. Negationism in India, and in De Morgen

 

 

1.      Negationism in India, and in De Morgen

 

(Doorbraak, 5 April 2020; translation of koenraadelst.blogspot.com 14 Dec. 2020; I do plenty of writing in Dutch, and once in a while correct the gross and massive disinformation about India.)

On March 25, 2020, the Flemish daily De Morgen (DM) published a double page on "How India is rewriting history", contributed by Delhi correspondent Aletta André, and prominently mentioned my name. Let's take the opportunity to educate an ignorant audience about some basic facts, because India is a domain where disinformation has been leading the way for too long.

 

One-sidedness

An introductory general observation, which cannot have escaped the editorial board’s notice, is the completely one-sidedness of the article. There is a debate about historiography in India, and a newspaper can do its readers a service by reporting on it, preferably objectively. However, this piece is not a report on a debate, but a loudspeaker for one of the two warring parties within that debate. Any attempt to create even the appearance of impartiality is missing here. This is allowed, but as a reader you had better realize it.

Another observation is that this kind of article on Hindu nationalist history rewriting is a regular feature, which I have seen popping up many times since 1988; but that this one is original in that it for the first time leaves unmentioned the temple/mosque dispute in Ayodhya. There, the Babar Mosque stood on the site of the ruined temple of Rama's birth, which all parties involved knew or admitted to have existed, until the Communist "eminent historians" in the late 1980s argued without reason that there had never been a temple there. Almost immediately, they were joined by utterly ignorant foreign Indologists and India-watchers in the media.

Those who held to the time-honored consensus, or presented new evidence for the temple, were told by the Alettas of that time (like me now, and for that matter, then as well) that “his sources are in question”, or other excuses to ignore his evidence. But the evidence continued to pile up and was taken seriously by the Court. It ordered an archaeological investigation of the site, and the temple remains were finally revealed. The 'eminent historians' were allowed to come and explain their allegations on the witness stand, and one by one they imploded: “I am not an archaeologist”, “I have never been to Ayodhya”, “I signed that statement because my colleagues also did”.

In 2019, after 69 years of judicial process, the Supreme Court finally assigned the disputed site to the Hindus so that they can rebuild the Rama Birth Temple. The Eminences do not want to be reminded of their foul play in the lost historical debate about Ayodhya, and the friendly media are still playing their game: that debate has suddenly disappeared into oblivion, also in this DM article. For all those years it served as an illustration to throbbing articles like this on "history rewriting", and it indeed illustrates that scientific (slandered as "Hindu-nationalist") historiography requires a rewriting of the now dominant version.

 

Aurangzeb

The story begins anecdotally with the successful agitation by Hindus for the renaming of Aurangzeb Marg (street). As a historian, I am not a fan of the erasure of old names either; but on the other hand, now that there is so much pressure to erase the name Cyriel Verschaeve, who was merely wrong-headed but killed no one himself [a once-famous Flemish poet, with streets named after him, who in old age had recruited Flemish young men for the German Eastern Front troops in World War II, and whose name is now being scrapped from streets’ nomenclature], and now ally but “war criminal” Marshall Foch [French World War I leader, after whom the central square of my home town and WW1 hotspot Leuven was named, but now held responsible for fanatically wasting many thousands of young lives] has disappeared from the streets of Leuven, why not the name of Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb, who has killed thousands?

Well, it is just one reason to put the spotlight on historian Prof. Audrey Truschke work on this Aurangzeb. I have already given my thoughts on it in writing (see chapters 13 and 18 of my book Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars, 2019). She had no other answer than to block me on Twitter. "There is only evidence for a handful of destroyed temples under Aurangzeb", as Aletta André quotes Audrey Truschke? Not at all.

Firstly, there is the continued accumulation of archaeological evidence. With the regularity of a clock, the Archaeological Survey of India finds remains of temples in mosques. Under the rule of the Congress party, the excavators were forbidden to say a word about it, but now it is spoken about openly, as it should in a democracy. (Same phenomenon for terrorism: if the police used to track down a terror network, they were stopped or sabotaged from above, while now they can go their own way; so that India has become measurably a lot safer.)

Secondly, the Aurangzeb court records themselves are the best evidence of the tens of thousands of temple destructions. These contain both the destruction orders and the reports of their implementation. Most of the documentary evidence about Islamic iconoclasm, from the Chachnama on the Arab conquest of Sindh in 712 onwards, is indeed of Muslim origin and is quite open about the Muslim eradication of "idolatry". Often visible remains of the destroyed temples were built into the new mosques to demonstrate the triumph of idolatry. It is only since the 20th century that some Muslims under modern-Western influence have become somewhat embarrassed about their own religious fanaticism, so that they began to minimize or deny their own iconoclasm -- a negationist trend of which the presently-discussed article is an offshoot.

 

Modern standards of values

The attempt to whitewash Islam's role is a case of the cardinal sin against historiography: the projection of modern standards of values ​​onto a past in which they did not apply. (This includes e.g. the modern secularist inability to empathize with the seriousness of pre-modern people about their religion.) In modern propaganda, it is unfortunate to have to admit that your favorite religion has caused a lot of destruction and slaughter and the destruction of many important temples. That is exactly what Aletta thinks she can accuse the Hindus of: "violate history with their contemporary prejudices." No, when Muslim conquerors and their chroniclers speak of "thousands", which archaeology confirms, it is "doing violence to history" to say there were "only a few".

It is further said in this article that Aurangzeb "protected countless temples" (from whom?), Or that he "left thousands of other temples". Many important temples have indeed been destroyed, and the mosques in place are standing evidence of Aurangzeb's violent Islamization policy and as many rebuttals of Truschke's whitewash.

But de minimis non curat praetor [“an important man does not busy himself with trifles”], so the operation was not 100% impeccable, there were indeed some shrimps that managed to escape. By tricks or bribery, the Hindus were able to save even the eminent yet remote Jagannath Puri temple; for Truschke such are temples that Aurangzeb "left alone", but they actually were on his list of cultural property to be destroyed. Nonsensical though the whole argument may be, it is nonetheless useful to crime lawyers: "Yes, Your Honour, the facts have been proven, my client did indeed commit those murders. But! Still you will acquit him, because look at how many people he has left alive! "

Anyone who wants to fuss about the number of temple destructions can do so scientifically. Take the thousands of renowned cases of Islamic temple destruction and show that a different scenario applied there. In 1990, the book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by Sita Ram Goël was published, with a presentation of the Islamic doctrine of iconoclasm from Mohammed onwards, but above all with a still very incomplete list of 1862 destroyed temples. There are many more, and many more have been discovered in the last 30 years, but let's start with that list. A scientific statement is falsifiable, as Karl Popper taught us. Well, there you have 1,862 falsifiable statements: go for it, prove them wrong if you can. But in those 30 years, neither Truschke nor anyone else has been able to (or even dared to try to) disprove one of them.

