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Was There an Islamic 'Genocide' of Hindus? - by Dr. Koenraad Elst
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Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
Dr. Koenraad Elst
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org
"The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu
pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political
embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such
language warranted, or is it a ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
To give an idea of the context of this question, we must note that
the term "genocide" is used very loosely these days. One of the
charges by a Spanish judge against Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet, so
as to get him extradited from Great Britain in autumn 1998, was
"genocide". This was his way of making Pinochet internationally
accountable for having killed a few Spanish citizens: alleging a
crime serious enough to overrule normal constraints based on
diplomatic immunity and national sovereignty. Yet, whatever
Pinochet's crimes, it is simply ridiculous to charge that he ever
intended to exterminate the Spanish nation. In the current
competition for victim status, all kinds of interest groups are
blatantly overbidding in order to get their piece of the entitlement
to attention and solidarity.
The Nazi Holocaust killed the majority of European Jewry (an
estimated 5.1 million according to Raul Hilberg, 5.27 million
according to the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and about
30% of the Jewish people worldwide. How many victim groups can say as
much? The Partition pogroms killed hardly 0.3% of the Hindus, and
though it annihilated the Hindu presence in all the provinces of
Pakistan except for parts of Sindh and East Bengal, it did so mostly
by putting the Hindus to flight (at least seven million) rather than
by killing them (probably half a million). Likewise, the ethnic
cleansing of a quarter million Hindus from Kashmir in 1990 followed
the strategy of "killing one to expel a hundred", which is not the
same thing as killing them all; in practice, about 1,500 were killed.
Partition featured some local massacres of genocidal type, with the
Sikhs as the most wanted victims, but in relative as well as absolute
figures, this does not match the Holocaust.
Among genocides, the Holocaust was a very special case (e.g. the
attempt to carry it out in secrecy is unique), and it serves no good
purpose to blur that specificity by extending the term to all
genocides in general. The term "Holocaust", though first used in a
genocidal sense to describe the Armenian genocide of 1915, is now in
effect synonymous with the specifically Jewish experience at the
hands of the Nazis in 1941-45. But does even the more general term
"genocide" apply to what Hinduism suffered at the hands of Islam?
Complete genocide
"Genocide" means the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic
community, or by extension any community constituted by bonds of
kinship, of common religion or ideology, of common socio-economic
position, or of common race. The pure form is the complete
extermination of every man, woman and child of the group. Examples
include the complete extermination of the native Tasmanians and many
Amerindian nations from Patagonia to Canada by European settlers in
the 16th-19th century. The most notorious attempt was the Nazi "final
solution of the Jewish question" in 1941-45. In April-May 1994, Hutu
militias in Rwanda went about slaughtering the Tutsi minority,
killing ca. 800,000, in anticipation of the conquest of their country
by a Uganda-based Tutsi army. Though improvised and executed with
primitive weapons, the Rwandan genocide made more victims per day
than the Holocaust.
Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971,
when the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as
their most wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most
writing about Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of
its serious implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu
death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of
Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is significant
that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll
has been attempted: the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling
classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against
Muslims.
Nandan Vyas ("Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan", Young India, January
1995) has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the
1971 genocide was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In
comparing the population figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the
observed natural growth rhythm into account, Vyas finds that the
Hindu population has remained stable at 9.5 million when it should
have increased to nearly 13 million (13.23 million if the same growth
rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for Muslims). Of the missing 3.5
million people (if not more), 1.1 million can be explained: it is the
number of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to the genocide. The
Hindu refugees at the time of the genocide, about 8 million, all went
back after the ordeal, partly because the Indian government forced
them to it, partly because the new state of Bangladesh was conceived
as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu refugees into India only
resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards islamization of the
polity were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus to be
explained. Taking into account a number of Hindu children born to
refugees in India rather than in Bangladesh, and a possible
settlement of 1971 refugees in India, it is fair to estimate the
disappeared Hindus at about 2 million.
While India-watchers wax indignant about communal riots in India
killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of
three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-
Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a
whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus.
Even apart from the 1971 genocide, "ordinary" pogroms in East
Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of
riot victims in India since 1948.
Selective genocide
A second, less extreme type of genocide consists in killing a
sufficient number who form the backbone of the group's collective
identity, and assimilating the leaderless masses into the dominant
community. This has been the Chinese policy in Tibet, killing over a
million Tibetans while assimilating the survivors into Chinese
culture by flooding their country with Chinese settlers. It was also
Stalin's policy in eastern Poland and the Baltic states after they
fell into his hands under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, exemplified by
the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in Katyn. Stalin's
policies combining murder of the elites, deportation of entire ethnic
groups and ruthless oppression of the survivors was prefigured in
antiquity by the Assyrians, whose deportation of the ten northern
(now "lost") tribes of Israel is attested in the Bible.
During the Islamic conquests in India, it was a typical policy to
single out the Brahmins for slaughter, after the Hindu warrior class
had been bled on the battlefield. Even the Portuguese in Malabar and
Goa followed this policy in the 16th century, as can be deduced from
Hindu-Portuguese treaty clauses prohibiting the Portuguese from
killing Brahmins.
In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for
slaughter and the women and children for slavery or concubinage.
Thus, in 416 BCE, the Athenians were angered at the Melians'
reluctance to join the war against Sparta, and to set an example for
other client states, Athens had Melos repopulated with Athenian
colonists after killing its men and enslaving its women. Another
example would be the slaughter of the Jews of Medina by Mohammed in
626 CE: after expelling two Jewish tribes, the third one, the Banu
Quraiza, were exterminated: all the ca. 700 men were beheaded, while
the women and children were sold into slavery, with the Prophet
keeping the most beautiful woman as his concubine (she refused to
marry him).
Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic
conquerors, e.g. when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus
basin in 712 CE. Thus, in Multan, according to the Chach-Nama, "six
thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and
dependents were taken as slaves". This is why Rajput women committed
mass suicide to save their honour in the face of the imminent entry
of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women immolated themselves
during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where this most
enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants). During the
Partition pogroms and the East Bengali genocide, mass rape of Hindu
women after the slaughter of their fathers and husbands was a
frequent event.
