Religious cleansing of Hindus
Dr. Koenraad ELST, speaking in The
Hague, 7 Feb. 2004, at the Agni conference on the persecution of Hindus in
various countries
1. A
brief overview of the problem
"Religious cleansing" is the deliberate removal of a targeted religious
community from a given territory.
In
India, the practice is mainly associated with Muslim rule and the
persecution of the Hindus in the name of Islam, vividly remembered in its
instances of West Pakistan 1947, East Pakistan 1971 and the Kashmir Valley
1990. Yet, it didn't start with the Muslim conquests themselves, from the
conquest of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in AD 712 onwards. Conquerors
imposed Islamic rule by force, and some also tried to impose conversion to
Islam on the population, but the physical removal of non-Muslims from a
given region mostly took place only at a later stage, because it required
the presence of a Muslim population already sharing the territory with the
Hindus and participating in their expulsion. Even then, in most cases,
the Hindus were not told to leave (as were the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990),
but the social pressure and sometimes sheer terror against them made them
opt for either conversion or emigration, which equally amounted to the
liquidation of Hinduism in the region.
1.1. Afghanistan
The
first part of South Asia to be cleansed of Hinduism was Afghanistan. The
10th century saw a life-and-death struggle there between Muslim
invaders and the local Hindu population and dynasty. In this case, the
replacement was not just religious, of Hindus by Muslims, but also ethnic,
viz. of Indo-Aryans by Iranians. The fact of an at least partial physical
replacement of the native population by invaders is attested by the
linguistic shift. Until then, in much of the present-day Pashtu-speaking
region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, an Indo-Aryan Prakrit was spoken
(remember how the Sanskrit grammarian Panini was a native of Peshawar).
It was replaced with Pashtu, an Iranian language.
The
mountain range Hindu Koh received the nickname Hindu Kush, a
nickname which has stuck to become the official name. It means "slaughter
of the Hindus", in reference to the night in 1399 when the frost killed a
hundred thousand Hindu slaves on transport to Central Asia.
In the
mountainous region, however, an old quasi-Vedic Paganism persisted, which
is why the region was called Kafiristan, "land of the Pagans". In
the 1890s, with British support, the king of Afghanistan sent an
expedition to convert the Kafirs to Islam by force and renamed the region
Nuristan, "land of light". Only on the British side of the border,
in the Chitral region of the Northwest Frontier Province, did some Pagans
survive. Under Pakistani rule, the number of these so-called Kalash
Kafirs has dwindled to less than four thousand. Two years ago, Jordi
Magraner, a Catalan scholar settled among them and working for their
cultural memory and survival, was murdered by Islamic activists. It seems
that the Pakistani government now deliberately reins in attempts to
convert the Kalash Kafirs because they can serve as a human-rights
showpiece and as a tourist attraction.
During
the era of British but especially that of Soviet influence, the cities of
Afghanistan saw a certain amount of immigration of Hindu entrepreneurs,
eventually amounting to several tens of thousands. Most of them were
expelled again by the Mujahedin who chased out the Soviets in 1992, or
after 1996 by the Taliban. Under Taliban rule, the remaining hundreds of
Hindus in Kandahar, who had taken to inconspicuous dress in order not to
stand out among their Muslim neighbours, were forced to wear a yellow
strip to make themselves recognizable.
1.2. Kashmir
The
first part of what is now India to see the near-disappearance of the Hindu
presence is probably Kashmir, where practically all castes were forcibly
converted to Islam by the 14th century. Most of the Kashmiri
Brahmins emigrated, some to return in quieter times, most to settle for
good in Panjab and as far as Maharashtra and Goa. Those few who toughed
it out, never forgave their fellow Kashmiris their so-called treason.
When Kashmir reverted to Hindu control under the Sikhs and then under the
Dogra dynasty in the 19th century, the Kashmiri Brahmins
reportedly opposed plans by the Maharajas to reconvert the Kashmiri
Muslims to Hinduism.
Their descendants were
to regret this purism. In 1947, local Muslims joined hands with Pakistani
invasion troops in massacring the Hindus in the Pak-occupied territories,
where all traces of the hoary Hindu presence were annihilated. In 1990, a
terror campaign under the motto, "kill one to expel a thousand", led by
Pakistani militants but supported by a critical mass of the local Muslim
population, managed to chase out practically the whole of the Kashmiri
Pandit population from the Kashmir Valley. Even the supposedly
Hindu-nationalist governments led by the BJP in 1998-2004 didn't achieve
(nor even seriously try to achieve) the resettlement of the Pandits in
their native state.
