Descendants of Tilak, Savarkar battle it out
MUMBAI: Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of India’s foremost freedom fighters, was an abiding influence on revolutionary-turned-hindutva ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
This Sunday, though, the descendants of Tilak and Savarkar will battle it out for control of the Swatantryaveer Savarkar Rashtriya Smarak or Swatantryaveer Savarkar National Memorial at Dadar in central Mumbai. The memorial is the nerve-centre of Savarkarites.
The memorial’s president has a one-year tenure. Its membership is limited to Savarkarites (applications are vetted by existing members, and only those that are loyal to Savarkar’s ideology are approved), and is controlled by 11 trustees, who are also part of a 21-member working committee. There are provisions to co-opt up to five members on the working committee.
Close to 400 members of the trust will vote by secret ballot on December 26. Deepak Tilak, the great-grandson of the Lokmanya, will fight for the president’s post; and Ranjit Savarkar, the grandson of Savarkar’s younger brother Dr Narayanrao aka Bal, and his associates, have fielded former state director general of police Praveen Dixit.
Located opposite Shivaji Park, the memorial is spread over 6,650 sq m (1.65 acres), of land. The land was granted by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in the early 1970s, and the first phase was thrown open in 1989, with the second phase inaugurated in 2003.
Deepak’s father Jayantrao Tilak became a Congress leader following a stint with the Hindu Mahasabha, a social organisation-turned-political-party that Savarkar headed between 1937 and 1943. It was under Savarakar that Hindu Mahasabha became became a staunch critic of the Congress party. Jayantarao was the chairman of the memorial from 1987 to 1996 and its president from 1996 to 2001. As a Congressman, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1968 to 1980, and was also chairman of
In 1905, Savarkar, then a student at the Fergusson College in Pune, organised a massive bonfire of imported clothes, with Tilak in attendance.
Tilak also recommended Savarkar to the revolutionary Shyamji Krishna Verma, enabling him to get a scholarship to study in London.
Savarkar would stay in the Kesari office guest house at Pune and his daughter Prabhat was married there in 1945.
Tilak’s other grandson GV Ketkar was also the editor of Mahratta and Kesari. Savarkar was arrested in connection with the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, but
the Maharashtra Legislative Council.
Deepak is the chancellor of the Tilak Maharashtra University and controls the Kesari newspaper, while his son Rohit is a Congress leader and had contested the assembly elections from Kasba Peth in Pune. Deepak said poor management has led to the memorial’s weak financial position. “The management of the Smarak is poor... its financial health has collapsed,” he said, adding that he had written to the members of the institution in the past about these issues. He said that Congress leaders had also played acquitted by special court. In 1964, presiding over a function to felicitate the accused who had been released from prison, Ketkar disclosed that for three months before Gandhi’s murder,
Nathuram Godse discussed these plans with him.
This led to an uproar and prompted the Centre to set up the Justice J.L. Kapoor commission. It would say that “all these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.” However, in 2018, the SC ruled that the finding of the commission did not interfere with the acquittal or overturn it.
a role in the development of the institution and had donated to it.
A trustee from 2004 to 2007, Deepak says he has promised to restore its glory, add more members and also complete work on the museum of armed revolutionaries, which he alleged is hanging fire for 20 years.
“Deepak Tilak has no moral right to contest as he kept mum when the Congress was defaming Savarkar,” said Ranjit, the current working president. He said the Tilak Smarak Mandir Trust controlled by him had given the Lokmanya Tilak award to Congress leaders such as Pranab Mukherjee and Sheila Dixit.