Hindu terrorism, how to prevent it

 

The UPA Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, is but the umpteenth to repeat in public the notion of “Hindu terrorism” and to apply it to the RSS and BJP. Predictably, the RSS and BJP react furiously. They say they have nothing to do with Hindu terrorism, and that the lone Hindu terrorist Nathuram Godse, the  assassin of Mahatma Gandhi and hanged 63 years ago, was not a member.

 

Nathuram Godse

To start with the last point: ideologically, Nathuram Godse had remained an RSS man, singing an RSS hymn to Mother India on his way to the gallows. His brother Gopal Godse testified in several interviews, including to myself, that Nathuram had emphasized his quitting the non-political RSS (for the political party Hindu Mahasabha) in order to provide the RSS some breathing distance to his own inevitably demonized person. His non-membership was an organizational technicality, but ideologically, he had remained with the RSS. That way, at least, Gopal liked to pull the leg of the “soft” RSS and its even softer political party, the BJP. However, I think Nathuram’s non-membership was essential in the one respect that is crucial here: if he had been a full RSS man, his superiors would have told him not to commit the assassination.

No matter what its ideological position, the RSS was first and foremost an organization. It had a purpose, and considered itself important to the realization of that purpose. So, it wanted to safeguard itself. Now, the crackdown on the RSS and other Hindu organizations after the Gandhi assassination in 1948 was perfectly foreseeable. On the other hand, Gandhi was discredited by his non-resistance against the Partition and its attendant calamities. The Hindu movement had been proven right and had the wind in the sails. The assassination changed all that completely: the grip on society by Jawaharlal Nehru and his secularism was enormously strengthened while the Hindu movement was marginalized and thrown back for decades. It is unlikely that the RSS felt suicidal and would want to bring this setback on itself. An RSS member would have thought of the consequences to the organization and the  wider Hindu movement.  Only a non-member, ideologically on the same wavelength as the Hindu nationalists but organizationally a lone wolf, could commit this murder. In the RSS, the widespread anti-Gandhi sentiment was suppressed by the even higher consideration of the Sangh’s own welfare. But Godse made himself the instrument of this much wider sentiment, shared by many suffering Hindus who had never been near the RSS. That is why leftists who blame the RSS for the murder of Gandhi are wrong.   

For the same reason, they are wrong in associating the RSS or the BJP with terrorism. More than any other organizations in India, the RSS and its allies know that if anything happens, they will get the blame. Even they are not stupid enough to smash their own windows by engaging in terrorism. But numerous Hindus are on the same Hindu nationalist wavelength without being members, and some of them may be tempted  by hit-and-run alternatives rather than by the characteristic discipline of the RSS. I have already remarked that many Hindu initiatives are seeing the light of day without any RSS affiliation. That counts for those disappointed with the weak-kneed policies of the RSS, or with its anti-intellectual inclination, or with its appeasement of the non-Hindus; but it may also take the form of nuclei of militants who want “direct action”.

 

Suspicion

Now fast forward to the present. Does it exist at all, Hindu terrorism?

On the scale and the level of organization of Muslim terrorism, it of course does not exist. It is a figment of the secular imagination. Not even of Hinduphobia, because the secularists have no genuine “fear of Hindus”. They fear the Muslims (which makes them, in their own terminology, “Islamophobes”), not the Hindus. Indeed it is because they have a real fear of the Muslims but only pretend to fear the Hindus that they bend over backwards to please the Muslims and not the Hindus. Yes, the Hindus are capable of rioting in the streets, generally when provoked, but willful violence against persons, groups or property by purposely prepared groups is rare, if existent at all.  It has so far not been their favourite modus operandi.