1.3. Partition
The
single most dramatic instance of religious cleansing took place in 1947,
removing the Hindu presence completely from West Panjab, Pak-Occupied
Kashmir, the Northwest Frontier Province and parts of Baluchistan and
Sindh. The official number of victims, Hindus and Muslims counted
together, is usually given as 600,000. We may assume that for the sake of
not exacerbating communal animosity, the governments of both India and
Pakistan minimized the true figure, which may well be one or two million.
After
the fact, the main thrust of literary and historiographical elaborations
of the Partition atrocities was to posit equal guilt between Hindus and
Muslims. Of course, you could anecdotically counterbalance actual cases
of Muslim cruelty with actual cases of Hindu or Sikh cruelty against
Muslims. But the over-all fact remains that Partition with all its
concomitant horrors was unilaterally imposed upon the unwilling Hindus and
Sikhs by the Muslim League. If there was a superficial symmetry in
migration patterns, there was an asymmetry in the motives of the migrants:
whereas Hindus and Sikhs from West Panjab or the Northwest Frontier fled a
land they had never wanted to leave, Muslims from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar
moved to the promised land of their own creation. Also, the atrocities on
Hindus aimed at eliminating them either by massacre or by forced
emigration had started in the projected Pakistani regions months before
any similar anti-Muslim atrocities started on the Indian side of the
projected new border.
Another false escape clause, systematically propagated by the Congress
regime, was that Partition had been the handiwork of the British rather
than of the Muslim League. This is totally untrue: the last Viceroy, Lord
Mountbatten, had only been mandated to organize Partition under pressure
from its seeming inevitability or its emerging status as a "lesser evil"
in comparison with the orgy of violence which the Muslim League was
threatening to unleash. But the original British position had been
articulated by his two predecessors, Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell, who
had told the Muslim League leadership in clear terms that they were proud
of their Indian empire and were in no mood to let anyone dismember it even
if it were to pass out of British hands. While other parties including
the British rulers and some Hindu leaders (Rajaji, Morarji Desai, Sardar
Patel, Ambedkar and finally also Mahatma Gandhi) merely acquiesced
in Partition as a lesser evil, it was purely the will and determination of
the Muslim League which imposed the division of India upon an unwilling
majority.
1.4. The Bangladesh war
On the
borders of what was to become East Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim violence in 1947
was far smaller in scale. What happened there was that after a relatively
peaceful transition to independence, the Partition process of religious
cleansing took place anyway but drawn out over decades. During this
"prolonged Partition", there has been a constant trickle of Hindu refugees
from East Bengal to India, which became a flood in times of crisis. The
biggest crisis was of course the Bangladesh war of 1971, when the
Pakistani army and its Bengali and immigrant-Bihari collaborators hunted
down Hindus along with Muslim Bengali nationalists. The official death
toll as claimed by the Bangladeshi government was 3 million; foreign
observers settle for 1.5 million. All disinterested observers agree that
Hindus were the first and largest among the victim groups. As for the
Muslim victims, they were not killed by Hindus but by Pakistanis and their
Jamaat-i-Islami collaborators who killed them for not being Muslim
enough.
After
1971, East Bengal made a fresh start as a secular state, and many refugees
returned in the hope of a decent life. But soon Islamization policies
returned to the country, along with discriminations and pogroms against
the minorities. Consequently, Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists
from Bangladesh have gradually moved to India. This picture is muddied a
bit by the seemingly parallel but actually quite distinct phenomenon of
mass Muslim emigration from Bangladesh to India for purely economic
reasons. Estimates approved by the Indian government put the number of
Bangladeshi Muslims illegally staying in India at over 20 million. Most
border regions of West Bengal and the North-Eastern states, originally
allotted to India rather than to East Pakistan precisely because they had
Hindu majorities, now have large Muslim majorities. Hindus are under
pressure to leave there, too.
1.5. Small-scale cleansing
throughout India
In many pockets of
Muslim concentration in India, non-Muslims are slowly cleansed out. This
is sometimes done in an unplanned manner, but in most cases one can
discern the rudiments of a strategy behind it. In some southern cities,
major Hindu temples have been isolated from their constituency of
worshippers after Muslims strategically bought up all the real estate
around the temple. In Ahmedabad, Hindus have practically been driven out
of the old city.
