. 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!

Hindus for Hitler?

 

Anti-Hindu writers love to portray Hindu revivalism as a form of “fascism”. Given the Hindu movement’s record of service to democracy and abiding by democratic norms, they have a hard time sounding serious. Fortunately for them, they find perfect allies in the rare but vocal Hindus who do applaud Adolf Hitler.

 

Wendy Doniger

During the commotion around the publisher’s withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s book Hinduism, an Alternative History, the author herself held a plea pro domo: her article “Banned in Bangalore”, NYT, 5 March 2014. In it, she mocked the ignorant Hindu objection by Dina Nath Batra in his official complaint “that the aforesaid book is written with Christian Missionary Zeal”. When an internet Hindu reproduced this allegation, she replied: “Hey, I’m Jewish.” So far, so good: it is fair and correct to notice that Hindu activists are too smug and too lazy to study their enemies, so that they make embarrassing mistakes about Wendy, including her religious denomination.

But then: “I was hit with a barrage of poisonous anti-Semitism. One correspondent wrote: ‘Hi. I recently came across your book on hindus. Where you try to humiliate us. I don’t know much about jews. Based on your work, I think jews are evil. So Hitler was probably correct in killing all jews in Germany. Bye.’”

This may be an invention: the New York Times readers would not know the ins and outs of Indian politics, but they can be counted on to hear the alarm go off at the mention of anti-Semitism. So Wendy may have invented this case of anti-Semitism so as not to have to bore her readers with categories on Indian public life which they don’t know nor care about. As Vishal Agarwal (The New Stereotypes of Hindus in Western Indology, Hinduworld Publ., Wilmington DE 2014) has documented, her contentious book contains hundreds of wrong statements, from innocent slips and incorrect data to willful and ideologically motivated misrepresentations. So, we should not deem her above inventing this outburst. On the other hand, there really are internet Hindus who are capable of utterances like this. They don’t write books or papers, but the inboxes of Hindu activist websites have dozens of examples.

 If the above-quoted e-mail really exists, we can infer that it was written by a Hindu who had thus far been ignorant of Jews and anti-Semitism (most Hindus are ignorant about the “Jewish question” in Europe and the Middle East), and who became anti-Semitic on the spot, namely by extrapolating from Wendy to her community, which upon her own declaration is Jewish. The generalization from an individual to her community is of course logically unsustainable, but very common among the kind of people who vent heated reader’s letters. But all these details will be lost on the average reader, who simply comes to associate “Hindu” with “anti-Semitism”. And that was the point of her whole exercise. But Hindu loudmouths don’t see through such tactical schemes and readily take the bait, freely providing their enemies with all the anti-Hindu ammunition they need.

 

Hindu pro-Semitism

Hindu activism has always been sympathetic to the Jewish people and Jewish state, at least since 1923 when Hindu leader V.D. Savarkar in his trail-blazing book Hindutva expressed his support for the Jewish project of a state of their own. He had nothing with the Jewish theology of the Promised Land, which he may even not have known, but he observed the nationalist logic that the Jews were a really existing nation and therefore were entitled to their own nation-state. That is also why the Hindu nationalist parties were the only ones in India who, until the advent of diplomatic recognition in 1991, advocated full relations with Israel.

Hindus in general have always admired the revival of Hebrew as mother tongue of Israel, where Hindus themselves are not even capable of pushing through a common second language to replace English. They also feel familiar with Judaic believers as a fellow target of the Christian missionaries, and feel an affinity with the Jewish quasi-Brahminical book-orientedness and the ritualism, food prescriptions and sheer ancientness of Judaism. For what it is worth: Aristotle thought the Jews descended from “the philosophers of India”.   

Yet, Hindus also have a soft corner for conspiracy theories. In the past, they used to make up their own. But now with the internet, they have access to the minutely developed Western conspiracy theories, and the master theory among these is the Zionist World Conspiracy. The blogsite Vijayvaani, for instance, has published a few articles in this vein, e.g. that 9/11 was a inside job masterminded by the CIA together with the Mossad. Amazing how the Mossad managed even to fool Osama bin Laden, who genuinely believed that his Al-Qaeda men had done it; but anyway, that is what millions of conspiracy theorists believe, now including some Hindus.

