The Late Shriyut V.V.S. Aiyer In Memoriam

Heavy griefs have often embittered our life, but none heavier than what thy sudden death caused, Oh friend, ever taxed our capacity to endure. Memories of those momentous years and trying days rise in a flood and struggling to find a vent, keep knocking at the gates of our heart. How we wish we could have spoken them all and recited our reminiscences; but our lips must remain sealed. How we long to write of thy goodness and gentleness of disposition—how, when betrayed, thou stood'st unshaken, how thou served'st them who owned thee not and how thou suffered'st when unknown and madest not the slightest mention of it when thou gotst known—how we long to write of it all; but our pen is a broken reed. The noble story of thy life must for, the time being, may perhaps for all time to come, remain untold. For while those who can recite it are living, the time to tell it may not come, and when the time comes when all that is worth telling will no longer remain suppressed and will be eagerly listened to, the generation that could have recounted it might have passed away. Thy greatness, therefore, must stand undimmed but unwitnessed by man, like the lofty Himalayan peaks. Thy services and sacrifices must lie buried in oblivion as do the foundations of a mighty castle. The news of thy sudden death was bitter enough. But bitterer by for, is this our inability to relate to posterity under what heavy obligations thou hast placed them and to express the fulness of our personal and public grief. For, indeed, he was a pillar of strength, a Hindu of Hindus and in him, our Hindu race has lost one of the most exalted representatives and a perfect flower of our Hindu civilization. Ripe in experience, hallowed by sufferings and devoted to the service of man and God, the cause of Hindu Sanghatan was sure to find in him, one of its best and foremost champions in Madras. In 1907 A.D. or somewhere there, one day the maidservant at the famous India House in London handed a visiting card to us as we came downstairs to dine, and told us the gentleman was awaiting in the drawing room. Presently, the door was flung open and a gentleman neatly dressed in European costumes and inclined to be fashionable, warmly shook hands with us. He told us he had been a pleader at Rangoon and he had come over to England to qualify himself as a full-fledged barrister. He was past thirty and seemed a bit agreeably surprised to find us so young. He assured us of his intention to study English music and even assured that he was eager to

get a few lessons in dancing as well. We, as usual, entered our first mild protest against thus dissipating the energy of our youth in light-hearted pastime when momentous issues hung in balance. The gentleman, unconvinced but impressed, took our leave promising to continue to call upon us every now and then. He was Shriyut V.V.S. Aiyer In 1910 A.D., somewhere in March, we stood as a prisoner then only very recently pent up in Brixton—the formidable prison in London. The warder announced visits. Anxiously, we accompany the file of prisoners to the visiting yard. We stand behind the bars wondering who could have come to call on us and thus invited the unpleasant attentions of the London police. For, to acknowledge our acquaintance from the visitor's box in front of the prison bars, was a sure step to eventually get behind them. The visitors are let in. They crowdedly pass past our window. Presently, one dignified figure enters the box in front of us. It was V.V.S. Aiyer. His beard was loosely waving on his breast. He was unkempt. He was no longer the neatly dressed fashionable gentleman. His whole figure was transformed with some great act of dedication of life. “Oh leader!” he feelingly accosted us, “why you left Paris at all”! Soothingly, I said: “Friend, what is the use now of discussing it here. Rightly or not I am here, pent up in this prison-and the best way now is to see what is to be done next, how to face the present.” While fully occupied in discussing future plans, the bell rang and the warders came rushing and shouting unceremoniously: “Time is up.” With a heavy heart, we looked into each others’ eyes. We knew it would perhaps be the last time we ever saw each other in this life. Tears rose, Suppressing them we said: “No! no! We are Hindus. We have read Gita. We must not weep in the presence of these unsympathetic crowds.” We spoke in Hindi; curious crowds of English men watched the ‘young Indian rebel ‘ and his friend. We parted, I watched him till he disappeared and said to my mind: “Alas! it is well nigh, impossible to see this loving soul again.” For, one of the two fates was certain to fall to my lot, the gallows or the Andamans, and neither could hold any prospect before me of seeing my friends again. This was in 1910 A.D.; fourteen years rolled by, and the impossible actually happened. Travelling the most dangerous and meandering bypaths and bylanes and subterenean passages of life so formidably bordering the realms of death, I met Shriyut Aiyer a couple of months ago. He had travelled all the distance from Madras to Bombay to enable us to revel a

