“History is not a battlefield where victors erase the vanquished—it is a tapestry where rival threads must coexist."

The Ministry of Petroleum’s Independence Day poster, which brought together Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, has triggered a renewed debate. At its heart lies a paradox: Gandhi and Savarkar represented sharply divergent philosophies, methods, and political imaginations.

Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, rooted his politics in ahimsa, inclusivity, and moral force. Savarkar, by contrast, began as a fiery advocate of revolutionary ways and later developed the ideology of Hindutva, arguing for a Hindu nation defined by cultural unity. Their paths, though occasionally intersecting, were ultimately parallel lines—never reconciled, never convergent.

Yet the State, by placing them together, poses a question to us: is this a distortion of history, or is it an act of recognition, an acknowledgment that the Indian freedom struggle was a plural story that cannot be reduced to a single line of thought?

To understand this better, it is worth looking beyond India. Nations across the world, both ancient and modern, have faced the challenge of remembering rivals together. In these acts of commemoration, we see the ways in which societies reconcile conflicting legacies and transform discord into a collective memory.

The Roman Empire was unparalleled in its ability to subsume conflict into symbols of unity. The Forum Romanum, the ceremonial and political heart of the empire, is filled with arches that commemorate victories of rulers who were bitter enemies. The Arch of Titus (AD 81) celebrated the Flavian conquest of Judaea. A century later, the Arch of Septimius Severus marked triumphs over Parthia. Still later, the Arch of Constantine (AD 315) glorified the victory over Maxentius. These men were not comrades—they were adversaries who competed for legitimacy. Yet today, their monuments stand within walking distance of each other, telling not the story of their rivalries, but of Rome’s continuity. For the empire, the permanence of the state mattered more than the ideological divisions of its........

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