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The continuing campaign to caricature Vinayak Damodar Savarkar says rather more about the impoverishment of India’s political discourse than it does about Savarkar himself. A recent viral video mocking him proffers the familiar spectacle of those who believe that reducing a complex historical figure to a punchline constitutes serious political argument. The most revealing aspect of the latest mockery is its casualness. It treats the man as though he were merely a political opponent from...

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The continuing campaign to caricature Vinayak Damodar Savarkar says rather more about the impoverishment of India’s political discourse than it does about Savarkar himself. A recent viral video mocking him proffers the familiar spectacle of those who believe that reducing a complex historical figure to a punchline constitutes serious political argument. The most revealing aspect of the latest mockery is its casualness. It treats the man as though he were merely a political opponent from yesterday, rather than a revolutionary who spent years confronting the British Raj and endured the extraordinary brutality of Cellular Jail in the Andamans. The conditions of Kala Pani were marked by punishing isolation, hard labour, oil grinding and coir pounding, which were instruments of punishment designed to break prisoners physically and psychologically. The argument over his mercy petitions illustrates precisely this problem. Critics cite them as proof of capitulation while Savarkar’s defenders point to the circumstances in which they were written and reject the conclusion that they erase his revolutionary record. But even more telling is the erasure of the human cost borne by Savarkar and his family. In 1909, while he was in London, his four-year-old son Prabhakar died of smallpox. His brother Baburao was imprisoned and the family was subjected to severe persecution. Savarkar could not simply return home without exposing himself to arrest. At Brighton, amid this personal catastrophe and exile, he composed Sagara Pran Talamalala, a cry of longing for his motherland. One need not share Savarkar’s politics to recognise the human tragedy behind it. There is also a delicious irony in the selective memory surrounding him. India itself has never treated Savarkar as an uncomplicated historical footnote. It was the government headed by Congress scion Rahul Gandhi’s own grandmother - Indira Gandhi – that had issued a commemorative stamp bearing his portrait and the Cellular Jail. The country’s historical establishment has, at different times, recognised his place in the freedom struggle even while disagreeing profoundly with his politics. But today’s political class appears less interested in such complexity. Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders have repeatedly used Savarkar as a rhetorical punching bag, apparently calculating that attacking him is an easy way to attack the political tradition they oppose. A democracy does not become more liberal by making contempt its substitute for history. Savarkar does not need protection from criticism. It is Indian history that needs protection from intellectual laziness. The man can be debated and his ideas challenged. But what should not pass for political courage is the cheap denigration of someone like Savarkar, whose life was marked by sacrifice, imprisonment and extraordinary historical consequence unimaginable to his detractors. In fact, the real weakness of Savarkar’s detractors is not that they criticise him. It is that, so often, they seem incapable of doing anything more serious.

Fragile Frontiers

Correspondent

Jul 1

2 min read

The flash floods tearing through Arunachal Pradesh and adjoining Assam were an unsettling demonstration of how climate change, ecological degradation and unwise development are converging to create disasters of startling speed and scale. The Arunachal Pradesh floods are a glimpse of a broader environmental future in which extreme weather collides with weakened ecosystems to magnify human and economic losses.

Strangely, much of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have experienced a rainfall deficit during the first three weeks of the monsoon. Yet within a matter of hours, torrential rainfall transformed ordinarily placid streams into destructive torrents. While the Siang River itself remained relatively restrained, a network of smaller rivers like the Tolon Korong, Sibo, Simen and others overwhelmed villages, destroyed paddy fields and cut off entire communities.

Generally, India’s flood discourse has focused overwhelmingly on its great rivers and reservoirs. Yet the most immediate danger increasingly lies elsewhere, in the countless small Himalayan catchments whose steep gradients and fragile geology are converting rainfall into devastating flash floods. Unlike the Brahmaputra, these rivers possess neither the floodplains nor the storage capacity to moderate sudden surges. Once intense rainfall strikes the eastern Himalayan foothills, water descends with astonishing speed, carrying enormous quantities of sediment, boulders and uprooted trees.

Global warming does not necessarily produce longer monsoons; it produces more erratic ones. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and releases it in shorter, more violent bursts. The result is a paradox that India is witnessing with increasing frequency: weeks of deficient rainfall punctuated by cloudburst-like downpours capable of delivering an entire month's precipitation in a single day.

Adding to this, human activity has amplified every inherent vulnerability. Indiscriminate extraction of sand, pebbles and boulders has altered river channels and destabilised banks. Deforestation and hill-cutting have weakened already fragile slopes composed of young sedimentary rocks. Landslides inject massive volumes of debris into rivers, temporarily damming them before catastrophic breaches unleash fresh surges downstream.

The floods should also revive an uncomfortable debate about the rush towards large hydroelectric projects in one of the world’s youngest and most unstable mountain systems. Arunachal Pradesh’s enormous hydropower potential has long tempted policymakers. Yet the eastern Himalaya are geologically restless, highly seismic and increasingly exposed to extreme weather.

Development divorced from ecological realities ultimately defeats itself. The lesson extends beyond the Northeast. Across India, environmental governance remains curiously fragmented. Climate policy sits in one ministry, river management in another, disaster response in a third and infrastructure planning somewhere else entirely. Rivers, however, recognise no bureaucratic boundaries. Neither do floods. Integrated watershed management, scientific land-use planning, better rainfall forecasting, restrictions on destructive riverbed mining and climate-resilient infrastructure are no longer desirable reforms but necessities.

India has long treated floods as seasonal inconveniences. They are now ominous warnings from a climate system growing increasingly volatile and landscapes made dangerously fragile by human intervention.

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