Smaller-scale acts of terror, such as arson of Muslim religious buildings (or of the jeep of the Australian missionary Graham Staines, with three people inside) or the targeted assassination of religious leaders, have been alleged. Some famous court cases have led to nothing, but other incidents have been reported that seem genuine cases of “Hindu terrorism”. Thus, in Panjab, the so-called Shiv Sena has been accused of targeting some Khalistani leaders. The Azad Sangathan has been mentioned as targeting Muslims in Haryana, and likewise the Sanatan Sanstha in Maharashtra. Church burnings in Manipur have been blamed on Hindus. The Bengal revolutionary movement against the British, the Abhinava Bharat society, has been refounded. Those who take this trend seriously, fear that though small now, it might signal a wave of the future, when “Hindu terrorism” will be a large and endemic problem. It is therefore important to address it at the root.

There may be reasons not to believe the allegations by the biased media, but when Hindus I know testify from their personal contacts that “Hindu terrorism does exist”, I tend to believe them. It is but the factual tip of a verbal iceberg: the pro-violence messages I receive all the time on the internet, often from Gujarati businessmen raised on a diet of Gandhian non-violence but wizened up by real-life experiences with Islam. Hindus who make the move from this mouse-clicking violence to actual terrorism are very rare, but more than zero.

The one thing that can be said in defence of Hindu terror is that it proves Hindus are not dead yet. Like the Sangh Parivar, where numerous people are dedicating themselves to making a success of projects and policies that may of may not be rightly-inspired, the as yet little-studied Hindu terrorists are sacrificing for the Hindu cause. As it happens, they are mindlessly sacrificing other people’s lives thinking this will further the interests of Hindu society. There are better ways, requiring more intelligence and a more persistent sense of direction, so one hopes that their primitive enthusiasm can be transmuted in a more constructive direction.

 

Logic behind terrorism

Supposing it exists, what is the logic behind Hindu terrorism? What makes a Hindu conclude that terror is the solution? Several factors combine.

Firstly, Islam is comfortable with violence, has no scruples about it, and uses it on a large scale. This is being confirmed every day, from Nigeria and Mali through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Xinjiang and southern Thailand. Some hot-blooded Hindus conclude very logically that, at any rate, violence is a language Muslims understand.

Secondly, the government is not protecting Hindus. In West Bengal, it sides with the illegal Muslim immigrants against the Hindu Samhati. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindus are permanently exposed to petty acts of terror, from eve-teasing through abduction and forced marriages to Muslim to torture and murder; the Indian government fails to raise its voice, let alone use its influence. Bangladesh owes its very existence to India and is an indigent country dependent on foreign aid; it should be easy to get its government to prevent anti-Hindu terror; yet this is not happening. Hindus are increasingly desperate.

Thirdly, whenever Islam commits acts of terror, the secular elite (in India like in the West) is superficially making “religion” in general guilty, thus allotting guilt to Hinduism when judging crimes committed in the name of Islam, with Hindus as the victims. In reality, there are occasional terrorists in other religions, from Guy Fawkes in Catholicism and Yigal Amir in Judaism to Nathuram Godse in Hinduism, but Islam is violence-prone and terror-minded with an unprecedented systematicity and therefore on a much larger scale. Unlike Hinduism, Islam was founded by and looks up to a man who committed murder, abduction for ransom, rape, slave-taking and slave-trading.

More importantly here, the secular elite implicitly but unmistakably expresses a fascination with violence. When Communism was going strong, numerous intellectuals were Communist or were defending Communist regimes. Politicians were introducing policies inspired by Communism, such as India’s stifling licence-permit raj. As I remember, left-wing “city guerrilla” in Europe in the 70s and 80s was considered an object of fun, perhaps a bit misguided but fundamentally well-inspired. It never delegitimized the  use of its language of “class struggle” in mainstream politics. The trendy intellectuals have blood on their tender hands.

