. Few comparisons reveal this
better than the public images and private ironies surrounding Savarkar, Gandhi,
and Jinnah. Each became a towering symbol. Each is now packaged as a simplified
mascot. And each, if resurrected, might politely decline the brochure written
in his name.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar presents the first
paradox. A Chitpavan Brahmin who did not treat diet as destiny, he openly
consumed meat and spoke in rational and utilitarian terms about cow protection
and cow slaughter. His writings show that he approached the cow less as a
divine mother and more as an economic animal. This alone is enough to make many
of his present day admirers reach for selective quotation and spiritual white
correction fluid. Savarkar’s personal habits were strikingly modern for his time.
Anecdotes describe him as someone who enjoyed meat and fine drink, sometimes
jokingly said to be paired with Zetsun whiskey, whether literally or in spirit.
The larger point stands. His cultural politics was orthodox in identity but
flexible in lifestyle. He separated personal conduct from political
mobilisation with impressive convenience.
Savarkar was a master of ideological engineering.
He understood that identity, when sharpened, becomes a political weapon more
efficient than any sword. His project of Hindutva was not merely religious but
civilisational and territorial. It was designed as a binding glue as well as a
boundary wall. He wrote with clarity and force. He argued with discipline. He
provoked with purpose. But there was also a theatrical quality to the
construction. The champion of cultural purity was personally unburdened by ritual
purity. The architect of Hindu consolidation was socially radical in some
reforms yet rigid in civilisational definition. It is as if the chef refused to
eat from the menu he so passionately marketed.
Then comes Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who
appears at first glance as Savarkar’s mirror opposite. A devout Hindu and a
lifelong vegetarian, Gandhi turned personal discipline into public method. His
politics wore a moral costume and often insisted that everyone else try it on.
Yet Gandhi’s great disruption was not dietary but democratic. He invited
disagreement. He tolerated critics. He argued in public and corrected himself
in public. He spiritualised politics but also pluralised it. His Hinduism was
deeply felt but rarely framed as a citizenship test.
Gandhi’s irony lies elsewhere. The most religious
of the three often behaved in the most politically inclusive way. He could be
stubborn, moralising, and occasionally impractical, but he did not build his
politics on permanent enemies. He built it on conversion of hearts, including
the hearts of his opponents. Empires prefer rebels with bombs. They find rebels
with conscience extremely inconvenient. Gandhi’s method was slow, exasperating,
and annoyingly humane. In a century addicted to strong medicine, he prescribed
moral physiotherapy.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah completes the trio with
perhaps the sharpest twist. Urbane, impeccably dressed, trained in law, and
culturally Westernised, Jinnah was not known for religious orthodoxy in
personal life. He enjoyed wine. Many accounts suggest he was indifferent to
ritual observance. Some controversial claims even suggest dietary choices
forbidden in Islam. Yet history crowned him as the great spokesman of Muslim
political destiny. Nothing proves that politics is a costume party better than
this transformation.
Jinnah was not a cleric. He was a
constitutionalist who lost faith in constitutional guarantees. His demand for
Pakistan grew not from seminary theology but from political distrust and
strategic calculation. He mobilised religious identity with a lawyer’s
precision rather than a preacher’s passion. The result was a religious nation
argued into existence by a secular mind. It is one of history’s grand ironies
that personal liberalism can sometimes produce public separation.
Here is where the satire matures. Savarkar and
Jinnah, despite standing under different flags, used strikingly similar
political techniques. Both converted community identity into political
currency. Both warned their followers of cultural danger. Both argued that
coexistence without dominance was a risky bargain. Their languages differed.
Their symbols differed. Their emotional audiences differed. Their strategic
grammar often did not. Each ran a campaign of civilisational anxiety with
impressive intellectual packaging.
Gandhi alone refused to fully enter this
marketplace of fear. He spoke of civilisation too, but as an ethical experiment
rather than a guarded fortress. While the other two drafted blueprints for
political separation of identities, Gandhi drafted invitations for moral
coexistence. He was frequently ignored, sometimes opposed, and eventually
canonised in ways that also simplify him unfairly. Saints are often edited more
aggressively than sinners.
The lesson is not that one man was pure and the
others were villains. The lesson is that political memory is a talented fiction
writer. It removes inconvenient habits, upgrades symbolic value, and airbrushes
contradictions. The meat eating nationalist becomes a mascot of ritual culture.
The secular barrister becomes an icon of religious destiny. The spiritual
democrat becomes a harmless statue on currency notes.
If there is humour in this, it is dry and
durable. History does not just repeat itself. It also rebrands itself. And the
loudest brand ambassadors are often those who have not read the full manual.
Siddhartha Shankar Mishra is an advocate at
the Supreme Court of India and a commentator on law, politics and society. His
writings blend legal insight with social critique and aim to provoke reflection
on power, justice and public conscience.
Disclaimer : - The views
expressed here are interpretive and satirical in nature, meant for discussion
and reflection, not personal or religious offence.