At this point, however, we should not overlook a puzzling episode in
Hindu legend which describes a similar behaviour by a Hindu
conqueror: Parashurama, deified as the 6th incarnation of Vishnu,
killed all the adult male Kshatriyas for several generations, until
only women were left, and then had Brahmins father a new generation
upon them. Just a story, or reference to a historic genocide?
Genocide in the Bible
For full-blooded genocide, however, the book to consult is the Bible,
which describes cases of both partial and complete genocide. The
first modest attempt was the killing by Jacob's sons of all the males
in the Canaanite tribe of Shekhem, the fiancé of their own sister
Dina. The motive was pride of pedigree: having immigrated from the
civilizational centre of Ur in Mesopotamia, Abraham's tribe refused
all intermarriage with the native people of Canaan (thus, Rebecca
favoured Jacob over Esau because Jacob married his nieces while Esau
married local women).
Full-scale genocide was ordered by God, and executed by his faithful,
during the conquest of Canaan by Moses and Joshua. In the defeated
cities outside the Promised Land, they had to kill all the men but
keep the women as slaves or concubines. Inside the Promised Land, by
contrast, the conquerors were ordered to kill every single man, woman
and child. All the Canaanites and Amalekites were killed. Here, the
stated reason was that God wanted to prevent the coexistence of His
people with Pagans, which would result in religious syncretism and
the restoration of polytheism.
As we only have a literary record of this genocide, liberal
theologians uncomfortable with a genocidal God have argued that this
Canaanite genocide was only fiction. To be sure, genocide fiction
exists, e.g. the Biblical story that the Egyptians had all newborn
male Israelites killed is inconsistent with all other data in the
Biblical narrative itself (as well as unattested in the numerous and
detailed Egyptian inscriptions), and apparently only served to
underpin the story of Moses' arrival in the Pharaoh's court in a
basket on the river, a story modelled on the then-popular life story
of Sargon of Akkad. Yet, the narrative of the conquest of Canaan is
full of military detail uncommon in fiction; unlike other parts of
the Bible, it is almost without any miracles, factual through and
through.
And even if we suppose that the story is fictional, what would it say
about the editors that they attributed genocidal intentions and
injunctions to their God? If He was non-genocidal and good in
reality, why turn him into a genocidal and prima facie evil Being? On
balance, it is slightly more comforting to accept that the Bible
editors described a genocide because they wanted to be truthful and
relate real events. After all, the great and outstanding thing about
the Bible narrative is its realism, its refusal to idealize its
heroes. We get to see Jacob deceiving Isaac and Esau, then Laban
deceiving Jacob; David's heroism and ingenuity in battle, but also
his treachery in making Bathseba his own, and later his descent into
senility; Salomon's palace intrigues in the war of succession along
with his pearls of wisdom. Against that background, it would be
inconsistent to censor the Canaanite genocide as merely a fictional
interpolation.
Indirect genocide
A third type of genocide consists in preventing procreation among a
targeted population. Till recently, it was US policy to promote
sterilization among Native American women, even applying it secretly
during postnatal care or other operations. The Tibetans too have been
subjected to this treatment. In the Muslim world, male slaves were
often castrated, which partly explains why Iraq has no Black
population even though it once had hundreds of thousands of Black
slaves. The practice also existed in India on a smaller scale, though
the much-maligned Moghul emperor Aurangzeb tried to put an end to it,
mainly because eunuchs brought endless corruption in the court. The
hijra community is a left-over of this Islamic institution (in
ancient India, harems were tended by old men or naturally
napunsak/impotent men, tested by having to spend the night with a
prostitute without showing signs of virile excitement).
A fourth type of genocide is when mass killing takes place
unintentionally, as collateral damage of foolish policies, e.g.
Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward inducing the greatest man-made mass
starvation killing 20 million or more, or the British war
requisitions causing the Bengal famine of 1943 killing some 3
million; or as collateral damage of other forms of oppression. Unlike
the deliberate genocide of Native Americans in parts of the USA or
Argentina, the death of millions of Natives in Central America after
the first Spanish conquests was at least partly the unintended side-
effect of the hardships of forced labour and the contact with new
diseases brought by the Europeans. In contrast with Nazi and Soviet
work camps, where forced labour had the dual purpose of economic
profit and a slow but sure death of the inmates, there is no evidence
that the Spanish wanted their Native labourers to die. After all,
their replacement with African slaves required a large extra
investment.
The Atlantic slave trade itself caused mass death among the
transported slaves, just as in the already long-standing Arab slave
trade, but it is obvious that purely for the sake of profit, the
slave-traders preferred as many slaves as possible to arrive at the
slave markets alive. Likewise, the Christian c.q. Islamic contempt
for Pagans made them rather careless with the lives of Native
Americans, Africans or Hindus, so that millions of them were killed,
and yet this was not deliberate genocide. Of course they wanted to
annihilate Pagan religions like Hinduism, but in principle, the
missionary religions wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred
not to kill them unless this was necessary for establishing the power
of the True Faith.
That is why the mass killing of Hindus by Muslims rarely took place
in peacetime, but typically in the fervour immediately following
military victories, e.g. the fall of the metropolis of Vijayanagar in
1565 was "celebrated" with a general massacre and arson. Once Muslim
power was established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate
rather than kill the Hindus, and discourage rebellion by making some
sort of compromise. Not that peacetime was all that peaceful, for as
Fernand Braudel wrote in A History of Civilizations (Penguin
1988/1963, p.232-236), Islamic rule in India as a "colonial
experiment" was "extremely violent", and "the Muslims could not rule
the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm --
burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive
tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On
occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an
uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were
burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and
women were taken as slaves."
Though all these small acts of terror added up to a death toll of
genocidal proportions, no organized genocide of the Holocaust type
took place. One constraint on Muslim zeal for Holy War was the
endemic inter-Muslim warfare and intrigue (no history of a royal
house was bloodier than that of the Delhi Sultanate 1206-1525),
another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of Islamic law in
India. This is the only one among the four law schools in Sunni Islam
which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, dis-empowered third-class
citizens paying a special tax for the favour of being tolerated; the
other three schools of jurisprudence ruled that Pagans, as opposed to
Christians and Jews, had to be given a choice between Islam and
death.
Staggering numbers also died as collateral damage of the deliberate
impoverishment by Sultans like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir. As
Braudel put it: "The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one
catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics
capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was
the constant counterpart of the conquerors' opulence."
