Savarkar ate meat, wasn’t against cow-slaughter: K'taka minister

Karnataka Health Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao has claimed that Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar used to eat meat and was not against cow-slaughter.

“Savarkar, a 'Chitpavan Brahmin', used to eat meat. He was a non-veg eater and was not against cow-slaughter. He was modern in a way,” he said at an event here on Wednesday.

“Some say he used to eat beef as well. As a Brahmin, he used to eat meat and openly propagated eating meat. So he had that thinking,” the minister claimed.

Rao added that Mahatma Gandhi was a vegetarian and had a firm faith in Hinduism “but his actions were different. He was a democratic person.”

“(Founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali) Jinnah was another extreme. He was a hardcore Islamist believer. He used to drink wine and it is said that he used to eat pork as well but he became a Muslim icon after the two-nation theory and politics. Jinnah was not a fundamentalist but Savarkar was one,” he said.

On Thursday, explaining the context in which he made the comments, the minister said there was a discussion on Gandhi's assassination in a book release event where he had a “very healthy discussion”.

“It was basically an observation on the contrast between Gandhi and Savarkar. How Gandhi was a religious man and how Savarkar was an atheist, how Gandhi was a vegetarian and had a lot of beliefs in religion. Savarkar was a non-vegetarian and he was a modernist,” the minister told PTI Videos.

Rao said he drew a contrast between Gandhi and Savarkar to show “how to counter fundamentalism in this country, how fundamentalism leads to violence and how that can be tackled using Gandhi's philosophy”.

“If you look at (Nathuram) Godse's philosophy – because he believed in Savarkar's philosophy and fundamentalism, he had no regret of killing Gandhi. In fact, he thought he had done a great thing for the country. So that is the problem with fundamentalism. Whatever you do, you think it is good for the cause you are fighting for,” the minister said.

“I was talking about the contrast between Savarkar and Gandhi, the ideology of the two and how they were different,” he added.