New DelhiDecember 18, 2025 04:09 PM IST
First published on: Dec 18, 2025 at 04:09 PM IST
Last week, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat unveiled a statue of V D Savarkar in South Andaman.
Amid the continuing conflict between the ruling BJP and the Congress and other Opposition parties over the Hindutva icon, recently released documents from the Nehru Archive show that India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had advised President Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan against conferring the Bharat Ratna – the country’s highest civilian honour – on Savarkar.
The suggestion to award the Bharat Ratna to Savarkar came from the Punjab unit of the Hindu Mahasabha. Responding to Radhakrishnan’s letter from Dehradun in June 1963, Nehru wrote, “Your office has sent me a letter which I am returning. In this letter it is suggested that Bharat Ratna may be awarded to Shri Savarkar. Shri Savarkar has certainly played an important part in his early days in the freedom movement. But later he became a very controversial figure. I do not think it would be advisable to accept this suggestion made by the Punjab Hindu Mahasabha.”
Prior to this, Nehru had also written to the National Defence Academy (NDA), Khadakwasla against inviting Savarkar while supporting a proposal to dismantle the Cellular Jail in Andaman, where Savarkar had been imprisoned for several years.
On January 18, 1961, Nehru wrote to then Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon, stating: “I enclose a letter which I have received. You might find out if it is true that Shri V D Savarkar has been invited to visit the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla. If he has actually been invited and has accepted the invitation, then I think it will not be wise to withdraw the invitation at this stage. That will raise a controversy which is not desirable. It would probably have been better not to invite him or to encourage him in any special way. In case Savarkar has been invited and is going there, no particular fuss should be made about his visit and no great publicity given. He can be shown round. He is, I believe, very old, approaching 90.”
Documents reveal that after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, which led to several allegations against Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha, Nehru had told Radhakrishnan that Savarkar played a key role in India’s freedom struggle in his early days but later “became a controversial figure”.
While several of Nehru’s letters mention Savarkar, some of them are notable. In one such letter to J S Tilak, a Hindu Mahasabha MLA from Shivajinagar of the erstwhile Bombay state and editor of the Marathi daily “Kesari”, which was founded by his grandfather Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Nehru sought the junior Tilak’s intervention in dismantling the Cellular Jail. Tilak on January 8, 1961 had written to Nehru seeking to transform the jail into a memorial citing its links with Savarkar.
“I do not agree with you in your suggestion that this jail or any other jail should be kept intact as a memorial. Every jail in India has had distinguished Indians in it for considerable periods. Are we supposed to keep up all these jails then as some kind of memorials of past times? Only recently the Delhi District Jail, famous for many years because of the distinguished people who stayed there, was demolished,” Nehru responded on January 15, 1961.
However, later the Cellular Jail was declared a national memorial and it was inaugurated by the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai in February 1979.