Quite separate from this phenomenon, there is also a widespread sympathy for Adolf Hitler in India. Among Indian Muslims, this has the same motivation as among Palestinians, viz. Hitler’s anti-Semitism. This is ingrained in Islam and included in the Prophet’s precedent behaviour: he partly exiled and partly murdered the Jews of Arabia, where after the completion of his conquest no declared non-Muslim was left alive. But the same veneration for Hitler also exists among Hindus, though for very different reasons. Most Hindus only know of Hitler as the challenger to the British Empire and thus indirectly as a factor in India’s independence, while they denounce his enemy Churchill as a racist and as responsible for the millions of deaths in the Bengal famine of 1943. Usually they don't know about Hitler’s anti-Semitism and have only a vague idea of the Jews' place in European history.

 

A petition against Mein Kampf

In the spring of 2014, some members of the professional Indology list issued a petition to dissuade the leading publishing-house Motilal Banarsidass from republishing a translation of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. This book is very popular throughout the Muslim world, but also in India. Motilal replied graciously and withdrew the book from distribution. The petition’s author, Prof. Dominik Wujastyk (London/Vienna), related on the list that many Hindus he had spoken to, expressed admiration for Hitler, but once they were informed of his massacring the Jews in his domains, they recoiled in horror and embarrassment.

Hindus have a very mistaken view of Hitler. They don’t even realize that Hitler was only forced into war with Britain against his will; that he favoured British domination over India as the realization of his dream (white Aryans ruling over the “inferior races”) and the model for his planned domination of his “vital space” in Eastern Europe; that he opposed the Freedom Movement and advised the visiting British Foreign Minister to have the Congress leadership including Mahatma Gandhi shot. History moves in strange ways, and it is a fact that through WW2, Hitler bankrupted Britain and forced it to relinquish its prized Indian possessions; but he was no friend of the Hinduism or the Indians

 

 

Nazi Hinduism?

The blogsite Hindu Human Rights (www.hinduhumanrights.info) has received an e-mail making the following four points, rendered with corrected spelling. We will answer them one by one.

“1. The Myth of the Twentieth Century [by Alfred Rosenberg] is the book on social ideology of Nazism which CLEARLY states the state destruction of Christianity by proxies like Positive Christianity. And replacing it by HINDUISM and German paganism.”

The Nazi high command was inimical to Hinduism, which is briefly lambasted in both Mein Kampf and Hitler’s war-time Table-Talk, published by Henry Picker. Rosenberg was frowned upon by Hitler and other high Nazis for bringing in pre-modern concepts such as this “myth”. But as the Nazi movement was not a monolith (fairly obvious yet news to most experts of the period) nor a religious movement, his ideological idiosyncrasies were tolerated. Yet, even he did not advocate Hinduism as the religion for Germany. Contrary to popular opinion, a return to Germanic Paganism was also not favoured by the Nazis, and emphatically denounced by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The impression that the Nazis revived Germanic Paganism, eagerly fostered by the Christians who try to pass as having been anti-Nazi all along, is due to the 19^th-century revival of Paganism-lite which had entered general German culture somewhat, principally the celebration of the Solstices and the use of a particular type of candle. These were incorporated in the rituals of the Hitler Youth and the SS, not because they were Pagan but because they were German.

Post-Christian society does not want to do away with the scientific worldview and admits at most of a very restricted rehabilitation of religion, divested of all its superstitions. This was what was meant by the “positive Christianity” enshrined in the Nazi charter, the party’s official religious commitment (as opposed to Germanic Paganism, which later on was even outlawed along with all other non-conventional religions or “cults”).  Though raised as a Catholic, later in life Hitler became a typical ex-Christian, retaining a soft corner for Jesus (whose alleged “work”, the struggle against Judaism, Hitler flattered himself as continuing, and whom he defined as blue-eyed and non-Jewish), but ridiculing belief and religiosity as such. Thus, he mocked his Spanish allies during Spain’s civil war, who should have relied on their prayers to the Virgin Mary rather than on the German air force to defeat their enemies. 

While rank-and-file Nazis usually continued their Christian practices, the Nazi leadership consisted of hard-headed military men contemptuous of any religion. Yet they appreciated the organizational achievements of Christianity. Thus, the SS was partly inspired on the Teutonic Order of warrior-monks, and dimly also on the Jesuit Order. Hitler also lambasted systems of hereditary priesthood, which Hindus know well enough through the Brahmin caste, praising instead the Catholic system of celibate priests, necessarily drawn from the common people and thus in greater solidarity with the nation than can be expected of a priestly class locked in its separateness.

