LOL... what is the credibility of that article ? This is what it says,
"Treanor talked to him when
he was perhaps the only Hindu political leader to not be in jail (having asked the British for a pardon so he did not have to serve his 50-year prison term and the "prodigal son'' could return to the ''parental doors of the government")."
Why don't YOU read up on the diaries of Savarkar I have provided in the link ?
Take your own advice.
Let me post a few lines for that book.
"
Sir Henry Cotton
One day the news went abroad that a certain high official In England had forfeited his pension on my account. I could make no head or tail of this report till, a few days after, I fell upon a cutting from The Kesari of Poona which I found dropped in a corner of my room. That cutting helped me to piece out the news and gather up all its threads. It was thus: In London the Indians had a public meeting in connection with the celebration of the new Year.
The chief guest of the evening happened to be Sir Henry' the author of New India, and the president of the Congress Session in Bombay in 1904. In the hall where the meeting was being held, they had put up my portrait and Sir Henry Cotton happened to notice it. Looking at the portrait he said a few words in my praise, and regretted that a young man of such adventurous spirit and fervent patriotism should be reduced to a pass that had blighted his life for good. He expressed the hope that the International Court of Justice at Hague would restore me back to France and thus save itself from being the instrument of trampling under foot every man's bare right to hold his own opinions without any molestation from the State.
This reference to me by Sir Henry Cotton had raised a storm of criticism against him in the political dovecotes of England. To sympathise with Savarkar was such an abomination, even though the praise had not been free from censure! Some suggested that the speaker should be deprived of his knighthood. Others hinted that he should be made to forfeit his pension. Ultimately, the whole incident had proved to be nothing better than the proverbial storm in the tea-cup, though it was not without its repercussions in India. The Indian National Congress was alarmed by the news, and seemed to have lost its balance.
Sir William Wedderburn, the president of the Congress session that year, and Surendra Nath Bannerj i, one of its most prominent spokesmen, while returning from the annual Congress Session, attended a public meeting at Calcutta, where, speaking on the incident, they put a gloss on Sir Henry Cotton's remarks upon me. and declared that the Congress had nothing to do with Savarkar and his tribe and felt no sympathy whatever for him and his doings. I read this news in the cutting of the Kesari noticed above. Strange to say, the Kesari itself in its two leaderettes had sought to exonerate Sir Henry Cotton, and, in reference to me in that matter, had used a form of address that was highly insulting to me. It had said, "Sir Henry Cotton did not even know who this Savarkar was, whether he was a black man or a white man." Even a nationalist paper like the Kesari at Poona had to write in that tone then. It was a subterfuge, common in those days, to establish one's innocence and prestige by running down Savarkar as a traitor, and by referring to him, in name and style, as the veriest criminal. Every political organisation, at the time, used that handy weapon to save its own skin.
It was a cruel irony of fate, indeed, that an English gentleman should speak of Savarkar in glowing terms, while his countrymen at home should refer to him in newspapers and elsewhere in the language of insult and infamy. But it was not the newspapers that were really to blame in this matter. It only showed the wretched plight to which a foreign rule inevitably reduces a subject nation. It showed that we lost under it even the sense of humanity which, as individuals, we ought to hold, as the minimum that is due from one man to another. What a heavy price this, to pay for bare existence!
