Hence, even more than five decades after his death, Savarkar intrudes contemporary political debates like a few characters of our recent past have. C… - Vikram Sampath

What is noteworthy is that unlike in the past decades, there is at least space for a debate and discussion around Savarkar to happen in our public realm now. The persona-non-grata that he had become and the heavy price that anyone invoking his name with any modicum of positivity had to bear, are luckily not as pronounced. The idea of these two volumes is not to create an army of Savarkar fans who have an answer to every allegation hurled against him by any loony or vested quarter. I myself disagree vastly with several of his stances and I am deeply critical of his actions at various stages of his life, as seen from the happy comfort of a retrospective review. One may hate or love him as much as one might want. But then to blackout even a discussion and debate around him, based on facts and documents, rather than rhetoric and politics (as has been the case till now) is deeply prejudicial to the tenets of liberalism and democracy, where every opposing view needs to find a platform. In his own life, Savarkar welcomed those who were opposed to his ideas and even kept a record of critical assessments of him by the press or his contemporaries.

Right from his childhood, Vinayak found the caste system that plagued Hindu society reprehensible. In his own little way he broke these barriers. Despite being an upper-caste Brahmin, and a landlord at that, all his childhood friends were from poor backgrounds and belonged to the supposed lower castes.

Another cellar was found in the mosque, which seemed much like the remains of an old temple. But the team had simply not anticipated what they were going to discover next. It was going to shake up the entire matter and create a nationwide sensation. As the day was drawing to a close the team reached the wazu khana, which was situated on the eastern side of the mosque. The wazu khana is an ablution pond where worshippers wash themselves and rinse their mouths before praying at the mosque. The plaintiff advocates noticed a well-like structure in the middle of the wazu khana. The wazu khana had been covered from all four sides by a nine-inch wall. When they demanded that the water levels there be reduced so that it could be inspected from inside, the mosque officials and the defendant side flew into fits of rage. ‘Now don’t overdo things. Enough is enough, we will not comply to everything that you ask us to do. We have cooperated enough and thus far, and no further’, they screamed. ‘It became so clear to everyone,’ Hari Shankar Jain says with a mysterious smile, ‘that there was something there that they wished to hide. Else, till now, they had been grudgingly opening up cellar rooms and even the central premises. But it was clear as broad daylight that on our making this demand, some raw nerve had been touched.’