When Islam replaced Communism as the most popular justification of violence, intellectuals and politicians started defending Islam. And the more it made headlines with acts of terrorism, the more they defended it. At no time were more mosques visited by politicians than after the attacks of 11 September 2001, in order to ensure Muslim communities that in the eyes of the ruling class, they had no connection with what “a few extremists” had done in their name. In India too, Muslims prove that violence works. Thus, against the departing British colonizers’ and the Hindu majority’s opposition, the Muslim minority managed to force the Partition of India on all others by unleashing violence and making clear that the refusal of their demand would lead to even more violence. Incipient violence and the threat of more violence achieved the Shah Bano law, the banning of The Satanic Verses, and other small but symbolic gains for the Muslim community. More importantly, this creates an atmosphere where a confrontation with Muslim opinion on more consequential issues is avoided. Thus, the secular Congress Party does not dare to implement a Common Civil Code, an eminently secular reform enjoined by the Constitution and by the Supreme Court. Even the BJP, which had all along promised the enactment of a Common Civil Code, refrained from raising the issue when it was in power. The assurance that the BJP regretted the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the assumption of an ideological low profile by the supposed Hindu nationalist party, not to say its “appeasement policies”, are all remote consequences of the fear of Muslim violence.

So, Hindus conclude that violence works. Secularists prove it to them.

 

Moral objections

I would raise the objection that violence remains morally problematic. First of all, violence overrules the compassion you should feel for its innocent victims. Even victims guilty as hell could be prosecuted in a court of law rather than murdered, that is the way of a society under the rule of law.

Secondly, the Just War Theory, formulated by Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, but enunciated and practiced much earlier in the Dhanurveda and the Mahabharata, lays down as one of the conditions of a Just War that all non-violent means of achieving your end should be exhausted. India as a democracy offers plenty of possibilities, of which the Hindu majority could make use if well organized. Unfortunately, the party that collects Hindu votes with promises of pro-Hindu policies has never delivered. But what have the terrorists done to change that party, or to come into the legislature through another party, or to apply any other instrument provided for in the Indian system?

Thirdly, another condition for the Just War is that there is a chance of victory. There is no point in shedding blood for nothing. But the people concerned have never to my knowledge devised a strategy and surveyed the field to see where the highest probability of victory lies. It is very unlikely that stray acts of violence will lead to any other result than needless bloodshed of innocents, the perpetrators on the gallows, and Hindu nationalism discredited even more. In my experience, very few Hindus are into Hindu activism for the sake of victory. Most of them do it to vent their emotions or get a kick of self-justification, and to hell with victory.

 

Strategic objections

Moral problems apart, this pro-violence philosophy suffers from a strategic shortcoming, viz. it evokes very different reactions depending on the elite’s pre-existing ideological bias. Thus, the passive approval of left-wing terrorism was not matched by an equal approval of right-wing acts of terror, e.g. the recent murders of Turkish immigrants in Germany were sternly condemned. The reason is that public opinion has been conditioned to judge left-wing violence in a supposedly commendable cause differently than real or alleged violence from the real or alleged right wing, committed in the service of a disapproved cause. Che Guevara is on posters and T-shirts worldwide in spite of being a torturer and mass-murderer, because he was associated with a cause approved by the intelligentsia; any ideologically disapproved activist in his position would be treated as a proverbial criminal.  Similarly, a show of sympathy for Muslim causes does not predict an equal sympathy for Hindu causes, regardless of whether Hindus take to terror or not.   

As Herbert Marcuse, the New Left professor at Berkeley whom the leftist terrorists of the German Rote Armee Fraktion invoked, commented on their acts: terror (assuming in his Marxist philosophy that it is justifiable) can only be justified in a revolutionary situation, as a trigger for a general uprising. As an unpremeditated spontaneous act, it can only jeopardize the strategy of the revolutionary forces and play into the hand of the repressive authorities. Such a situation did not exist in the Germany of the 70s, and nor it exist in India today. In the present circumstances, stray acts of violence will not bring Hindu liberation closer.

 

Conclusion

                So, what to do? If Hindu terrorism doesn’t exist or is still marginal, it may become an acute problem. The reason is that Hindus are desperate, the number and aggressiveness of enemies is increasing, the callousness of the government is impressive, the ineffectiveness of the supposed pro-Hindu organizations has left them disappointed. So, by addressing these root causes of Hindu unrest, the threat of Hindu terrorism can be taken away.

