Author: Francois Gautier
Publication: www.saveindia.com
Date:
URL: http://www.saveindia.com/gautier.htm
The following is based on one of
the chapters in the book Rewriting Indian History (Vikas). In this first
part, the author argues that History books should be rewritten.
It is important to stop a moment
and have a look at what the Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst, has called "negationism
in India". In his foreword to the book of the same title, Koenraad explains
that negationism, which means in this context "the denial of historical
crimes against humanity", is not a new phenomenon. In modern history, the
massacre by the Turks of 1,5 millions Armenians, or that of the 6 million
Jews by the Nazis, the several millions of Russians by Stalin, or again
the 1 million Tibetans by the Chinese communists, are historical facts
which have all been denied by their perpetrators... But deny is not the
exact word. They have been NEGATED in a thousand ways: gross, clever, outrageous,
subtle, so that in the end, the minds of people are so confused and muddled,
that nobody knows anymore where the truth is.
Sometimes, it is the numbers that
are negated or passed under silence: the Spanish conquest of South America
has been one of the bloodiest and most ruthless episodes in history. Elst
estimates that out of the population of native Continental South America
of 1492, which stood at 90 million, only 32 million survived; terrible
figures indeed but who talks about them today?
"But what of the conquest of India
by Muslims", asks Elst?
In other parts of Asia and Europe,
the conquered nations quickly opted for conversion to Islam rather than
death. But in India, because of the staunch resistance of the 4000 year
old Hindu faith, the Muslim conquests were for the Hindus a pure struggle
between life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and their populations
massacred. Each successive campaign brought hundreds of thousands of victims
and similar numbers were deported as slaves. Every new invader made often
literally his hill of Hindu skulls. Thus the conquest of Afghanistan in
the year 1000, was followed by the annihilation of the entire Hindu population
there; indeed, the region is still called Hindu Kush, 'Hindu slaughter'.
The Bahmani sultans in central India, made it a rule to kill 100.000 Hindus
a year. In 1399, Teimur killed 100.000 Hindus IN A SINGLE DAY, and many
more on other occasions. Koenraad Elst quotes Professor K.S. Lal's "Growth
of Muslim population in India", who writes that according to his calculations,
the Hindu population decreased by 8O MILLION between the year 1000 and
1525. INDEED PROBABLY THE BIGGEST HOLOCAUST IN THE WHOLE WORLD HISTORY.
(Negat.34)
But the "pagans" were far too numerous
to kill them all; and Hinduism too well entrenched in her people's soul,
never really gave up, but quietly retreated in the hearts of the pious
and was preserved by the Brahmins' amazing oral powers. Thus, realising
that they would never be able to annihilate the entire Indian population
and that they could not convert all the people, the Muslims rulers, particularly
under the Hanifite law, allowed the pagans to become "zimmis" (protected
ones) under 20 humiliating conditions, with the heavy "jizya", the toleration
tax, collected from them.
"It is because of Hanifite law,
writes Mr Elst, that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves
exempted from the duty to continue the genocide of Hindus". The last "jihad"
against the Hindus was waged by the much glorified Tipu Sultan, at the
end of the 18th century. Thereafter, particularly following the crushing
of the 1857 rebellion by the British, Indian Muslims fell into a state
of depression and increasing backwardness, due to their mollah's refusal
of British education (whereas the elite Hindus gradually went for it) and
their nostalgia for the "glorious past"'. It is only much later, when the
British started drawing them into the political mainstream, so as to divide
India, that they started regaining some predominance.
Negationism means that this whole
aspect of Indian history has been totally erased, not only from history
books, but also from the memory, from the consciousness of Indian people.
Whereas the Jews have constantly tried, since the Nazi genocide, to keep
alive the remembrance of their six million martyrs, the Indian leadership,
political and intellectual, has made a wilful and conscious attempt to
deny the genocide perpetrated by the Muslims. No one is crying for vengeance.