Genocide by any other name
In some cases, terminological purists object to mass murder being
described as "genocide", viz. when it targets groups defined by other
criteria than ethnicity. Stalin's "genocide" through organized famine
in Ukraine killed some 7 million people (lowest estimate is 4
million) in 1931-33, the largest-ever deliberate mass murder in
peacetime, but its victims were targeted because of their economic
and political positions, not because of their nationhood. Though it
makes no difference to the victims, this was not strictly genocide or
"nation murder", but "class murder". Likewise, the killing of perhaps
two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge was not an attempt to
destroy the Cambodian nation; it was rather an attempt to "purify"
the nation of its bourgeois class.
The killing of large groups of ideological dissenters is a constant
in the history of the monotheistic faiths, of which Marxism has been
termed a modern offshoot, starting with the killing of some
polytheistic priests by Pharaoh Akhenaton and, shortly after, the
treacherous killing of 3,000 worshippers of the Golden Calf by Moses
(they had been encouraged to come out in the open by Moses' brother
Aaron, not unlike Chairman Mao's "hundred flowers" campaign which
encouraged dissenters to speak freely, all the better to eliminate
them later). Mass killing accompanied the christianization of Saxony
by Charlemagne (ca. 800 CE) and of East Prussia by the Teutonic
Knights (13th century). In 1209-29, French Catholics massacred the
heretical Cathars. Wars between Muslims and Christians, and between
Catholics and Protestants, killed millions both in deliberate
massacres and as collateral damage, e.g. seven million Germans in
1618-48. Though the Turkish government which ordered the killing of a
million Armenians in 1915 was motivated by a mixture of purely
military, secular-nationalistic and Islamic considerations, the
fervour with which the local Turks and Kurds participated in the
slaughter was clearly due to their Islamic conditioning of hatred
against non-Muslims.
This ideological killing could be distinguished from genocide in the
strict sense, because ethnicity was not the reason for the slaughter.
While this caution may complicate matters for the Ukrainians or
Cambodians, it does not apply to the case of Hinduism: like the Jews,
the Hindus have historically been both a religion and a nation (or at
least, casteists might argue, a conglomerate of nations). Attempts to
kill all Hindus of a given region may legitimately be termed
genocide.
For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its
occasional (though not continuous) intention to exterminate entire
Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was
never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, can
without exaggeration be termed genocide. To quote Will Durant's
famous line: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest
story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is
that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order
and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by
barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." (Story of
Civilization, vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, New York 1972, p.459)
Hinduism's losses
There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at
the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim
chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast
as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus
than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several
occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528)
killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal
whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus; and they were only a
third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place
during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual
conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192
ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-
1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by
comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population
declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to
substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to
India is yet to start in right earnest.
Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian
schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony
in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction
with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial,
this propaganda can be called negationism. The really daring
negationists don't just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert
the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is routinely
alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality,
Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule,
but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his
lieutenants.
Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of
enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets
in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely
to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian
mountain", was renamed Hindu Kush, "Hindu-killer", when one cold
night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu
slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur
conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal
that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter,
while in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each". Hindu
slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained
their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It
is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on
India were partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam.
Karm
The Hindu notion of Karm has come under fire from Christian and
secularist polemicists as part of the current backlash against New
Age thinking. Allegedly, the doctrine of Karm implies that the
victims of the Holocaust and other massacres had deserved their fate.
A naive understanding of Karm, divorced from its Hindu context, could
indeed lead to such ideas. Worse, it could be said that the Jews as a
nation had incurred genocidal karm by the genocide which their
ancestors committed on the Canaanites. Likewise, it could be argued
that the Native Americans had it coming: recent research (by Walter
Neves from Brazil as well as by US scientists) has shown that in ca.
8000 BC, the Mongoloid Native American populations replaced an
earlier American population closely resembling the Australian
Aborigines -- the first American genocide?
More generally, if Karm explains suffering and "apparent" injustice
as a profound form of justice, a way of reaping the karmic rewards of
one's own actions, are we not perversely justifying every injustice?
These questions should not be taken lightly. However, the Hindu
understanding of reincarnation militates against the doctrine of
genocidal "group karm" outlined above. An individual can incarnate in
any community, even in other species, and need not be reborn among
his own progeny. If Canaanites killed by the Israelites have indeed
reincarnated, some may have been Nazi camp guards and others Jewish
Holocaust victims. There is no reason to assume that the members of
today's victim group are the reincarnated souls of the bullies of
yesteryear, returning to suffer their due punishment. That is the
difference between karm and genetics: karm is taken along by the
individual soul, not passed on in the family line.
More fundamentally, we should outgrow this childish (and in this
case, downright embarrassing) view of karm as a matter of reward and
punishment. Does the killer of a million people return a million
times as a murder victim to suffer the full measure of his deserved
punishment? Rather, karm is a law of conservation: you are reborn
with the basic pattern of desires and conditionings which
characterized you when you died last time around. The concrete
experiences and actions which shaped that pattern, however, are
history: they only survive insofar as they have shaped your psychic
karm pattern, not as a precise account of merits and demerits to be
paid off by corresponding amounts of suffering and pleasure.
One lesson to be learned from genocide history pertains to Karm, the
law of cause and effect, in a more down-to-earth sense: suffering
genocide is the karmic reward of weakness. That is one conclusion
which the Jews have drawn from their genocide experience: they
created a modern and militarily strong state. Even more importantly,
they helped foster an awareness of the history of their persecution
among their former persecutors, the Christians, which makes it
unlikely that Christians will target them again. In this respect, the
Hindus have so far failed completely. With numerous Holocaust
memorials already functioning, one more memorial is being built in
Berlin by the heirs of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; but there
is not even one memorial to the Hindu genocide, because even the
victim community doesn't bother, let alone the perpetrators.
This different treatment of the past has implications for the future.
Thus, Israel's nuclear programme is accepted as a matter of course,
justified by the country's genuine security concerns; but when India,
which has equally legitimate security concerns, conducted nuclear
tests, it provoked American sanctions. If the world ignores Hindu
security concerns, one of the reasons is that Hindus have never
bothered to tell the world how many Hindus have been killed already.
