Being married to a "daughter of India" is a natural complement of my being in this country for 30 years. My roots are very much in this country, even… - François Gautier

SRINAGAR, May 30, Election Day. It's a small Hindu temple on the banks of the river Jhelum, lost amongst the hundred and one mosques of Srinagar. Its entrance is heavily guarded by BSF forces and it is protected by sandbags on all sides, as it has been hit recently by a rocket fired by militants. Inside, a handful of Kashmiri Pandits are still trying to preserve this sacred place, where a natural lingam is said to have emerged 3000 years ago and where their forefathers have worshipped for 20 generations. "We were once 30,000 in this district of Srinagar," remembers Shyam, a Hindu priest, "but today we are only two hundred. All our brothers and sisters had to flee. Our houses were burnt, our women raped, our sons killed". Shyam and his friends offer us a cup of tea and some biscuits and we leave this temple which seems to be doomed, wondering why nobody ever reports about it.

Gautier, in his book A History of India as it Happened—not as it has been written, tears into the questionable narratives of Marxist historians and quotes many examples of negationism. He says: “We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India”. Finally, Gautier explains why negationism must be challenged. He says “it is not about vengeance, or of reawakening old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes”. This is indeed central to the argument of Elst, Frawley, Gautier, and Bhyrappa. Secular, democratic India must know the truth and make peace with it.

Nevertheless, they did their fair share of harm to India, which has not yet really recovered from two centuries of Raj. Their brutality, whether the hangings of Indian nationalists, or the incredible ferocity which followed the great Indian Mutiny, or the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh, are today part of history. They ruled for two centuries with the unshakeable conviction of their own racial superiority which made Fitzjames Stephen, the philosopher of the Indian Civil Service, say: “Ours is essentially an absolute government, which has for base not the consent of the Indians, but their conquest. It does not want to represent the concept of the indigenous population of life and government and can never do, because then it would represent idolatry and barbarism. It represents a belligerent civilisation and nothing could be more dangerous than to have in one’s administration, at the head of a government founded on conquest—implying in all points the superiority of the conquering race, its institution, its principles, that men who hesitate to impose themselves openly.”