The new game of appropriating national leaders who are long dead and gone as ‘Hindu nationalists’ is rather interesting. It competes with the pastime, popularised in the early decades after Independence, to absorb all divergent streams of the national movement under one banner of the ‘Indian National Congress’. This leads to eulogisation and ‘canonisation’ and here, one must examine the recent attempt to foist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as the most noteworthy icon of Andaman’s infamous Cellular Jail.
