Author: Manohar Malgonkar
Publication: The Statesman
Date: February 3, 2003
22 December, 2002. People who had
been listening to the BBC's morning programme must have thought they had
got the wrong channel. The radio was playing Vande Mataram.
This couldn't be true, you told
yourself. Had the mandarins who run the BBC gone mad? Did they not know
that when the British were ruling India, the song Vande Mataram was banned?
That in Rudyard Kipling's India, those who sang it were classified as "anarchists",
and that even to say the two words Vande Mataram was a criminal offence
for which the usual sentence was a stiff jail term. So, how had it come
about that Britain's national broadcasting service was playing Vande Mataram?
It all seems to be a part of the
BBC's 70th birthday bash. As part of the celebratory programmes, the BBC
was going to broadcast the top ten popular songs of the past 70 years,
and invited its listeners to give their votes. Vande Mataram turned out
to be one of the most popular - indeed it only just missed being the top
song, which was an Irish number called "A nation once again!" Song number
3, incidentally was "Dil, dil, Pakistan".
All three are patriotic songs, almost
surrogates for national anthems. They ran away with the race. Love, religion,
even Rock, Pop, or Rap, were not even among the also rans. Who would have
thought that Vande Mataram a quiet salutation to the image and the people
of a vast land, could make the sahibs of the empire go pop-eyed with rage,
or again, incite the youths of India to desperate acts of valour and martyrdom
- and at least in one case, to commit murder. This happened in 1909. The
victim was the collector of Nasik, Mr AMT Jackson, of the Indian Civil
Service.
Ironically enough, Jackson was a
civilised and socially engaging person who respected scholarship and culture,
and liked Indian music. He had made a study of Sanskrit literature and
had taken the trouble to learn the language of his district, Marathi. Needless
to say, he had made many friends among Indians who had no quarrel with
imperial rule.
But then as an official of the government,
he was a true-blue imperialist, someone to whom the Empire was a faith,
sacrosanct, and those who opposed it were heretics, sinners deserving of
no mercy. He was aware that his district, Nasik, was a hotbed of anti-British
nationalists, who were the followers of the two Savarkar brothers, Babarao
and Tatyarao, and he considered it to be his god-given duty to put an end
to their movement.
At this time, in 1909, the younger
Savarkar, Tatyarao, had gone to England, but Babarao was in Nasik, busy
distributing seditious literature and inciting hot-headed young Indians
to become revolutionaries.
In England, Tatyarao was studying
to become a barrister, but at the same time pursuing his revolutionary
activities. He collected funds, acquired new followers, sent out a team
to Paris to be trained in making bombs, wrote patriotic songs and pamphlets
which he had published in Holland, and sent to India camouflaged as the
novels of Dickens and Scott - this even though Scotland Yard was keeping
a sharp eye on his activities.
The "treasonable" books that Tatyarao
sent were circulated in India by his brother, Babarao, and that was the
charge on which collector Jackson had him arrested. The evidence was thin
and the trial judge dismissed it. But another offence, that Babarao Savarkar
had himself written and published four patriotic poems, was proved in court,
and that, in the days of the Empire, was like committing a murder. Babarao
Savarkar, in his mid-20s, was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent off
to the jail in the Andamans.
The severity of the punishment shocked
the public, but to the handful of freedom fighters, their sense of outrage
was marked by frustration and shame. They wanted to hit back; to kill Jackson.
But they knew they could not do it with the lathis and dummy revolvers
they used for their practice sessions. The revolvers they had been promised
were still to come. These revolvers, 20 brand knew Brownings, had been
procured by Tatyarao Savarkar in London. In March 1909, a man called Chaturbhuj
who served as a cook in London's India House, brought them to Mumbai and
there handed them over to Gopal Patankar. Three of these weapons with 30
rounds, were to be sent on to Nasik. Patankar could not find someone reliable
enough to do the job till August, and that was when they finally reached
Nasik, where a trusted lieutenant of the Savarkars, Anna Karve, took charge
of them.
In their secret discussions they
had resolved that it would need at least three men with revolvers to make
sure of killing Jackson, because none of them had so much as seen a proper
revolver, and were not at all sure of their marksmanship. Anna Karve would
head the team, and Vinayak Deshpande and Anant Kanhere, who were still
at school, would assist him. Early in September Karve took his team to
a lonely wood and tried out their revolvers by firing three rounds each
at the trunk of a tamarind tree. All three managed to get their bullets
to hit the target, but in the process, they had used up nine rounds from
their stock of ammunition.
It was now up to Karve to decide
on the time and date of the assassination. "Not for another three months",
he told the other two. "But why?" they wanted to know.
"My guru, Bidikar Maharaj, says
that 1909 is not a good year for such acts. We'll do it in January."
Since it had been decided that,
after committing the murder, they would give themselves to the police in
any case, Deshpande and Kanhere were not convinced that it was the real
reason. "I'll do it on my own", Kanhere offered.
"No, we must be all there, so that
there is no bungling", Karve told them. They were not happy with that decision,
but agreed to go along -wait until January. In the event they found themselves
driven to act just before the year, 1909, ended.
(To be concluded)
