Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
May 28, 2021 13 tweets 6 min read Read on X
"Asaf Ali had described his old India House comrade Savarkar as someone who lived in the spirit of Mazzini and Shivaji, which was apt considering the fact that the Italian revolutionary and the great Maratha king were his political heroes."
"After Savarkar died, Hiren Mukherjee of the Communist Party of India stood up in the Lok Sabha to demand that parliament pay homage to [him].

Dange described him as a great anti-imperialist revolutionary while Indira Gandhi said Savarkar was a byword in daring and patriotism."
"His final release was widely welcomed. There was a lot of interest about his next move.

Two young socialist leaders, SM Joshi and Achyut Patwardhan, who would later become heroes of the 1942 movement, went to Ratnagiri to persuade Savarkar to join the Congress Socialist Party."
"There was Comrade M. N. Roy, who had once worked with Lenin in Moscow ... Khurshed F. Nariman, the lawyer who was recently the Congress mayor of Bombay, and a steadfast admirer of Savarkar [and] Lalji Pendse, the Marxist intellectual and independent trade union leader."
"Savarkar was famously galvanised by the example set by Joseph Mazzini, the revolutionary who helped integrate Italy into a united nation state.

He was also an admirer of Kemal Ataturk, calling on Indian Muslims to learn from the Turkish example, and join the modern world ..."
"Another improbable person he had a high regard for was Lenin.

Narayan Sadashiv Bapat, a member of Savarkar’s inner circle at Ratnagiri,who later became a Royist,wrote how Savarkar would urge colleagues to read Lenin.

Some lectures on Lenin were given by a young Nathuram Godse"
"[He] argued in the opening pages of 'Hindu Pad Padshahi' that it is the task of modern societies to overcome the strife of the past.

... added that people should read history not to perpetuate the old strife but to seek a way out of it by identifying the causes of such strife."
"A Hindu Nation is in no way inconsistent with the development of a common Indian Nation...in which all races and religions, castes and creeds, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians, could be harmoniously welded together into a political State on terms of perfect equality.”
"Such a warm reception for Savarkar from across the political spectrum seems almost unbelievable today.

The man who even his political rivals once respected has thus been lost in a fog of either hagiography or demonisation."

Great find, @akshayalladi!

swarajyamag.com/ideas/time-for…
An essential component of any revolutionary anti-colonial or anti-imperial movement is that national liberation and integration come first.

It is only upon that foundation that the institutions of monarchy or socialism or liberal democracy can be built.

Any country that experiences foreign tyranny, be it medieval Turkocracy or modern Western colonialism, experiences a historical trauma - their culture degraded, knowledge destroyed, people enslaved.

The cure is a unifying ideology of national liberation.

The left-right, libertarian-authoritarian model is dead, because it never really existed outside the Anglosphere.

Welcome to the real world.

Instead of labelling historical figures based on juvenile American political culture, understand their ideas and take them forward today.
It is reductionist to simplify complex historical personalities to fit contemporary political debates and labels. It only prevents us from understanding the past.

That holds true across cultures, continents, and centuries, be it Saladin, Garibaldi, Bismarck, or Haile Selassie.

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More from @ruchirsharma_1

May 15
Cargo cult: Why America cannot have nice things

Every society must cross its river of denial and pain to reach the shores of modernity. America is no exception.

Biden’s saving grace is that most Americans do not know that they don’t have nice things.

asiatimes.com/2024/05/cargo-…
Few Americans lament the lack of high-speed rail. How can you miss what you never possessed?

If you’ve never experienced 300 Mbps download speeds,you won’t question AT&T marketing 100 Mbps as 5G.

If every student goes $40,000 into debt,it’s not considered a burden on the young.
The US successfully twisted Japan’s arm in the 1990s, forcing them to build local factories. China forced all multinationals to manufacture domestically through local JVs. The US, however, might not be able to pull off something similar this time around.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 21
Just weeks after the import policy was introduced, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, during an August 26 meeting, told Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal privately that Washington wants New Delhi to "rescind the requirement", as per a USTR briefing paper.

theweek.in/news/biz-tech/…
Travis Coberly, a US diplomat for trade in New Delhi, reportedly told his US colleagues that India's IT ministry "understands they (India) screwed up. They admitted as much. American companies here have been hammering them about this," he wrote, according to the news agency.
However, Indian officials, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Reuters that the Centre did not reverse its policy because of US pressure but rather made the decision after realising that local manufacturing of laptops and other devices was not significant currently.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 31, 2023
Friedman has accidentally answered the question 'why do Indians support 🇷🇺 or 🇮🇱 online?'

It is a form of bitter self-critique.

Living in a soft state that has, in exchange for 'good boy points', consistently refused to stand up for them, people live vicariously through others. Image
“I myself pressed at that time for immediate visible retaliation” Shivshankar Menon wrote.

“But on sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert and other means was the right one for that time and place.”
Image
Chief among the reasons, Menon said, was that any military response would have quickly obscured just how outrageous and terrible the raid on Indian civilians and tourists was; “the fact of a terrorist attack from Pakistan on India with official involvement on the Pakistan side” would have been lost.
Image
Read 7 tweets
Jun 5, 2023
Germany: Leipzig forbids fresh far-left demonstration after 2 nights of unrest:

Police arrested nearly 30 people during the weekend protests, which followed the conviction of a left-wing activist for physically attacking neo-Nazis.

dw.com/en/leipzig-for…
The underpinning legal rationale for the decision, they said, was a broader restriction for any protests in the city this weekend connected to the conviction earlier in the week of left-wing activist Lina E. for her part in violent physical assaults on neo-Nazis.
On Saturday, around 1,500 people turned up to the demonstration, even though several courts had refused to authorize it. Police first tried to accommodate the protest, but broke it up when officers came under attack.
Read 7 tweets
Jun 4, 2023
New York traffic cop sues city over ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ cards issued to NYPD friends and family:

Mathew Bianchi claims superiors retaliated against him for writing tickets for people holding ‘corrupt’ courtesy cards.

theguardian.com/us-news/2023/j…
Bianchi was reprimanded for writing a ticket to a relative or parent of an officer; in others, his commanding officer reviewed body-camera footage to see if he was giving motorists with cards a “hard time”.
Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 3, 2023
Indonesia proposes demilitarised zone,UN referendum for Ukraine peace plan:

Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto proposed a multi-point plan including a ceasefire and establishing a demilitarised zone by withdrawing 15 km from each party's forward position.

reuters.com/world/indonesi…
The demilitarised zone should be observed and monitored by a peacekeeping force deployed by the UN, he said, adding that a UN referendum should be held "to ascertain objectively the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants of the various disputed areas".
Indonesia's proposal follows President Joko Widodo's visit last year to Moscow and Kyiv, where he offered to play peacebroker between their leaders and rekindle peace talks. He was chairman of the G20 group of major economies at the time.
Read 5 tweets

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