The Nazi attitude to Christianity is complex and is not helped by simplistic notions such as Pius XII being called “Hitler’s Pope”. The Nazis had Christian roots and largely Christian voters (in particular, their anti-Semitism had never existed in Germanic Paganism but was central to the Christian scheme), but in the event of victory in World War II, its top cadres planned a secularization and a replacement of Christianity by secular nationalism. A symbol of this planned reform was the replacement of the Christian greeting “Grüss Gott” (not by “Grüss Wotan” or “Grüss Krishna”, as this Hindu Nazi implies, but:) by “Heil Hitler”.

Maybe our Hitler-admiring correspondent is not a Hindu but a secularist. Hitler, at any rate, had no Hindu leanings but was very much a secularist.

 

“God-believing”

“2. 4% had converted to German Paganism and 1.5-2% to atheism. These pagans and atheists where the most dedicated Nazis. Source: State University of New York George C. Browder Professor of History College of Freedonia (16 September 1996), Hitler's Enforcers : The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution, Oxford University Press. pp. 166–. ISBN 978-0-19-534451-6. Retrieved 14 March 2013.)”

The 1939 census listed more than 90% of the Germans as Christians, thus necessarily also a majority among those who had supported Hitler in coming to power. It is not fashionable in Christian circles to bring up this fact, as they prefer to highlight anti-Nazi Christians (such as the Weisse Rose student group) and falsely pretend that Christianity was as much a force against Nazism as against Bolshevism. Hindus who want to study any aspect of National-Socialism or World War II are very poorly equipped to see through this pro-Christian and anti-Pagan slant in many works on the subject. We have the impression that our correspondent has swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

In this Christian climate, the “atheist” category, good for some 2%, was frowned upon and identified with “godless Bolshevism”. That is why atheist-minded Nazis joined the other category, Gottgläubig, “believing in God”. This was a vague category of “unspecified religious”, including deism, German peri-Christian mysticism (Hildegard von Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Cusanus, Rudolf Steiner), pantheism, Germanic Paganism and other excentric religions. The reduction of this category to “Germanic Paganism” is ruthless Christian propaganda, then already used to mobilize the Anglo-Saxon populace against the Nazis, who were depicted as bizarre exotics and Satanists; and it has only spread since and is even being taken over by a Hindu who fancies himself anti-Christian.

The category included many pacifists and other groups temperamentally disinclined to strong-arm Nazism. But yes, it also included Nazis: a top Nazi who strongly identified with this category was Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. He was creating a new religion out of the bits and pieces he found in many places: memory traces of ancient Germanic religion (the seeress Weleda), Germanic folklore, German-Christian mysticism, German-Christian nature lore, Christian organizational forms, witchcraft and excentric forms of modern science. The religion essentially died with him. It was an interesting attempt of what people will try when the post-Christian condition leaves them looking for something to fill the “God-shaped hole”. But with their own rich and unbroken lineage of spiritual masters, Hindus surely have no need for this syncretic attempt at all.

 

The Aryan Invasion Theory

Replying to an argument in an earlier discussion about the so-called Aryan invasion of India, but relevant here, he also reveals:

“3. I am an Out-of-India theorist. Which puts proto-Aryans’ light-brown [skin] with dark hair and eyes like North-Western Indians. On what basis [have] you claimed I consider blonde and blue 'better'?”

Apparently, our correspondent has earlier been accused of considering one race better than another. We simply accept his protestation that he rejects any claims of racial superiority. But he should expect this kind of allegation if he perforce wants to speak out in favour of the Nazis, who did believe in racial superiority, and very firmly.

In the Nazi scheme of things, the Aryans had invaded India, tried to protect their genetic purity by imposing caste apartheid, but ended up mixing with the natives to some extent. (This scenario is still taught by most Indologists, secularists, Dravidianists and neo-Ambedkarites.) So, to a Nazi, any Indian is definitely inferior: either he is an inferior native if Dravidian or low-caste; or he is an upper-caste Indo-Aryan with some superior Aryan blood in his veins, but unfortunately mixed with some native blood. That is why North-Western Indians are more European-looking, but not fully: their Aryan racial purity has been compromised by some admixture with the dark-skinned natives. So, to Hitler’s mind, they are better off being ruled by the superior pure Aryans from Britain. That is why during their only meeting, he told collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose to his face that Indians have the best possible deal as colonial underlings.

At any rate, the Aryan Invasion Theory was a cornerstone of the Nazi worldview, taught in every Nazi-controlled school. They had it in common with their arch-enemy Winston Churchill, who used the AIT to justify the presence of Britons in India, who had only taken over India the same way that their Vedic cousins once had.