few hours in the wines of romantic joy. We forgot for a while, the bitterness and the deep pangs of the afflicted and tortured past and lightly gossiped as boys fresh from schools meeting back after a long holiday. He took my leave. I watched him disappear and said to my mind, now can call him again, any time I like. Little I knew that it was then that he was to disappear beyond all human recall. When human wisdom shook its head and snorted out ‘impossible’, events proved it possible and when it gaily assured itself ‘at any time,’ Destiny put in a stern never; thus oft, fate seems to act with no nobler intention but to mock and humiliate human calculations! With Aiyer, the politician, we cannot concern ourselves here. It is the loss of Aiyer, the scholar, the friend, the noblest type of a Hindu gentleman, the author of Kural, the saintly soul, whose life has been one continuous sacrifice and worship that we so bitterly bewail to-day and bitterly chafe at our inability to pay a public tribute to his memory in a fashion worthy of the noble Dead. Oh, the times on which our generation has fallen! The noblest sink down and are washed off to the shores of Death, while the unworthy keep gaily swimming on the tides of Life. But thou hast done thy duty. Friend! It was for Human Love that thou livedst and thou diedst too for Human Love, even as a martyr unto her. Thou knewst no peace in life, oh, soldier of God. But Peace be with Thee in Death. Oh friend! Peace be with thee and divine rest!’ —(Mahratta 28-6-1925) $\square$

Then Who is Who, Pray? While cursorily glancing over the papers, our eye caught a heap of capitals, which, scanning a little closer, revealed a list of names of Pratap, Shivaji, Govind singh and others. Out of respect for these heroic representatives of our race, we naturally read a sentence or two of the article wherein those occurred, when to our surprise, we found ourselves face to face with the ghost of that hackneyed lie which had been killed and buried a dozen times over in the past and which asserted that the Hindus could not be said to be a race and could not, therefore, claim to inherit the blood of Pratap and Shivaji and Govind. We were just on the point of sweeping aside this statement as a contemptuous vapouring of foreign malice or ignorance, when somewhere about the sentence, the eye caught another familiar name. It was of Mahatma Gandhi. Without going further in the article, we instinctively felt that he must have been the author of that statement. It was worthy of no one else in India. From what other source can such profound shallowness flow than from the perennial fountain of ‘Himalayan mistakes!’ To level down to dust at a single non-violent stroke, the cherished love and pride and exalted emotions of a whole race that fondly felt in its vein the blood of a Shivaji and a Shankaracharya or a Pratap or a Chhatrasal or a Chaitanya flow—only a Mahatmaic audacity can accomplish that! Let the silly and unscientific Hindus disown forthwith the superstitious belief that after all, they were the sons of those sires who fought at Haldighat and were martyred at Sarhind and won at Udgir and ruled at Delhi! Gandhiji tells us we cannot be said to inherit the blood of Pratap and Shivaji and Govind. But then do we inherit any one’s blood at all? We are born in Maharashtra—can we claim to inherit the blood of Shivaji at least? The caste system that prevails amongst the Hindus and the consequent absence of the custom of intermarriages amongst them, which seems to be the reason, which prevents a Gujarati from owning the blood of a Rajput Pratap or a Maratha Shivaji in his veins, ought to, if true and sound a reason in the first case, prevent us also from claiming to inherit the blood of Shivaji. For, Brahmins in Maharashtra married not with the Bhonsle and other Kshatriya castes. Taking a step further, not only the Brahmins but also the Vaishyas and Shudras and Atishudras, the Prabhus and Saraswats— almost all of those crores of Hindus who go by the name of Maharashtrians, cannot look upon Shivaji as one of their forefathers any more than a

