I wanted to end the day with a thread on Veer Savarkar.
Who exactly is Veer Savarkar? To be honest, I have had days when even I have doubted his credibility. Probably the most controversial and misunderstood figure in Indian history.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a poet. If you are a Marathi, you would have definitely come across at least one of his poems. I will add a link to my favourite poem of his at the end of this thread. Somewhere down the biased history we study, his poems were lost.

People only talk about the mercy petitions he wrote from the Andaman Jail. But much before that, Savarkar was the person who said that caste system is a societal evil and should be abolished completely. Savarkar created the vision of a Hindu Rashtra but ...

... never considered Hinduism as a religion. Instead, he preached Hinduism as a way of live. He always said that religion is a concept of the west and we can only progress once we accept our true identity, i.e accept Hinduism.

He never meant converting your religion from Islam and Christianity. He always believed that Christian and a Muslim is also a Hindu if he leads his life in peace and follows the same set of laws as a Hindu does. Basically, a uniform civil code.

Talking about his role in independence, Savarkar didn't pick up a gun. He used his pen as a weapon against the British. He went to study law in UK and spent his time in the Indian House along with other freedom fighters studying the ideas of Italian and French revolutionaries.

He was the first to recognise that 1857 mutiny was actually a war of Independence and wrote a book on it. That book actually served as a manifesto for people like Bhagat Singh and even Bose.

He was amongst the most wanted criminals in the British Raj and was given a strict punishment of two sentences of 25 years each in the Andaman jails. While in Jail, he saw the misery of his fellow prisoners. They were beaten and tortured.

Here comes the infamous petition. He understood that he can only contribute to the struggle once he is out from the prison. Hence, himself being a barrister, he wrote petitions for himself and his fellow jail mates, stating that even prisoners have certain rights.

Indian history has always been unkind to him and these petitions have been one of the major source for people who doesn't understand history to target the man. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a poet and his contribution to India was his biggest poem.

This is a link to one of my favourite Savarkar's poem

This is link to Vajpayee Ji's poem about Savarkar