In
such an important economic centre, the planning by Muslim Gulf-based
mafias was obvious. One Muslim, or his Hindu stooge, would buy up a house
in a Hindu neighbourhood, overruling the Hindu owner's misgivings by
offering a price far above the market value. This would eventually prove
to be a very profitable investment. The next stage is that life for
Hindus is made uncomfortable, initially in perfectly legal ways, e.g. a
halāl butchery is opened in the middle of a vegetarian community where
people find the mere smell of meat nauseating. Then invariably follows
eve-teasing of Hindu girls, acts of disrespect to elderly Hindus, some
petty but in-your-face robbery. The first Hindus now put up their house
for sale, and again the mafia coffers are available to ensure a decent
price, though now not much above market value anymore. Muslim youngsters
start hanging out in larger numbers, holding out the threat of rape, and
finally commit an actual rape. A bogus Hindu provocation of Muslim
sentiments is enacted and a communal riot ensues. The conviviality of the
Hindu Bania neighbourhood now good and well destroyed, Hindus start
panic-selling their houses. Finally, the whole neighbourhood falls into
Muslim hands for a song. The mafia dons distribute the loot among their
supporters.
1.6. Cleansing of Hindus by Christians
Ever
since their first arrival in India as refugees, probably in the 4th
century, the Syrian Christians in Kerala had integrated peacefully into
Hindu society. They took their place in the caste system at a fairly high
rank, and never troubled their neighbours with campaigns of conversion.
This changed with the arrival of the Portuguese from 1498 onwards. They
made attempts to expel all Hindus from Goa and other territories they
held. However, being constrained by their limited numbers and their
commerce-oriented treaties with native rulers, they could never implement
their plans in full and ended up tolerating a continued Hindu presence
within their domains.
Under
British rule, missionary activities were curtailed or kept within limits,
because the administrators wanted to avoid communal conflagrations. It
was only in some of the tribal regions that the missionaries were given a
free hand to Christianize entire communities. Even then, they were held
on a tight leash. It is only in independent India that the missionaries
were given all manner of privileges to the point that they felt emboldened
to participate in illegal political activities including armed separatist
struggle in the North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur and
Tripura.
In
Fiji, the colonial government gave a free hand to the missionaries, so
that the native population was completely converted to Christianity and is
now generally hostile to the Hindu immigrant population. This has led to
the repeated ousting of an elected Hindu Prime Minister, to social
boycotts and discrimination in job recruitment, and to frequent vandalism
against Hindu temples.
The
Christian-dominated parts of India's North-East have witnessed several
instances of Hindu-cleansing. Hindu organizations like the Ramakrishna
Mission and the RSS have been targeted for elimination from the region
through pressure or violence. In the 1990s, tens of thousands of Riang
tribals who rejected conversion were expelled from Christian-dominated
Mizoram. The death toll of Hindus eliminated by Christian separatists
dwarfs that of the much-publicized Hindu violence against Christians,
which has killed only a handful since 1947, including in the supposed
"wave" of anti-Christian riots in 1998-99. The killing of Australian
missionary Graham Staines and his two sons by Orissa tribals who were
angry at the divisive effect of conversions on their society, was
front-page news in the whole world and remains a constant point of
reference in the dominant discourse on communalism. By contrast, when
shortly after that, four RSS workers were kidnapped by Christian
separatists in the North-East and their mutilated bodies were subsequently
found, it was hardly reported in the Indian press and not at all in the
international media.
1.7. Cleansing of Hindus by Buddhists
In a bid to counter
the grim and wide-ranging Hindu case against Islam as a destroyer of Hindu
lives and culture, Marxist historians have propagated the claim that
Hindus had done likewise to Buddhists: destroying their religious
establishments and killing the inmates. This claim has gained wide
currency, including in Buddhist countries where it impedes the natural
solidarity between Buddhists and Hindus. However, this claim is entirely
fictitious.
Even a very general
knowledge of Indian history already shows that any instances of Hindu
persecution of Buddhism could never have been more than marginal. After
fully seventeen centuries of Buddhism's existence, from the 6th
century BC to the late 12th century AD, most of it under the
rule of Hindu kings, we find Buddhist establishments flourishing all over
India. Under king Pushyamitra Shunga, often falsely labelled as a
persecutor of Buddhism, important Buddhist centres such as the Sanchi
stupa were built. As late as the early 12th century, the
Buddhist monastery Dharmachakrajina Vihara at Sarnath was built under the
patronage of queen Kumaradevi, wife of Govindachandra, the Hindu king of
Kanauj in whose reign the contentious Rama temple in Ayodhya was built.