 

Vagueness

Aletta André's other authority, Manu Pillai, tries to debunk the abundant evidence with two excuses well-known in India. One is that at the time there was "no generalization in terms of Hindus and Muslims", ​​so that there was vagueness about these identities. You have already had conflicting opinions, disputant doctores, with genuinely meant conclusions from multi-faceted sources that turn out to be wrong on closer examination; but this assertion of Pillai is really nonsense to which no source gives cause.

Indeed, there were sometimes temporary trans-religious alliances, as in the Crusades (e.g. between the Christian Templars and the Shiite Muslim Assassins, both enemies of the Caliphate) or the Reconquista, which nonetheless remain unmitigated examples of Holy War. Such vagueness has been common among Hindus with their tradition of pluralism; but there is no source of ambiguity about Hindu or Muslim on the part of the Muslim leaders. The Muslims were sometimes confused about the many different Hindu communities (that is how the Buddhists were called the "shaven Brahmins"), but they were all Pagans in any case, destined for slavery or hell. Or show me a Muslim who confuses a mosque with an idolatrous temple. As a great precedent justifying the aggression against the Hindus and Hinduism, the Prophet and his iconoclasm were again and again invoked, especially the destruction of the 360 ​​images of gods in the Kaaba, Mecca.

That basic fact of Islamic aggression against the infidels since Islam’s beginnings is systematically obscured by the Truschkes and Pillais, as it refutes their easy excuse that the conflict-centred description of the Muslim conquests "dates back to British colonial times". Again and again the Islamophile provincials try to put blinders on their audience so as not to see the foreign and precolonial dimension of Islamic imperialism.

 

 

 

"1,200 years of slavery"

Hence, there was nothing wrong with Narendra Modi's quoted reference to "1,200 years of slavery". The Islamic invasion did not take place all over India at the same time, in that sense the choice of "1200" is somewhat arbitrary, but his point was that colonization started not with the British but with the Islamic invasion. And that is absolutely correct.

The Caliphate, the Sultans and the Mughals severely oppressed the Hindus (e.g. win your lawsuit against your neighbour if you convert to Islam) and exploited them (toleration tax for unbelievers), literally trafficking millions as slaves, and always considered themselves as foreigners to India. Until the end of the Mughal Empire in 1857, the court and judicial language was Persian, and numerous Muslim administrators (contrasting with the Britons sent to India) did not speak any native language. The only difference is that, in addition to their exploitation, the British also imported a number of valuable novelties, which cannot be said of the Arabs, Afghans and Turks. Furthermore, the post-colonial Britons have accepted that their former colonization of India is called by its proper name, while the Muslims make great scandal if you characterize the sultanates as colonial regimes.

Furthermore, Pillai is very selective in his historical evidence. Knowledgeable disinformers won’t allow themselves to be caught in explicit lies, they mislead their audience by, for example, keeping some facts out of the picture, or by misrepresenting actual facts. The cited temporary alliance of Emperor Aliya Rama Raya of Vijayanagar with Sultan Adil Shah in 1558 may seem a compelling example of multicultural cosiness to naive people, but it does not exactly constitute an argument in the real world for the symbiosis of Hindu and Muslim, quite the contrary.

Because what was the sequel? Rama Raya included two Muslim units in his army, exemplarily multicultural. But in 1565, an alliance of sultans attacked him, and they fought at Talikota. He was winning the battle, but then the consciences of the two Muslim generals began to gnaw. They defected, captured Rama Raya and beheaded him. That is what can happen, especially to a Heathen.

A similar case where an untypical blur between Hindu and Muslim proved fatal was the crucial break-in from the fringes of India to the heartland in 1191-92: King Jayachandra of Kanauj sought to settle his feud with King Prthiviraj Chauhan of Delhi by inviting the aid of Sultan Mohammed Ghori. This Ghori lost to Chauhan at Tarain but was pardoned. He returned a year later, defeated Chauhan at Tarain and beheaded him; and a little later it was also Jayachandra's turn. He may have been Ghori’s ally for a while, but to Muslims he was primarily a Pagan. In the following two years, the greatest iconoclasm in history took place in the Ganges plain, in which, among other things, the Buddhist universities (both buildings and scholars) were razed to the ground. The lack of clarity between Hindu and Muslim that Pillai tries to talk us into, the neglect of their intrinsic hostility, is what led to the catastrophes of Tarain and Talikota in real history.

Finally, according to Pillai, the written sources may contain exaggerations: the countless Muslim testimonies of massacres among Hindus "served to praise the sultans to heaven". It does not follow from this that they are false, without any further indication. But suppose that such flattering false attribution of agency has indeed happened: what does that say about the ideology that applied in their environment, namely Islam? Extermination of the disbelievers and their shrines is indeed glorious there, for it is a faithful imitation of the example of the Prophet.

 

Negationism

The word has surfaced: negationism [from French négationnisme]. Does that term, known from Holocaust denial, really apply, or is it just a rhetorical exaggeration? Indeed, in this minimizing discourse, we find some typical techniques used by Holocaust deniers. The above argument that Aurangzeb "had also saved a lot" is frequently found in denier literature: "Hitler could hardly have made work of the destruction of the Jews: see how many still there are, with their own state and all!"

Very typical is the frequent swapping of rule and exception. Holocaust deniers make the most of small successes over fringe events. For example, it is no longer claimed that Hitler refused to shake hands with the American athlete Jesse Owens during the Olympic Games because he was black. The negationists had always denied this urban legend, they say triumphantly. Possibly, but that little correction doesn't diminish the fact of the Holocaust.

For example, the favourable elements that Truschke can cite about Aurangzeb's personality are correct, e.g. that he was an ascetic and was very careful with public money (for example, he refused payment from the treasury and took his father Shah Jahan to task for having wasted money on prestige projects such as the construction of the Taj Mahal), but these do not detract from his campaigns against Hinduism. On the contrary, they come from the same basic motif, namely his piety: because it was moulded by Islam, it did not lead to charity or yoga or anything, but to jihad.

Also common is that most of them tell demonstrable untruth, but genuinely believe what they say. The difference is only in social acceptance. Holocaust deniers marginalize themselves, but they willingly make that sacrifice because they think it serves the truth. Something like Christian martyrs who would rather give their lives than convert to Islam or atheism with a knife to their throats: no doubt courageous and consistent, but also tragic because their “true faith” was a delusion that did not become the truth just because they gave their lives for it. There was simply no resurrection, no abolition of sin and of mortality through it, no virgin birth. The faith for which they make a heroic sacrifice remains no less a delusion.

This combination of truthfulness and delusion also explains why some negationists, after further study, still grow away from negationism, either from specific beliefs (for example, many have come back from their earlier denial of the mass murder in Babi Yar, Ukraine, under the influence of new evidence) or of Holocaust denial as such (e.g. my fellow Orientalist Christian Lindtner, an ex-denier). But, to reiterate, their apparent sincerity does not alter the fact that their negationist position was or is mistaken.