Gujarati can. Even amongst those who are Kshatriyas of Shivaji’s caste, all cannot claim him as their ancestor; for many—nay, the majority of their families had no blood connection with the Bhonsles or the Jadhavas. Leaving aside the question of Shivaji, we cannot positively succeed in proving that we possess the blood of even the Peshavas in our veins unless and until our genealogy reveals a marriage connection with the Bhats and other families relating to the Peshavas. All Brahmins also cannot claim common blood, for they all do not intermarry. So, then taking the last case of Maharashtra, not only does a Gujarati or a Bengali or a Madrasi or a Punjabi Hindu fail to establish his superstitious belief that claims Bajirao and Shivaji and Ramdas and Nana and Bhau and the hundred other heroic figures that fought for, died for and won the cause of Hindu-patpadashahi in the past as his glorious forefathers, but even a Maratha, a Maharashtrian, must disown them unless indeed, any one of them can produce a genealogy establishing an individual blood relation through inter-marriage. Nor can all Rajputs claim Pratap for their ancestor, nor the Sikhs Guru Govind for theirs. In such an anomalous situation, all that one can state is that Sambahji alone inherited the blood of Shivaji or following the more unobjectionable style of Satyakama Jabali of old, assert that any given person can claim the blood of his mother alone—and of no one else. So, then, the poor Hindu is no racial entity at all. Shri Ram and Shri Krishna are mere persons to him, with whom he has nothing more in common either in blood or ancestry than he has with the citizens of Timbuctoo or with the man in the moon! Thus, he who used to live and breathe and had his being in a sublime conviction of his consanguinity and affinity with the seers and heroes and warriors, with Ram and Krishna and Shivaji, find the stream of his lifeblood suddenly choked and dried up, lost in bogs and sands of Mahatma Sahara of absurdity, and stand alone, a unity by himself, no one in the world whom he can call his kith or kin outside the scrap of his family-genealogical chart. But then, the Hindu suffers not alone. He has to undergo the pangs of bereavement in company with almost all the world. If a Hindu cannot be said to possess the blood of a Pratap or a Shivaji, as Englishman too cannot by the same analogy, be said to be positively entitled to inherit the blood of a Cromwell or a Shakespeare. For, in spite of a general custom of intermarriages amongst the English people, no one can assert that every English individual has affinity with all other English people or has entered

through his family in an individual blood relation with every other English family, which he can prove as soon as summoned by M. Gandhiji to do so. How can the cockney in the East London dare to claim to inherit the blood of the house of York or the proud Earls, whose pedigree boasts of pure patrician blood, that for generations and generations admitted none but a patrician within its sacred precincts? If a Hindu cannot be said to possess the blood of a Pratap and Ram or Rohidas Chambhar on account of the absence of the custom of intermarriages amongst castes and consequent absence of individual blood relations with the persons or their families, with whom he claims consanguinity, then an Englishman too cannot necessarily be said to inherit the blood of a Shakespeare, or an American of Washington, or an Italian, of Mazzini, or a German, of Frederick the Great, on account of the absence of any positive proof of his or any of his family being allowed to mix his blood with that of the other, in spite of the custom of intermarriages amongst the European nations that can suggest a mere possibility of consanguinity or affinity, but cannot in itself be a positive proof thereof. The only advantage that a cockney of East London has over the Hindu is that the cockney may be imaginatively looked upon as a blood relation of, say, Henry VIII. Just as he may be imaginably looked upon to be the prospective King of England or, for the matter of that, of all Europe! But just as in spite of this imaginable possibility of being the Emperor of all Europe, he, so far as facts are concerned, remains a cockney amongst cockneys; even so, in spite of a possibility of being otherwise, he, so far as all practical proofs are concerned, cannot be said to inherit the blood of a Shakespeare or Hampden or Pitt or the Black Prince and, most certainly, not of all these put together. And yet the school-children of these every cockneys are made to short till they get hoarse in their school: We are the sons of sires that baffled, crowned and martyred tyranny! They defied the field and scaffold, for their birthright-so will we!” Foolish rhodomontade! How can all English children be supposed to have entered through their families into blood relation with all those Englishmen, who centuries and centuries ago, ‘baffled, crowned and martyred tyranny! We sincerely hope that if ever Mahatma Gandhi comes to wield the power of a Supreme World Censor—God forbid!—which he hypothetically granted to himself on the occasion of opening the offices of the Hindusthan Times at Delhi, he would give his second attention to suppress throughout Europe—nay all the world over—these foolish blusterings of intoxicated