This may be contrasted with the ruined state of Buddhism in countries like
Afghanistan or Uzbekistan after one thousand or even one hundred years of
Muslim rule. Indeed, the Muslim chroniclers themselves have described in
gleeful detail how they destroyed Buddhism root and branch in the entire
Gangetic plain in just a few years after Mohammed Ghori's victory in the
second battle of Tarain in 1192. The famous university of Nalanda with
its fabulous library burned for weeks. Its inmates were put to the sword
except for those who managed to flee. The latter spread the word to other
Indian regions where Buddhist monks packed up and left in anticipation of
further Muslim conquests. It is apparent that this way, some abandoned
Buddhist establishments were taken over by Hindus; but that is an entirely
different matter from the forcible occupation or destruction of Buddhist
institutions by the foreign invaders.
However, while
Hinduism has a very good record in tolerating and patronizing Buddhism,
the reverse is not entirely the case, especially in the modern age. In
Myanmar in the 1960s, the Hindu immigrant population, mainly Tamil
labourers and traders settled there under British rule, was formally
expelled. As far as I know, this was less for religious than for ethnic
and anti-colonial reasons.
Likewise in Bhutan,
Nepali-speaking Hindus are being expelled in a classical instance of a
sons-of-the-soil reaction against foreign settlers. The Tibetan Bhutanese
explain their actions by pointing to the case of Sikkim, where
Nepali-speaking Hindu immigrants had become the majority and decided
democratically to liquidate the state's sovereignty and Tibetan identity
and to join India. This does not justify the atrocities committed against
the Hindus in Bhutan (atrocities on a scale revealed here by eye-witnesses
which most of us had not deemed possible in such a seemingly idyllic
nation), but it provides a sobering background to a dramatic development
which would otherwise seem incomprehensible.
In Sri
Lanka too, Sinhalese resentment of the Tamils, who may be either Hindus or
Christians, was initially less for religious than for ethnic reasons,
particularly the conflict over language policy. Under British rule, the
Tamils had been privileged, and the Sinhalese tried to turn the tables on
them by declaring a Sinhala-only official language regime. But Buddhist
monks soon added a religious dimension to the incipient conflict by
vandalizing Tamil Hindu shrines. The conflict developed into a full-scale
civil war which, in spite of major recent peace moves, is not fully over
yet.
1.8. Hindu-cleansing in Africa
Many
Hindus in Great Britain and the USA are refugees from another instance of
Hindu-cleansing, viz. their expulsion from the East-African countries of
Uganda and Tanzania shortly after docolonization. The Hindu presence
itself was perceived as a legacy of colonialism. In neighbouring Kenya,
Hindus have so far been able to live with peace and dignity, though there
too, some nativist political parties promise to expel them. Likewise in
South Africa, the acceptance of the Hindu presence by other communities
cannot be securely taken for granted. The Communist-nativist group
Pan-African Congress has a slogan: "There is only one place for Indians in
South Africa, and that is the Indian Ocean." Likewise, the Hindus of
Trinidad and Tobago, of Surinam and of Guyana typically have a tense
relationship with the (mainly christianized) Africans there.
In
each of these cases, the main grievance of the Africans against the Hindus
seems to be economical: the Hindus allegedly monopolize business and don't
feed the accumulated wealth back into the host society. This is in
essence the same resentment which exists against successful Lebanese
traders in West Africa, European settlers in Zimbabwe, or earlier the
Jewish communities in Europe. There may also be a cultural aspect,
though. Hindus are perceived as haughty, cunning and selfish.
Conversely, Hindus themselves privately describe Africans as promiscuous,
disorderly, lazy and unclean,-- and the Africans are sufficiently aware of
this. For them, there is a markedly greater distance in lifestyle from
the Hindus than from the Muslims.
1.9. Hindu-cleansing in Europe?
In Europe, it is oddly
by amalgamation with the Muslim population that Hindus risk being expelled
one day. There is little or no resentment against Hindus as such. They
are practically absent from the crime statistics and they don't push any
separatist or otherwise provocative political demands. Very few Europeans
would ever vote for an anti-immigrant party on the basis of their
experiences with their Hindu immigrant neighbours.