Secularists could abandon their buffoonery and suddenly become even-handed. They could work with the Hindu nationalists for the eminently secular Common Civil Code, they could abolish the legal privileges of non-Hindu-majority states, they could apply Karl Marx’s dictum that “all criticism starts with criticism of religion” to Islam or Christianity for once. The Hindu organizations, while not committing Hindu terrorism themselves, are co-guilty of it by failing to provide the Hindu population with successes and hope for the future. They could defuse the threat of Hindu violence by suddenly turning effective and really pro-Hindu.

 

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“Not everything is a matter of Islam”

 

In the blog magazine Dagelijkse Standaard, Joost Niemöller writes (15 december 2012, “Het Marokkanenprobleem is geen islamprobleem”, “The Moroccan problem is not an Islam problem”) that the reduction of all problems to Islam is stupid: “Look, this kind of thinking is not just dumb, it is also dangerous. Whoever can only think of Islam as the root of all evil, moves through the world blind with anger and has lost all ability to correct himself.” He calls this thinking “hysterical”.

Probably that article was written after its author had a discussion with someone who obsessed over Islam, as described. But except for this putative debating partner, is there really anyone to whom this allegation applies? I have never met or read such a person, and I say this after having met many victims of Islam in South Asia. Even Geert Wilders, whose Party For Freedom is routinely labeled as “anti-Islam party” in the media, has campaigned for the 2012 on another plank, viz. the relations between the Netherlands and the European Union. In my experience, people who reduce all problems to Islam are a figment of the Islam defenders’ fondest imagination.

Some people, allegedly, claim that Islam is the reason for e.g. the misbehaviour of Muslim youngsters. The author, by contrast, proposes “cultural, pedagogic and genetic explanations” in addition to the Islam problem. Or even instead of it: “Moroccan boys are raised by their mothers as little princes, and so they start behaving as spoiled brats.” There are no indications that Turkish boys are raised that differently, yet according to the author they have a lower criminality rate. For that matter, Hindu boys are raised likewise and they stand out by a low crime rate. So, Niemöller’s explanation by educational factors falls flat. However, the shortcomings in the examples he chooses need not invalidate the case he is making. Indeed, we are convinced along with him that Islam is not the only factor of evil.

Thus, to reiterate some examples he uses, the high rate of violence in Brazil or the vast and variegated problems of Black Africa exist outside the reach of Islam. Indeed, most world religions are older than Islam and have a whole theology of evil, often with prescribed punishments for a number of specified crimes. It seems evil existed before Mohammed, and we will still have it on our hands after Islam has gone. Many critics of Islam are Christians and Christianity famously teaches that all men are inheritors of Original Sin, so Islam only added to a pre-existing store of evil.

Niemöller only expects criticism of his arguments about Moroccan boys’ upbringing, so he counters it beforehand: “Now the ‘true’ Islam critics will undoubtedly start saying that this is a typical Islam problem is, and then surely a Quran quotation can be found that points in that direction. But that is of course nonsense.”

Frankly, that one phrase is the reason why unlike so many media articles on Islam, this one provided me with a reason to respond: “But that is of course nonsense.” (Maar dat is natuurlijk lariekoek, in the original Dutch) In the 24 years since I first wrote in a critical sense about Islam, pro-Islamic responses have mostly been of this calibre. Rather than going into the contents of Islam criticism, where they know they can’t win, the friends of Islam pretend that there is no honest debate because Islam critics are a bunch of loonies. The whole Islam debate is between well-informed critics quoting chapter and verse and superficial sympathizers resorting to rhetorical tricks.

Actually, in this specific case, Islam as a factor of problems is a valid (if only partial) explanation. The double standard in the treatment of the sexes, by mothers as by everyone else, already exists in the animal world, not to speak of most human societies. Even hermaphrodite lower animals prefer the male to the female role; the preference for a male over a female birth is much older than Islam. If any problem predates Islam, or any other organized religion, sexism certainly is it. But the effect of religion is to stick to such natural habits even against pressure to reform. And this is where Islam trumps other religions: whereas others make compromises with the modern world, Islam is still standing firm. Feminism is making big inroads in Christianity, as exemplified by the woman bishops in the Church of England; but hardly any into Islam.