Jihad deniers, by contrast, bathe in social recognition and approval, both in India and internationally. Perhaps not from the numerical majority (most Europeans and most Hindus see through the Islamophile excuses) but because of the official circles in politics, education and the media. They flourish and are given all kinds of benefits, rewards and promotions. Most members of the vocal class are conformists and therefore gravitate towards these unfounded but approved opinions pro Islam, without realizing the true facts in this history dispute. However, the logical structure of their denial techniques is the same.

“Genocide”

But: although the denial of the crimes of Muslim conquerors and Nazis is the same, are the crimes involved therefore similar? In India there are some who speak of "Hindu genocide" or "the Hindu Holocaust". When the French-Indian journalist François Gautier founded a museum in Pune for the extermination struggle against Hinduism and the Hindu movement against it, there were voices that wanted to call it the Hindu Holocaust Museum. Eventually it was named the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum after the great freedom fighter, Shivaji Bhonsle (17th century), but at first that Holocaust reference was one of the contenders. My advice was also sought, and I strongly urged not to make that mistake.

In the first place, it is not very diplomatic to go against Jewish sensibilities with this. Although the term "Holocaust" first referred to the Armenian Genocide, it has gradually become a kind of property of the Jewish community, which would take it as very unpleasant if anyone else tried to make off with it. Beside the votaries of the state of Israel, the Hindu nationalists have almost no friends abroad, so they’d better respect them.

Secondly, the term once again draws attention to other people's experience, while the uniqueness of the Hindu experience still remains underexposed. There are indigenous terms, and it is now necessary to choose one as the default term and promote it. These include Hindū-vaṁśa-vicchédana or Hindū-saṁhāraṇa, "genocide of the Hindus". Since I also find that term imprecise, I will stick to the more general Hindū-hatya, "slaughter of the Hindus." That term follows an old pattern, e.g. the Śākya-hatya, the slaughter of the Śākyas, the ethnic group to which the then very aged Buddha belonged (by an illegitimate grandson of the Śākya state leader who was hurt in his honour, so not for doctrinal reasons). The term leaves undecided what exactly was the nature of that slaughter.

 

Millions dead

The massacre of Hindus, according to the Muslim chronicles themselves, has left easily more than six million dead; as well as millions of slaves, and all kinds of other forms of personal damage, and enormous (not indirect but very deliberate) cultural destruction. You even come close to the 5.3 to 5.7 million official deaths of the Jewish Holocaust if you consider the 20th century alone. At least two million people, mostly Hindus, were killed during the Partition of 1947 (and more in Bengal over the following years); official historiography minimizes those figures and presents them as essentially symmetrical, which is quite incorrect. The surviving Hindu-Sikh “migrants” were all true refugees who left their homeland only under duress or threat, while most of the Muslims who moved to Pakistan were genuine “migrants” (Mohajirs) to the Promised Land which they had carved out themselves and supported in very large majority in the ballot box. In 1971 the Pakistani army, with local accomplices, committed a massacre in East Bengal, with at least 80% victims in the Hindu minority, and the Muslim victims were also killed for anti-Hindu reasons: they still wore saris and no Muslim clothing, their language was not Arabized etc., so they were still considered half Hindu. The death toll, according to the government of the Bangladeshi state, was three million.

 

Holodomor

To say that a mass murder killed more than six million people feels like a kind of sacrilege to some. Note how conformist sources like Wikipedia regarding the Holodomor, Stalin's mass murder in Ukraine in 1932-33, which was of a similar magnitude (Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who publicly denied the Holodomor, privately estimated a 10 million dead), insist on keeping the death toll as low as possible. Well, I am not an expert on the Holodomor figures, I will leave them undecided for now, but Muslims have certainly killed more than six million Hindus. Historian K.S. Lal estimated more than 80 million between 1000 and 1526, all while acknowledging that demographic figures from the Middle Ages are inevitably inaccurate. He wrote this more than 40 years ago, and since then no further research has been done about it, because thematizing the crimes of Islam would be a very bad career move.

But for that death toll they had over thirteen centuries, from the Arab-Caliphal conquest of Sindh in 712 to the terrorism of recent years, and a very large country with a huge population. The mass murder of the Hindus was therefore much less intense than the Holocaust. Those who say the Holocaust was the worst crime in history are right in this respect, that it was unusually thorough. For example, Edith Stein was a Catholic nun of Jewish descent, but that could not save her: the Nazis made it clear that all born Jews were targeted, they could not escape their innate identity.

This is what justifies the term genocide: merely belonging to the Jewish birth-group was sufficient for extermination. The Hindus, on the other hand, always had the option of escape through conversion, except in acute conflict situations. They were not prisoners of their biology. Islam does not decree to physically exterminate the Heathens, only to wage jihad against them until they submit. There may be plenty of deaths during that jihad, but that is not the end in itself, only collateral damage to the goal set by the Quran, namely world domination.

I am not going to venture into a more precise estimate of the death toll. Like Audrey Truschke, I studied Sanskrit and Persian, but for years I have lost interest in the specifics of Islamic history, I only discuss Islam when current events require me to do so. After all, the general picture of the ideological roots of Islamic crimes is perfectly clear, the only remaining thing to do now is to make the right policy decisions regarding Islam. So I am not going to deal with the reporting of massacres and iconoclasm any further, fortunately there is a new generation of scholars in India ready to do that work.

So much for the subject of negationism, which De Morgen exemplifies here.

 

“Increasingly radical”

Representing the contemporary context of that "rewriting" of history also requires some rectifications. The article’s subtitle addresses an "increasingly radical Hindu nationalism". Ever since that movement caught my attention in 1989, I have never seen it described in the world media other than as "increasingly powerful" and "increasingly radical"; this is how press correspondents justify the space they claim from their editor-in-chief for the subject. That was true even at the movement’s lowest point in 2009, after the BJP’s second consecutive election defeat, when its enemies in India danced on its corpse and even predicted the impending end of Hinduism: a "post-Hindu India", their openly advertised goal.

The primary fact in India's religious conflict is that Hinduism is fighting for its survival in its only homeland, while the "minorities" (in fact the Indian branch of powerful and wealthy multinationals) are only angling for additional conquests. In addition, Hinduism is steadily declining, also numerically, mainly because, unlike its challengers, it has no strategy and no ideological backbone, and especially no political leadership. It remains to be seen whether there is any radicalization against this background.  

The Hindu nationalist party BJP (Indian People's Party) has never been more powerful than after its election victory in 2019, at least in a strict party-political sense. But more radical? Only liars and their ignorant parrots can say that. Compare the party program in the years after 1951 with that of today, and you see the opposite. At the time, for example, there was talk of a "Hindu state" as the target. In marginal circles belonging to the mass organization RSS (National Volunteer Corps, which spawned the BJP) you can still hear this, but not with their leaders, and the party discarded that ideal during its 1980 refounding. Today, even the term "Hindu" is being questioned: "Every Indian is a Hindu", claims the RSS chairman, Mohan Bhagwat.

