We cannot separate an icon from his followers as we cannot the “dancer from the dance.” This truth shimmers in veteran journalist Arun Shourie’s The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts, wherein he analyses the writings and speeches of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the progenitor of Hindutva. Shourie establishes the primacy of hate and violence in Savarkar’s worldview, spotlights his reworking of Hindu morality, his propensity to spawn myths about himself, and his delusions. Savarkar, to invoke poet W B Yeats’ imagery, was the dancer; his dance, albeit posthumously, is the politics of his followers today.

“Hate unites as well as separates,” Savarkar wrote, arguing that “nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a State as the pressure of a common foe.” Hate, thus, is a necessary political tool for unity, for which an enemy must be invented in case there doesn’t exist one—and kept separated to build imaginary “pressure” on the rest.