High priority must be given to work among Hindu women, they say, "since they are the custodians of the faith"... (62) - Arun Shourie

Thus, not just whitewash, hogwash too.

Next comes the Urdu press. It has been one of the most potent allies of, in some ways the instrument of the ulema, as we saw in reviewing the campaigns against Dr Zakir Hussain and Maulana Azad. We saw the same role and the same potency in the campaigns in 1992 against Mushirul Hasan, pro-vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia in Delhi, and Abid Reza Bedar, director of the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna. A shrill tone, wholesale distortions, creating echoes upon echoes of their allegations, fomenting an extreme insecurity and then presenting everything as an assault on Islam—these are its hallmarks. And they invariably end up being deployed to fortify the world view which the ulema want the community to retain.

The condescension, the picture which is drawn of Hindus and other non-believers, their being clubbed with animals and vermin—any text doing this in the case of Muslims would call forth howls of denunciation. From the secularists as much as from Muslims.