Healing
What should Hindus say to Muslims when they consider the record of
Islam in Hindu lands? It is first of all very important not to allot
guilt wrongly. Notions of collective or hereditary guilt should be
avoided. Today's Muslims cannot help it that other Muslims did
certain things in 712 or 1565 or 1971. One thing they can do,
however, is to critically reread their scripture to discern the
doctrinal factors of Muslim violence against Hindus and Hinduism. Of
course, even without scriptural injunction, people get violent and
wage wars; if Mahmud Ghaznavi hadn't come, some of the people he
killed would have died in other, non-religious conflicts. But the
basic Quranic doctrine of hatred against the unbelievers has also
encouraged many good-natured and pious people to take up the sword
against Hindus and other Pagans, not because they couldn't control
their aggressive instincts, but because they had been told that
killing unbelievers was a meritorious act. Good people have
perpetrated evil because religious authorities had depicted it as
good.
This is material for a no-nonsense dialogue between Hindus and
Muslims. But before Hindus address Muslims about this, it is
imperative that they inform themselves about this painful history.
Apart from unreflected grievances, Hindus have so far not developed a
serious critique of Islam's doctrine and historical record. Often
practising very sentimental, un-philosophical varieties of their own
religion, most Hindus have very sketchy and distorted images of rival
religions. Thus, they say that Mohammed was an Avatar of Vishnu, and
then think that they have cleverly solved the Hindu-Muslim conflict
by flattering the Prophet (in fact, it is an insult to basic Muslim
beliefs, which reject divine incarnation, apart from indirectly
associating the Prophet with Vishnu's incarnation as a pig). Instead
of the silly sop stories which pass as conducive to secularism,
Hindus should acquaint themselves with real history and real
religious doctrines.
Another thing which we should not forget is that Islam is ultimately
rooted in human nature. We need not believe the Muslim claim that the
Quran is of divine origin; but then it is not of diabolical origin
either, it is a human document. The Quran is in all respects the
product of a 7th-century Arab businessman vaguely acquainted with
Judeo-Christian notions of monotheism and prophetism, and the good
and evil elements in it are very human. Even its negative elements
appealed to human instincts, e.g. when Mohammed promised a share in
the booty of the caravans he robbed, numerous Arab Pagans took the
bait and joined him. The undesirable elements in Islamic doctrine
stem from human nature, and can in essence be found elsewhere as
well. Keeping that in mind, it should be possible to make a fair
evaluation of Islam's career in India on the basis of factual
history.
More at:
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/irin/genocide.html
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
-----
About the terrorist Goon Squad:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
As everyone knows, a goon is a bully or thug who terrorizes or tries
to do away with opposition.
"Myself, Mallu. Yourself?" (V. Bhattathiri) <KalluM...@gmail.com>
tries his best to be a bully -- telling others what and when to post,
where to post and where not to post, deliberately publishing lies
about others, stalking and abusing them with hate speech -- but fails
miserably. He is really stressed out, and like his lap dog Prem
Thomas (who currently posts as "P. Rajah" <us...@this.com>, and issues
*death threats* to people), is priming himself for conditions such as
stroke and heart disease. Others in the Goon Squad include
Dayashankar M. Joshi "DMJoshi" <jos...@gmail.com> who displays
unquestioning obedience to Goon Squad thugs, and the instigator who
posts as "Bholu" <bh...@hotmail.com>
The Goon Squad currently post most of their abuse through eternal-
september.org and by writing someone else's name or handle in the
"From:" header -- their favorite now is "fana...@gmail.com" (note
the extra "b" and "gmail.com") to make it appear as if the posts are
from "fan...@aol.com", who has been a regular poster for many years.
-Updated on February 2, 2012-
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Dr. Koenraad Elst
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org
"The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu
pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political
embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such
language warranted, or is it a ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
To give an idea of the context of this question, we must note that
the term "genocide" is used very loosely these days. One of the
charges by a Spanish judge against Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet, so
as to get him extradited from Great Britain in autumn 1998, was
"genocide". This was his way of making Pinochet internationally
accountable for having killed a few Spanish citizens: alleging a
crime serious enough to overrule normal constraints based on
diplomatic immunity and national sovereignty. Yet, whatever
Pinochet's crimes, it is simply ridiculous to charge that he ever
intended to exterminate the Spanish nation. In the current
competition for victim status, all kinds of interest groups are
blatantly overbidding in order to get their piece of the entitlement
to attention and solidarity.
The Nazi Holocaust killed the majority of European Jewry (an
estimated 5.1 million according to Raul Hilberg, 5.27 million
according to the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and about
30% of the Jewish people worldwide. How many victim groups can say as
much? The Partition pogroms killed hardly 0.3% of the Hindus, and
though it annihilated the Hindu presence in all the provinces of
Pakistan except for parts of Sindh and East Bengal, it did so mostly
by putting the Hindus to flight (at least seven million) rather than
by killing them (probably half a million). Likewise, the ethnic
cleansing of a quarter million Hindus from Kashmir in 1990 followed
the strategy of "killing one to expel a hundred", which is not the
same thing as killing them all; in practice, about 1,500 were killed.
Partition featured some local massacres of genocidal type, with the
Sikhs as the most wanted victims, but in relative as well as absolute
figures, this does not match the Holocaust.
Among genocides, the Holocaust was a very special case (e.g. the
attempt to carry it out in secrecy is unique), and it serves no good
purpose to blur that specificity by extending the term to all
genocides in general. The term "Holocaust", though first used in a
genocidal sense to describe the Armenian genocide of 1915, is now in
effect synonymous with the specifically Jewish experience at the
hands of the Nazis in 1941-45. But does even the more general term
"genocide" apply to what Hinduism suffered at the hands of Islam?
Complete genocide
"Genocide" means the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic
community, or by extension any community constituted by bonds of
kinship, of common religion or ideology, of common socio-economic
position, or of common race. The pure form is the complete
extermination of every man, woman and child of the group. Examples
include the complete extermination of the native Tasmanians and many
Amerindian nations from Patagonia to Canada by European settlers in
the 16th-19th century. The most notorious attempt was the Nazi "final
solution of the Jewish question" in 1941-45. In April-May 1994, Hutu
militias in Rwanda went about slaughtering the Tutsi minority,
killing ca. 800,000, in anticipation of the conquest of their country
by a Uganda-based Tutsi army. Though improvised and executed with
primitive weapons, the Rwandan genocide made more victims per day
than the Holocaust.
Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971,
when the Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as
their most wanted target. This fact is strictly ignored in most
writing about Hindu-Muslim relations, in spite (or rather because) of
its serious implication that even the lowest estimate of the Hindu
death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most numerous victims of
Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is significant
that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll
has been attempted: the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling
classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against
Muslims.
Nandan Vyas ("Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan", Young India, January
1995) has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the
1971 genocide was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In
comparing the population figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the
observed natural growth rhythm into account, Vyas finds that the
Hindu population has remained stable at 9.5 million when it should
have increased to nearly 13 million (13.23 million if the same growth
rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for Muslims). Of the missing 3.5
million people (if not more), 1.1 million can be explained: it is the
number of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to the genocide. The
Hindu refugees at the time of the genocide, about 8 million, all went
back after the ordeal, partly because the Indian government forced
them to it, partly because the new state of Bangladesh was conceived
as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu refugees into India only
resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards islamization of the
polity were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus to be
explained. Taking into account a number of Hindu children born to
refugees in India rather than in Bangladesh, and a possible
settlement of 1971 refugees in India, it is fair to estimate the
disappeared Hindus at about 2 million.
While India-watchers wax indignant about communal riots in India
killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of
three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-
Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a
whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus.
Even apart from the 1971 genocide, "ordinary" pogroms in East
Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of
riot victims in India since 1948.
Selective genocide
A second, less extreme type of genocide consists in killing a
sufficient number who form the backbone of the group's collective
identity, and assimilating the leaderless masses into the dominant
community. This has been the Chinese policy in Tibet, killing over a
million Tibetans while assimilating the survivors into Chinese
culture by flooding their country with Chinese settlers. It was also
Stalin's policy in eastern Poland and the Baltic states after they
fell into his hands under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, exemplified by
the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in Katyn. Stalin's
policies combining murder of the elites, deportation of entire ethnic
groups and ruthless oppression of the survivors was prefigured in
antiquity by the Assyrians, whose deportation of the ten northern
(now "lost") tribes of Israel is attested in the Bible.
During the Islamic conquests in India, it was a typical policy to
single out the Brahmins for slaughter, after the Hindu warrior class
had been bled on the battlefield. Even the Portuguese in Malabar and
Goa followed this policy in the 16th century, as can be deduced from
Hindu-Portuguese treaty clauses prohibiting the Portuguese from
killing Brahmins.
In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for
slaughter and the women and children for slavery or concubinage.
Thus, in 416 BCE, the Athenians were angered at the Melians'
reluctance to join the war against Sparta, and to set an example for
other client states, Athens had Melos repopulated with Athenian
colonists after killing its men and enslaving its women. Another
example would be the slaughter of the Jews of Medina by Mohammed in
626 CE: after expelling two Jewish tribes, the third one, the Banu
Quraiza, were exterminated: all the ca. 700 men were beheaded, while
the women and children were sold into slavery, with the Prophet
keeping the most beautiful woman as his concubine (she refused to
marry him).
Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic
conquerors, e.g. when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus
basin in 712 CE. Thus, in Multan, according to the Chach-Nama, "six
thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and
dependents were taken as slaves". This is why Rajput women committed
mass suicide to save their honour in the face of the imminent entry
of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women immolated themselves
during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where this most
enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants). During the
Partition pogroms and the East Bengali genocide, mass rape of Hindu
women after the slaughter of their fathers and husbands was a
frequent event.
At this point, however, we should not overlook a puzzling episode in
Hindu legend which describes a similar behaviour by a Hindu
conqueror: Parashurama, deified as the 6th incarnation of Vishnu,
killed all the adult male Kshatriyas for several generations, until
only women were left, and then had Brahmins father a new generation
upon them. Just a story, or reference to a historic genocide?
Genocide in the Bible
For full-blooded genocide, however, the book to consult is the Bible,
which describes cases of both partial and complete genocide. The
first modest attempt was the killing by Jacob's sons of all the males
in the Canaanite tribe of Shekhem, the fiancé of their own sister
Dina. The motive was pride of pedigree: having immigrated from the
civilizational centre of Ur in Mesopotamia, Abraham's tribe refused
all intermarriage with the native people of Canaan (thus, Rebecca
favoured Jacob over Esau because Jacob married his nieces while Esau
married local women).
Full-scale genocide was ordered by God, and executed by his faithful,
during the conquest of Canaan by Moses and Joshua. In the defeated
cities outside the Promised Land, they had to kill all the men but
keep the women as slaves or concubines. Inside the Promised Land, by
contrast, the conquerors were ordered to kill every single man, woman
and child. All the Canaanites and Amalekites were killed. Here, the
stated reason was that God wanted to prevent the coexistence of His
people with Pagans, which would result in religious syncretism and
the restoration of polytheism.
As we only have a literary record of this genocide, liberal
theologians uncomfortable with a genocidal God have argued that this
Canaanite genocide was only fiction. To be sure, genocide fiction
exists, e.g. the Biblical story that the Egyptians had all newborn
male Israelites killed is inconsistent with all other data in the
Biblical narrative itself (as well as unattested in the numerous and
detailed Egyptian inscriptions), and apparently only served to
underpin the story of Moses' arrival in the Pharaoh's court in a
basket on the river, a story modelled on the then-popular life story
of Sargon of Akkad. Yet, the narrative of the conquest of Canaan is
full of military detail uncommon in fiction; unlike other parts of
the Bible, it is almost without any miracles, factual through and
through.
And even if we suppose that the story is fictional, what would it say
about the editors that they attributed genocidal intentions and
injunctions to their God? If He was non-genocidal and good in
reality, why turn him into a genocidal and prima facie evil Being? On
balance, it is slightly more comforting to accept that the Bible
editors described a genocide because they wanted to be truthful and
relate real events. After all, the great and outstanding thing about
the Bible narrative is its realism, its refusal to idealize its
heroes. We get to see Jacob deceiving Isaac and Esau, then Laban
deceiving Jacob; David's heroism and ingenuity in battle, but also
his treachery in making Bathseba his own, and later his descent into
senility; Salomon's palace intrigues in the war of succession along
with his pearls of wisdom. Against that background, it would be
inconsistent to censor the Canaanite genocide as merely a fictional
interpolation.