Do the Jews of today want to retaliate upon contemporary Germany? NO. It
is only a matter of making sure that history does not repeat its mistakes,
as alas it is able to do today: witness the persecution of Hindus in Kashmir,
whose 250.000 Pandits have fled their 5000 year old homeland; or the 50.000
Hindus chased from Afghanistan; or the oppression of Hindus in Bangladesh
and Pakistan. And most of all, to remember, is to BE ABLE TO LOOK AT TODAY
WITH THE WISDOM OF YESTERDAY. No collective memory should be erased for
appeasing a particular community.
Yet, what has happened in India,
at the hand of Hindus themselves, is a constant denial and even a perversion
of the genocide committed by Muslims in India. Hasn't the "radical humanist"
M.N. Roy, written "that Islam has fulfilled a historic mission of equality
and abolition of discrimination in India, and that for this, Islam has
been welcomed in India by the lower castes". "If AT ALL any violence occurred,
he goes on to say, it was a matter of justified class struggle by the progressive
forces against the reactionary forces, meaning the feudal Hindu upper classes.."
Want to listen to another such quote?
This one deals with Mahmud Ghaznavi, the destroyer of thousands of Hindu
temples, who according to his chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the Mathura
temple complex, sacred above all to all Hindus... and promptly proceeded
to raze it to the ground: "Building interested Mahmud and he was much impressed
by the city of Mathura, where there are today a thousand edifices as firm
as the faith of the faithful. Mahmud was not a religious man. He was a
Mahomedan, but that was just by the way. He was in the first place a soldier
and a brilliant soldier"... Amazing eulogy indeed of the man who was proud
of desecrating hundreds of temples and made it a duty to terrorise and
humiliate pagans. And guess from whom is that quote? From Jawaharlal Nehru
himself, the first Prime Minister of India and one of the architects of
independence!
M.N. Roy, and Nehru in a lesser
degree, represent the foremost current of negationism in India, which is
Marxist inspired. For strangely, it was the Russian communists who decided
to cultivate the Arabs after the First World War, in the hope that they
constituted a fertile ground for future indoctrination. One should also
never forget that Communism has affected whole generations of ardent youth,
who saw in Marxism a new ideology in a world corrupted by capitalism and
class exploitation. Nothing wrong in that; but as far as indoctrination
goes, the youth of the West, particularly of the early sixties and seventies,
were all groomed in sympathising with the good Arabs and the bad Jews.
And similarly in India, two or three young generations since the early
twenties, were tutored on negating Muslim genocide on the Hindus. In "Communalism
and the writing of Indian history", Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan
Chandra, professors at the JNU in New Delhi, the Mecca of secularism and
negationism in India, denied the Muslim genocide by replacing it instead
with a conflict of classes. The redoubtable Romila Thapar in her "Penguin
History of India", co-authored with Percival Spear, writes: "Aurangzeb's
supposed intolerance, is little more than a hostile legend based on isolated
acts such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares". How
can one be so dishonest, or so blind? But it shows how negationism is perpetuated
in India.
What are the facts? Aurangzeb (1658-1707)
did not just build an isolated mosque on a destroyed temple, he ordered
ALL temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most
sacred places of Hinduism and had mosques built on a number of cleared
temples sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered
destruction, with mosques built on them. A few examples: Krishna's birth
temple in Mathura, the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujurat,
the Vishnu temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares
and the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. (Neg 60). The number of temples
destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not 5 figures; according to
his own official court chronicles: "Aurangzeb ordered all provincial governors
to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete
end to all pagan teachings and practices". The chronicle sums up the destructions
like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said that 172 temples in the area had
been destroyed.
.. His majesty went to Chittor and
63 temples were destroyed..Abu Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples
of Amber, reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground".. Aurangzeb
did not stop at destroying temples, their users were also wiped-out; even
his own brother, Dara Shikoh, was executed for taking an interest in Hindu
religion and the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because he objected
to Aurangzeb's forced conversions. As we can see Romila Thapar and Percival
Spear's statement of a benevolent Aurangzeb is a flagrant attempt at negationism.