The BJP is still a nationalist party, and almost only Hindus vote for it, but programmatically it is certainly no longer a Hindu party. There are a number of discriminations against Hindus in the Constitution. You read that right: there are a number of legal privileges for the minorities and disadvantages for the Hindus. This mainly concerns the right to founding and managing their own schools and places of worship, two sectors crucial for a religion’s flourishing. Those of the minorities are independent and inviolable, those of the Hindus can be nationalized at any time and plundered by bureaucrats. That is why a number of Hindu sects have approached the court with varying degrees of success to have themselves recognized as a non-Hindu minority -- a race to the exit that is non-existent among minorities.

In India, citizens are not equal before the law according to religion (so it is not, as claimed here, a "secular state"), and it is the majority that is disadvantaged. A majority that allows itself to be minorized: it is bitter reality in the largest democracy in the world, but it is something that you cannot get explained abroad. Incidentally, that explains my own involvement in this tangle: a Fleming was needed to understand how a majority can be disadvantaged and allow that to continue. [Explanation: within Belgium, the Flemish are linguistically the majority but have always been, and in a few respects still are, second-class citizens, and this is partly due to their non-assertive nature.]

This is all the more curious because other societies with legally established inequality give a kind of justification for this that does not apply in India. In the US, blacks enjoy the privilege of "affirmative action"; it is debatable whether this is a just and effective response to the historical oppression of blacks -- but no one disputes the very fact of that oppression. Well, in India the Hindus have never oppressed the Muslims (nor the Christians), just the opposite. So here you get the absurd situation where the majority pays "compensation" for their own oppression to the offender community.

 

Ideologically lost

The Modi government has not taken any initiative to rectify this inequality, especially enshrined in Articles 25-30 of the Constitution. (It has, however, overruled Article 370 that gave privileges to the state of Kashmir, but the terms the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” formally do not appear in the laws underlying that controversy.) One of its MPs introduced a bill to that effect in 2018, but the government has not supported it nor mobilized a public opinion basis for it, and nothing has come of it. The reason is that the BJP has been so brainwashed by decades of "secularist" propaganda that it barely remembers its pro-Hindu origins and is ideologically lost. Former party chairman LK Advani showed himself to be an ideological babe in the wood by stating that "a party needs no ideology, only the offer of good governance", the long-standing mistake that governance can be ideologically neutral.

The history rewriting and the underlying Hindu radicalization that prompted Aletta André to write this article is simply non-existent. This also applies in the field of historiography. At the end of the first Modi administration in 2019, education minister Prakash Jadevkar was asked by some politically conscious people in his constituency what he had done about the grotesque distortion of history in the textbooks, and he proudly declared that he had not changed a letter in it. So he militantly chose the anti-Hindu camp, an example of how BJP leaders today have no higher (albeit futile) ambition in life than a pat on the shoulder from their enemies. The history rewriting and the underlying Hindu radicalization that prompted her to write this article is simply non-existent.

 

How history was rewritten

The Hindu mentality has not only been conditioned into an inferiority complex by "1,200 years of slavery", it is especially after independence that there has been a systematic undermining of Hindu self-respect and a progressive elimination of Hindu moves against it. That was mainly the work of the first Prime Minister (1947-64) Jawaharlal Nehru, a native Hindu who hated Hinduism (like the ex-Catholic popist-eaters here), his education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (Muslim fundamentalist), his daughter Prime Minister (1966- 77 and 1980-84) Indira Gandhi, her secretary PN Haksar and her education minister Nurul Hasan. The rewriting of history was a central item on their agenda.

It started with Nehru himself, who in his book The Discovery of India presents some strong examples of negationism. For example, he speaks of Mahmud Ghaznavi, who organized a series of raids in India around 1000, including temple destructions, and he claims: “Architecture interested Mahmud...” This refers to his conquest of the city of Mathura and the speech to his army when they entered the temple complex. around Krishna's birthplace. He praises it to heaven: "Here are magnificent temples as strong as the faith of the faithful. Surely it took an army of angels years to build it…” In his pretended silliness, Nehru ignores the blatant sarcasm of that speech, which culminated in the order to destroy all the temples. And so it happened. Later, the birth temple was rebuilt, but destroyed again by the aforementioned Aurangzeb, and replaced by a mosque. It still stands today, as one of the countless "silent witnesses" of Truschke's and Pillai's spectacular wrongness.

The whitewashing of Muslim rule accelerated under Nehru's daughter Indira. In a power struggle within the Congress party, she needed the support of the Communists, who in return demanded and gained control over culture and especially education. Their first priority was to establish a curriculum that would "promote integration between Hindus and Muslims" ​​by obliterating any memory of historical conflict and oppression. As if in Germany, in order to spare everyone, they were to delete all references to the crimes of the Nazi regime. A then education bureaucrat told me how, at the first announcement of that policy, he protested that a history book should simply report the facts; he was promptly promoted away.

In 2002, competent minister MM Joshi made a clumsy attempt at a correction, but it was without consequence. The situation since then has been that Indian youth has been presented with a very streamlined rewritten version of history. The current government has done nothing about it and is not making any moves. It has filled the relevant administration with incompetent RSS-BJP gerontocrats whom it wanted to thank for their services rendered to the organization, and who have neither the expertise nor the dynamism to change the game. Aletta André's outrage over a "history rewriting" (actually a rectification of the Communist rewritten history, a glasnost) is simply devoid of a real-world object.

 

Conclusion

Most India watchers live in a fantasy world, with India as a secular state (which it is not) threatened by an increasingly monstrous Hindu nationalism. To keep the flame burning, they regularly tell a scare story to keep the blushing virgins in a state of alarm and hatred against resisting Hinduism. In doing so, they are making a good career move, becoming spokesmen for a confluence of interests between the Islamic internationale, the missionary lobby and cultural Marxism, each of which has declared war on Hinduism for its own reasons. If, on the other hand, they were to show a realistic, let alone a favorable image of militant Hinduism, then some degree of exclusion awaits them. So the eternal return of articles on the alleged cunning of the Hindu Chauvinists will be with us for some time.

Read more!

Equal rights for Hindus: one year later

 

 

Equal rights for Hindus: one year later

 

(IndiaFacts, 21 September 2020)

 

One year ago on Autumnal Equinox, 21 September 2019, Hindus organized a conference in Delhi devoted to the discriminations against the Hindus in the Constitution, and, on this bedrock, also extant in India’s laws and effective policies. This was not a Sangh initiative (though VHP leader Alok Kumar was present and being honoured), rather it had been called to formulate demands addressed to the Sanghi governing party. Formally, it was the work of an ad hoc grouping, the Hindu Charter (www.hinducharter.org). 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

Education

 

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. 

