Thread by @VaibhavP21

What #Savarkar got was not a 'stipend' or 'pension,' as Congress alleged, but an allowance from the British Raj. Others who got such an allowance from the British Raj were the Bose brothers Subhas & Sarat Chandra, Mahatma Gandhi & so many other Indian freedom fighters. A small 🧵

https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1578654169338040321

When the #British imprisoned #Indians or held them as detenus or internees, usually in cases where there were no charges & no trials (as when Savarkar was interned in Ratnagiri from 1924 to 1937), they paid a monthly allowance to them for 'loss of income' so they (in terms of..

food etc) and/or their families could maintain themselves. Govt statue allowed them to have money from the public purse for this purpose. When the Raj, in the early 1930s, decided to drastically cut these allowances, Subhas Chandra Bose...

wrote from Europe (where he stayed for 3 yrs from 1933 to 1936) protesting against the cuts & discussing the issue. Here's his first letter which was published in The Guardian @guardian on 4 April 1933. 👇 The letter led to much debate & replies, in the course of which names...

of those getting allowances, those still not getting allowances and the merits/demerits of the issue were discussed in detail. Bose himself provided a lot of details, as can be seen here in another letter he wrote to the paper. 👇There were also...

some Britishers who supported his case & the case of #Indian prisoners, their families & their dependents during this debate, as this letter reveals. 👇 Neither Savarkar nor Gandhi nor Bose nor Bose's brother were 'traitors'. Unfortunately @RahulGandhi for political purposes...

is still going on & on about Savarkar in a bid to paint him as 'pro-British.' Rahul Gandhi is free to have fundamental political differences with Savarkar's ideology & to voice his opinions & his opposition to that ideology strongly, but I do wish he stopped spreading his..

(deliberately?) flawed understanding of Indian history & of #India's extraordinary fight for #freedom and all those who led that struggle. And Savarkar was certainly one of them, whether Rahul likes him or not
#Savarkar #Gandhi #SubhasChandraBose #Netaji @INCIndia #Indianhistory