Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and … - Vikram Sampath

I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian’s enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle.... A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. ...The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society.

The edifice of national unity and social cohesion cannot stand on the shaky and false foundations of whitewashed history.

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.’