 

But before this too, the discrimination was already palpable. Thus, in the 1980s the Ramakrishna Mission's schools in West Bengal were harassed by the Communist teachers' unions and threatened with nationalization. Instead of appealing to Hindu society to come to its rescue, instead of challenging the discriminatory rules which made this hostile takeover possible, it dishonourably decided to abandon Hindu society and desolidarize itself from all other Hindu sects that invest in schooling. Instead it approached the Court to get itself recognized as a non-Hindu minority, exemplifying the scramble for the exit from Hinduism.

 

The RK Mission failed in its attempt at dehinduization, as had happened before already to the Sri Aurobindo Society: the Court had to admit that the respective founders, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, had explicitated that they were Hindu and had never intended to found a new religion. But the Arya Samaj at the Panjab state level, the Jains and the Lingayats did succeed in getting recognition as a non-Hindu minority religion. 

 

Point is that article 30 is a constant invitation to the Hindu sects to leave Hinduism. It tends to fragment Hindu society. Apart from the sheer injustice of this anti-Hindu discrimination, its power to trigger the fragmentation of Hindu society should be reason enough for pro-Hindu activists to do something about it. It also helps to confirm the state's right to interfere in other fields of Hindu life, especially the places of worship, again unlike the minorities' inviolable churches and mosques.

 

These two areas, education and places of worship, are extremely important in today's world. In centuries past, children became Hindu by spontaneously absorbing the religion and culture because these were all around them. That is much less the case today. By contrast, formal schooling is far more important than ever before. Keep the teaching of Hinduism out of the schools (a requirement of enforcing "secularism", but only on the Hindus), and it will enter the children's minds less and less. Unknown makes unloved, and it makes Hindus unable to defend the choice for Hinduism to others and even to themselves. This way, they become easy prey for whomever wants to seduce them into abandoning their ancestral religion and entering other worldviews and ways of life. For Hinduism, removing these discriminations is a matter of life and death.

 

 

Abolition

 

The conference a year ago resolved to try and influence the government into finally taking up the problem of this Constitutional inequality. But it can be doubted whether anyone except the participants has even heard of it. For the Government's policies, it has at any rate not made any difference. In 2018 there was a Private Bill by BJP MP Satyapal Singh, but both the party and the Government refused to take it up.

 

If the BJP and Narendra Modi had cared about Hinduism, they would have prepared the correct parliamentary procedures before acceding to power, and set to work in 2014 itself. Failing that, they could have come to their senses in a next phase, and belatedly set to work anyway. Instead, while they may have done their job on the development front, they remained emphatically passive on the "communal" front. Many in there are just time-servers satisfied with enjoying the perks of being in government.

 

The slightly more principled types, of RSS provenance, had absorbed so much of secularist thought that the idea of recognizing and abolishing anti-Hindu discriminations that were strangling Hindu life, just didn't even occur to them. Instead, they take pride in outdoing Congress in minority appeasement, having replaced Hindutva with "BJP secularism" as their ideological backbone. Even independent activist Hindus tend to get carried away by minor issues and muster no more than fleeting attention to the main issue.

 

The problem here is that Hindus are suckers for tokenism. With superficial gestures, wearing Hindu clothes and getting filmed visiting a temple here and there, BJP ministers can assure themselves of Hindu votes. A child's hand is easy to fill, and Hindus will gladly believe that only economic issues are "the real issues", while the reforms that would make a difference to the life and future of Hinduism are but "boutique issues" (to borrow the term that a Hindu actually used).

 

When put on the spot, BJP devotees defend the BJP's actual performance against the ideals to which they were once committed, like "justice for all, appeasement of none". They insist that the leaders "need time": even after more than 6 years in power, without discerning any BJP intention to stray from the Nehruvian path of minority appeasement (for that is what maintaining the anti-Hindu discrimination amounts to), many are still not ashamed to say this, all while consistently remaining passive on the issues for which they supposedly needed that time.

 

 

What to do

 

If you want to achieve any goal, you have an interest in being coldly realistic. Let us face the fact that there is very little commitment among even activist Hindus to abolish these discriminations. This is an instance of a situation with which leaders ought to be familiar. Some policies have popular appeal, but other policies, though the best-informed and most prescient leaders see how necessary they are, just don't ring a bell among the people. Yet, if a leader explains the need for abolishing these discriminations, every parliamentarian of the BJP (and many others too) will fall in line. Many don't think it is a priority, some had never thought about it, but no one will object to it.

 

This is all the more true because abolishing the Constitutional inequality between Hindus and non-Hindus is not hard to do. First of all, it may not even be necessary to amend the Constitution, possibly it is enough to approach the Supreme Court for an authoritative opinion. The judges may point out that the Constituent Assembly could not have meant to deny to Hindus the rights they were giving to the minorities. At that time, the Muslims and Christians were on the defensive, acutely feeling how that were deemed guilty of the Partition massacres c.q. the just-concluded colonial exploitation. The Hindu members had no reason at all to enact discriminations against themselves.

 

Secondly, if amending the Constitution still proves necessary, this need not be insurmountable. Many opposition MPs may supports reforms amounting to more equality. Congress and other parties still have their eyes on the Hindu vote-bank: maybe they never would have taken the initiative for this reform, but they will hesitate to oppose it once it is there. And with the thumping majority that it has, the BJP needs very few votes from outside. What a luxury, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

 

The normalization of the Kashmir situation was harder, needing lots of security precautions and triggering many negative reactions from the usual suspects. But the BJP was ready to take these challenges on, partly because it was a safely secular issue. Everybody knows the separate status of Kashmir was due to its character as a Muslim-majority state, yet the relevant laws didn't mention religion. It could be framed in terms of national unity, a discourse in which the RSS-BJP is more at home than in anything pertaining to Hindu aspirations.

 

Once religion comes into the picture, the going gets tougher. This was clear from the CAA controversy earlier this year, about the welcome to be given to the non-Muslims oppressed in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, the enemy had it easy to deduce his allegations of BJP fanaticism from the obvious *inequality* between the religions in the CAA. This inequality between oppressed communities and oppressor community had its justification, but the mere mention of inequality counted as criminal to most outside observers. The episode ended as a publicity failure, a loss of face for the BJP government.

 

Well, here you don't have to accept the burden of a word that triggers negative knee-jerk reactions. Here you don't have to justify inequality, only to advertise equality. Who could be against equality?

 

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.

 

 

But

 

Of course, the secularists are going to resist this normalization of India's interreligious relations. They will for the first time be put in a position of openly having to defend inequality, but some will find a way of stooping that low without getting a bad conscience. Thus, some will say that in order to achieve equality, a little bit of inequality is necessary. That is the principle behind America's "affirmative action".

 

So they will claim (and we already have heard some professors, when pressed to pronounce on this, affirm it) that as a majority, the Hindus owe the minorities something. But in a secular state, there is no such thing as a minority, there are only equal citizens. To insist nonetheless on this point, they will allege that the American white majority has kept the black minority as slaves, ergo majorities commit injustice against minorities (an unjustified generalization), ergo in India too the majority has oppressed the minorities. 