fancy that sings “We are the sons of sons that baffled.” What lies! No man should be allowed to state that he is the son of any other sire, but his individual father and mother and at the most, of those, whom he can prove on written testimony to have entered into blood connection with his family. We were going to claim his first attention for this task but that he has already reserved, as he declared in that speech for the still more urgent business of suppressing all other papers but Young India and Nav-Jivan! The poor Mahratta, of course, being destined to be the first fat kid to be sacrificed to the Goddess of Liberty, as Gandhiji had seen her. But if a mere chance that the cockney in the East London has, of conceivably being related through blood in the ninetieth generation before him to, say Thomas-a-Backet by virtue of the custom of intermarriages, entitles him to claim him as his sire, then surely, the chance, that the poor Hindu too has, of being somehow, somewhere and somewhen relation through blood to the illustrious names of Hindu history must entitle him, in spite of the caste system and absence of the custom of intermarriages amongst the Hindus, to claim to inherit their blood. For, first of all, the racial stock of the Aryans used to intermarry amongst themselves. Even a casual acquaintance with the Vedic literature can convince—has convinced, every one, of the fact, outside the Sabarmati Ashram. Secondly, even the mere mention of the Aunloma (अनुलोम) and Pratiloma (प्रतिलोम) theory of marriage, which the most ancient Smrities record, and the hundreds of examples that lie scattered throughout the pages and periods of the history and mythology of our race, prove that these systems actually affected the everyday life of the people. The mere mention of these should be enough to prove that the racial blood of our ancestors could never be said to have been absolutely locked in watertight compartments. Mahabharat abounds with precedents—the very heroes of that epic show that even the kingly houses, did at times, admit strains of popular blood. The birth stories of Vyasa, Valmiki, Parashuram or Vashishtha, the origin of the castes of Suta and Magadha down to Chandals, the descriptions of the harems of Krishna and Arjun and Bhima—who married Hedamba—Chandragupta and Ashoka-down to Mahadaji Scindia who descended from a Rajput mother and a Mahratha—all these and hundreds of other illustrations joined with the supreme fact that Nature has and will ever prove stronger than all the caste rules and regulations, prove to the hilt that the caste system has not been and perhaps was never meant to be, an absolute and imperious dam

and that the life-current of our mind flowed richly from the Himalayan altitudes of our ancestry to common plains. We, Hindus, own a common life, a common blood pulsed through our veins, and we have as much a right to assert that we inherit the blood of Pratap and Shivaji and Shankaracharya, as the Englishman has to claim that of Shakespeare or the American of Washington. Dravidians or Aryans—we are, Indians even through blood, Hindus first and everything else next. —Mahratta, 14-6-1925 ❑

Crushing Reply to Sir Kishan Prasad

The following statement is issued by Br. Savarkar, the President of the Hindu Mahasabha, in reply to the Article published by Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad of Hyderabad regarding the Hindu Civil Resistance Movement: In spite of the personal respect, which every Hindu feels for the elderly, noble and highly placed Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad, we cannot but denounce the statement he has recently issued carrying down the Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj Civil Resistance Movement against the intolerably anti-Hindu policy of the Nizam Government as untrue, timid and treacherous. His charges against the Arya Samaji in particular are not only baseless but base. For, if during the last fifty years or so, any section of Hindudom had really proved itself to be the Defender of the Hindu faith, culture and community, it is the Arya Samaj that has done so. Neither the Hindu Mahasabha nor the Arya Samaj has launched this civil resistance movement in a light mood. Thousands of Hindus groaning under the Nizam Rule had for years been calling upon the Hindu Mahasabha to come to their rescue. Just on the very eve of the Civil Resistance Movement, the Maharashtra Provincial Hindu Sabha had deputed trusted workers to investigate into the grievances of our co-religionists in the Nizam State and they, after studying the situation on the spot, had published reports full of unimpeachable facts and figures to substantiate that the condition of the Hindus was actually worse than what had come to light. The leaders of the Civil Liberties Union, who hail from the state itself, have borne ample testimony to the same fact. Nay, the Hindu leaders, who now under the spell of the State Congress, are persisting in a guilty silence had only the other day, been loudest in condemning the Nizam Government’s policy as most detrimental to Hindu interest and dictated by Moslem fanaticism. Does the Maharaja, Sir Krishan Prasad venture to say that he has any better right to represent the Hindu feeling than these thousands of aggrieved Hindus in the State? But apart from all that, the very statement of Maharaja carries with it its own refutation. During the course of the statement, he boastfully asserts that he and his ancestors had ever gloried in living contentedly under the subjection of the Moslem rule for generations together. The long subjection of the Hindus in Hyderabad State is a historical fact and one can understand if a Hindu tolerates it as an inevitable evil. But what are we to think of a