Thus, when Copts from Egypt or Sudan settle in Europe, they go by the rule: “When in Rome, do as the Romans”, so they abandon any plans to circumcise their daughters. By contrast, Muslims from the same region will stick to this custom, sanctioned by Islam though dating from much earlier, against their European neighbours and even against European law. They believe that their law is supreme, while the law of the land is negotiable. Sexism was not invented by Islam, of course not, but today Islam is a strong upholder of sexism in a world adopting more egalitarian norms regarding the sexes.

            In fact, very little was invented by Islam. Except for the veneration of the person of Mohammed, most doctrines and rules in Islam are taken from Arab Paganism, Judaism or Christianity. The double standard in treating Muslims and non-Muslims was adopted and adapted from a universal ethnic discrimination between in-group and out-group. But whereas modernity consists in combating this natural tendency, Islam upholds it. That parents frowned if their daughter married someone from another religion, was common elsewhere too, but today only Islam insists that she can never marry a non-Muslim, to the point of killing the groom or even their daughter in order to prevent it.

            That is why Islam poses a very specific problem, different from the general immigration problem. Immigrants from, say, Russia or Congo do pose certain social problems, but because they do not militate against assimilation, at least their children are bound to blend in and ultimately become Europeans with the Europeans. In the case of Islam, it is the reverse: the present generation of Muslims is less integrated than their parents. In expectation of becoming strong enough to take our countries over, Islam cultivates separateness for now.

            At the fag end of his article, Niemöller also admits that Islam, while not being the sole problem, is nonetheless a problem. He cites and rejects the opinion that “criticism of Islam is really criticism of Muslims and therefore hurting and annoying”. He also counters the usual remark about “the kind Muslim neighbour” by saying that “he is mostly kind in spite of, and not because of Islam”. I can live with his conclusion: “Yes, Islam is a problem. But not all problems with Muslims are an Islam problem.”

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The history of the Yijing

It is since about seventeen years that I take an actively skeptical view of the Yijing, the Chinese Book of Changes. Ever since, I have followed the ongoing debate at a distance but, save for a booklet in 1997 and a few lectures around 2010, not really taken part in it. Other people with more drive or more leisure for exploring the subject have devoted themselves to original researches into it, triggered by several discoveries of ancient texts and artifacts as well as by the disbelieving but benevolent spirit of the times.

A fairly recent book confirms my viewpoint that the Yijing is, to a far larger extent than realized by the starry-eyed New Age users of this classic, the story of a successful coup d’état. King Wen held the Zhou fief at the western border against the barbarians, and therefore had a better army than the other feudal lords. He formed a threat to the regime of the imperial Shang dynasty. He spent 7 years in prison at Youli, and was, at least according to a later tradition, released after eating his own eldest son Yi Kao. He then prepared to seize power but died. A single battle against the established overlord was enough for his successor as vassal, his second son King Wu, to topple the Shang regime and establish himself as sovereign. Not only was it a military and political success story, it was uniquely successful as a propaganda exercise: the propagandistic justification of the coup d’état, viz. the depiction of the last Shang emperor Zhouxin as a model of wickedness and decadence begging for replacement, and especially the doctrine of the Heavenly Mandate allotted to successive dynasties, became the state ideology of a whole civilization for three Thousand years.

S.J. Marshall’s book The Mandate of Heaven (Columbia University Press, New York 2001) fills in a lot of detail that most Sinologists including myself will be surprised to learn; not to speak of the wholly new world that it will open to New Age enthusiasts of the Book of Changes. It confirms that a number of Yijing characters hitherto given a general meaning (by the Chinese tradition as much as by Western translators) actually refer to specific places or persons that played a role in the coup d’état.

