The Betrayers Of Savarkar

Warning: speculation ahead

In searching for a plot for India House, I needed villains. Well, I mean, the British empire is as villainous as can get, and I think there’s a perfectly evil guy in Lord William-Hutt Curzon Wyllie, who was the head of the India Office, and the nemesis of Indian revolutionaries in London. But, he is assassinated midway through the plot, and the rest of the plot is about the might of the British empire coming down on the revolutionaries.

The gates of the fortress are often opened from within when we lose, in most of Indian history. This episode was no different. It took a lot for the British to piece together a connection to Savarkar from the murder of Magistrate Jackson, and the case clicked into place only when his associates turned approver. Here, I try to piece together what happened, and the variety of ways in which Savarkar was betrayed.

Basic Facts

For those just tuning in, here’s a short summary of the episode of history I’m fictionalizing. Skip ahead to the next section if you’re already familiar.

Vinayak Savarkar, already well-known as an anti-British student organizer, goes to London on a scholarship in 1906. He lives in India House, a boarding house for Indian students. He quickly becomes a thorn in the side of Lord Curzon-Wyllie, the head of the India Office in London, when he writes and publishes a book about the history of the 1857 War of Independence from the Indian perspective. As the India Office increasingly harasses him, he escalates his activities, going as far as to compile a Bomb Manual from exiled Russian revolutionaries, and disseminating them to India.

When the Anushilan Samiti in Bengal, led by Barin and Aurobindo Ghosh, fail in their attempt to assassinate Magistrate Kingsford, the bomb manual falls into the hands of the British. Parallelly, Vinayak’s brother Babarao is in Maharashtra disseminating the knowledge of the bomb manual in every village and town he can get to. When a highly placed Congress leader tips off the British to watch Babarao, the British put two and two together, and realize Vinayak in London is the source of the bombs manual.

Unable to get to Vinayak as England has more liberal laws, they arrest and imprison Babarao in the dreaded Cellular Jail. In retaliation, Madanlal Dhingra, Vinayak’s friend, assassinates Lord Curzon-Wyllie in the heart of London.

Vinayak is now considered the most dangerous man in the Empire, and they will leave no stone unturned to stop him. Meanwhile, assassinations escalate in India, conducted with guns that have been shipped from London, and the India Office, with Sidney Rowlatt and Winston Churchill at the helm, are determined more than ever to throw the book at Vinayak, resorting to illegal arrests and torture to get his associates to turn approver.

Some of them do, which has him sentenced to fifty years of Sazaa-e-Kalapani - two life sentences in the dreaded island prison. But his loyalists have escaped to Paris and the French enclave of Pondicherry, and are continuing his campaign of targeted assassinations, which makes Vinayak hopeful that the British empire won’t be able to hold on to India for fifty years.

In real life, Vinayak returns to the mainland in 11 years, and the Cellular Jail is shut down for human rights violations shortly thereafter. The British empire, as he rightly predicted, does not last for fifty years. Vinayak passes away peacefully in 1962, well into his 80s, after voluntarily giving up food and drink after his wife’s death from illness.

The Appointed Spies

Savarkar was watched in London from the moment he set foot there. The inmates of India House were followed wherever they went, both to understand what they were doing, and to make it a pain point so no Indian students in London associated with them. But they couldn’t actually get their men into India House because they were too conspicuous.

In the aftermath of the bomb manual being discovered in Bengal though, they decided extreme measures had to be taken. They sent a government clerk and translator from Bombay to join India House and report from there, but he got found out quick, and Savarkar actually would write his reports for him to send to the India Office.

However, they had an ace up their sleeve - another spy called Sukhsagar Dutt, who was never found out until the end. What’s not clear here is who this name referred to. There were two of them associated with India House. One of them was the brother of Ulhaskar Dutt, who had made bombs using the bomb manual, and was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to several years in the Cellular Jail. Sukhsagar is described by contemporaneous accounts as being cynical about revolutionary activities and being against organized violence. He was shipped off to London by his parents because they didn’t want their other son too to be swept up in revolutionary thought and end up imprisoned or dead. So it could likely be the same person, being convinced to do this to stop future violence.

The Approvers

There were a handful of men who turned approver, i.e. testified against Savarkar in court.