 

Well, we have news for them: no, the Hindus have never oppressed the Christians nor the Muslims. The reverse, yes. So if inequality can be justified as a compensation for past injustice, then it is the Christians and Muslims who have to pay compensation.

But we should not go that far. For the present and future, simple equality will do.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The achievement of equality is not the end. Once the state has created a level playing field, civil society has the task of using the opportunities that arise. Hindus will have to take initiatives. A religion that relies on state patronage will become weak. 

 

Hindus should not want (and fortunately, by and large don't want) to replace a system discriminating against them by a system where they can discriminate against others. Just equality will do, and then let the best worldview and way of life win. But that very limited goal of equality is really necessary, and now becoming urgent. 

 

After 2019 even more than before, BJP devotees smugly assume that they are natural election-winners, so that they can safely postpone any jobs till next term. Right now the opposition is in relative disarray and not in a position to win against the BJP. But this can change. One of my farthest memories about Indian politics concerns the accession to power of the Janata Party, prepared by Jayaprakash Narayan's mass campaign that galvanized the opposition against the seemingly invincible Indira Gandhi. In the coming years too, we might see the rise of a leader type who manages to unite and motivate the opposition.

 

If the BJP loses power, many Hindus will rue the missed opportunities. What are the chances that an avowedly secularist government will care about justice for Hinduism and take the initiative to revise articles 25-30? Crying and gnashing of teeth, that is what many Hindus will feel when they realize that the seemingly timeless window of opportunity has passed, and that an ever-shrinking Hindu society has little chance of ever bringing it back.

 

But it need not come that far. You still have more than three years to get the job taken up and finished. What have you done to persuade the BJP leadership to use the unique window of opportunity that still presents itself?

Read more!

The truth about Ayodhya that many journalists seem to ignore

  

(Published in MyIndMakers, 10 Aug 2020)

 

Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord (Aleph, Delhi 2018) is the first book by Valay Singh. It is a journalistic overview of the developments pertaining to the Ayodhya affairs of the last years. The book is full of interesting anecdotes, both about the recent Ayodhya agitation and how the locals experienced it, and about the late Middle Ages.

 

Balanced?

On the cover, the book is announced as “a balanced chronicle of faith, fanaticism and the war between secularism and religious fundamentalism in a key battleground in modern India". Balanced?

Even before reading the book itself, we can form an idea by checking its index and bibliography. There we find that the main scholarly writers arguing for the Hindu claim to the site and about the fact and foundation of the Islamic iconoclasm that created the dispute in the first place, are simply absent. There is no mention of the very key to understanding the whole affair, viz. the 1990 book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by historian Sita Ram Goel, which catalogues 1836 destroyed temples replaced by mosques, and presents the theology of Iconoclasm that explains it all.

There is only one mention of Prof. Meenakshi Jain. Perhaps her last Ayodhya book and certainly her book about the Hindu reaction to Islamic iconoclasm (2017, 2019) came a little too late for our author, but most certainly her earlier book (Rama and Ayodhya, Aryan Books, Delhi 2013) should have been a prime source for any later book on the Ayodhya affair. For one, by 2018 it was the only book that detailed how badly the Eminent Historians, Singh’s main source of faithfully parroted information, fared when put on the witness stand in Court. So, he only quotes Meenakshi  Jain (p.60) about a 5th-century Shiva linga, quite peripheral to the debate, though perhaps meant as useful to Rama deniers for asserting that Shiva was worshipped there and not Vishnu through his incarnations.

As a report, it is formally rather up to standard: when claims are made about living persons, he has contacted them for their version, as a journalist should. Thus, when the Shia Waqf Board became a party to the Ayodhya dispute very shortly before its conclusion, observers found it suspiciously close to the Hindu wish of weakening the Sunni position: “The desire of the Shia Waqf board members to ingratiate themselves to the Yogi or Modi govenments cannot be ruled out.” Valay Singh is a de facto supporter of the Sunni Waqf Board’s claim, so he has an interest in presenting all factors that may thwart it as suspect. Yet he admits, after due verification at the source: “The chairman of the Board, Wasim Rizvi, denied that this is the case.” (p.368) But then, Jesuits and journalists are known for wrong-footing the reader without brazen-faced lies but with selectively citing otherwise genuine facts.

 

 

The author

On the back cover, Singh is introduced as ”an independent journalist” who has launched himself by working for “NDTV as a researcher and editor” (not exactly a guarantee of objectivity) and has since become a widely-published columnist. Not a professional historian, and ever since the controversial intervention of the “eminent historians” in the Ayodhya affair, this might count as a good thing.

                His position in the ideological spectrum can also be deduced from the description (p.268) of  Irfan Habib as one of the “independent historians like Irfan Habib who had opposed the VHP”. The anti-temple historians representing the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) since December 1990 ludicrously called themselves “independent historians”, though they were statutorily and ideologically in the BMAC’s employ. An objective journalist would have taken his distance from this transparent camouflage, but Valay Singh has no qualms about showing on what side he stands.

By contrast, he sidelines the evidence dug up in the early 1970s by the dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. Braj Basi Lal, or rather, “pro-temple archaeologists like BB Lal” (p.268). No, first Lal did neutral excavations, and after that he stood by his findings; then, more than a decade later, the VHP showed interest in them. Note also that in the 1970s when he had made his discovery, PM Indira Gandhi emphatically ordered him to keep it secret. It is only when the debate came in focus in 1989 that he went public with it.

Unlike Irhan Habib, BB Lal has a record of going where the evidence leads him, regardless of partisan loyalties. Thus, when his diggings had found a human presence at the disputed site down to the -2nd millennium, this refuted the Eminent Historians’ claim that the Masjid had been built on virgin land, but it also conflicted with many Dharmacharyas’s belief that Rama had lived in the -6th or -13th millennium or even a million years back. He stood firm against their protests by replying: “I am not saying this, but my spade tells me so.” Likewise, in the Indo-European Homeland debate, he is nowadays falsely decried as “a convert to Hindu nationalism” for supporting the Vedic nature of the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilization, but for decades he was cited as the lone archaeologist who had given physical proof for the hypothetical Aryan Immigration. As a junior scholar in the 1950s, he had made his name by documenting the Painted Grey Ware and fitting it into the dominant immigrationist paradigm by identifying it as a sign of the Aryan movement deeper into India. Since the 1990s, however, he has gone public with the insight that he had only force-fitted his findings into the reigning paradigm without ever proving it, and that the accumulated evidence of the last decades points in the opposite direction: “The Vedas and Harappa are but two sides of the same coin.” That may be to the VHP’s liking, but the development of this insight was demonstrably independent from any ideological loyalty.

                Finally, note that at the time of the Supreme Court’s final verdict the BBC selected Valay Singh to report the reactions in Ayodhya. There was nothing to report: the carefully crafted stereotype that Kar Sevaks express their joy by organizing massacres of poor hapless Muslims turned out to be false, probably to the BBC’s disappointment. Indeed, this was representative of the cold shower felt throughout anti-Hindu circles: the controversy had been so much fun for them, with plenty of opportunities for virtue-signalling (“look how free I am from this superstitious Hinduism”) and an enemy you’d love to hate.  At any rate, the Mendacious Media only hand out such plum posts to people whom they deem ideologically reliable, i.c. “secularist”. 

