MUMBAI: The family of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has asked chief minister Uddhav Thackeray to take legal and criminal action against ‘Shidori’, the mouthpiece of the state unit of the Congress, for making “baseless allegations” against the freedom fighter in two pieces published in this month’s edition.

Former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP demanded that the publication be banned for the articles on the freedom fighter, popularly known as

, and asked the Shiv Sena how long it would continue to “kowtow” to the Congress and NCP “for power”.

Savarkar’s grand-nephew

and the

, which was set up here after the freedom fighter’s death in 1966 with the then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s blessings, urged Thackeray to withdraw the publication and arrest its editor and publisher for having carried the two pieces, “which are based entirely on falsehood and gross perversion of facts”.

One of the pieces in the Marathi publication, written by Sanjiv Chimbulkar, is headlined ‘Andharaateel Savarkar’, or ‘Savarkar in the Dark’, and is intended to malign him, said the grand-nephew and trust.

The piece makes charges against Savarkar, especially about his conduct in England. Savarkar spent five years in London from 1906 to 1910 as the leader of a group of revolution-minded youths and was considered the chief spokesperson at India House, a hostel for Indian students in Highgate opened by the nationalist

where demands were openly made for freedom.

It was here that Scotland Yard began tailing Savarkar and where his aides, such as the Tamilians M P T Acharya and V V S Aiyar, the Maharashtrians P M Bapat and W V Phadke, and the Bengalis Virendra Chattopadhyaya and Niranjan Pal, worked with him for freedom. India House was shut by British authorities in 1909 after a Punjabi youth inspired by Savarkar,

, killed a British official, Curzon Wyllie.

The second piece regurgitates charges about Savarkar’s “mercy petitions” to the British, said the trust.

Addressing the chief minister, Manjiri Marathe of the Savarkar Smarak said Savarkar was “an icon for Balasaheb Thackeray, so an insult to him is an insult to Balasaheb and to the Hindu community”.