Islam, by contrast, is
a central concern of the national-populist parties, though not in a
uniform manner. The extreme Right, which by definition is only a fringe
tendency, cherishes fantasies of a Euro-Islamic alliance against a
perceived American-Zionist world hegemony. This is a parallel development
with what you see in the extreme Left, where Muslim immigrants are
considered a substitute for the proletariat as a force capable of
destroying the system. Less marginally and more consequentially, the
fast-growing populist Right, by contrast, takes an alarmist view of Islam
and dramatizes all Islam-related "affairs" such as the ongoing hijāb
controversies. In some cases, viz. the true-blue racists who want to send
all coloured immigrants back, this focus on the problems posed by Islam is
only a rhetorical cover for a more general anti-immigration drive
regardless of the religion of the immigrants.
One could imagine a
scenario where native resentment of the Muslim immigrant population
reaches such a pitch that all Muslims are driven out, in a reversal of the
expulsion of European settlers and their native "collaborators" in Algeria
in 1962. In such a case of extreme polarization between native and
immigrant, one could further imagine that the distinction between Muslims
and other immigrant groups gets blurred, and that Hindus are cleansed out
as well. For the time being, we dare surmise that this scenario remains
imaginary, but if ethnic tension rises, nobody knows what can happen.
2. Why does nobody know or care
about the plight of the Hindus?
2.1. Distortion of the terms underlying the
information
When
we want to understand a social problem, we need a language capable of
expressing the data and underlying concepts describing the problem. In
India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just
plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called "secularism". In
practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists,
Christian missionaries and americanized adepts of consumerism who share a
hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for
secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the
same name in the West.
Genuine secular states have equality before the law of all citizens
regardless of religion. By contrast, India has different civil codes
depending on the citizen's religion. Thus, for Christians it is very hard
to get a divorce, Hindus and Muslim women can get one through judicial
proceedings, and Muslim men can simply repudiate their wives. The secular
alternative, a common civil code, is championed by the Hindu
nationalists. It is the so-called secularists who, justifying themselves
with specious sophistry, join hands with the most obscurantist religious
leaders to insist on maintaining the present unequal system.
Likewise, there exists a legal inequality in matters of temple management,
pilgrimage subsidies, special autonomy for states depending on their
populations' religious composition, and the right to found religious
schools; and this inequality is defended by the so-called secularists
because it is invariably to the disadvantage of the Hindus. The Hindu
nationalists favour the secular alternative of equality regardless of
religion.
In
India, shari'a-wielding Muslim clerics whose Arab counterparts
denounce secularism as the ultimate evil, call themselves secularists.
Just as the English word deception differs in meaning from its
French counterpart déception (= disappointment), the word
secularism has a sharply different meaning in Indian English as
compared to metropolitan English.
When
we consider "secularism" as an intellectual movement rather than as a
juridical concept, "secularism" means that religion is treated as a human
construct rather than the product of a divine revelation. It implies a
frank and critical investigation of the claims of religion. In this
respect, the failure and dishonesty of Indian secularism is even more
radical. Its discourse on religion is extremely and wilfully
superficial. It shields from criticism even the most obscurantist
religious beliefs or institutions, provided they are non-Hindu (and even
in attacking Hinduism, its criticisms of even legitimate targets tend to
be crassly superficial). For instance, almost every self-styled
secularist, from former President A.K. Narayanan to the editors of the
newspapers, has sworn by the story that Christianity was brought to India
by the apostle Thomas. In the West, not just secularists but even
Catholic universities like the one where I studied have dropped this
myth. But in India, the secularists are its most determined upholders.
Indian
secularism is systematically dishonest in its assessment of the religions
hostile to Hinduism. Thus, after the murder of Australian Protestant
missionary Graham Staines, which resulted from the well-attested
resentment of the tribals against the divisive effect of conversion on
their communities, the secularists massively denied that the Christian
missionaries are in India for purposes of conversion. In reality, the
project of converting all mankind is intrinsic to the Christian religion.
In Catholic school, I always learned that the missionaries provide medical
and educational services primarily in order to make the targeted
communities receptive to conversion. Staines' own bulletin to his
Australian sponsors (which his supporters tried to conceal from the
official investigators) proved he was doing conversion work. In 1999, the
Southern Baptist Church reconfirmed that Hindus are doomed unless they
become Christians. In the same year, the Pope himself came to Delhi to
say in so many words that the Church intends to "reap a rich harvest of
faith" in India. Yet this authoritatively attested fact is still
dismissed by vocal secularists as a figment of Hindu paranoia.
