Transformation in Andamans

I was interested in why Savarkar shifted his opinion on the issue of Indian-Muslim unity. In the introduction to Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations (ed. Thomas Pantham and V.R. Mehta. New Dehli: Sage, 2006), Pantham and Mehta, summarizing Patham's later chapter, "Religious Diversity and National Unity: The Gandhian and Hindutva Visions," describe the political differences that account for the differences between Gandhi and Savarkar's religious views, implying that there religious ideas are often confused. It's helpful to also see how these scholars intervene in a scholarly discussion about "secular-liberal democracy." In order to make this argument, the notions of "self" in both Gandhi and Savarkar are interpreted and redefined. Pantham's essay is described as follows:

Thomas Pantham's essay, "Religious Diversity and National Unity: The Gandhian and Hindutva Visions," is meant to be a corrective to the tendency, discernible in the scholarly literature on secular-liberal democracy, to conflate the Gandhian and Hindutva views. He argues that "for Gandhi and Savarkar (the propounder of the Hindutva ideology), religion, be it Hinduism or any other religion, meant different things and that on that difference hinges the difference between their political philosophies."

....

Savarkar's view on the political relation between the Hindu religious majority and the Muslims went through a process of change in the 1920s. In that period, in reaction to certain political developments, he gave up his earlier commitment to Hindu-Muslim political unity in the "war" against colonial rule, and, in its place, he formulated his famos Hindutva conception of militant majoritarian nationalism, which, according to him, can only have either an assimilationist or an exclusionary relation to the Muslims of India. According to Pantham, this ideology of Hindutva rests on a traditional an rigidly hierarchic concept of the "self'." "It is," as he points out, "a 'self', which can relate to the 'non-self' or Other only by assimilating it (i.e. by bringing it into hierarchic subordination) or by excluding it as 'alien', 'enemy' or 'impure'"; it cannot relate to the Other "either on friendly terms of the freedom and equality of every person or in terms of the Gandhian ethics of love/non-violence!"

In the second part of Chapter 13, Gandhi's conception of Hind Swaraj, sarvodaya and satyagraha are shown to be resting on, or informed by, moral-political conceptions of the "self," religion, satya, swaraj, etc., which are radically different from Savarkar's political-ideological conceptions of them. For instance, Gandhi's conception of the moksha-seeking "self" is that of a "self" seeking unity, in this world itslf, with God-as-Love/Truth through love of, and service to, one's fellow-humans. (xlv-xlvi)