Obviously, the superior Aryans had to have originated in Europe, and then proceeded from there to colonize India, as was their wont. Anything coming in from India was tainted with the inferior native race, witness the Gypsies. In order to racially purify Europe, the Gypsies along with the Jews had to be removed, first according to some yet to be worked out master-plan, then during the war by simple extermination.

If our correspondent really is an Out-of-India theorist, then on this point he is diametrically opposed to the Nazi position.  

 

Bhagavad Gita

“4. The Nazis had often quoted the Bhagavad Gita to the SS, famously by Himmler. Goebbels had criticized the British take-over of India heavily in his news articles. In the time when the majority of Western countries heavily supported racism (see the reaction to the Japanse proposal of equality in the League of Nations), the CLEAR claim of Goebbels of India as great and ancient... and then the specific Nazi glorification of Hinduism in their literal scriptures speak for themselves.”

In the racial worldview of the Nazis, the biological inferiority of the Hindus was an overriding fact. That is why Hitler mocked their supposed otherworldliness, a trait typical of inferior people who fail in this world and hence have to withdraw in an imaginary world. This in contrast with the down-to-earth Germanic realism, which naturally had to result in competence, victory and conquest. (The exception were the marginal Germanic neo-Pagans, whom he also mocked because they lived in the past and dreamed of a pre-Christian utopia instead of embracing the post-Christian world of science and domination.) But the Gita, being ancient, could be stretched to have been written by the early Aryans who had freshly entered India and were not yet tainted by racial admixture.

At the same time, Orientalism had deeply penetrated German culture. While it could be denounced, it could not entirely be wished away. And so, yes, it had affected Himmler, who swallowed all he could lay his hands on in terms of the occult, secret societies and unconventional religion. He did not propagate the Gita, as some Hindus seem to believe, but he did read it and took some ideas from it – while very purposely leaving out others.

Nazism was still in its infancy and could have taken very different directions. The Army High Command, for instance, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 thinking it was starting a brief local war, more or less completing the German claim on historically German lands (if, as nationalists often do, you only consider the time of your nation’s greatest expansion). It did not glorify war, which it saw as an extension of politics, meant to project power conditioned by a political plan. There was no plan to conquer Germany’s Western and Northern neighbours, for instance, no ambition to rule these countries, and they only embarked on this invasion (May 1940) reluctantly, with Hitler himself masterminding a very daring strategy which wonderfully succeeded. The ensuing offensives likewise established the German reputation for invincibility, which made many in India go wild (including Mahatma Gandhi, whose Quit India movement of August 1942 was predicated on an Axis victory). But then Hitler’s strategic luck ran out, the generals tried to save the situation with more careful tactics, but their position continued to decline to inevitable defeat.

In this scenario, not that unusual in military history, the SS and its view on war stood out. Normally, war is sometimes considered a necessary evil, and then embarked upon in a spirit of embracing the inevitable. This is also the case in the Mahabharata, the larger work of which the Gita forms part: Krishna tries non-violent solutions to the enmity between two groups of cousins, and only when these fail, does he counsel a merciless war. This was the first point where Himmler went against Krishna’s example, upholding a modern interpretation of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory instead: war is a natural and good test to decide who shall survive and who is not worthy of survival. He arrived at the view that war for war’s sake is a good thing. It is only a careless and superficial reading of the Gita (shared, incidentally, by Wendy Doniger) that can see it as a justification of “war for war’s sake”. But I agree that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that the Gita can be a dangerous book in the hands of an incompetent do-it-yourself amateur like Himmler (or a Sanskrit-knowing yet equally incompetent Indologist like Wendy Doniger).

A second point is the Gita’s doctrine of Nishkama Karma, “action without desire (for its benefits)”. We see traces of it in Himmler’s decision to organize the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”. This expression already existed in the 1930s and meant a planned emigration of the Jews from Germany. A forced emigration is neither pleasant nor fair, but at least it is preferable to being slaughtered. Its relatively innocuous meaning changed drastically in 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. At first, German Jews were being resettled in the conquered territories, but this proved impractical and external emigration was now ruled out by the war circumstances. So something more sinister was being worked out: the secretive extermination of the Jews. People knew vaguely of a plan to deport the Jews to new settlements, so they were not overly upset when they saw the Jews around them being taken away. In some occupied countries, even Jewish committees themselves helped organize the deportation to what they thought were new labour sites in the East.

