Icons and Ironies in the Politics of Faith

 

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.