00:00Dear viewers, here is something you don't see every day in Indian politics.
00:04A man files a criminal defamation case to protect his great-uncle's reputation.
00:09He takes the stand, he testifies, and then, under cross-examination,
00:13he confirms, on the record in a court of law,
00:17the exact thing that his grand-uncle's critics have been saying for decades.
00:21That's not a hypothetical.
00:22That's just what happened in a Pune MP MLA court.
00:26And it tells you something important.
00:28Not just about Savarkar, not just about Rahul Gandhi,
00:31but about what Indian political culture has quietly become.
00:35So what exactly happened?
00:36Why did Savarkar's grand-nephew accept that he indeed wrote 10 mercy petitions to the British?
00:43And why is Rahul Gandhi at the center of these revelations?
00:47Let's get into it.
00:48Hello, I'm Tejas and you're watching Honest Reek on Lokman Times.
00:51But before we start, you know the drill.
00:53Please subscribe to Lokman Times if you haven't already
00:55and press the bell icon to never miss another video.
00:57So Rahul Gandhi gave a speech in London in March 2023 at an overseas congress event.
01:03In that speech, he alleged, among other things,
01:06that Savarkar wrote in a book about beating up a Muslim man.
01:10Satyagi Savarkar, Savarkar's grand-nephew, says,
01:13that incident never happened.
01:15That passage doesn't exist in any book.
01:17He says Gandhi knew it was false and said it anyway,
01:21specifically to damage Savarkar's reputation and cause mental anguish to his family.
01:26So Satyagi filed a criminal defamation complaint under section 500 of the IPC.
01:30Even though the speech was delivered in England,
01:34he argued that defamation occurred in Pune because the remarks were watched and circulated across India
01:40and he submitted news reports and a YouTube link of the speech as evidence.
01:45The case is now being heard by special judge Amul Shinde in Pune.
01:48Gandhi's lawyer is cross-examining Satyak and this is where it gets interesting.
01:54During cross-examination by Rahul Gandhi's counsel, Milin Pawar,
01:58Satyagi Savarkar was asked a series of questions about the historical record
02:02and here is what he confirmed on oath in open code.
02:061. Savarkar filed dem, clemency or mercy petitions to the British government
02:12seeking reduction of his sentence.
02:142. His first mercy petition was filed within the first month of being sentenced.
02:20And 3. Revolutionaries of the same era,
02:22he specifically named Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Bhattu Keshwarda and Ashwagulla Khan
02:27did not file such petitions.
02:29They demanded to be treated as prisoners of war.
02:32They refused concessions, they refused leniency
02:35and they did not compromise on their principles
02:38in any of their dealings with the British right until their executions.
02:43Now let's be clear, Satyaki did not just blurt this out.
02:47He tried to contextualize it.
02:48He said mercy petitions were a routine procedure available to all prisoners,
02:53not just Savarkar.
02:54He said the language in those petitions wasn't one of loyalty but of official protocol.
02:59He said the British actually rejected all 10 petitions partly because they feared
03:05Savarkar's release could revive revolutionary activity.
03:08Fine, those are his arguments, he is entitled to weak them.
03:11But the admissions, those are now in the record.
03:14Savarkar filed 10 mausyip petitions.
03:17Bhagat Singh did not.
03:18That's not allegation anymore.
03:20That's a testimony from Savarkar's own grand-nephew
03:23made under oath in a court that was supposed to defend Savarkar's honor.
03:28Let's just sit with that for a moment.
03:30Because the political right in India has spent years
03:33trying to silence the discussion around Savarkar's mercy petitions.
03:37Books have been written defending them,
03:39TV debates have been had,
03:41people have been called anti-national for bringing it up.
03:44And now, in a courtroom case literally designed to protect Savarkar's image,
03:48his grand-nephew has confirmed everything the critics were saying.
03:53And it is now part of the official court record.
03:56But here is the thing.
03:57The irony, as entertaining as it is for Congress and its supporters,
04:01isn't actually the most important part of the story.
04:04What is more important is what this whole episode reveals
04:07about where Indian political culture has arrived.
04:10Think about what is happening here.
04:13Two men.
04:13One currently the leader of opposition in Parliament.
04:15The other, the grand-nephew of a major historical figure,
04:19are fighting a criminal defamation case in a Pune court
04:22over a speech made in London about a man who died in 1966.
04:27This is what we have come to.
04:29Indian politics has turned the freedom struggle into a battlefield.
04:33Every major historical figure,
04:35be it Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savarkar, Bhagat Singh,
04:38has been converted from a complex human being into a weapon.
04:42You pick your ancestor, I will attack yours.
04:44And back and forth we go endlessly while the actual present disappears.
04:49The Savarkar camp will tell you he was a brave revolutionary
04:52who spent 11 years in the brutal cellular jail in the Andamans,
04:57who translated and inspired revolutionary literature
04:59whose early life was genuinely heroic.
05:02That is true.
05:03His critics will tell you the mercy petitions represent a moral capitulation.
05:08That while Bhagat Singh walked into the gallows without flinching,
05:11Savarkar wrote 10 letters asking the British for leniency.
05:15They will also point to his later political writings and ideology
05:19which are genuinely and legitimately contestant.
05:22Both of these things can be true at the same time.
05:25History doesn't usually give us pure heroes or pure villains.
05:29It gives us complicated people.
05:31But the moment you try to say that in Indian political discourse today,
05:34someone files a defamation case.
05:37What that does is move the debate from classrooms and public forums into courtrooms.
05:42And courtrooms are not where historical questions get resolved.
05:46They are where they get weaponized.
05:48Satyagi Savarkar's argument that Gandhi's statement about a non-existent passage is defamatory
05:54may or may not hold up legally.
05:57That is for the court to decide.
05:58But the instinct behind it, that the correct response to a political speech you disagree with
06:03is criminal litigation, is itself a symptom of something broken.
06:07Because what is the end state of that logic?
06:09If every politician who says something historically disputed can be dragged into court,
06:15we have effectively made historical debate a criminal enterprise.
06:19And in a country with as contested and layered a history as India's,
06:23that means a very large number of people saying very little about anything that matters.
06:29Here is what I want to leave you with.
06:31Satyagi Savarkar went to court to say,
06:34Rahul Gandhi lied about my great uncle.
06:37The statement about the book passage may or may not be true.
06:40Let the court figure that out.
06:42But in the process of defending Savarkar,
06:45his grandnephew has handed the historical record,
06:48something it did not previously have in quite this form.
06:51A sworn in-quote confirmation that Savarkar filed 10 mercy petition.
06:56And that Bhagat Singh and his comrades,
06:58facing the same empire, the same prisons, the same death sentences,
07:02refused to ask for mercy at all.
07:05What you do with that comparison is up to you.
07:07History is complicated.
07:09People make choices under impossible circumstances.
07:12And we should be careful about judging them from the comfort of 2026.
07:17But what we shouldn't do, what India desperately needs to stop doing,
07:21is treat that complicated history as raw material for today's political warfare.
07:26Because while we are relitigating 1920 in a Pune courtroom,
07:30the country has issues to deal with.
07:32Issues like poverty, inflation and unemployment.
07:35Bhagat Singh did not die at 23,
07:37so we could spend the next 100 years fighting about him or his compatriots on primetime television.
07:42And that is the honest thing.
07:44If this made you think, comment on it, share it forward,
07:47and keep watching Lokman Lines for more stories.
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