Hindu of the eminence of the Maharaja, who glories in the fact that his Hindu ancestors had been contented slaves throughout centuries under the political domination of the Moslems? Is it not a fact that it is these contented Hindu slaves who proved traitors to the Hindu cause in the past, fought for their Moslem masters against the emancipating forces of the Maratha Empire and enabled the Moslem rule to survive in Hyderabad? The Nizam was defeated in battles after battles at Bhopal, Udgir, Kharda and the Marathas liberated Hindu Provinces from Nagar to Nagpur and from Nagpur to Orissa from the grip of the Moslem rule. But it is to the treacherous assistance of these contentedly slavish 'Ancestors', that gave the Nizam Government the long lease of life it enjoys. Otherwise, the forces of the Maratha Empire would have freed the Hindus in Hyderabad long ago and spared them their present serfdom, Instead of hanging his head down in shame at the thought of this continuous political and racial subjection of the Hindus to Moslem domination, the Maharaja parades it as if it was an additional feather in his cap. This one fact proves as no detailed Hindu grievance can ever do, the thoroughness with which the anti-Hindu policy of the Nizam Government has succeeded in emasculating the Hindu spirit in the dominions and how not a vestige of self-respect is left even in the best of them by the age-long serfdom to which the Moslem rule had reduced them. It is this supreme task and not only the removal of local and detailed minor grievances of the Hindus—this task of emancipating the Hindu mind from this slavish mentality—that the Hindu Mahasabha had set before itself. The Mahasabha demands that the Hindus in the Nizam Dominions must be allowed all Civil Liberties in equal measure in common with other non-Hindu citizens, so that they may grow to their full height as self- respecting men, who would not tolerate anything that implies racial inferiority or humiliation to which they are subjected as Hindus. So far as the right of representing our Sanatani Section which the Maharaja wants to monopolise is concerned, it cannot be better refuted than by pointing out to the one single fact that the President of Warnashram Swaraja Sangha of Maharashtra and the leader of the Sanatanists all over India—Dharmaveer Vishwasrao Davre—is rotting even at this moment in the Nizam's jail under the very nose of the Maharaja, for championing the cause of the Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj Civil Resistance Movement. The spirit of the real Sanatan Dharma is represented by

Dharmaveer Davre. What Maharaja Kishan Prasad represents in his article is not the spirit of Sanatan Dharma but of Sanatan slavery. He is playing that part today, which Raja Man Singh played so ignobly in days gone by when he posed as the leader of the Rajputs in lieu of Rana Pratap. It is not even now too late for the Maharaja to repent, to go in sackcloth and ashes and as a gentleman bold enough to make amends for this untrue and treacherous article by boldly confessing the truth. —Mahratta 12-5-1939 ❏

Freedom and Democracy The following Cablegram was sent by Br. Savarkar, the President of the Hindu Mahasabha, to President Roosevelt of U.S.A. on 23rd April, 1939: “If your note to Hitler is actuated by disinterested human anxiety for safeguarding Freedom and Democracy from Military Aggression, pray ask Britain too to withdraw her armed domination over Hindusthan and let her have free and self-determined Constitution. A Great Nation like Hindusthan can surely claim at least as much international justice as small nations in your opinion do.” Britain’s Policy towards India The statement issued by the Viceroy regarding Britain’s policy towards India with reference to the present war situation is disappointing to a degree. The four or five columns of the verbose statement could have well been compressed into four or five sentences, so far as substance is concerned. The rest is full of platitudes. The Viceroy refers to the old and often discarded declaration that India’s ultimate goal is Dominion Status, made somewhere in 1919 A. D. It has not materialised since during the last twenty years and was almost forgotten till this war broke out. The present repetition of those same vague phrases may share the same fate, if things are allowed to drift in this manner by the Indians, till another war breaks out some twenty years hence. H.E. the Viceroy should realise that India is sick of running after this wordy mirage. She refuses to look upon the Dominion Status as an ultimate goal. But instead, insists upon it as an immediate step to be taken. A constitution based on that Status must be conceded by Britain to India, just at the end of this war, at the latest. A definite and the shortest time limit to the actual introduction of this constitution was the essential thing, which was expected by the Indian political world and it is precisely this very point that has studiously been omitted in the statement issued by His Excellency. Even now, it is not too late to mend. The British Government must bear in mind that India can never extend a willing co-operation unless she feels that the cause of her own freedom is likely to be served in a substantial measure by offering responsive co-operation to Britain. The Advisory Board contemplated in the statement is welcomed. But then, it has not its functions and powers defined. If it is going to be a mere appendage to serve as a camouflage to conceal autocratic high-handedness,

