Belgian author
The British, by contrast, could rule India with more limited violence largely outsourced to native Sepoys, but their influence penetrated far more deeply. Firstly, they managed to pit several Hindu sub-groups against the mainstream: most obviously the Sikhs, for whom the status of separate religion was made of whole cloth, promoted as a social reality and underpinned at the scholarly level.
That the Constitution discriminates against Hinduism, and that this has large-scale consequences for the transmission of Hinduism to the next generation, is one of India's better-kept secrets. Most academics suppress this information and pretend loudly that India is a secular state, i.e. a state with equality of all citizens before the law. It is not, and the good implication is that for secularists it will be hard to object to a reform that would turn India into a secular state, one in which no religion is discriminated against.
The most consequential and effective discrimination is comprised in article 30. It guarantees *to the minorities* (leaving the majority unmentioned) the right to found and manage educational institutions. This means that Hindu schools can be nationalized or subjected to other government controls from which minority schools are exempt. In application of this discrimination, the Right to Education Act, enacted by the Congress-Communist combine in 2008, imposes a back-breaking burden on Hindu schools (putting hundreds out of business) from which it exempts minority schools.
At the initiative of the Scheduled Tribes, targets par excellence of the missionary efforts, several Indian states have enacted laws against forcible or fraudulent conversion (which according to the missionaries and their secularist allies are non-existent anyway). But these state laws can never acquire teeth as long as the Constitution guarantees the right to propagate religion. Thanks to this unshakable guarantee, the missionary apparatus considers these anti-conversion laws as but an impotent scarecrow, useful only to underpin its own internationally propagated image of hapless victims being persecuted by an overbearing Hindu majority.
Some discriminations are rather academic and only consequential at several removes. Thus, the understanding of religious freedom as guaranteed in article 25, especially the inclusion of the right to propagate one's religion and thus to encourage others to convert, is tailor-made for the Christian mission. This interest group had successfully lobbied to ensure that the right to convert be included in the Constitution. It also fits the Islamic design to islamize all of mankind, but the notion of conversion is foreign to Hindus and even more to Parsis. So the constitutional right to convert seemingly creates a level playing field, counting for all religions, yet in practice it upholds a right central to Christianity and Islam but meaningless (except negatively) to Hinduism. It legalizes the aggression by the foreign and conquering religions to the detriment of the indigenous religion.
The facts here are very clear, but rest assured that they will be contested. Like most Hindu-Muslim riots, this riot started as a Muslim pogrom on Hindus, with some spectacular killings of Hindu policemen, but then Hindus started striking back, and ultimately the Muslim death toll surpassed the Hindu one. Similar to Gujarat 2002, which started with a Muslim pogrom of 59 Hindu women and children in the women's wagon of a train returning from Ayodhya, locked in and burned to death. Then the Hindus retaliated, and it ended with some 300 Hindus and 800 Muslims killed. In international reporting, the all-explaining opening move is scrupulously left out, as if you have WW2 start on 6 June 1944 with the Allied "aggression" on Europe and highlight the higher death toll on the German compared to the Anglo-American side. "Major media have been caught in the act of fabricating fake news, e.g. the Wall Street Journal brought an interview with policeman Ankit Sharma's brother, who described how a (Muslim) mob had stabbed his brother to death. In the published version, the WSJ inserted that this mob was shouting a Hindu battle-cry to shift the blame to the Hindus to save their narrative that the Hindus were committing a pogrom. Fortunately, the brother and other witnesses publicly denied this and pointed out the WSJ's manipulation. Scroll.in and other papers published a photograph of a Muslim mob on the attack, easily recognizable by their clothes, and captioned that this was a "Hindu mob". When this was exposed, Scroll removed the photograph, i e. the evidence, but maintained its mendacious narrative. Same manipulation in Wikipedia, which suppressed corrections; or how blatantly fake news was quickly turned into the received wisdom.
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India too had its share of human-engineered famines. Yet, while they killed many millions, with more than 3 million in the 1943 Bengal famine alone, they cannot be characterized as “genocide”. They were facilitated by the perpetrators’ active disdain for Hindus (Sultanate) or Indians (British), which was very explicitly stated by Winston Churchill even much before he deliberately refused to alleviate the Bengal famine. But an intention to eliminate them rather than just treat them harshly remains to be proven. Rather: these famines were collateral damage of punitive land tax policies (Sultanate) or of motherland-oriented economic reforms (British Empire).