 

 

History and myth

The drawback of Valay Singh’s journalistic approach is that he has to rely on others and isn’t sure of his grip on the less obvious elements, hence many instances of “it is said that” and similar hazy claims. Hence also some writing mistakes against technical terminology and historical names, e.g. “Puspamitra Sung” (p.7) for Pushyamitra Shunga.

If these corrections could still be dismissed as pedantry, more consequential is his unsophisticated understanding of the basic categories of history and mythology. On the first page of text already, he shows reliance on the secularist superficialism that “the Ramayana is an epic of mythology and scripture and not a historically verifiable document” (p.3). In fact, a text that is pure fantasy or “myth” is a modern invention. Ancient epics were typically rooted in real history, but with a lot of embellishment. Pitting mythology against history is a 19th-century childhood disease of the scientist worldview, when anything scriptural was laughed off as “obviously unhistorical”,-- until amateur Heinrich Schliemann dug up Troy and showed that Homer’s “fanciful legend” did have a basis in real history.

Here and there, Singh has dug up interesting anecdotes, though always in the service of an anti-Hindu agenda. Thus, we learn that in 1938, the Vaishnava Pandit Ramtahal Das wrote a “hagiograpical” biography of Akbar-age Vaishnava saint Devmurari. Yet he claims: “Pandit Ramtahal Das, himself a Vaishnava, displays remarkable neutrality when writing about the historicity of the Vaishnava tradition. He asserts that if there was indeed a Ram or Vaishnava centre in Awadh at the time of Nabhadas (circa 1600) it would certainly have been mentioned in his Bhaktamal.” (p.60) “Neutrality” is of course code for a viewpoint that comes in handy for Singh’s own narrative. So when Babar’s contemporary Guru Nanak does report his pilgrimage to Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, we are expected to consider this testimony “neutralized” by the alleged non-mention in this Nabhadas’ writings almost a century later?

“According to a legend, corroborated by interviews with several Vaishnava saints in Ayodhya, ‘if 500 Vaishnavs used to go to the north, only 50 would return.’ Ramtahal Das also confirms this in Devmurari’s biography: ‘the Dashnamis, with the help of north Indian kings, started attacking Vaishnav saints who used to venture northwards for pilgrimages. It was the time of Muslim rulers and they had decreed that the sects be allowed to settle their scores without interference.” (p.60) No close sources are given, only a “legend”, that is (in spite of his claming otherwise) not corroborated by any real sources. A 20th-century writer is quoted as alleging only that Vaishnava pilgrims got “attacked”, yet Valay claims that 95% of the Vaishnava pilgrims were “killed”, a pretty sensational phenomenon that ought to have left tangible traces in the record.

 

 

Casteism

Valay Singh’s desire to belittle Hindus and predictably reduce Hinduism to “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste” makes him put a casteist spin on many stories. Describing a controversy between the purely Brahmin Ramanujis (followers of Ramanuja, the medieval philosopher crucial in the tradition of Rama worship) and the Ramanandi order, he quotes the Dutch scholar Peter van der Veer as certifying that a particular Ramanandi leader, Lakshmandas, had been humiliated by a Ramanuji teacher of Sanskrit. This proved that the Ramanujis looked down on the Ramanandis simply because, according to Van der Veer, “he belonged to the Ramanandi community.”

But a sectarian conflict can exist within any religion, and for a Hindu-basher, that is not good enough: Hinduism must be confirmed to be blacker than the rest, viz. through caste. So: “However, the possibility that van der Veer leaves out of his anthropological study is that (…)  Lakshmandas was perhaps not a high-caste Brahmin and as his guru knew that, he could not have given him the same pot that was used in his kitchen.” (p.177) This Singh writes less than one page after he himself had written that Lakshmandas had been “born in UP in a Brahmin family”.

The Ramanandis, because of their association with the Janmabhumi temple association, tend to be back-projected as the bad guys, yet Valay Singh reports that in 1813-14, “Francis Buchanan found that the Ramanandi priests ‘stressed upon their followers a strict moral code and adherence to a daily regimen of prayer and physical exercise; they also forbade meat and alcohol. Observance of their Vaishnava traditions gave them, untouchables included, a substantial amount of self-respect’, he concluded.” (p.94)

Unlike the secularists, who have demonized the Rama devotees, the British (who must have recognized much of their own Protestant innovation of Methodism in the Ramanandis) actually liked them: “The British found the Vaishnava values of complete devotion to a personal god to be more in line with their own idea of religion. As opposed to the militant, extremely ambitious and warlike Shaiva ascetics, the British found common ground with Vaishnavas.” (p.92)

Singh even admits that throughout the Vaishnava world, a fermentation of caste reform was taking place ca. 1900. Far from leading the peasant revolt of 1921, MK Gandhi actually tried to rein it in: “You, the peasants, should bear a little if the zamindar torments you.” (p.151) In their quest for social justice, the Vaishnavas went farther than upper-Bania Gandhi was willing to go.

 

 

The much-maligned British

Valay Singh of course rehashes the very popular lie (not just among secularists and Indologists, but also among Hindu sentimentalists) that British policies “result[ed] in the partition of the subcontinent on religious lines”. (p.180) No, it was the Muslim League’s policy that did so. There were only two significant opinion currents in the Muslim community, both Muslim supremacist: the traditionalists like Maulana Azad who felt that, like until the 18th century, Muslims could take full power in India in spite of being the minority (silly secularists call them “nationalist Muslims” because they tried to use Congress as their vehicle); and the modernists who took the new wave of democratic thinking into account and calculated that the Muslims should first settle for geographically limited sovereignty and only prepare for the conquest of the rest of the Subcontinent once the demographic equation had evolved in their favour.  The British involvement was limited to unwittingly creating circumstances favouring the second party over the first.

So, Singh misrepresents Muslim attacks on Hindus, such as the “Great Calcutta Killing”, which took place when the British were on their way out and the provinces had native autonomy. This pogrom, which convinced the British that their resistance to the Partition plan was useless, was planned by the Muslim League, with the passive connivance of the police which was under control of the Muslim League state government. He, however, denies Muslim agency by calling it a “large-scale riot” and a “massacre of Hindus and Muslims” (p.181). This is the usual media discourse: two-sided violence or even one-sided Muslim violence is presented as a Hindu attack on the poor hapless Muslims (as in late February 2020, when the Wall Street Journal and Scroll.in notoriously misrepresented a photograph of a Muslim rioters’ attack in Delhi as showing a Hindu attack), and only when the Muslim initiative is too glaring to be denied, their rearguard tactic is to present it as two-sided. In the case of the Great Calcutta Killing, this was purely a one-sided attack by the Muslim League on the Hindus, with the passive complicity of the state police, which only started to intervene as soon as the Hindu side managed to mobilize for self-defence.

