Negationism of India and the Muslim Conquests, 80 million Hindus killed by muslims by Francois Gautier

Sacrificer           Francois Gautier
Sacrifice code       wfor0136
Sacrifice date       February 22nd, 1999

Subject: [Hindutva] Negationism of India and the Muslim Conquests, 80 million Hindus killed by muslims

by Francois Gautier

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To: savarkariyahindutva@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 16:44:17 -0000

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Issue# 1999.00

February 22nd, 1999

Written by Francois Gautier

Negationism and the Muslim Conquests

This article by Francois Gautier has been taken from the book
"Rewriting Indian History"

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 Jawarlhal 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 Hindu; 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.

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