This much was clear already from the mention of Prince Ji (36/5), a privileged witness of the corruption of the Shang court; but unlike him, others were forgotten. Thus, Feng, the character that serves as title of hexagram 55, and usually translated as “fullness”, is actually the name of the temporary military capital built by King Wen in preparation of the attack on his Shang overlord. Just as the character Kang has recently been found to refer to “the Marquess of Kang”, an early title of the later Duke of Wei, i.e. Feng, the 9th son of King Wen and faithful brother of King Wu, and not to the traditional “brave marquess”; so now, the character Fa, “send out”, now turns out to refer to the personal name of King Wu. Meng, usually translated as “the youthful folly” (hexagram 4), means “the deceitful boy”, a nickname which King Wu earned as a lad and which the Shang nobles remembered all too well when he had conquered their capital. The mention of penultimate Shang emperor Di Yi marrying his younger sister off (hexagram lines 11/5, 54/4) pertains to her marriage to King Ji, the father of King Wen whom she bore.

Mingyi, traditionally “the darkening of the light” and translated by some modern scholars as “the bright pheasant” (hexagram 36), may refer to the meng Yi, the “allied Yi-(barbarians)”, who attacked Shang from the east to facilitate the Zhou attack from the west; an added “bowl” radical to the character ming turns it into meng, and such variations in writing were commonplace in archaic Chinese.  The lines refer to an archer shooting a bird in the sky, but may also refer to a solar eclipse, an occasion for shooting arrows at the dog supposedly eating the sun.

Immediately after the death of King Wen, his temporary capital Feng witnessed a complete solar eclipse, detailed in the lines of hexagram 55. This eclipse allows the author to date the event, agreed to be vaguely around 1100 BC, to 1070. His successor King Wu saw this as a sign from heaven that the mandate of the Shang dynasty had lapsed and passed to him. Instead of observing the prescribed period of mourning, he immediately amassed his troops and went on the attack. He crossed the river separating his domains from the Shang’s (his own Rubicon, as it were) and met the Shang army at Muye, “the wilds of Mu”. Hexagram 7/5 says that the elder brother leads the army, the younger carts the corpse: King Wen’s dead body was taken along into the battle by his younger son, the marquess of Kang, while the army was led by his elder son, King Wu. The judgment of hexagram 18 refers to the Jiazi day, i.e. the first day of the 60-day cycle, when the battle was timed to take place.

Some hexagrams refer to older forms of divination or shamanic magic. We already knew this of hexagram 31, about “feeling” in the successive parts of the body. This was a very simple form of divination: if a feeling somewhere spontaneously presented itself, it meant something. Even now, some people still think that if your ears start ringing, it means people are talking about you. Similarly, hexagram 1 refers to an old belief in dragons sleeping at the bottom of the well, then conjured awake, rising through the well and finally taking flight in the sky, followed by clouds and then rain. It is a rain-provoking ritual performed in days of great drought,-- which is the ordinary meaning of the hexagram’s name Qian. By the time of Wang Bi, the 3^rd-century AD philosopher who promoted a symbolic reading of the Yijing, elite circles had mostly forgotten about this belief or evinced skepticism of it, but rural folk practiced this dragon magic till last century. The last line refers to the autumnal constellation Kang Long, “Dragon’s Gullet”, the autumn being the time when the dragon redescends into his well for hibernation.

The lines of hexagram 18 refers to bu, the ancestral curse that explained misfortune, and that could be remedied by sacrificing to the specific ancestor whose grievances had led to this revenge. Hexagram 53 refers to interpreting the flight of geese by a young wife as predicting the return or non-return of her husband from the war that King Wu had declared. Hexagram lines 2/1, 44/2-4, 47/3-6 refer to marriage customs.