Indirect genocide
A third type of genocide consists in preventing procreation among a
targeted population. Till recently, it was US policy to promote
sterilization among Native American women, even applying it secretly
during postnatal care or other operations. The Tibetans too have been
subjected to this treatment. In the Muslim world, male slaves were
often castrated, which partly explains why Iraq has no Black
population even though it once had hundreds of thousands of Black
slaves. The practice also existed in India on a smaller scale, though
the much-maligned Moghul emperor Aurangzeb tried to put an end to it,
mainly because eunuchs brought endless corruption in the court. The
hijra community is a left-over of this Islamic institution (in
ancient India, harems were tended by old men or naturally
napunsak/impotent men, tested by having to spend the night with a
prostitute without showing signs of virile excitement).
A fourth type of genocide is when mass killing takes place
unintentionally, as collateral damage of foolish policies, e.g.
Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward inducing the greatest man-made mass
starvation killing 20 million or more, or the British war
requisitions causing the Bengal famine of 1943 killing some 3
million; or as collateral damage of other forms of oppression. Unlike
the deliberate genocide of Native Americans in parts of the USA or
Argentina, the death of millions of Natives in Central America after
the first Spanish conquests was at least partly the unintended side-
effect of the hardships of forced labour and the contact with new
diseases brought by the Europeans. In contrast with Nazi and Soviet
work camps, where forced labour had the dual purpose of economic
profit and a slow but sure death of the inmates, there is no evidence
that the Spanish wanted their Native labourers to die. After all,
their replacement with African slaves required a large extra
investment.
The Atlantic slave trade itself caused mass death among the
transported slaves, just as in the already long-standing Arab slave
trade, but it is obvious that purely for the sake of profit, the
slave-traders preferred as many slaves as possible to arrive at the
slave markets alive. Likewise, the Christian c.q. Islamic contempt
for Pagans made them rather careless with the lives of Native
Americans, Africans or Hindus, so that millions of them were killed,
and yet this was not deliberate genocide. Of course they wanted to
annihilate Pagan religions like Hinduism, but in principle, the
missionary religions wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred
not to kill them unless this was necessary for establishing the power
of the True Faith.
That is why the mass killing of Hindus by Muslims rarely took place
in peacetime, but typically in the fervour immediately following
military victories, e.g. the fall of the metropolis of Vijayanagar in
1565 was "celebrated" with a general massacre and arson. Once Muslim
power was established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate
rather than kill the Hindus, and discourage rebellion by making some
sort of compromise. Not that peacetime was all that peaceful, for as
Fernand Braudel wrote in A History of Civilizations (Penguin
1988/1963, p.232-236), Islamic rule in India as a "colonial
experiment" was "extremely violent", and "the Muslims could not rule
the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm --
burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive
tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On
occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an
uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were
burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and
women were taken as slaves."
Though all these small acts of terror added up to a death toll of
genocidal proportions, no organized genocide of the Holocaust type
took place. One constraint on Muslim zeal for Holy War was the
endemic inter-Muslim warfare and intrigue (no history of a royal
house was bloodier than that of the Delhi Sultanate 1206-1525),
another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of Islamic law in
India. This is the only one among the four law schools in Sunni Islam
which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, dis-empowered third-class
citizens paying a special tax for the favour of being tolerated; the
other three schools of jurisprudence ruled that Pagans, as opposed to
Christians and Jews, had to be given a choice between Islam and
death.
Staggering numbers also died as collateral damage of the deliberate
impoverishment by Sultans like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir. As
Braudel put it: "The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one
catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics
capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was
the constant counterpart of the conquerors' opulence."
Genocide by any other name
In some cases, terminological purists object to mass murder being
described as "genocide", viz. when it targets groups defined by other
criteria than ethnicity. Stalin's "genocide" through organized famine
in Ukraine killed some 7 million people (lowest estimate is 4
million) in 1931-33, the largest-ever deliberate mass murder in
peacetime, but its victims were targeted because of their economic
and political positions, not because of their nationhood. Though it
makes no difference to the victims, this was not strictly genocide or
"nation murder", but "class murder". Likewise, the killing of perhaps
two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge was not an attempt to
destroy the Cambodian nation; it was rather an attempt to "purify"
the nation of its bourgeois class.
The killing of large groups of ideological dissenters is a constant
in the history of the monotheistic faiths, of which Marxism has been
termed a modern offshoot, starting with the killing of some
polytheistic priests by Pharaoh Akhenaton and, shortly after, the
treacherous killing of 3,000 worshippers of the Golden Calf by Moses
(they had been encouraged to come out in the open by Moses' brother
Aaron, not unlike Chairman Mao's "hundred flowers" campaign which
encouraged dissenters to speak freely, all the better to eliminate
them later). Mass killing accompanied the christianization of Saxony
by Charlemagne (ca. 800 CE) and of East Prussia by the Teutonic
Knights (13th century). In 1209-29, French Catholics massacred the
heretical Cathars. Wars between Muslims and Christians, and between
Catholics and Protestants, killed millions both in deliberate
massacres and as collateral damage, e.g. seven million Germans in
1618-48. Though the Turkish government which ordered the killing of a
million Armenians in 1915 was motivated by a mixture of purely
military, secular-nationalistic and Islamic considerations, the
fervour with which the local Turks and Kurds participated in the
slaughter was clearly due to their Islamic conditioning of hatred
against non-Muslims.
This ideological killing could be distinguished from genocide in the
strict sense, because ethnicity was not the reason for the slaughter.
While this caution may complicate matters for the Ukrainians or
Cambodians, it does not apply to the case of Hinduism: like the Jews,
the Hindus have historically been both a religion and a nation (or at
least, casteists might argue, a conglomerate of nations). Attempts to
kill all Hindus of a given region may legitimately be termed
genocide.
For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its
occasional (though not continuous) intention to exterminate entire
Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was
never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, can
without exaggeration be termed genocide. To quote Will Durant's
famous line: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest
story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is
that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order
and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by
barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." (Story of
Civilization, vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, New York 1972, p.459)
Hinduism's losses
There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at
the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim
chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast
as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus
than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several
occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528)
killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal
whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus; and they were only a
third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place
during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual
conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192
ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-
1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by
comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population
declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to
substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to
India is yet to start in right earnest.
Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian
schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony
in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction
with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial,
this propaganda can be called negationism. The really daring
negationists don't just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert
the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is routinely
alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality,
Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule,
but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his
lieutenants.
Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of
enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets
in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely
to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian
mountain", was renamed Hindu Kush, "Hindu-killer", when one cold
night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu
slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur
conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal
that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter,
while in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each". Hindu
slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained
their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It
is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on
India were partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam.
Karm
The Hindu notion of Karm has come under fire from Christian and
secularist polemicists as part of the current backlash against New
Age thinking. Allegedly, the doctrine of Karm implies that the
victims of the Holocaust and other massacres had deserved their fate.
A naive understanding of Karm, divorced from its Hindu context, could
indeed lead to such ideas. Worse, it could be said that the Jews as a
nation had incurred genocidal karm by the genocide which their
ancestors committed on the Canaanites. Likewise, it could be argued
that the Native Americans had it coming: recent research (by Walter
Neves from Brazil as well as by US scientists) has shown that in ca.
8000 BC, the Mongoloid Native American populations replaced an
earlier American population closely resembling the Australian
Aborigines -- the first American genocide?
More generally, if Karm explains suffering and "apparent" injustice
as a profound form of justice, a way of reaping the karmic rewards of
one's own actions, are we not perversely justifying every injustice?
These questions should not be taken lightly. However, the Hindu
understanding of reincarnation militates against the doctrine of
genocidal "group karm" outlined above. An individual can incarnate in
any community, even in other species, and need not be reborn among
his own progeny. If Canaanites killed by the Israelites have indeed
reincarnated, some may have been Nazi camp guards and others Jewish
Holocaust victims. There is no reason to assume that the members of
today's victim group are the reincarnated souls of the bullies of
yesteryear, returning to suffer their due punishment. That is the
difference between karm and genetics: karm is taken along by the
individual soul, not passed on in the family line.
More fundamentally, we should outgrow this childish (and in this
case, downright embarrassing) view of karm as a matter of reward and
punishment. Does the killer of a million people return a million
times as a murder victim to suffer the full measure of his deserved
punishment? Rather, karm is a law of conservation: you are reborn
with the basic pattern of desires and conditionings which
characterized you when you died last time around. The concrete
experiences and actions which shaped that pattern, however, are
history: they only survive insofar as they have shaped your psychic
karm pattern, not as a precise account of merits and demerits to be
paid off by corresponding amounts of suffering and pleasure.
One lesson to be learned from genocide history pertains to Karm, the
law of cause and effect, in a more down-to-earth sense: suffering
genocide is the karmic reward of weakness. That is one conclusion
which the Jews have drawn from their genocide experience: they
created a modern and militarily strong state. Even more importantly,
they helped foster an awareness of the history of their persecution
among their former persecutors, the Christians, which makes it
unlikely that Christians will target them again. In this respect, the
Hindus have so far failed completely. With numerous Holocaust
memorials already functioning, one more memorial is being built in
Berlin by the heirs of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; but there
is not even one memorial to the Hindu genocide, because even the
victim community doesn't bother, let alone the perpetrators.
This different treatment of the past has implications for the future.
Thus, Israel's nuclear programme is accepted as a matter of course,
justified by the country's genuine security concerns; but when India,
which has equally legitimate security concerns, conducted nuclear
tests, it provoked American sanctions. If the world ignores Hindu
security concerns, one of the reasons is that Hindus have never
bothered to tell the world how many Hindus have been killed already.
Healing
What should Hindus say to Muslims when they consider the record of
Islam in Hindu lands? It is first of all very important not to allot
guilt wrongly. Notions of collective or hereditary guilt should be
avoided. Today's Muslims cannot help it that other Muslims did
certain things in 712 or 1565 or 1971. One thing they can do,
however, is to critically reread their scripture to discern the
doctrinal factors of Muslim violence against Hindus and Hinduism. Of
course, even without scriptural injunction, people get violent and
wage wars; if Mahmud Ghaznavi hadn't come, some of the people he
killed would have died in other, non-religious conflicts. But the
basic Quranic doctrine of hatred against the unbelievers has also
encouraged many good-natured and pious people to take up the sword
against Hindus and other Pagans, not because they couldn't control
their aggressive instincts, but because they had been told that
killing unbelievers was a meritorious act. Good people have
perpetrated evil because religious authorities had depicted it as
good.
This is material for a no-nonsense dialogue between Hindus and
Muslims. But before Hindus address Muslims about this, it is
imperative that they inform themselves about this painful history.
Apart from unreflected grievances, Hindus have so far not developed a
serious critique of Islam's doctrine and historical record. Often
practising very sentimental, un-philosophical varieties of their own
religion, most Hindus have very sketchy and distorted images of rival
religions. Thus, they say that Mohammed was an Avatar of Vishnu, and
then think that they have cleverly solved the Hindu-Muslim conflict
by flattering the Prophet (in fact, it is an insult to basic Muslim
beliefs, which reject divine incarnation, apart from indirectly
associating the Prophet with Vishnu's incarnation as a pig). Instead
of the silly sop stories which pass as conducive to secularism,
Hindus should acquaint themselves with real history and real
religious doctrines.
Another thing which we should not forget is that Islam is ultimately
rooted in human nature. We need not believe the Muslim claim that the
Quran is of divine origin; but then it is not of diabolical origin
either, it is a human document. The Quran is in all respects the
product of a 7th-century Arab businessman vaguely acquainted with
Judeo-Christian notions of monotheism and prophetism, and the good
and evil elements in it are very human. Even its negative elements
appealed to human instincts, e.g. when Mohammed promised a share in
the booty of the caravans he robbed, numerous Arab Pagans took the
bait and joined him. The undesirable elements in Islamic doctrine
stem from human nature, and can in essence be found elsewhere as
well. Keeping that in mind, it should be possible to make a fair
evaluation of Islam's career in India on the basis of factual
history.
More at:
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/irin/genocide.html
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
-----
About the terrorist Goon Squad:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
As everyone knows, a goon is a bully or thug who terrorizes or tries
to do away with opposition.