The first of these is Harishchandra Koregaonkar. He was quite a close associate of Savarkar. When Madanlal Dhingra went to assassinate Sir Curzon-Wyllie, Koregaonkar went with him to ensure he got the job done and didn’t quit out of nerves. He went back to India with a package of guns, bullets and bomb manuals in a false-bottomed bag. He was caught and made to turn approver. I haven’t been able to find his testimony, but it seems like his testimony was about shipping guns to India than about Savarkar’s masterminding of Curzon-Wyllie’s assassination.

The second is Chanjeri Ramarao. He was a policeman in Madras Presidency, and went to study sanitation engineering or something like that so he could come back to India and switch to a higher paying job in the British Indian administration. In London, he met VVS Aiyar, a close associate of Savarkar, and fell in with the revolutionary cause. He, like Koregaonkar, came back to India with a cache of guns, bullets and incendiary writing, and was apprehended right at the port. He likely suffered more in prison due to having been a policeman himself. He had a wife and several children, and had had quite a comfortable life prior, and was expecting nothing short of that in the future, so he turned approver. He testifies that he had been forced to join in with Savarkar and execute his commands on penalty of death. In his memoir, Savarkar rubbishes this and says his story shouldn’t be told taking court testimony as fact, because such confessions were extracted under duress where people were saying whatever they could to not get a prison term themselves.

Another is Ganu Vaidya, the armorer of Nashik, who was one of the conspirators behind Anantlaxman Kanhere’s assasination of Magistrate Jackson, and he testified that the guns came from London.

But the biggest, most confusing betrayal to me is that of Chaturbhuj Jhaveribai Amin Patidar, the chef at India House. It is clear that he went to India in 1908, before the arrest of Babarao Savarkar, with a cache of guns. The members of Abhinav Bharat in Bombay were all under watch, so it took him some time to find out who to hand over the guns to, but he did eventually. Shortly after, he was back in London. Babarao Savarkar was very insistent that guns don’t reach Nashik, because he was being watched intently, but the guns did end up in Nashik, leading to a whole chain of events that ended with both brothers in the Cellular Jail.

Chaturbhuj’s testimony is what does Savarkar in finally. But I am not able to find much information about how and why he was suspected and arrested.

It is mentioned in various sources that he had a brother Govind Amin, who was in Paris with other revolutionaries, trying to learn other bombmaking techniques and establishing safe houses for bombmaking in Paris. When this is the case, how does one betray a cause that has his own brother in it?

I found one source though, that’s talking about Govind Amin. It’s a page of the Indian Sociologist from 1912, which says Govind Amin committed suicide after absconding with jewels worth millions.

I do know in Paris there was the moneybags of the revolutionaries, Sardarsinh Rana, also a Gujarati, who was known as the “pearl prince”. I wonder if that was who was paying Govind to courier gems. I wonder honestly why he decided to flee and then end his life. Was it even a suicide? I imagine people don’t take gently to having their trust broken, especially not when millions are at stake.

That said, if Chaturbhuj turned approver in 1910, how is Govind still faithfully working with the revolutionaries until 1912? Was Chaturbhuj forced to turn approver with torture? Seems likely. I think reading his testimony would clear up everything for me - the circumstances of his arrest, whether he willingly testified, and what came of him later.

And now for some murky speculation…

In his first volume on Savarkar, Vikram Sampath writes:

Moghe was shocked to find a telegram from Lord Morley to Lord Minto that referred to a certain ‘G.K.’ who had informed him that given the proximity between Tilak and the Savarkar brothers and Bapat, a close watch on them was necessary. Given that Gopalkrishna Gokhale was then touring London and was regularly meeting Lord Morley, they deduced that the mysterious ‘G.K.’ was none other than him and that he was passing on information about the revolutionaries to the British. Coincidentally, a few days after this, the police instituted a regular surveillance on Babarao.