2.2. History denial
Our
perception of current events is largely conditioned by our knowledge and
understanding of the past. The facts concerning the persecution of Hindus
in the pre-modern age were a matter of consensus until recently. For
contemporary political reasons, the Congress movement under Mahatma Gandhi
and especially under Jawaharlal Nehru thought it opportune to minimize or
deny this painful history. They invented a history of Hindu-Muslim
bhai-bhai totally at variance with the information given in the
primary sources. The job of rewriting history in this sense was
subsequently taken up in right earnest by the post-independence generation
of vocal Marxist scholars, who gained firm control of the guiding history
institutions under Indira Gandhi (r. 1965-77 and 1980-84).
For those unfamiliar with
modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much
power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly
on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by
Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she
needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan
packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When,
during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies
threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them
from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians'
short-sightedness, they left the Marxists' hold on the cultural sector
intact.
In the old Soviet
tradition, the Marxists at once set out to falsify history and propagate
their own version through the official textbooks. In spite of recent
instances of brutal Marxist-Muslim conflict (Iran 1979, Afghanistan in the
1980s), one of their priorities was to paint a rosy picture of Islamic
rule in India, c.q. to impede criticism by blurring the very notion of
"Islamic rule". This somewhat anomalous Marxist-Islamist alliance should
be understood in the Indian context of a joint anti-Hindu front uniting
all the minorities, a typical instance of the old Marxist "common front"
policy.
After coming to power in
1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always
very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency)
at least in the history textbooks. They ordered the writing of new
history textbooks for the schools. This led the Marxists to start a
furious hate campaign against the so-called "saffronization" (hinduization)
of history. Most of the new textbooks have rightly been criticized for
being written in poor English and riddled with errors,-- the result of
both the Hindu movement's long-standing anti-intellectual prejudice and
the systematic exclusion of aspiring pro-Hindu scholars from the
institutions by the ruling Marxists. The one major exception, however, is
precisely the volume on the Muslim conquest and rule, Medieval India
(class XI) by Prof. Meenakshi Jain, an impeccable text systematically
based on primary sources.
Since
some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as "McCarthyist" anyone who
points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized
that "eminent historians" like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib
are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's
Dictionary of Marxist Thought. During the official historians'
Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation
and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's
Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook
innovations most furiously denounced as "saffronization" was the truism
that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a "coup
d'état". And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils
against glasnost, the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a
textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer
called Stalin "at least as ruthless as Hitler". Such are the true
concerns of the "secularists" warning the world against the attempts at
glasnost in India's national history curriculum.
History falsification comes in different forms and has concentric lines of
defence and attack. At the time of unlimited "secularist" self-confidence
and belligerence, this went as far as to deny that any Islamic persecution
or oppression of Hindus had taken place. When that proved untenable, it
was claimed that intolerance had admittedly existed but that it had been
unrelated to Islam, that it was a general phenomenon typical of the
medieval period. As if a tick of the clock, viz. the arrival of the
so-called Middle Ages, could cause the widespread destruction which India
suffered. In reality, the age had nothing to do with it. Tolerance
remained the rule in medieval Hinduism: for all its untouchability and
other flaws, it did tolerate Syrian Christians, Parsis and Jews in its
midst (who, unlike in their countries of origin, also learned to tolerate
one another in India), and the lively debates between its own numerous
sects rarely if ever spilled over into physical confrontations. The
problem was not the age but the Islamic doctrine of conquest and
self-righteousness. Unfortunately, secularists have developed a habit of
staring past uncomfortable historical facts, particularly those disturbing
the newly claimed progressive image of any anti-Hindu group or movement or
religion.
2.3. False reporting
When
it comes to contemporary religious conflict, the same refusal to face
facts is in evidence. Distortive or even totally false reporting on
communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian
journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this
endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor
ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his
peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth
has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to
trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit
of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories.
Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal
situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent
treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on
convenient ones. After the BJP came to power in 1998, India should have
witnessed a genocide of the minorities, gas chambers and what not, at
least if you believed the predictions made by the secularists in the
preceding years. Nothing of the kind happened, and the secularists didn't
dare to pretend that events were bearing out their prediction. So in the
next two years the secularists tried to make the most of what few
incidents did take place, giving them a significance which no sober
observer could have attributed to them.