"Myself, Mallu. Yourself?" (V. Bhattathiri) <KalluM...@gmail.com>
tries his best to be a bully -- telling others what and when to post,
where to post and where not to post, deliberately publishing lies
about others, stalking and abusing them with hate speech -- but fails
miserably. He is really stressed out, and like his lap dog Prem
Thomas (who currently posts as "P. Rajah" <us...@this.com>, and issues
*death threats* to people), is priming himself for conditions such as
stroke and heart disease. Others in the Goon Squad include
Dayashankar M. Joshi "DMJoshi" <jos...@gmail.com> who displays
unquestioning obedience to Goon Squad thugs, and the instigator who
posts as "Bholu" <bh...@hotmail.com>
The Goon Squad currently post most of their abuse through eternal-
september.org and by writing someone else's name or handle in the
"From:" header -- their favorite now is "fana...@gmail.com" (note
the extra "b" and "gmail.com") to make it appear as if the posts are
from "fan...@aol.com", who has been a regular poster for many years.
-Updated on February 2, 2012-
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Since newsgroup posts are being removed
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this post may be reposted several times.
fanabba
Feb 7, 2012, 1:04:12 PM2/7/12
to
On Feb 6, 9:38 pm, use...@mantra.com and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr.
> "Myself, Mallu. Yourself?" (V. Bhattathiri) <KalluMallu...@gmail.com>
Dhanyavaad for your post !
Dhanyavaad for your service to Sanaatan Dharm !
Jai Maharaj) wrote:
> Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
>
> Dr. Koenraad Elsthttp://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org
> Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
>
> tries his best to be a bully -- telling others what and when to post,
> where to post and where not to post, deliberately publishing lies
> about others, stalking and abusing them with hate speech -- but fails
> miserably. He is really stressed out, and like his lap dog Prem
> Thomas (who currently posts as "P. Rajah" <u...@this.com>, and issues
> where to post and where not to post, deliberately publishing lies
> about others, stalking and abusing them with hate speech -- but fails
> miserably. He is really stressed out, and like his lap dog Prem
> *death threats* to people), is priming himself for conditions such as
> stroke and heart disease. Others in the Goon Squad include
> Dayashankar M. Joshi "DMJoshi" <josh...@gmail.com> who displays
> stroke and heart disease. Others in the Goon Squad include
> unquestioning obedience to Goon Squad thugs, and the instigator who
> posts as "Bholu" <bh...@hotmail.com>
>
> The Goon Squad currently post most of their abuse through eternal-
> september.org and by writing someone else's name or handle in the
> "From:" header -- their favorite now is "fanab...@gmail.com" (note
> posts as "Bholu" <bh...@hotmail.com>
>
> The Goon Squad currently post most of their abuse through eternal-
> september.org and by writing someone else's name or handle in the
> the extra "b" and "gmail.com") to make it appear as if the posts are
> from "fana...@aol.com", who has been a regular poster for many years.
Dhanyavaad for your service to Sanaatan Dharm !
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Feb 7, 2012, 3:00:23 PM2/7/12
to
In article <bd4f7323-577a-4cad...@g27g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
fanabba <fan...@aol.com> posted:
>
> Dr. Jai Maharaj posted:
> > in the Canaanite tribe of Shekhem, the fianc=E9 of their own sister
Dharm!
fanabba <fan...@aol.com> posted:
>
> Dr. Jai Maharaj posted:
>
> > Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
> >
> > Dr. Koenraad Elsthttp://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org
> >
> > "The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu
> > pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political
> > embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such
> > language warranted, or is it a ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
> >
> > To give an idea of the context of this question, we must note that
> > the term "genocide" is used very loosely these days. One of the
> > charges by a Spanish judge against Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet, so
> > as to get him extradited from Great Britain in autumn 1998, was
> > "genocide". This was his way of making Pinochet internationally
> > accountable for having killed a few Spanish citizens: alleging a
> > crime serious enough to overrule normal constraints based on
> > diplomatic immunity and national sovereignty. Yet, whatever
> > Pinochet's crimes, it is simply ridiculous to charge that he ever
> > intended to exterminate the Spanish nation. In the current
> > competition for victim status, all kinds of interest groups are
> > blatantly overbidding in order to get their piece of the entitlement
> > to attention and solidarity.
> >
> > The Nazi Holocaust killed the majority of European Jewry (an
> > estimated 5.1 million according to Raul Hilberg, 5.27 million
> > according to the Munich-based Institut f=FCr Zeitgeschichte) and about
> > Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus?
> >
> > Dr. Koenraad Elsthttp://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org
> >
> > "The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu
> > pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political
> > embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such
> > language warranted, or is it a ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
> >
> > To give an idea of the context of this question, we must note that
> > the term "genocide" is used very loosely these days. One of the
> > charges by a Spanish judge against Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet, so
> > as to get him extradited from Great Britain in autumn 1998, was
> > "genocide". This was his way of making Pinochet internationally
> > accountable for having killed a few Spanish citizens: alleging a
> > crime serious enough to overrule normal constraints based on
> > diplomatic immunity and national sovereignty. Yet, whatever
> > Pinochet's crimes, it is simply ridiculous to charge that he ever
> > intended to exterminate the Spanish nation. In the current
> > competition for victim status, all kinds of interest groups are
> > blatantly overbidding in order to get their piece of the entitlement
> > to attention and solidarity.
> >
> > The Nazi Holocaust killed the majority of European Jewry (an
> > estimated 5.1 million according to Raul Hilberg, 5.27 million
> Dhanyavaad for your post !
>
> Dhanyavaad for your service to Sanaatan Dharm !
You are welcome ji, and dhanyavaad for your service to Sanaatan
>
> Dhanyavaad for your service to Sanaatan Dharm !
Dharm!
pundit.har...@inderoje.com
Feb 7, 2012, 3:33:46 PM2/7/12
to
> > "The Partition Holocaust": the term is frequently used in Hindu
> > pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political
> > embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such
> > language warranted, or is it a ridicule-inviting exaggeration?
parts.
Tens of thousands were killed on both sides and the same for those forced
to leave,ie. ethnic cleansing.
There is no glory or honor or lesson in morality to be found in that sad
time. The worst of what humans can be was on full display for all the
world to see.
It is the first entry on the mass terror event list.
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