Remember the Hindu Holocaust

[ Islam’s jihad against Hindustan is a gory record of burnt temples, libraries and entire cities. Millions have been killed over the ages simply because they were Hindus ]

In the light of Mr Kanchan Gupta’s scathing column on the defenders of the fidayeen who attacked Mumbai (“Mumbai’s Butcher and human rights”, December 17, 2008) and Ms Sandhya Jain’s warning in her article (“Dark shadow of jihad, December 23, 2008), it is worth recalling yet again that this jihad against India is neither new nor will it stop. It is also imperative to trace what this jihad has historically cost India in general and Hindus specifically.

In general, India was forcibly split into two countries. When we examine the specifics, we can with little doubt say that Islamic jihad has carried out a virtual Hindu Holocaust.

Some years ago, French journalist Francois Gautier had posed the same question (“Where’s India’s holocaust museum?”, October 21, 2003). Mr Gautier asserted that based on available historical evidence, it is sufficient to conclude that a Hindu Holocaust has occurred.

The Holocaust evokes horrific images and is associated typically with a specific event. As we shall see, we can safely apply it to the Islamic conquest of Hindu India.

The Oxford English Dictionary first used the word to describe Hitler’s treatment of Jews in as early as 1942. With time the term has come to be equated with the Nazi genocide of Jews in conventional parlance. The Holocaust elicits horror mostly due to these important reasons:

Colossal scale of killings

Its short time span

Assembly-line like method

Ideology that motivated it

The Holocaust is a fairly recent event, and thanks to the efforts of the Jews, its memory has been kept alive. A few generations in future, it will at most evoke pity sans the intensity of experience. The chill of experiencing horror first hand doesn’t have the same shock value 100 years later.

Barring the sheer numbers of Jews exterminated in a specific historical period, the other defining features of the Holocaust apply equally to the Hindu genocide. Indeed, ‘holocaust’ is a rather apt term because the root meaning of holocaust is ‘burn’.Islam’s violent history in India is a bloody record of burnt idols, temples, libraries, and entire cities. There’s yet another crucial differentiator: Hindu genocide was at least three-fold. On the purely physical plane, millions of Hindus were killed because they were Hindus. On the socio-cultural plane, those who were not killed were spared because they agreed to convert to Islam, a good instance of cultural genocide. Finally, on the economic plane, those that were allowed to live as Hindus were subject to the unjust jizya, a tax system, forcing them into perpetual penury, an instance of economic genocide.

In his Growth of Muslim Population in India,Prof KS Lal estimates that the Hindu population decreased by 80 million between 1000 AD and 1525 AD, an extermination unparalleled in world history.This number is overwhelming but then the Hindu genocide, unlike the Jewish Holocaust, happened in painfully-regular installments.

‘Hindu Kush’ is a good example of one such instalment. The conquest of Afghanistan in 1000 AD saw the annihilation of its entire Hindu population. Even today, this region is known as the ‘Hindu Kush’, which literally means ‘Hindu slaughter’, named after that massacre. In 1399, Taimur killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single day, and the Bahamani Sultans made it a sacred duty to kill 1,00,000 Hindus every year.

In our own times, we see the systematic murder of Hindus by Islamists in both Pakistan and Bangladesh after Partition. On our own soil, thanks to anarchic policies and abject neglect, an estimated 4,00,000 Kashmiri Pandits are refugees in their own country. Understandably, few voices speak out against this modern ethnic cleansing.

The unremitting flood of terror attacks against India ever since the UPA took over is thus a protraction of that centuries-old jihad. Only, in changed times, the intent of cultural genocide is manufactured in the offices of the ISI and Pakistani terror camps remain intact. Its perpetrators know how to express that intent with alarming regularity.

It is tragic that thousands of educated and intelligent Indians seek to negate the Hindu Holocaust —— mostly unwittingly. That is partly the result of reading fabricated history right from childhood, and partly of being politically correct. No nation can be built on a foundation of half truths and outright lies about its own history. It leads to mistrust within its own people, as is evident today. Our own perverse political parlance sustains these falsehoods and its attendant consequences.When our Prime Minister says Muslims have the first claim on resources, is the underlying message any different from Aurangzeb’s diktat that all Muslims were exempt from tax?