In
particular, all manner of small incidents within the Christian community
were at once blamed on the evil hand of Hindu nationalism. In Kandhamal,
Orissa, a Christian man murdered a girl and her little brother. At once,
a cry went up in the secularist and Christian media that Hindu
nationalists had perpetrated the crime. When the official investigation
revealed the true story, viz. that the murderer was a Christian himself,
it was reported only marginally in Indian papers and not at all in the
international media, which had eagerly carried the initial allegations.
Likewise, in the Central-Indian town of Jhabua, a quarrel among mostly
christianized tribals led to the rape of four nuns. With no Hindu
nationalists in sight, the media decided nonetheless that this was an act
of Hindu nationalist cruelty against the poor hapless Christian minority.
Though the official investigation confirmed the total innocence of the
Hindu nationalists in this affair, their guilt has been consecrated by
endless repetition in the media. While the media in India couldn't
prevent the truth from quietly making itself known, the international
media have never published a correction, and the story of "four nuns in
Jhabua raped by Hindu nationalists" now keeps on reappearing as an
evergreen of anti-Hindu hate propaganda.
Similarly, a series of bomb blasts against Christian churches in South
India was automatically blamed on the Hindu nationalists. In that
version, the story made headlines around the world: Hindu bomb terror
against Christians. Hindu organizations alleged that it was a Pakistani
operation, a blame-shifting exercise which only earned them ridicule and
contempt. Yet, when two of the terrorists blew themselves up by mistake,
their getaway car led the police to their network, and the whole gang was
arrested. It turned out to be a Muslim group, a section of the Deendar
Anjuman, with headquarters in Pakistan. But this was not reported on
the front-pages in India nor made the topic of flaming editorials; and in
the international media, it was not reported at all. In the worldwide
perception of Hindu nationalism, the false association with raping nuns
and bombing churches has stuck.
So,
moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you
are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not
be made to bear any consequences. Striking first is what counts. Any
second round in which the truth comes out, will hardly be noticed.
Indeed, conditioned by the initial lie, many readers and viewers will
deride the correction as an attempt at "denial" of the grim facts which
"everybody knows well enough". And the audience abroad will never even be
informed that there has been a correction.
2.4. Riot vultures
These
days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly
jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu
propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they
go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is
welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness
to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an
allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of
Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter.
Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two
daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man
had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be
in the US at the time of the "facts". Harsh Mander has already been
condemned by the Press Council of India (decision 14/106/02-03 dd. 30 June
2003, Dr. Krishen Kak vs. Times of India) for spreading false
rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan
Hamara (Times of India, 20 March 2002). Teesta Setalwad has
reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating
testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.
All of
them have given exaggerated death toll figures ("more than 2,000 Muslims",
in reality about 800, next to over 250 Hindus whom they never mention) and
characterizations ("genocide") of the Gujarat riots, which in fact paled
in comparison with the communal confrontations which took place in the two
decades before the cathartic post-Demolition riots of December-January
1992-93. With their depiction of India as a country where the minorities
live in constant fear for their lives, a story eagerly believed abroad,
these riot vultures do a lot of damage to their country.
Dealing with communal confrontations at face value has
never solved the problem. Most secularist writings on the Gujarat riots
manage to leave madrassa education unmentioned. How serious are
you about weeding out Hindu-Muslim riots if you don't want to address the
permanent source of religious hatred among Muslims, the very cause of
Partition and of jihad?
Secondly, Gujarat has not been claiming attention all
by itself. An intensive effort by the usual suspects has kept attention
as much as possible away from other scenes of communal violence. In the
past months, how many people have been killed by Christian separatists in
the Northeast, by Communists in Kerala or Andhra or Nepal, by Muslims in
Bangladesh or Jammu? As for Gujarat itself, how many Hindus have been
killed by Muslims even after Godhra? The secularists have been acting as
if attacks on Muslims in Gujarat are the only communal flashpoint. This
is typical of hate discourse: apart from pure lies, the main technique
consists in exclusively highlighting the - sometimes admittedly real -
crimes of the targeted group and keeping instances of its innocent
victimization out of view.
But I
will agree in general terms that this was mostly a Hindu retaliation for
the Godhra massacre, and for all the earlier occasions of Muslim
aggression. Gujarat and especially Ahmedabad have witnessed a sustained
low-level terror campaign against the Hindus. With their Gandhian
tradition of fleeing and turning the other cheek, the Gujaratis had
amassed considerable resentment against the Muslims, and after Godhra it
all came out.