Even the respectable Encyclopedia Brittannica in its entry on India, does
not mention in its chapter on the Sultanate period any persecutions of
Hindus by Muslims, except "that Firuz Shah Tughlaq made largely unsuccessful
attempts at converting his Hindu subjects and sometime persecuted them".
The British, for their own selfish purpose, were of course greatly responsible
for whitewashing the Muslims, whom they needed to counterbalance the influence
of the Hindus and the Congress. It is sad that Jawaharlal Nehru and the
Congress perpetuated that brand of negationism. But that is another story.
The happiest in this matter must
be the Muslims themselves. What fools these Hindus are, they must be telling
themselves: We killed them by the millions, we wrested a whole nation out
of them, we engineer riots against them, and they still defend us!... But
don't the Hindus know that many orthodox Indian Muslims still cling to
the Deoband school, which says that India was once "Dar-ul-Islam", the
house of Islam, and should return to that status. Maulana Abul Kala Azad,
several times Congress President, and Education Minister in free India,
was a spokesman for this school. The Aligarh school on the contrary, led
by Mohammed Iqbal, propounded the creation of Pakistan. What particularly
interests us in the Aligarh school is the attempt by Muslim historians,
such as Mohamed Habiib, to rewrite the Chapter of Muslim invasions in India.
In 1920, Habib started writing his magnum opus, which he based on four
theories: 1) that the records (written by the Muslims themselves) of slaughters
of Hindus, the enslaving of their women and children and razing of temples
were "mere exaggerations by court poets and zealous chroniclers to please
their rulers". 2) That they were indeed atrocities, but mainly committed
by Turks, the savage riders from the Steppe. 3) That the destruction of
the temples took place because Hindus stored their gold and jewels inside
them and therefore Muslim armies plundered these. 4) That the conversion
of millions of Hindus to Islam was not forced, "but what happened was there
was a shift of opinion in the population, who on its own free will chose
the Shariat against the Hindu law (smriti), as they were all oppressed
by the bad Brahmins"...!!! (Negationism p.42)
Unfortunately for Habib and his
school, the Muslims invaders did record with glee their genocide on Hindus,
because they felt all along that they were doing their duty; that killing,
plundering, enslaving and razing temples was the work of God, Mohammed.
Indeed, whether it was Mahmud of Ghazni (997-1030), who was no barbarian,
although a Turk, and patronised art and literature, would recite a verse
of the Koran every night after having razed temples and killed his quota
of unbelievers; or Firuz Shah Tughlak (1351-1388) who personally confirms
that the destruction of Pagan temples was done out of piety and writes:
"on the day of a Hindu festival, I went there myself, ordered the executions
of all the leaders AND PRACTITIONERS of his abomination; I destroyed their
idols temples and built mosques in their places". Finally, as Elst points
out, "Muslim fanatics were merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions.
It is not the Muslims who are guilty but Islam". (Negationism in India,
p. 44)
But ultimately, it is a miracle
that Hinduism survived the onslaught of Muslim savagery; it shows how deep
was her faith, how profound her karma, how deeply ingrained her soul in
the hearts of her faithfuls. We do not want to point a finger at Muslim
atrocities, yet they should not be denied and their mistakes should not
be repeated today. But the real question is: Can Islam ever accept Hinduism?
We shall turn towards the Sage, the yogi, who fought for India's independence,
accepting the Gita's message of karma of violence when necessary, yet had
a broad vision that softened his words: "You can live with a religion whose
principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully with
a religion whose principle is "I will not tolerate you? How are you going
to have unity with these people?...The Hindu is ready to tolerate; he is
open to new ideas and his culture and has got a wonderful capacity for
assimilation, but always provided India's central truth is recognised..