then it can only mean an insult added to injury. But if it is made to serve as a tentative measure with powers, more or less equal to a Federal Board of Ministers, is entrusted without reservation with matters concerning Indian defence during the war time and if its advice carried into effect as that of a responsible Council of Ministers, it may prove a step in advance on the line of political progress. But much will still depend on its composition. The Hindu Mahasabha must secure such a representation on it as is in keeping with the proportion to population of the Hindus! ❏

Moslem Chinaman: Hidden Motive of Chinese Moslem Mission to India The following statement is issued by Barrister V. D. Savarkar, the President of the Hindu Mahasabha, in connection with the Chinese Moslem Mission to India: We had no mind to give expression to the details, which point beyond doubt to well-concerted activities on the part of the Indian Moslems to inject the Chinese Moslems too with the Pakistani virus, while the Chinese Moslem Mission led by Mr. Woo was in India on behalf of our friendly neighbour China. But the Moslem Mission is grievously transgressing its national and friendly task and has, in its message recently sent to the Moslems at Nellore, been guilty of betraying anti-Hindu tendency. It has, consequently, forfeited the right of a national hospitality on the part of the Hindus and I feel myself quite justified in exposing the real nature of the movement, so that Hindudom may be warned of the dire consequences, which must result, if it is not watched, opposed and checked in time. Burma Lesson A couple of years ago, I had issued a statement warning the Burmese that there was growing rapidly a hybrid Moslem population in Burma, which would in near future constitute a similar danger to the homogeneity of the Burmese people, as it did in the case of India. The Moslems used to marry Burmese girls in large numbers for at least a century in the past and were very particular in bringing up their progeny as Moslems, while no Moslem would, as a rule, give his girl in marriage to a Burmese. The easy-go-lucky Burmese hardly suspected political danger out of such designed social relations. But soon after that, the Burmo-Moslem riots, miscalled the Indo- Burmese riots, started. The Moslems paid a heavy price for their mischief and the eyes of the Burmese got opened. Just then, the Japanese invasion took place and held all such questions in suspension. China Follows Suit Next to Burma comes China. The Moslem population there is to be counted in crores. China was once ruled by the Tartars, and when the Tartars embraced Islam, these Moslems made China their home and for a short period, even looked upon themselves as a ruling class. But the great Buddhistic Empire, which rose on the ashes of the Tartars, showed the Moslems their right place and they were more or less thoroughly reduced to

unquestioning subjection. But the fall of the Chinese Empire, the Japanese conquest of the large portions of the Chinese territories and the simultaneous rise and spread of the pan-Islamic movement about the time of the last great European war stirred up the Moslems in China too, with the consciousness which was latent in all Moslems through the Koranic teaching itself of being a separate entity unallied with and even antagonistic to, anyone else, who did not believe Koran and especially the Hindus, including Buddhists. We know how the Moslems bore a special hatred to and massacred the Buddhists on their way to India and how the word Buddha prashasti, which means, in fact, the worship of the Lord Buddha, had come to mean the greatest sin man can commit in the Moslem eyes. The Chinese Moslem Federation was formed and a large section of the Chinese Moslems refused to merge themselves with the Chinese, but maintained that they should keep up their separate entity and even a political brotherhood. The Marshal’s Fable We have great respect for Marshal Chiang Kai Sheik as a doughty warrior and a farsighted statesman. But that is the very reason why he could not but tell us the fairy tale that in China they were all Chinese first and last and in politics there was no clash between the Buddhists and the Moslems. But in face of facts we cannot but take this statement of the Great Marshal with a pinch of salt. Was it not only a couple of years ago that a batch of young Chinese Moslems was sent to Turkasthan and Egypt to get themselves initiated into pan-Islamic mysteries and who, on reaching Bombay, sought the interviews of Mr. Jinnah and other Leaguers, discarded their National Chinese dress and paraded their newly-bought fez caps as an insignia of a new order? This present mission, led by Mr. Woo, is a far more significant step on the part of the Chinese Moslems and is primarily meant and was perhaps invited by the Indian Moslem Leaguers themselves to establish a closer pan-Islamic contact. They have chosen to interview the leading lights of the Pakistani movement including the Nizam, and they are already emboldened to talk such trash as that they would not fail to help their Islamic brothers in India after the war is over. But are they sure whether they themselves would be in a helping or a helpless position at the end of this war? A covenant between the sparrows and the rabbits to defeat the eagle has no sense so long as the eagle dominates the field. Again, what kind of help