There are also references to older beliefs held in common at the time of the coup d’état. Yu the Great, dike-builder and founder of the Xia-dynasty which preceded the Shang-dynasty, is mentioned in hexagram lines 43/4 and 44/3, speaking of a difficult walk due to the damage that the heavy work has done to the legs. His impaired walking ability is well-known, even ballet dancers have a standard imitation of “the walk of Yu”. Incidentally, he was also credited with discovering the Luoshu, “the book of the river Luo” found on the back of a tortoise climbing out of the river, which the Neo-Confucian interpreters took to be the magic square of 3 x 3. Hexagram 8 and its top line refer to a custom instituted by Yu, viz. the beheading of whomever comes too late at an important meeting.

Oh, and where does the character Yi in the title come from? Here, Marshall only confirms what I read in some French book 25 years  ago. The character shows sunrays peeping through the clouds, indicating the “change” from cloudy to sunny, from yin to yang (to use later concepts, here in their literal meaning, “cloudy” and “sunny”), and most relevant here: from Shang to Zhou. The Book of Changes describes a revolution (geming, revolution-of-Mandate, Ge being the name of hexagram 49), and I may emphasize: a political revolution.

Much to the chagrin of most of its users, the book is not about spiritual matters, or about emotions and relationships and personal growth. It is a hard-headed book about politics and war. It is an upper-class book, not for petty-bourgeois dabblers in the soft arts.

This year, the Dutch Yijing symposium should take place for the 5^th time. The first two installments took place in the hippie colony Ruigoord, and the dominant voices were the old spiritualists with their touchy-feely interpretation. The last two, in the cultural centre of Soest, gave more space to the hard Sinological reading of the Changes. This is symptomatic for the change from an unhistorical anything-goes understanding of the book to a more down-to-earth one.

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Vijayanagar negationism

                In several articles and speeches since at least 2004 (“Trapped in the ruins”, The Guardian, 20 March 2004), and especially in the commotion provoked by Girish Karnad’s speech in Mumbai (autumn 2012), William Dalrymple has condemned Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul for writing that the Vijayanagar empire was a Hindu bastion besieged by Muslim states. The famous writer has taken the ruins of vast Vijayanagar as illustration of how Hinduism is a “wounded civilization”, viz. wounded by Islam. Dalrymple’s counter-arguments against this conflictual view of Indian history consist in bits of Islamic influence in the Vijayanagar kings’ court life, such as Hindu courtiers wearing Muslim dress, Hindu armies adopting techniques borrowed from the Muslims, styles of palace architecture and the Persian nomenclature of political functions; and conversely, elements of Hinduism in Muslims courts and households, e.g. the Muslim festival of Muharram looking like the Kumbha Mela of the Hindus.

 

Secularism and Vijayanagar

                As is all too common in Nehruvian-secularist discourse, Dalrymple’s analysis of the role of Islam in India stands out by its superficiality. Whenever a Hindu temple or a Muslim festival is found to employ personnel belonging to the opposite religion, secular journalists go gaga and report on this victory of syncretism over religious orthodoxy. Secular historians including Dalrymple do likewise about religious cross-pollination in the past.

                It is true that Hindus are eager to integrate foreign elements from their surroundings, from Hellenistic astrology (now mis-termed “Vedic astrology”) in the past to the English language and American consumerism today. So Hindu courts adopted styles and terminology from their Muslim counterparts. They even enlisted Muslim mercenaries in their armies, so “secular” were they. We could say that Hindus are multicultural at heart, or open-minded. But that quality didn’t get rewarded, except with a betrayal by their Muslim regiments during the battle of Talikota (1565): they defected to the enemy, in which they recognized fellow-Muslims. When the chips were down, Hindu open-mindedness and syncretism were powerless against their heartfelt belief in Islamic solidarity. In September 2012, Dalrymple went to Hyderabad to praise the city and its erstwhile Muslim dynasty as a centre of Hindu-Muslim syncretism; but fact is that after Partition, the ruler of Hyderabad opted for Pakistan, against multicultural India. When the chips are down, secular superficiality is no match for hard-headed orthodoxy.

