Negationism In India - Concealing The Record Of Islam

Copy Pasted from Sword of Truth Publication

Negationism In India - Concealing The Record Of Islam

ISBN NUMBER: 81 85990 01-8
NUMBER OF PAGES: 196
PRICE: $7.00
AUTHOR: Koenraad Elst (Leuven, 1959), a Belgian scholar, grew up in the Catholic community in Flanders. He studied at the famous Catholic University of Leuven and holds licentiate degrees (MA) in Chinese Studies, Indo-Iranian Studies and Philosophy. He studied Indian philosophy at the Benares Hindu University (BHU) and interviewed many Indian leaders and thinkers during his stay in India between 1988 and 1991. His publications include: (in Dutch) Language policy issues, Contemporary politics, Early History of Scientific Thought and Oriental Philosophies; (in English) The Ayodhya Issue, The General Relgio-political Situation in India. NEGATIONISM IN INDIA - CONCEALING THE RECORD OF ISLAM is his latest treatise on the subject
PUBLISHER: VOI, New Delhi, India.
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1992
REVIEWER(S): A. Ghosh


Negationism in Europe usually means the denial of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. India has its own brand of negationism.

A section of the Indian intelligentsia, primarily led by Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru during their life time, tried and is still trying to erase from the Hindus' memory the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam. The number of victims of this persecution far exceeds that of the Nazi crimes primarily because it lasted much longer. The Islamic campaign to wipe out what they call Paganism or KUFR could not be equally thorough but it has continued for centuries without any moral doubts arising in the minds of the persecutors and their chroniclers. The Islamic reports on the massacres of Hindus, destruction of Hindu temples, the abduction of Hindu women and forced conversions invariably express great glee and pride.

They leave no doubt that the destruction of Paganism by every means, was considered the Allah-ordained duty of the Moslem community or UMMA. Yet today many Indian historians, journalists and politicians, deny that there ever was a Hindu-Moslem conflict. They ignore the facts that led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, both Islamic theocracies. They shamelessly rewrite Indian history and talk of 'centuries of Hindu-Moslem amity'; now a growing section of the public in India and the West only knows their negationist version of history.

The Negationism regarding the Nazi crimes has been the object of much public discussion. Turkish negationism about the Armenian genocide has received some attention. Less well-known is that India has its own brand of negationism.

Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to rewrite history and to deny the millenium-long conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Today, most politicians and English-writing.

Intellectuals in India will go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of 'communal amity' between Hindus and Muslims.

Making people believe in a history of Hindu-Muslim amity in India is not an easy task: the number of victims of the persecution of Hindus by Muslims is of the same order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy, though no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism. On top of these, there is a similar number of abductions and deportation to harems and slave markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and cultural destruction. The American historian Will Durant summed it up like this: "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".

Only off and on did this persecution have the intensity of a genocide, but it was sustained much longer and spread out much wider geographically than the Nazi massacre. Whereas the Germans, including most members of the Nazi party, were horrified at the Nazi crimes against humanity within a few years, the Moslems, for whom GOTT MIT UNS (or Allah with us) was not a slogan but a religious certainty, managed to keep a good conscience for centuries. We will encounter similarities as well as differences between Nazi and Islamic crimes against humanity, but the most striking difference is definitely the persistence with which Islamic persecutions have continued for 14 centuries. This is because it had more spine, a more powerful psychological grip on its adherents than Nazism.

The ideological foundation of the Islamic campaign was similar to the Nazi ideology. The Muslim invaders (as we can read in numerous documents which they left us, from the Koran and the Hadis onward) distinguished between three kinds of people: first of all the Muslims, the HERRENVOLK (master nation) to which Allah had promised the world; secondly, the Jews and Christians, also sometimes called the AHL-I-KITAB (people of the book), who could live on under Muslim rule but only as third class citizens, just like the Slavic UNTERMENSCHEN (inferior people) in Hitler's new order; thirdly the species to be eliminated, the real Pagans who had to disappear from the face of the earth.

Different from Hitler's victims, the non-combatants among the 'unbelievers' often got a chance to opt for conversion rather than death. What Mohammed (later emulated by his successors) wanted, was his recognition of Allah's final prophet, so he preferred people to live and give him this recognition (by pronouncing the Islamic creed or KALIMA, ie. converting), and only those who refused him this recognition, were to be killed. Still, conversion often came too late to save defeated Pagans from slavery. At this point, Mohammed deserves comparison with Stalin: unlike Hitler Stalin killed people not for their race but for their opinion. But one can hardly say that the one totalitarianism is better than the other.

