A 22-year-old student of Poona’s Fergusson College led other youngsters to light a bonfire on October 7, 1905, Vijayadashami Day. It was not to burn an effigy of Ravan, but to turn to ashes clothes and other goods made in England and sold to Indians.

The student, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was the first to organise what would become an outbreak of bonfires of foreign goods after the Partition of Bengal in 1905. The freedom fighters believed that the fire captured the moral force of resistance.

The Swadeshi Movement had begun.

Exactly 120 years later on the eve of Navratri, PM Narendra Modi, in an address to the nation, called for a revival of that spirit. It was a call for Swadeshi Movement 2.0.

What was kept untold was that this time, the adversary is........

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