Hindu-Muslim relations
Hindu-Muslim relations, historically never in a cordial state, are poised to deteriorate further.
The country faces an invisible but grave threat. There is a sustained, well-funded and orchestrated campaign by divisive forces led by the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal to defame Bharat, denigrate Hinduism, vilify Indian culture, and divide Indians on the basis of caste and religion. They could well be called the Anti-Hindu Anti-Bharat (AHAB) gang.
Communal disharmony has become an ulcer that has been eating into the vitals of our society. If this great nation of ours has to march to the glory it deserves, the nation must not be wasting its vital energies in combating its internal stresses arising out of communal discord. We need true social unity in the country, not just political unity.
What torments the Hindus?
The very fact that serious communal issues have continued to beset modern India in 2023 also; 1,311 years after the first invading Muslim armies set foot on Indian soil in 712 AD, proves that something so deep, so powerful is at work, which has resisted all the attempts of over a century-and-a-quarter at whitewashing and window-dressing of the ugly realities of Hindu-Muslim relations.
The sheer savagery of the Muslim invasions; rendered obscenely grotesque by the naked dance of mass slaughter, enslavement, mass rapes, sexual slavery, plunder, rapine and wanton destruction of sacred temples; has left an indelible imprint on the collective psyche of the Hindus that haunts them to this date. The wounds continue to fester in spite of over 13 centuries of ‘forced coexistence’ of the two communities.
In his painstaking research work titled ‘Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them’ (in two volumes, the first published in December 1990), Sita Ram Goel furnished a partial but still impressive list of some 2,000 mosques across the country that were built after demolishing temples that stood there and for which there is prima facie structural evidence exists for anyone to verify that for himself. Koenraad Elst pointed out in an article in the First Post in October 2021 that not one of his claims have had been challenged since then on merit.
One example of the atrocities that had ‘burned’ the Hindus can be had in the following. Elliot and Dowson cite from ‘Tarkih-i-Wassaf’ where the chronicler speaks about Alauddin Khilji’s campaign in Gujarat in the following unmistakeable words: “With a view to holy war, and not for the lust of conquest, the Muhammadan forces began to kill and slaughter, on the right and on the left unmercifully, throughout the impure land, for the sake of Islam, and blood flowed in torrents…They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes, more than pen can enumerate…In short, the Muhammadan army brought the country to utter ruin…Many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden underfoot, the largest of which was called Somnath…The fragments were conveyed to Delhi, and the entrance of the Jama masjid was paved with them so that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory.” Exactly, the same trend continued until they were ousted by the British.
Most historians agree that what had started with Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD, continued unabated until Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1761 AD. For Qasim’s attack on Debal, we learn from Mirza Kalichbeg’s translation of ‘Chachnama’ (originally an undated but probably eighth-century Arabic text, later translated into Persian in the 13th century by Ali Kufi) and Sir Wolseley Haig’s ‘Cambridge History of India’ that all males of the age of 17 and upwards were put to the sword and their women and children were enslaved. For the Third Battle of Panipat (1761), we learn from the voluminous historical work ‘Siyar-ul-Mutakherin’ of Sayyid Ghulam Husain Tabatabai and H. G. Rawlinson in ‘Cambridge History of India’ that “the unhappy prisoners were paraded in long lines, given a little parched grain and a drink of water and beheaded, and the women and children who survived were driven off as slaves—22,000, many of them of the highest rank in the land.”
The ugly reality of Hindu-Muslim relations in India
In his famous book, ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’, Dr B. R. Ambedkar writes at length on ‘The Riot-Torn History of Hindu-Muslim Relations, 1920-1940’ (Chapter VII, Part IV) where he describes every single riot that took place in India in this period. He says, “These acts of barbarism against women, committed without remorse, without shame and without condemnation by their fellow brethren show the depth of the antagonism which divided the two communities. The tempers on each side were the tempers of two warring nations.”
However hard the ‘commissioned’ historians and the cabal tried, the demon has refused to die and no amount of deluding others or self-delusion could wish it away.
There is no running away from the fact that there were such irreconcilable differences between the two communities throughout the medieval period, which prevented any intermingling beyond the most superficial.
Irrespective of all the contrived pretences of a composite culture; the so-called Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb; paying obeisance to the Muslim saints at dargahs; Iftar parties; Holi-Milan functions; Sufi music concerts; mushairas; biryani festivals, and various other markers of a so-called harmonious co-existence, the harsh fact, as it screams out aloud from the sheer frequency of all sorts of communal troubles on the smallest of pretexts and horrific incidents of beheadings (‘sar tan se juda’) in the country, is that the two communities have all along been living with their fingers held on hair triggers without the slightest hint of any reconciliation or rapprochement!
Lack of sincerity and ulterior motives
Relations between the two communities; marked by terrible atrocities, suffering and mutual hatred over 13 centuries, could not and cannot be improved by reading them a fake historical narrative that everything was hunky dory in the past and their respective ancestors had been revelling in bhaichara (fond brotherhood) under the benevolent and enlightened Muslim rulers. How can we expect the deeply hurt feelings of the Hindus to be assuaged when the history ‘manufactured’ by the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal does not even acknowledge the truth of their suffering? Lies can never buy peace in the long run. Today, the communal situation we are witnessing is both a reaction to that blatant malfeasance and an ever-widening ‘propagation’ of the fault lines that were left un-mended.
It is not the historical injustices and devastation that are painful to Hindus but the refusal to acknowledge the same that strikes deep into the consciousness of the Hindu mind as an act of unbearable travesty. It denies them even basic human dignity. It denies their existence, their pain and their hopes.” A rape victim could perhaps tide over the trauma of rape; however, an insidious attempt in the court to prove that she was never raped at all and that she is telling a lie would be torture unbearable to her.
Also Read:
The devil’s workshop to poison the minds of Indian Muslims
Indian Muslims: Ham Paanch, Hamare Pachis?
A most glaring and painful example of the political policy of exalting Muslim tyrants and thereby appeasing the Muslim community is the Lodi Gardens located in the heart of Delhi. What was the necessity of honouring this cruel man in particular? There are reasons to believe that this was done on purpose with the dual intention of ‘pleasing’ the Muslims who still identified themselves with the medieval rulers, and of subtly hurting Hindu sentiments.
It is like the hypothetical scenario of Israel naming a public garden after Reinhard Heydrich (generally accepted as the principal architect of the Holocaust and the darkest figure within the Nazi regime) or China naming a garden in Nanking (infamous in history for the so-called Rape of Nanking during 1937-38 when the imperial Japanese forces are believed to have raped 20,000 to 80,000 women and massacred 260,000 to 430,000 people) after the convicted war criminal Gen. Hideki Tojo! Can the world imagine that? Obviously, not! In that case, how can the Hindus be comfortable with naming that garden after Sikandar Lodi?