Gopalkrishna Gokhale was a ‘moderate’ (i.e. loyal to the British empire) leader of the Indian National Congress. He was quite familiar with the Savarkar brothers. Tilak mentioned here is Balgangadhar Tilak, who was an ‘extremist’ (i.e. wanted the British out of India) leader of the Congress, was also the Savarkars’ mentor, and it was he, in fact, who recommended Vinayak for his London scholarship. The idea, it seems to have been, was for Vinayak to get a good education and grooming, which he would then use to become a leader in the Congress. On similar lines, Bipin Pal, another ‘extremist’ leader was grooming Chittaranjan Das and Aurobindo Ghosh. The Congress, which had started as a toothless safety valve for educated Indians, was soon becoming a vociferous voice for Indian independence. In the 1907 session of the Congress, the ‘moderates’ overrode Tilak and pushed their own candidate to be the president of the Congress, which led to widespread physical violence at the session.

Gokhale and his ilk here felt threatened by the rising influence of Tilak, Pal and Lala Lajpati Rai. He needn’t have worried much; Bipin Pal was also questioned in connection with the Kingsford bombing, Aurobindo Ghosh was jailed before the approvers in his case were killed, and on release, he went to Pondicherry and took to spirituality, and after this episode, Tilak was sent away to Mandalay Prison, and the Savarkar brothers to Cellular Jail. A few short years later, in 1916, Gokhale introduced his mentee to the Congress, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

So, irrespective of whether GK was indeed Gopalkrishna Gokhale, the biggest gainer from this tip has been Gopalkrishna Gokhale.

Some even more murky speculation…

David Garnett was a British author and publisher. When he was in his late teens, he came across Savarkar. Being from a family with an anarchist bent, he was immediately drawn to the Indian revolutionaries. When Savarkar was imprisoned, David used his connections with the Irish revolutionary group, Sinn Fein, to organize an escape plan, where a couple of toughs from Sinn Fein would waylay his guards when he was being taken to court, and then spirit him away to the coast, where a waiting boat would take him to safety in France.

To execute on this, Savarkar asked David to coordinate with one of his associates, known only as ‘AA’ in David’s memoirs.

AA stalled on arranging the boat, so David did it himself. When David returned from arranging for the boat, David’s father showed up, forcing him to abandon his role, and AA didn’t take it up.

Later, Savarkar did escape quite dramatically when the ship deporting him to India was anchored off the coast of Marseilles, but that attempt was foiled leading to a year-long international incident that was argued about at The Hague by Karl Marx’s grandson. David asserts that it was quite likely AA who derailed the plans to meet Savarkar at the coast and take him to get asylum.

Here’s the full account. I also have this unabridged in David Garnett’s memoir The Golden Echo.

David Garnett says

Savarkar was a good swimmer and reached land just before the boat, but he was exhausted. He had asked for a car to be waiting, but A.A. had once again disobeyed orders and there was no help at hand.

WOW.

So who WAS this AA?

Let’s see how David describes him. David Garnett comes off as racist and prone to self-aggrandization, but I have no reason to believe he would lie or make up this tale of treachery.

This is his first impression

One older man near me was bearded and wore a fez;

And then

After that, the man in the fez came up and with a teasing look at me insisted on putting on a record of The Cock of the North “as a compliment to our guest, who must want to hear some real music and can’t be expected to enjoy our barbarous tunes.” This was tiresome of him, but I said nothing. The man in the fez---I learned at his name was A.A.---then put on a record of Harry Lauder.

Where is AA from?

He began making personal remarks of a joking kind about my youth and my looks, which embarrassed and annoyed me, and I was uncertain for a moment or two how I should take them. Without my realizing it, all the Indians were listening to us. By strange chance my reading of Indian literature enabled me suddenly to turn the tables. Simply because he was wearing a fez, I guessed he was different from the others, and I suddenly asked him what race he belonged to. He replied that he was a Tamil.

“That explains why I have been so puzzled by you,” I relied. “For the Tamils, you know, are the descendants of Hanuman, the divine monkey who helped Ram to conquer India and I can tell your monkey origin in the witty remarks you are making at my expense, which are such a contrast to the greetings I have received from everyone else.”

This produced roars of laughter on all sides and I was hence forward safe from A.A.

Like I said, David Garnett comes off as racist, superior and ignorant, but that’s a post for a different day.

I don’t recall the details, but at exactly this time, Indians were quite fascinated by Turkey for some reason, the details of which I’d have to refer to another book, but essentially, wearing a Fez to show solidarity with the Turkish, like how some folks today have Ukrainian flags on their social media, was a thing.