The BLITZ-KRIEG of the Muslim armies in the first decades after the birth of their religion had such enduring results precisely because the Pagan populations in West and central Asia had no choice (except death) but to convert. Whatever the converts' own resentment, their children grew up as Muslims and gradually identified with this religion. Within a few generations the initial resistance against this forcible conversion was forgotten, and these areas became HEIDENFREI (free from Pagans, cfr. JUDENFREI).In India it didn't go like that, because the Muslims needed five centuries of attempts at invasion before they could catch hold of large parts of India, and even then they encountered endless resistance, so that they often had to settle for a compromise.

The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle for life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) hills of Hindu skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the HINDU KUSH, i.e. "Hindu slaughter". The Bahmani sultans (1347- 1480 AD) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 Hindus every year. In 1399, Taimur killed 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1565 left large areas of Karnataka depopulated. And so on.

But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never fully surrendered. What some call the "Muslim period" in Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the HANAFITE school (dominant in India) of Islamic law made possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the HANAFITE school gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but to allow them toleration as ZIMMIS (protected ones) living under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the JIZYA (toleration tax) from them. Normally the ZIMMI status was only open to Jews and Christians (AHL-I-KITAB or peoples of the book); and even that concession was condemned by jurists of the HANABALITE school like IBN TAYMIYA, which explains why these communities have survived in Muslim countries while most other religions have not. On these conditions some of the higher Hindu castes could be found willing to collaborate, so that a more or less polity could be set up. Even then, the collaboration of the Rajputs with the Moghul rulers, or of the Kayasthas with the Nawab dynasty, only became a smooth arrangement when enlightened rulers like Akbar (whom orthodox Muslims consider an apostate) canceled these humiliating conditions and the JIZYA tax.

It is because of the HANAFITE law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide of the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their MULLAHS). Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests, Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous kingdoms, and were content to extract the JIZYA tax, and to limit their conversion effort to material incentives and support to the missionary campaigns of SUFIS and MULLAHS (in fact, for less zealous rulers, the JIZYA was an incentive to discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of revenue). Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against Islamic sport of bride-catching.

The last JIHAD against the Hindus before the full establishment of British rule was waged by Tipu Sultan in the beginning of the 19th century. In the rebellion of 1857, the near-defunct Muslim dynasties (Moghuls, Nawabs) tried to curry favor with their Hindu subjects and neighbors, in order to launch a joint effort to re- establish their rule. For instance, the Nawab promised to give the Hindus the Ramjanmabhoomi/Babari Masjid site back, in an effort to quench their anti-Muslim animosity and redirect their attention toward the new common enemy from Britian. THIS IS THE ONLY INSTANCE IN MODERN HISTORY WHEN MUSLIMS OFFERED CONCESSIONS TO THE HINDUS; AFTER THAT, ALL THE CONCESSIONS MADE FOR THE SAKE OF COMMUNAL HARMONY WERE A ONE-WAY TRAFFIC FROM HINDU TO MUSLIM.

After the British had crushed the rebellion of 1857, the Indian Muslims fell into a state of depression, increasing backwardness due to their refusal of British education, and nostalgia for the past. As soon as the British drew them into the political process (founding of Muslim League in 1906) in order to use them as a counter-weight against the Indian National Congress, they immediately made heavy and hurtful demands on the Hindus, such as the unlimited right to slaughter cows; and they started working for political separation. First they obtained separate electorates where Muslim candidates would only have to please Muslim voters and later they would succeed in separating a Muslim state from India.

By the twenties, they took to unscrupled use of muscle power in a big way, creating street riots and outright pogroms. If Hindus retaliated in kind, it was a welcome help in instilling the separate communal identity into the ordinary Muslim, who would have preferred to co-exist with his Hindu neighbors in peace. By creating riots and provoking retaliatory violence, the Muslim League managed to swing the vast majority of the Muslim electorate toward supporting its demand for the partition of India. The roughly 600,000 victims of the violence accompanying the Partition were the price which the Muslim League was willing to pay for its Islamic state of Pakistan (See MUSLIM LEAGUE ATTACK ON SIKHS AND HINDUS IN THE PUNJAB 1947 compiled by Gurbachan Singh Talib and published in 1950 by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee. It has been reprinted by VOICE OF INDIA in 1991). While every Hindu and Muslim who took part in the violence is responsible for his own excesses, the over-all responsibility for this mass-slaughter lies squarely with the Muslim leadership.