(Sri Aurobindo India's Rebirth 161,173) Or behold this, written on September
1909: "Every action for instance which may be objectionable to a number
of Mahomedans, is now liable to be forbidden because it is likely to lead
to a breach of peace. And one is dimly beginning to wonder whether worship
in Hindu temples may be forbidden on that valid ground (India's Rebirth
p. 55). How prophetic! Sri Aurobindo could not have foreseen that so many
Muslim countries would ban Rushdie's book and that Hindu processions would
often be forbidden in cities, for fear of offending the Muslims. Sri Aurobindo
felt that sooner or later Hindus would have to assert again the greatness
of Hinduism.
And here we must say a word about
monotheism, for it is the key to the understanding of Islam. Christians
and Muslims have always harped on the fact that their religions sprang-up
as a reaction against the pagan polytheist creeds, which adored many Gods.
" There is only one real God they said (ours), all the rest are just worthless
idols ". This " monotheism versus polytheism business " has fuelled since
then the deep, fanatic, violent and murderous zeal of Islam against polytheist
religions, particularly against Hinduism, which is the most comprehensive,
most widely practiced of all them. It even cemented an alliance of sorts
between the two great monotheist religions of the world, Christianity and
Islam, witness the Britishers' attitude in India, who favoured Indian Muslims
and Sikhs against the Hindus; or the King of Morocco who, even though he
is one of the most moderate Muslim leaders in the world, recently said
in an interview: " we have no fight with Christianity, our battle is against
the Infidel who adores many gods ".
But the truth is that Hinduism is
without any doubt the most monotheist religion in the World, for it recognises
divine unity in multiplicity. It does not say: " there is only one God,
which is Mohammed. If you do not believe in Him I will kill you ". It says
instead: " Yes Mohammed is a manifestation of God, but so is Christ, or
Buddha, or Krishna, or Confucius ". This philosophy, this way of seeing,
which the Christians and Muslims call " impious ", is actually the foundation
for a true monotheist understanding of the world. It is because of this
" If you do not recognize Allah (or Christ), I will kill you ", that tens
of millions of Hindus were slaughtered by Arabs and other millions of South
Americans annihilated by the Christians. And ultimately the question is:
Are the Muslims of today ready to accept Hinduism ? Unfortunately no. For
Muslims all over the world, Hinduism is still the Infidel religion " par
excellence ". This what their religion tell them, at every moment, at every
verse, at the beginning of each prayer : " Only Allah is great ". And their
mollahs still enjoin them to go on fight " jihad " to deliver the world
of the infidels. And if the armies of Babar are not there any longer; and
if it is not done any more to kill a 100.000 Hindus in a day, there is
still the possibility of planting a few bombs in Bombay, of fuelling separatisms
in the hated land and eventually to drop a nuclear device, which will settle
the problem once and for all. As to the Indian Muslim, he might relate
to his Hindu brother, for whatever he says, he remains an Indian, nay a
Indu; but his religion will make sure that he does not forget that his
duty is to hate the Infidel. This is the crux of the problem today and
the riddle if Islam has to solved, if it wants to survive in the long run.
We will never be able to assess
the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more
difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu
India. But once again, the question is not of vengeance, or of reawakening
old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, the
harm done by the Muslims conquest is not over. The seeds planted by the
Moghols, by Babar, Mahmud, or Aurangzeb, have matured: the 125 million
Indian Muslims of today have forgotten that they were once peaceful, loving
Hindus, forcibly converted to a religion they hated. And they sometimes
take-up as theirs a cry of fanaticism which is totally alien to their culture.
Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo once said: "More than 90% of the Indian Muslims
are descendants of converted Hindus and belong as much to the Indian nation
as the Hindu themselves"...(Rebirth of India, p.237) The embryo of secession
planted by the Mahomedans, has also matured into a poisonous tree which
has been called Pakistan and comes back to haunt India through three wars
and the shadow of a nuclear conflict embracing South Asia. And in India,
Kashmir and Ayodhya are reminders that the Moghol cry for the house of
Islam in India is not yet over, as Kargil has just shown.
