India's ruling coalition calls him a Hindu hero; the opposition labels him a traitor to India's freedom movement.
Vinayak Damodhar Savarkar, who was the first to demand that India be made a Hindu nation, was given a rare honor when President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam unveiled his portrait in Parliament's central hall on Wednesday.
Opposition parties boycotted the program. They said the portrait of Savarkar doesn't merit a spot facing a picture of the nation's independence leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, as Savarkar's credentials have been questioned by historians.
Some accuse Savarkar of tacitly supporting Gandhi's assassination. Gandhi was shot to death by a Hindu hard-liner, Nathuram Godse, because he opposed the partition of India and Pakistan by the British rulers.
The biggest charge against Savarkar is that he had sought clemency from the British government in 1911 after being imprisoned in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, off India's eastern coast. He later escaped from the jail.
On Tuesday, Opposition Leader Sonia Gandhi asked the government to review its decision to hang the portrait.
"How can we honor a man who sent mercy petitions to the colonial rulers within a few months of imprisonment?" said Nilotpal Basu, a Communist Party lawmaker.
Basu cited Savarkar's address at a 1937 conference of Hindu groups, where he supported splitting British-ruled India along religious lines. That call for a Hindu nation came at least two years ahead of the Muslim League's demand for a separate Pakistan, Basu said.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, however, rejects the charges.
"People across the country have great respect for him," BJP President Venkiah Naidu told reporters after the opposition boycott. "They have insulted Savarkar and the people who adored him."
Savarkar's supporters downplay his move to seek clemency, saying it was a matter of strategy. Instead, they highlight his "heroic escape" from jail.
Indian historian Jyotsna Kamat, in a biography of Savarkar, describes him as "an extraordinary Hindu scholar, a recklessly brave revolutionary and fiercely patriotic."
According to Nirmala Deshpande, who heads the Gandhi Memorial Society in New Delhi, Savarkar knew of Godse's plan to kill Gandhi.
"In Maharashtra, it was common knowledge that Savarkar had blessed Godse just a few weeks before the assassination. I was a student during those days," the United News of India quoted Deshpande as saying. Savarkar came from the western Maharashtra state, which is also Deshpande's home state.