By all means, preserve
the Godhra articles and columns in a special folder, one day they will be
the object of a spectacular case study in the human capacity for
doublethink. Though disgusting, it was at the same time quite funny to
watch the extreme inventiveness of the secularists in blaming the
victims. They were very annoyed that the Gujarat carnage was so
unambiguously started by Muslims with their massacre of Hindu pilgrims,
mostly women and children. So, they falsely started describing the
victims as "extremists" and inventing stories of how these Hindu children
had kidnapped a Muslim woman into their riding train. That canard was
borrowed from an Islamist website. There is never much difference between
secularist reporting and Islamist propaganda anyway, which is why Indian
theocratic Islamists call themselves "secularists". The latest is their
"report" claiming that the Hindus in the train had themselves lit the
fire, in a gigantic mass suicide. I suppose free speech includes the
right to speak nonsense.
For
four years after the BJP's accession to power in 1998, in spite of
numerous massacres of Hindus by Muslim terrorists, the Indian Muslims were
left alone. Hindus had often refused to be provoked into taking their
anger out on their Muslim neighbours, e.g. after the Mumbai blasts of
March 1993, all remained quiet. Hindus again showed remarkable restraint
after Islamic terrorists killed forty BJP activists, allegedly "Hindu
Nazis", in Coimbatore in 1998. But unlike the Nazis in 1938 with their
Kristallnacht killing nearly a hundred Jews in reaction to the murder
of a single German diplomat, the BJP did not retaliate in kind at all.
Hindus have been killed with great frequency in Jammu, even the parliament
buildings in Srinagar and Delhi were attacked, yet the Muslims remained
unharmed. So, the secularists were losing credibility day by day. They
needed the Gujarat carnage, and they thanked Heaven when it finally
materialized. They were suddenly back in business, getting invited all
the way to Washington to tell their scare stories.
2.5. Foreign complicity
Most
of the foreign India reporters borrow not just data, but also opinions and
judgments from their Delhi contacts without critically examining them. On
top of these borrowed distortions, they themselves also manage to
disregard pertinent data which stare every normal observer in the face.
Thus, practically every Hindu activist whom I have interviewed between
1990 and 1998 brought up the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, murdered or
expelled from their homeland, as a telling illustration of the true
religio-political power equation in India. But most publications
purportedly analyzing Hindu nationalism in the 1990s manage to overlook
this expulsion of Hindus from a part of India. They have to if they want
to uphold the image of India as dominated by an overbearing Hindu majority
threatening a hapless Muslim minority.
The
foreign correspondents also systematically misunderstand and misrepresent
the relationship between Hindu vanguard organizations and the common
people. It is increasingly clear that genuine acts of anti-Muslim or
anti-Christian violence are often the handiwork of desperate but
unorganized locals. Membership of an organization like the Vishva Hindu
Parishad, by contrast, offers them the hope of participating in a larger
countersubversive strategy and thereby keeps acts of desperation in
check.
It has
to be admitted, however, that Hindu nationalist organizations have played
into the hand of the disinformation campaigners. For too long, they have
spurned the intellectual and mediatic struggles. On the plea that "you
don't need arguments to love your mother", meaning Mother India, the Hindu
nationalists had always neglected intellectual work and favoured a
mindless activism. Instead, they have adopted a boy-scout attitude of
doing one's best and disregarding the opinions of the inactive and the
hostile people. This way, they have left the field wide open for their
sworn enemies, who have been getting away with their hate-mongering
accounts for decades. Correcting this deeply uneven power equation in the
control over public opinion proves to be a hard and long-term job.
3. Conclusion
The
problem which Hindus face when they want to mobilize support for their
oppressed brothers and sisters, is that nobody even seems to have heard of
any oppression of Hindus. The news about this large and widespread
problem gets sidetracked and minimized and ultimately silenced somewhere
along the way. Yet, whether the story is heard in the international media
and especially in the centres of power, is a very consequential matter.
Thus, a country like Bangladesh is heavily dependent on international aid,
and is therefore susceptible to being pressured into correcting its
human-rights performance if only the donors knew about the human-rights
violations there. Getting the information across to world opinion is,
thus, of vital importance. That is why I would like to thank the
organizers for at least making a serious effort to that end by holding
this conference.