This is already clear if we limit our count to the 20th century, omitting all the killings and other crimes against humanity since the first (failed) naval invasion in 636 or the first occupation of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in 712, and all that happened in the intervening centuries. In the Partition of 1947, the Hindu-Sikh death toll easily amounted to 1 million+ in West Pakistan alone. In East Pakistan, it ended up becoming a similar number, though the killing there was drawn out over several years. In 1971, in the repression campaign that led to the war that led to the country’s liberation and recreation as Bangladesh, the Pakistanis and their Jamaat-i-Islami allies killed nearly 2,4 million Hindus, 80% of the total death toll of some 3 million (as per the government of Bangladesh itself). Add the great killings of many thousands in the Moplah Rebellion of 1920-21, the Direct Action Day of 1946, the many recurring pogroms in East Pakistan, the large-scale riots in India (admittedly with a two-sided death toll), the constant petty terror in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the expulsion of the Pandits from Kashmir (1990), and you get very close to the 5,3 million estimated for the Holocaust.
The concomitant archaeological evidence is rarely of human massacres, as the Hindu victims were not buried; if at all given a funeral, it was cremation, thus “destroying the evidence”. But demolished forts, burned cities and temples levelled or replaced with mosques are ten a penny. Many more deserve to be inventorized, but with those we know, we already get a fair idea of the magnitude of the Islamic destruction. Historians and archaeologists have their work cut out for them in tabulating more than a millennium of Islamic destruction across a whole subcontinent, especially after half a century of willful neglect of this dimension of India’s history.
The enemies of Hindu Dharma and of India can get away with any lie or distortion because they have the media and the India-watching academics and movie directors at their disposal. They will exploit any mistake the Hindus make, knowing fully well that they do not have the same luxury of getting away with missteps. Any sin against the canon of scholarship will be used to create an impression of an “anti-science” mentality, of “amateurism” at best, but more likely of “superstition” or “jingoistic history distortion”. In fact, even in the case of utmost Hindu conscientiousness, they will still throw all these swearwords at the Hindus and thereby still condition numerous mediocre minds against the Hindu position (or more precisely, against the historical truth), at least in the short term; but in that case, at least knowledgeable and discerning people will come over to the Hindu side of the argument, and they will make the difference in the long run... The mass killing of Hindus by Islamic Mujahedīn (Arabic: “those who strive [on the path of Allah]”) is a historical reality, costing many millions of Hindu lives. A recent Nehruvian-cum-Marxist current in Indian and India-watching historiography tries to deny this fact, but the evidence is plentiful, much of it from the horse’s mouth: the Muslim chronicles that take great pride in being able to describe the destruction of Pagan people and Pagan culture. This Negationism is an interesting topic, both for refuting it as a matter of correct history-writing and for analysing its psychological and political determinants.
Increasingly, leftist intellectuals on the European continent are realizing that the instrumentalization of postmodern "cultural relativism" as a shield against criticism of Islam's treatment of women and of non-Muslims just can't be reconciled with their basic commitment to equality and emancipation.
Between 1988 and 1993, we saw numerous street riots; a political crisis including the fall of VP Singh's Central Government in 1990 and the rise of the pro-temple BJP from 2 seats before the elections of 1989 to 121 after those of 1991; the occasion for starting the Satanic Verses affair, with the ban on Salman Rushdie's novel as bargaining chip for the cancellation of a Muslim "march on Ayodhya"; the demolition of the mosque building on 6 December 1992 by Hindu activists defying the orders of their more prudent leaders; more political crisis with the dismissal of four BJP state governments; and a crescendo of revenge violence spilling over to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the UK, culminating in a new model of terrorism on March 12, 1993, when simultaneous explosions at different localities in Mumbai killed hundreds....
Suddenly it seemed that the Bābrī Masjid had become the last bulwark of secularism besieged by irrational forces. This contributed substantially to the shrillness of the controversy, making it acquire a Holy War character, needlessly dramatic and bloody.