and against whom are these Chinese Moslems going to render to the Islamic brothers in India after the war? Against the Hindus and to prop up Pakistan? The appointment of Sir Mohomed Zaffarulla Khan as Indian Agent General in China under such circumstances bodes nothing but evil. He may represent the pan-Islamic or Pakistani principles there as every dutiful Moslem is expected to do. A Mere Dream! The Indian Moslems, who want to carve out a Western Pakistan from Delhi to the Tribal regions, have openly declared more than once that they would depend upon their co-religionists outside India from Afganistan to Turkey. But they could not indulge in any such airy nothings, regarding the support for their Eastern Pakistan to be constituted out of Bengal and Assam. That is why they are trying desperately to forge a pan-Islamic line between the Burmese and the Chinese Moslem groups and now that the Chinese Moslems have promised them help after the war on the Eastern side, they may very well build castles in the air hoping thereby to frighten the Hindus in the East, too. If that be so, I can only remind them that the Hindus have also some trump cards in their hand. If it is feasible for the Indian Moslems to have a united Chinese Moslem front on the East, whether cultural or political, then it is at least as feasible, if not more, for the Hindus to have a united Hindu- Buddhist front from Jammu to Japan. Just as the frog cannot but remain a frog even if she jumps into the sea, so also the hopeless Indian Moslem minority can never grow into a dominating majority, even if Mr. Woo woos them with all the Chinese Moslems. —Mahratta, 29-5-42 ❑

Gandhi-Jinnah Negotiations (September 29, 1944) Emphasising that the proposal to vivisect India had assumed ‘a far more dangerous aspect today when the Gandhi-Jinnah talks are adjourned than it had on the day when the talks began’, Mr. V.D. Savarkar, President of the Hindu Mahasabha, in a statement, appeals to all those opposed to the partitioning of the country to support the Akhand Hindusthan Leaders’ Conference to be held at Delhi on October 7 and 8. Mr. Savarkar says: Mr. Jinnah demands vivisection of India even more relentlessly than before. Gandhiji wants to placate that intolerable demand even more relentlessly than before. The Moslems are openly claiming that they have nothing to do with the so-called Indian nation, that they are a different nation by themselves and that they want to cut off as many provinces of India as possible, utilise them as a territorial base to rear up an anti-Hindu Moslem state quite independent of any central Indian Government. Gandhiji, who confidently asserts in getting the Congress to support him, is ready to hand over, at any rate, four frontier provinces, which form the natural and invulnerable Himalayan borderline of our Motherland, to the Moslems for the above treacherous objective, for the mere asking of it without firing a shot. The tragedy of it all is that the ‘Indian National Congress’, which was ushered into existence to consolidate the Indian nation, has itself betrayed its sole mission. The very justification of its existence and falling a victim to the pseudo-nationalistic malady, had dealt the unkindest cut of all at the ‘Indian national integrity. The Indian National Congress itself is indulging in treacherous conspiracies to vivisect the oneness of that Indian nation so as to wipe out the very name of India from the map of the world. When Gandhiji started from Wardha by ‘the Pakistani train’ almost in a triumphal mood, he left orders behind to the country or to the Congress at any rate to keep peace, to have complete confidence in him and not to criticise the Gandhi-Rajaji proposal while his talks with Jinnah continued to find out a way to Hindu-Moslem unity on the basis of handing over to them some of the holiest and cherished parts of India and acknowledging their right to form a separate and sovereign state there. This trick, in fact, was so transparent that it was not likely to dupe any sensible politician. What reliance could there be on the assurance of a