My first thought was that AA was VVS Aiyar. The fez might not check out with him unless he saw solidarity with the Turksbut, but the beard definitely did. And he was Tamil. But he also was very passionate about the Kamba Ramayanam, and he definitely would have pushed back on inaccuracies in what David Garnett said. Aiyar was present in France when Savarkar escaped. He also made it safely through guile to get to Pondicherry. He went on to engineer more political assassinations from there, but while his associates were jailed, he never was, which was suspicious. He led most of his life under British surveillance. He also lost his child and his mother due to second order effects of him being harassed by the officials, so I strongly doubt he’d turn.

Another possibility (speculated in the above link) is that AA is Asaf Ali, who was a famous politician in independent India, and also famously argued the case of the INA soldiers accused of treason. The fez checks out. He also talks in his memoir about the environment at India House being “too politically charged”. What doesn’t check out though is that he came from Delhi, and he was not Tamil. It’s however possible that he was messing with the ignorant white boy, especially given the belligerent nature of their interaction here.

But the suspicious thing really is he had a very very good career both in British India as well as post-independence. He was quite close to Nehru and was ambassador to various countries. Very few revolutionaries had a good career in independent India, especially not with the government. Most who had given in with the revolutionaries saw generations of their descendants live in poverty, while the collaborator class wildly succeeded. It’s possible Asaf Ali was a collaborator. If he was associated with India House at one point and still allowed to succeed, my feeling is he must have done something to convince them that he was trustworthy.

I’m also not sure being a lawyer for the INA means much, because even Nehru was one of the lawyers for the INA. I suppose the Congress jumped in on it to ride the popular pro-INA wave which would help them in the elections. Nehru famously rewarded one of the men who misappropriated the INA’s treasure, while INA soldiers and the navy sailors who mutinied in 1946 didn’t get recognition or a pension. The Congress did not bother taking up political leadership of the mutineers and negotiating with the British either, so there’s no need to assume that anyone who was successful politically after 1947 stood with the revolutionaries in spirit, even if they might have done so in deed at one point or another.

Vikram Sampath in his book is not very vocal about the events that led to Savarkar’s botched escape attempt, so I don’t have any official source on asserting the identity of AA. It’s possible there were others in India House or in London at the time with the same initials, but I haven’t come across any.

Conclusion about the collaborator class

It’s kinda hard to hate too much on those that turned approver. It’s like in the movie No One Killed Jessica where the actor playing Shayan Munshi says “On the one hand, you have a pistol to your head, and on the other, you have a suitcase full of money”.

We must remember no one cared for the human rights of Indians. There were Mengle-esque experiments conducted on the prisoners in Cellular Jail and Viper Island, and they went on for decades before they were shut down. The penal code in India was structured so as to brook no opposition to the colonizer. Those who ended up in prison had zero human rights, even more so those jailed under sedition or Waging War Against King And Crown. It was not surprising that so many cracked.

Also there was significant moral confusion about British rule. In several princely states, the princes couldn’t harbor anti-British sentiment, so even those not living under direct British rule couldn’t speak out against them. If your king and queen are seen supporting the British quite publicly, it becomes difficult to oppose the British in your mind. As for those in the presidencies, there was still an active memory of war and instability and people just wanted to settle down in peace and improve their personal standing after centuries of famine and oppression. At least the British weren’t taking away their daughters on their wedding day. Any time there was ideological clarity about opposing the British, violent revolt would break out and be even more violently crushed. Ideological clarity got muddied.

Even so, many hundreds and thousands of men and women stood up everyday against British rule, putting at risk their life, limb, and financial stability. Moral clarity was definitely possible even if not yet incredibly common.

I reserve my harshest criticism though for highly educated folks who were brainwashed into believing that you could ask the British nicely to go away and they would. Not only did they believe it, but when faced with some colossal evidence to the contrary, they went on to violently ruin the lives of those who actually did oppose the British, and then once in power, they spread the myth of peacefully attaining independence. They and their descendants however went on to lead really cushy lives, holding on to power for generations.

AA, whoever he was, was definitely part of that class. I really hope his conscience pricked him till his dying day, and then some.