All manner of probably true statements are spun to convey some anti-Hindu or at least Hindu-belittling messages. Thus, “given the late development of Ayodhya as a pilgrim centre, it was not surprising that most Hindus had never been to Ayodhya.” (p.234) Not too late for Guru Nanak to go on pilgrimage there in 1510-11 as per his Janam Sakhi biography, at any rate. But alright, even in the present age of trains and airplanes, it is still only a minority that has actually gone there, let alone in the age before high-tech. In those days, how many Muslims had been to Mecca and earned the title Hajji (someone who has performed the Hajj)? And does this prove that Mecca “developed only late as a pilgrim centre”? Journeying was long and difficult, only available to well-to-do people, mostly only in the latter part of their lives if their health still permitted it. For every lay pilgrim who made it to Ayodhya, there were a hundred Rama devotees back home.

Singh claims about Walter Hamilton’s gazette of 1928: “It is noteworthy that Hamilton finds not one temple to be described in detail.(...) His account makes no mention of Rama’s birthplace temple or of the Hanumangarhi or even the ancient Nageshwarnath temple.” (p.97) So he himself admits at least the existence of the Hanumangarhi and Nageshwarnath temples, yet notes that Hamilton doesn’t care to mention them. Rather than taking this non-mention as proof of how unimportant Rama’s birthplace is, he should merely have drawn the obvious conclusion that Hamilton never sought to give a description of Ayodhya’s religious landscape. So the non-mention of Rama Janmabhumi cannot even be used as an argument from silence (as non-historian Valay Singh does here), which would still be the weakest type of argument anyway.

By contrast, other British sources are conceded to mention the Hanumangarhi, but he still finds fault with those: “In 1855, curiously enough, no extant British record of the Hanumangarhi identifies the said mosque as Ram Janmabhumi.” (p.111)  Well, of course, because it wasn’t.

He adds facts that might become important the day a real history of the Ayodhya movement is written, e.g. that Hindutva stalwarts MS Golwalkar and Nana Deshmukh had been present for the installation of the idols in 1949. The strong involvement of the Hindu Mahâsabhâ from the beginning was already known, but recently the RSS has been magnifying its own role in the early Ayodhya agitation. Here Singh maintains a proper distance, qualifying this claim with “if true”. (p.189)

 

 

Me

There is a mention of myself (p.29), where I discuss Ramacharitmanas poet Tulsidas’s perfectly explainable non-mention of the purported temple demolition by his contemporary Akbar’s grandfather Babar. (I later learned that in a lesser-known text of his, the Doha Shataka from 1590, verse 85-92, deposed before the Allahabad High Court in 2003, Tulsidas does mention Babar’s destruction.) This is a rather peripheral historical argument within my book Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, which he has apparently read. The central thesis of the book, which he studiously ignores, consists of scholarly arguments for the temple, and a refutation of all the secularists’ and Eminent Historians’ attempts to escape this evidence.

Moreover, that book of mine also treats of a few parallel cases. Thus, it is where Singh could have found the demolition of the well-known false claim that Pushyamitra Shunga awarded a prize for the head of every Buddhist. Yet, he faithfully reproduces this false claim: “In Ayodhya, local tradition says that he declared a price of one gold coin for the head of one Buddhist. He is believed to have led a Brahmin campain to wipe out Buddhist rule from north India.” (p.7) The claim is not just wrong, but is also misattributed: his local informers have not expressed some “local tradition”. Being located far from Pushyamitra’s capital, the locals have merely parroted the Nehruvian story megaphoned through the textbooks and media. In history courses, you learn about the need for “origin criticism”; once you have some experience with this, you can, even before delving into the books or the dusty manuscripts, already see that in the present case, the claim is not based on some mysteriously preserved local tradition but on the (carefully engineered) received wisdom.

At any rate, Singh has been caught in the act of denying pro-temple evidence which he must have learned about as per his own testimony. So it doesn’t surprise us that he feigns unfamiliarity with the scholarly state of the art. According to him, the VHP sought “the cover of scientifically gathered evidence”  and “is said to have surmised that if the excavation proved (which it did in the minds of some Hindus) that there was a Hindu temple at the site prior to the Babri Masjid, then the demolition of the Babri Masjid was justified.” (p.270) No, proof from the excavations (converging with that from many documentary sources) did not just show the temple’s existence “in the mind of some Hindus”; this variegated proof is the scientific state of the art. Those who deny it, even if they boast academic titles, are ipso facto anti-science.

 

 

Some good things

Let’s not be overly pedantic. Some good things can be reported about this book. We learn here that Narasimha Rao (who, as PM, followed in Rajiv Gandhi’s footsteps by promising a solution in consonance with the historical evidence, a neutral way of saying: in accordance with the Hindu preference), according to a Congress politician, was “India’s first BJP Prime Minister”. (p.257) He certainly was India’s best PM so far, for he patronized the decisive move away from the Nehruvian socialist policies that had bankrupted India, and he sat unmoved through the news of Kar Sevaks demolishing the disputed structure without ordering the only thing that could have saved the Masjid: an intervention by the army. This actually saved many lives, for a standing Masjid would have swayed millions of fence-sitting Muslims to go on claiming this otherwise unimportant building, and would have dissuaded the Supreme Court from finally closing the controversy by letting common sense prevail: leave a Hindu sacred site to the Hindus.  

On p.82-83, he faithfully quotes the Austrian Jesuit Josepf Tieffenthaler, an eye-witness to the religious practices in Ayodhya. Like all witnesses in the first centuries after Babar, he reports plenty of Hindu activity at the site, esp. celebrations of his incarnation on Ram Navami; and conspicuously omits mentioning any Muslim activity there. Perhaps Akbar, who sought to curry favour with the Hindus as a counterweight to the sectarian and ethnic Muslim lobbies threatening his power, had reached a compromise with the Hindus to the effect that they could worship Rama there on condition of not offending the Muslims by demolishing the mosque architecture. The details about that period, probably ending with or interrupted by Aurangzeb’s iconoclastic fury, remain to be explored by the historians, who are all the more free to do so now that the burden of a momentous controversy has been lifted. 

Singh also approaches honesty when he reports: “On 27 February 2002, more than fifty karsevaks were burnt to death reportedly by a ‘Muslim mob’.” (p.262) These scare quotes were unnecessary, the facts have been established and even confirmed by the judiciary, but at least the true story is more or less explicitated.

This is his farewell sentence: “Ayodhya has come a long way in its journey over millennia, and while today it is called the graveyard of Inda’s composite culture and rule of law, I am hopeful that this label, too, will not stick forever. Ayodhya will keep changing its course with the river Sarayu as its eternal witness.” (p.369) We retain that the false label on Ayodhya as graveyard of pluralism will, in spite of frantic attempts by the secularists, not stick forever.

 

 

Read more!