leader like Gandhiji, who only the other day, asserted that vivisection was a sin and is today supporting Rajaji’s Pakistani proposals. Only those Congressites and some other leaders among the Hindus, who had grown in the habit of accepting any Gandhist ‘mumbo-jumbo’ as a gospel truth, obeyed those orders and tried their best to stand tongue-tied. Not only that, but they wanted to hush-hush even the Hindu Sanghatanists and other far- sighted politicians, who refused to be duped by that flimsy political trick and refused to acquiesce in such a guilty silence. Whirlwind of protest The whirlwind of protest raised by the indignant people, the forest of black flags and picketings, through which that triumphal Pakistani train had to pass crestfallen from Poona to Panchagani, Panchagani to Wardha and Wardha to Bombay, the trenchant statements issued by some of our foremost leaders in the country condemning the treacherous proposal, those thousands of meetings and signed protests wherein millions of Indian citizens led by the Hindu Sanghatanists pledged themselves to stand by the integrity of their Motherland and to resist the Pakistani proposals, defeated the design of the Gandhist group to lull the whole country into a false sense of security, and by demonstrating the fact that there was a country-wide challenge thrown to them, made it impossible for Gandhiji and others of his persuasions to claim the leadership of the whole country in general and of the Hindus in particular. It was to organise this whirlwind of protest against these sinful designs to break up the integrity of Hindusthan, as a nation and a state, and to consolidate all those leaders and citizens who had thus protested publicly against the Pakistani proposal that the Akhand Hindusthan Leaders’ Conference was convened to meet at Delhi on October 7 and 8. It was supported by hundreds of prominent leaders from all parts of India including the accredited representatives of the Sanghatanists, Sikhs, Arya Samajists and other Hindu Sanghatanist organisations, as well as by several leaders of note in their personal capacity. This conference had, from its very inception, almost nothing to do, to the beginning or ending of the Gandhi- Jinnah talks. It is an independent effort to consolidate those who stand by the integrity of India into a common front. Many of those Congressites and others who had secret sympathy with Gandhiji’s unholy mission either through conviction or want of foresight, tried their best to frustrate the efforts of holding such an Akhand Hindusthan Leaders’ Conference.

Gandhi-Jinnah talks were over simply because Gandhiji said: “Let no one speak against the Gandhi-Rajaji proposal till we are trying to arrive at a compromise with brother Jinnah!” But the organisers of the Akhand Hindusthan Leaders’ Conference did not yield to these efforts simply because the very starting point of those Gandhi-Jinnah talks was the acceptance in this or that form of the treacherous concession of Pakistan. It was impossible, as the Rt. Hon. Shreenivasa Shastriji said, for a genuine Indian nationalist to remain tongue-tied while the integrity of our Motherland and hoty land was being openly sold at auction. Political Matricide Even now that the Gandhi-Jinnah talks are over for the time being, none should overlook the point that Gandhiji had made it quite clear that they are only adjourned ‘sine die.’ Are we also going to remain tongue-tied without raising a finger in defence of the integrity of our nation or without uttering a single word of protest against the political matricide and keep looking on it unconcerned ‘sine die’? I earnestly request those Congressites and other leaders who wanted to wait till the Gandhi-Jinnah talks were over but were in their heart of hearts against the Pakistani proposal, to take courage in both hands to conquer their own inferiority complex and come forward to condemn all further efforts to vivisect India and attend the Akhand Hindusthan Leaders’ Conference to consolidate the anti-Pakistan front. They would doubtlessly be welcomed in the conference by each and every one who had consented to attend it. But even if some of those do not find themselves to do so, the Akhand Hindusthan Leader’s Conference will meet at Delhi irrevocably on 7th and 8th of October. The prominent leaders of our Sikh brotherhood, the Mahantas of different Mathas and Ashramas, His Holiness Shankaracharya of Puri, the Sanatani, the Arya Sanghatanist leaders and their personalities occupying prominent position in the social and political life of the country, have already consented to attend the conference. A hope that specially in view of the adjournment of the Gandhi-Jinnah talks and the consequent commitment, which Gandhiji and almost all the Congressite press, and the fact that the Congressite following has now made to accept this or that proposal to vivisect India, it is all the more urgent to consolidate the anti-vivisection party. As a first step towards it, the genuine

national leaders all over India will not fail to join the Akhand Hindusthan Leaders' Conference at Delhi.