After independence, the Islamic persecution of Hindus has continued in different degrees of intensity, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir (as well as heavy discrimination in Malaysia). This is not the place for detailing those facts, which the international media have been ignoring completely. What may cut short all denials of this continued pestering of Hindus in Muslim states, are the resulting migration figures: in 1948, Hindus formed 23% of the population of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), in 1971 the figure was down to 15% and today it stands at 10%. No journalist or human rights body goes in to ask the minority Hindus for their opinion about the treatment they get from the Muslim authorities and populations; but they vote with their feet. In the first months of 1990, the entire Hindu population (nearly a quarter million) was forcibly driven from the Kashmir Valley, which used to be advertised as a showpiece of communal harmony. Muslim newspapers and mosque loudspeakers had warned the Hindus to leave the valley or face bullets.

It will be evident that the Hindu psyche has very little sympathy for Islam. Doing something about this was the chief motive for NEGATIONISM.

CONGRESS CONCOCTION
The political context of the first attempts at negationism was chiefly the attempt of the independence movement, led by the Indian National Congress, to eliminate all factors of disunity between Hindus and Muslims. It was the time of the KHILAFAT movement (1919- 23), the agitation of the Indian Muslims against the British take- over of the Islamic sacred places from the deceased Ottoman empire. The khilafatists demanded the restoration of the Ottoman Caliph's authority over the sacred places. Congress saw in this the occasion to enlist the Muslims in the national freedom struggle against the same British imperialists.

This was a miscalculation: the KHILAFAT movement intensified the Islamic sense of communal identity (therefore, the rejection of Indian nationalism), and added considerably to Muslim separatism and the Pakistan ideology. But before 1923, when the Turks themselves abolished the caliphate so that the movement lost its raison d'etre (and got transmuted into pogroms against the Hindus), there was great expectation in Congress circles. Therefore, Congress people were willing to go to any length to iron out the differences between Hindus and Muslims, including the invention of 'centuries of communal amity'.

At that time, the Congress leaders were not yet actively involved in the rewriting of history. They were satisfied to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur in 1931, a Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy-image by changing the contents of the history books.

The next generation of political leaders, especially the left-wing, that was to influence the Congress in the thirties, and control it completely in the fifties, would profess negationism very explicitly. The 'radical humanist' (i.e. bourgeois Marxist), M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had fulfilled a historic mission of equality and abolition of discrimination, and that for this, Islam had been welcomed into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had occurred, it was a matter of justified class struggle by the 'progressive forces' against the 'reactionary forces', meaning 'feudal' Hindu upper castes.

This is a modern myth springing from an incorrect and much too grim picture of the caste system, a back-projection of modern ideas of class struggle, and an uncritical swallowing of contemporary Islamic apologists, which has incorporated some voguish socialist values. There is no record anywhere of low-caste people 'welcoming the Muslims as liberators'. Just like in their homeland, the Muslim generals had nothing but contempt for the common people, and all the more so because they were idolaters. They made no distinction between rich Pagans and poor Pagans: in the Koran, Allah had promised the same fate to all idolaters.

By contrast, there is plenty of testimony that these common people rose in revolt, not against their high-caste co-religionists, but against the Muslim rulers. And not only against heavy new taxes (50% of the land revenue for ALAUDDIN KHILJI, whom negationists hail as the 'precursor of socialism') and land expropriations, but especially against the rape and abductions of women and children and the destruction of their idols, acts which have been recorded with so much glee by the Muslim chroniclers without anywhere mentioning a separate treatment of Hindu rich and Hindu poor, upper-caste KAFIR or lower-caste KAFIR. Even when some of the high-caste people started collaborating, the common people gave the invaders no rest, attacking them from hiding places in the forests. The conversion of low-caste people only began when Muslim rulers were safely in power and in a position to reward and encourage conversion by means of tax discrimination (win the dispute with your neighbor if you convert), handing out posts to converts, and simple coercion. Nevertheless, the myth which M.N. Roy spread, has gained wide currency.

THE BEST KNOWN PROPOUNDER OF NEGATIONISM WAS CERTAINLY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU. He was rather illiterate concerning Indian culture and history, so his admirers may invoke for him the benefit of the doubt. At any rate, his writings contain some crude cases of glorification of Muslim tyrants and concealment or denial of their crimes. Witness his assessment of Mahmud Ghanavi, who, according to Mahmud's chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the temple complex at Mathura and then immediately proceeded to destroy it. Nehru writes:"Building interested Mahmud, and he was much impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi. About this he wrote:'There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of dinars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of 200 years'." And that is all: Nehru described the destroyer of Mathura, as an admirer of Mathura, apparently without noticing the gory sarcasm in Ghaznavi's eulogy. Moreover, Nehru denied that Mahmud had committed his acts of destruction out of any religious motive: "Mahmud was not a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, but that was just by the way. He was in the first place a soldier and a brilliant soldier." That Mahmud was definitely a religious man, and that he had religious motives for his campaigns against the Hindus, is quite clear from Utbi's contemporary chronicle. Every night Mahmud copied from the Koran "for the benefit of his soul". He risked his life several times for the sake of destroying and desecrating temples in which there was nothing to plunder, just to terrorize and humiliate the Pagans. In his campaigns, he never neglected to invoke the appropriate Koranic verse. In venerating Mahmud as a pious hero of Islam, Indian Muslims are quite faithful to history; unlike Nehru, the ordinary Muslim refuses to practice negationism.

