THE BIGGEST HOLOCAUST IN THE WHOLE WORLD HISTORY
abourick
"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.