The Hounding Of Vikram Sampath: Parallels From Israel's Right-Left Battles

In a review column of the first part of Savarkar’s biography, Manu S Pillai had recommended his fellow historian Vikram Sampath to portray Savarkar as a “brave revolutionary, suffering prisoner, formidable ideologue, but also a man capable of a good deal of whitewashing” in the next volume.

Had Dr Sampath heeded the good advice, he probably would have avoided the storm he is experiencing for the last few months. If, in the past, a mainstream representative of Indian historians claimed that “the only serious intellectual in India who is also socially conservative is Arun Shourie”, now there are voices bordering on panic insisting that right-wing intellectuals are a clear and present danger.

Unlike Sanjeev Sanyal who got into debates about the political and spiritual agenda of the Mauryan Empire and encountered strong opposition from scholars, Vikram Sampath is without a doubt one of Savarkar’s most important researchers, and he has upgraded interest in Savarkar in India and globally. As Israeli columnists, we are really jealous of India that a biography of a political leader manages to resonate so much in today’s India and turn the biographer into a cultural hero.

India and Israel are rare exemplars of stable democracies in a post-British-colonial order.

The Labor Party in Israel and the Congress Party in India both ruled continuously between 1947-1977. Even when they lost power, the academic arena was identified with the Israeli and Indian left. In Israel, the struggle of right-wing intellectuals with a left-wing academic agenda is not a new issue.

The Israeli right went through three stages, and at each stage there was a different relationship between the Israeli right and its political opponents. From the 1930’s until the Six Day War in 1967, there was no doubt that some of the most important intellectuals of the Zionist camp were on the right side of the map.

The founding father of the Israeli right and the patriarch of today's Likud party was Ze’ev Vladomir Jabotinsky. A brilliant young poet, intellectual and man of letters in Imperial Russia, he discovered Jewish nationalism and added beautiful Hebrew poetry and prose to his voluminous Russian writings and translations. He became a leading Zionist activist, and his Revisionist movement ideologically opposed the Socialist factions that were eventually led by David Ben-Gurion in founding the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky is the Israeli parallel of Veer Savarkar in many interesting ways, from his primordial feud with the Socialist ruling parties, his atheism, his staunch insistence on Jewish self-defense and on “Greater Israel” (Israeli “Akhand Bharat”), to the sheer amount of animosity aimed at him during his lifetime and even decades after his death. He died on a trip to New York in 1940, and despite his last will and testament seeking to be buried in the Jewish state whenever it was founded, it was only in 1964, after Prime Minister Ben Gurion had retired, that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol allowed his coffin to be buried at Mt. Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem, in the ‘Plot of the Leaders of the Nation.’

Jabotinsky’s closest disciples shared his destiny of ostracism, and it remains in the back of the minds of their biological children, many of whom are Likud elites till this day. Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary, the historian and encyclopedist Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Ben Zion was not officially denied a position in Israeli academia, but it was clear enough to him that he was unwanted, and most of his career passed at Cornell University, NY. Fear of Leftist elites has been a central theme in his son’s mind throughout his maneuvering against today’s elites.

Jabotinsky’s primary protégé, the future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, fared no better. Ben Gurion refused to even mention his name in daily parliament sessions.

One of Begin’s closest associates, the philosopher Prof. Israel Shayeb-Eldad, was a leading hard-right intellectual of the day. Had he been in the left camp, his majestic translations of Fredrich Nietzsche would have won him prestigious prizes. Yet when he finally landed a teaching position at a prestigious high school in Haifa, the appointment was blocked by Ben Gurion and his Defence Ministry. Eldad petitioned the High Court, which, in a monumental precedent, ruled against Ben Gurion.

It is worth noting that Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a famous public intellectual belonging to the extreme left, stood by Eldad in his battle. The ideological gaps between Leibowitz and Eldad were enormous - as the gaps between Vikram Sampath and Audrey Truschke are these days - but Leibowitz had the integrity to admit that an intellectual from the opposing camp was discriminated against just because of his political views.

When the generation of the founding fathers had died the younger generation was preoccupied with building settlements. That was their strategic battle, and at the time few thought it could be won in defiance of all international powers. Their leaders were mostly religious, graduates of religious seminaries.

In two famous chapters recorded in his non-fiction book. In the Land of Israel (1982), Amos Oz visited the unusually well-educated and cultured settlement of Ofra and debated the locals in their public forum.

“What’s happening with your creative minds?” Oz thundered in his monologue. “Why are the majority of Israel’s creators Leftists, heavens forbid? Is there a conspiracy? Are we selling our novels in Damascus?... And don’t tell me it’s a global phenomenon. There are fascinating writers and thinkers all across the globe who are anything but leftists. And don’t tell me you’re too busy either. The early Zionist pioneers were at least as busy as you and created anyway. Why is your camp a desolate wasteland?!”

But in the first decade of the new millennium, the restoration of the right-wing intellectual camp began.

The right-wing camp learned from the left of the 70's and began importing ideas from America. Popular American conservative classics were translated into Hebrew. Fringes of the settlement movement had historically opposed the English language, and many of their sons could not comfortably read academic books without translations.

Academic seminars popped up led by a growing cadre of right-wing intellectuals with a variety of conservative agendas. It was immediately obvious that many of them were immigrants educated in elite American universities. In America they were not engaged in pioneer work and had continued in the more common Jewish path of intellectual excellence. These immigrants opened two large think-tanks, ‘Tikvah Fund’ and ‘Kohelet Forum’ that today are powerful institutions. The former deals in academic enrichment programmes and the latter produces policy papers.

Yoram Hazoni is a global intellectual star with open doors to Nationalist leaders throughout the West. Their success is mainly in the political discourse concerning the Jewish character of the State of Israel. On socio-economic issues, their free market views are not yet the “desi” orthodoxy even within the right-wing camp.

The journey towards a hegemony of right-wing intellectuals in India and Israel is different. The intellectual power of right-wing thinkers was not denied even when the Israeli Labor movement discriminated against them, causing some of them to lose their jobs or leave Israel. But in both cases, academia was a space where the left gained and kept a clear advantage even as the right-wing parties won the elections.

The academic delegitimisation that Vikram Sampath is undergoing indicates that he is the joker in the card deck of the Indian right-wing elites, the talented maverick that his opponents can neither swallow nor spit out.

Lev Aran is a former coordinator of the Israel-India Parliamentary Friendship League and Israel-based freelance columnist and journalist. His work has been published in Makor Rishon, Mida, Ynet, Haatetz, MargAsia among other publications. @LevAranlookeast on twitter

Yeshaya Rosenman is a student of Indian Studies and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, alumni of the ‘Hebron Hills Torah Academy’ religious seminary at Otniel, Editor at ‘Yozevitch’s World’, a leading Israeli podcast @RosenmanYeshaya on twitter