With Nehru, negationism became the official line of the Indian national Congress, and after independence also of the Indian state and government.

MAULANA AZAD'S CONVICTIONS
A second factor in the genesis of negationism was the penetration of Western ideas among a part of the Muslim elite and especially the (in Europe newly emerged) positive valuation of tolerance. The Islamic elite was concentrated around two educational institutes, spearheads of the traditional and of the (superficially) westernizing trends among Indian Muslims. One was the theological academy at Deoband, the other the British oriented Aligarh Muslim University.

The Deoband school was (and still is) orthodox-Islamic, and rejected modern values like nationalism and democracy. It simply observed that India had once been a DAR-UL-ISLAM (house of Islam), and that therefore it had to be brought back under Muslim control. The fact that the majority of the population consisted of non- Muslims, was not important; in the medieval Muslim empires the Muslims had not been in a majority either, and moreover demography and conversion could yet transform the Muslim minority into a majority.

Among the scions of the Deoband school we find Maulana Maudoodi, the chief ideologue of modern fundamentalism. He opposed the Pakistan scheme and demanded the islamization of all British India. After independence, he settled in Pakistan and agitated for the full islamization of the (still too British) polity. Shortly before his death in 1979, his demands were largely met when General Zia launched his islamization policy.

Outsiders will be surprised to find that the same school of which Maudoodi was a faithful spokesman, also brought forth Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was Congress president for several years and who was to become minister of Education in free India. Understandably but unjustifiably, Azad has often been described as a 'moderate' and 'nationalist' Muslim: he rejected the Partition of India and the foundation of Pakistan, not because he rejected the idea of a Muslim state, but because he wanted all of India to become a Muslim state in time.

When in the forties the Partition seemed unavoidable, Azad patronized proposals to preserve India's unity, stipulating that half of all members of the government had to be Muslims (then 24% of the population), with the other half to be divided between Hindus, Ambedkarites, Christians and the rest. In short, a state in which Muslims would rule and non-Muslims would be second class citizens electorally and politically. The Cabinet Mission Plan, proposed by the British as the ultimate sop for the Muslim League, equally promised an effective parity between Muslims and non- Muslims at the Central Government level and a veto right for the Muslim minority. Without Mr. Gandhi's and other Congress leaders' knowledge, Congress president Azad Assured the British that he would get the plan accepted by the Congress. When he was caught in the act of lying to the Mahatma about the plan and his assurance, he lost some credit even among the naive Hindus who used to consider him a 'moderate'. But he retained his position of trust in Nehru's cabinet, and continued his work for the ultimate transformation of India into a Muslim state.

Maulana Azad's pleas for Hindu-Muslim cooperation had an esoteric meaning, clear enough for Muslims but invisible for wilfully gullible non-Muslims like his colleagues in the Congress leadership. Azad declared that Hindu-Muslim cooperation was in complete conformity with the Prophet's vision, for "Mohammed had also made a treaty with the Jews of Medina." He certainly had, but the practical impact of this treaty was that within a few years, two of the three Jewish clans in Medina had been chased away and the third clan had been massacred to the last man (the second clan had only been saved by the intervention of other Medinese leaders, for Mohammed wanted to kill them). Maulana Azad could mention Mohammed's treaty with the Jews as a model for Hindu-Muslim cooperation only because he was confident that few Hindus were aware of the end of the story, and that better-informed Hindus honored a kind of taboo on criticism of Islam and its prophet.

This parenthesis about Maulana Azad may help clear up some illusions which Hindus and Westerners fondly entertain about the possibility of Islamic moderacy. The Deoband school was as fundamentalist in its Azad face as it was in its Maudoodi heart, and its spokesmen had no problems with the horrors of Islamic history, nor did they make attempts to rewrite it. That Muslims had persecuted and massacred Hindus, counted as the fulfillment of Allah's salvation plan to transform the whole world into a DAR- UL-ISLAM.

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