What did happen was that Himmler took it upon himself to do what race theorists thought best for the German people: eliminate the Jews. He accepted that his SS men would handle this tough task. He relieved even ordinary soldiers of this difficult task, for he had seen how killing, as with a neck shot, was difficult and often became unbearable for ordinary men. He saw this as a kind as ascetic dutifulness: take upon oneself a thankless task, not expecting any reward but doing what has to be done. This ascetic sense of duty could easily be sourced elsewhere, e.g. in Stoicism, widely known among the educated classes of Europe; but it is also present in the Gita, though nowhere applied to the task of extermination.

He could perhaps have used Krishna’s explanation that killing isn’t really killing, just as dying isn’t really dying, because death is only like taking off your clothes to put on fresh ones tomorrow, i.e. in a next incarnation. But he didn’t. Possibly he believed it himself, but as a Nazi, he did not want to propagate an airy-fairy pre-modern doctrine like reincarnation. The Nazi scheme nowhere envisions that the Jews were destined to come back to haunt their killers. The karmic implications taught by the Gita and by much of Hindu tradition did not figure in Himmler’s plans. Nor did the bulk of the Gita, dealing with the Sankhya philosophy’s worldview and its applications, with the need to become a yogi, with the worship of Krishna etc. So, maybe Himmler got a few half-digested ideas from the Gita which he could have gotten from elsewhere too, and most of the Gita’s 18 chapters simply have nothing to do with his project.

As for Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, I know only little of his very considerable output, and have never heard of his utterances in favour of India’s independence. If true, I would expect them to be plastered all over the place by the numerous intellectuals who have an interest in associating Hinduism with Nazism. At any rate, if true, it was never taken over by the Nazi movement or regime. Goebbels has a record of deviating from official Nazism, and not always in a good sense. Thus, he was responsible for the Kristallnacht vandalism and murders, which heavily damaged Germany’s international standing, was resented by the common Germans because they had never voted for riots and disorder in their streets, and disapproved of by the other top Nazis. Not because these disapproved of ill-treatment of the Jews, but because they didn’t want disorder and unexpected private initiatives.

That National-Socialists praised Hinduism to the skies and fostered studies of Indian culture, is a fable spread by anti-Hindu authors such as Sheldon Pollock. At most, some Nazis could be found who praised the culture of the still-pure Aryans entering India. Really existing Hinduism, by contrast, was only looked down upon. If living in the Nazi era, our Hindu correspondent could expect to be treated like the Gypsies.

 

Conclusion   

Our correspondent ends his mail in the all too familiar scatological fashion: “If you are unable to give credible answers to these points and break them, based upon reliable references, you are the son of a bitch, a proud brown babu of the British barbarians. And all you can do is trolling like other idiots.”

It is easier to catch mosquitoes with honey than with vinegar, so you would expect internet warriors seeking to convince people to use agreeable language. Instead, many internet Hindus couldn’t care less about the impression they make on their public. After all, they are not into it because they are out to convince people and score an argumentative victory. No, they are into it just to vent their emotions. They foam at the mouth not because they somehow think this has a better chance of convincing anyone, but because they have so much anger and excitement in their hot heads that they simply have to let off steam.

As for the contents, this man surprises outsiders by not thinking strategically at all. He plays massively into the hands of the enemy. A general planning a battle should study the strength and the characteristics of the enemy, as well as the characteristics of the battlefield. This man, by contrast, seems oblivious of the massive anti-Nazi mood in most of the world, which only gets grimmer as time passes. India has the advantage of having extracted more good than evil out of World War 2, of having terminated the war-generated animosities in 1945 itself, and of therefore being able to take a more distant view of the different parties in that war including National-Socialism. But this doesn’t mean that anything goes. Maybe the Holocaust and other war crimes did not affect you personally, but the facts themselves have to be taken into account.

For victory, you should not only know the enemy, you should first of all know yourself. In this case, a knowledge of Hinduism would at once reveal the fundamental differences with the Nazi worldview. Any contacts or similarities could never be more than accidental. Thus, in the much-maligned Hindu caste society, the Jewish community would simply have formed a caste (as indeed it did on the Malabar coast), just as it effectively did in Germany for many centuries; the Nazi desire to eliminate it, however, constituted a break with this arrangement. Hitler may have been wrong on many things, but he was at least right in one respect: that as a Nazi, he could only hold Hinduism in contempt. Either you are a Nazi or you are a Hindu.

 

 (Hindu Human Rights and Centre Right India, 10 June 2014)

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