                Muslims too sometimes adopted Hindu elements. However, it would be unhistorical to assume a symmetry with what the Hindus did. Hindus really adopted foreign elements, but most Muslims largely just retained Hindu elements which had always been part of their culture and which lingered on after conversion. Thus, the Pakistanis held it against the Bengalis in their artificial Muslim state (1947-71) that their language was very Sanskritic, not using the Arabic script, and that their womenfolk “still” wore saris and no veils. The Bengali Muslims did this not because they had “adopted” elements from Hinduism, but because they had retained many elements from the Hindu culture of their forefathers. “Pakistan” means the “land of the pure”, i.e. those who have overcome the taints of Paganism, the very syncretism which Dalrymple celebrates. Maybe it is in the fitness of things that a historian should sing paeans to this religious syncretism for, as far as Islam is concerned, it is a thing of the past.

                A second difference between Hindus and Muslims practicing syncretism is that in the case of Muslims, this practice was in spite of their religion, due to a hasty (and therefore incomplete) conversion under duress and a lack of sufficient policing by proper Islamic authorities. If, as claimed by Dalrymple, a Sultan of Bijapur venerated both goddess Saraswati and prophet Mohammed, it only proves that he hadn’t interiorized Mohammed’s strictures against idolatry yet. In more recent times, though, this condition has largely been remedied. Secular journalists now have to search hard for cases of Muslims caught doing Hindu things, for such Muslims become rare. Modern methods of education and social control have wiped out most traces of Hinduism. Thus, since their independence, the Bengali Muslims have made great strides in de-hinduizing themselves, as by widely adopting proper Islamic dress codes. The Tabligh (“propaganda”) movement as well as informal efforts by clerics everywhere have gone a long way to “islamize the Muslims”, i.e. to destroy all remnants of Hinduism still lingering among them.

               

Hindu iconoclasm?

                Another unhistorical item in the secular view of Islam in India is the total absence of an Islamic prehistory outside India. Yet, all Muslims know about this history to some extent and base their laws and actions upon it. In particular, they know about Mohammed’s career in Arabia and seek to replicate it, from wearing “the beard of the Prophet” to emulating his campaigns against Paganism.

Dalrymple, like all Nehruvians, makes much of the work of the American Marxist historian Richard Eaton. This man is famous for saying that the Muslims have indeed destroyed many Hindu temples (thousands, according to his very incomplete list, though grouped as the oft-quoted “eighty”), but that they based themselves for this conduct on Hindu precedent. Indeed, he has found a handful of cases of Hindu conquerors “looting” temples belonging to the defeated kings, typically abducting the main idol to install it in their own capital. This implies a very superficial equating between stealing an idol (but leaving the worship of the god concerned intact, and even continuing it in another temple) and destroying temples as a  way of humiliating and ultimately destroying their religion itself. But we already said that secularists are superficial. However, he forgets to tell his readers that he has found no case at all of a Muslim temple-destroyer citing these alleged Hindu precedents. If they try to justify their conduct, it is by citing Mohammed’s Arab precedents. The most famous case is the Kaaba in Mecca, where the Prophet and his nephew Ali destroyed 360 idols with their own hands. What the Muslims did to Vijayanagar was only an imitation of what the Prophet had done so many times in Arabia, only on a much larger scale.

From historians like Eaton and Dalrymple, we expect a more international view of history than what they offer in their account of Islamic destructions in India. They try to confine their explanations to one country, whereas Islam is globalist par excellence. By contrast, Naipaul does reckon with international cultural processes, in particular the impact of Islam among the converted peoples, not only in South but also in West and Southeast Asia. He observes that they have been estranged from themselves, alienated from their roots, and therefore suffering from a neurosis.

So, Naipaul is right and Dalrymple wrong in their respective assessments of the role of Islam in India. Yet, in one respect, Naipaul is indeed mistaken. In his books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, he analyses the impact of Islam among the non-Arab converts, but assumes that for Arabs, Islam is more natural. True, the Arabs did not have to adopt a foreign language for religious purposes, they did not have to sacrifice their own national traditions in name-giving; but otherwise they too had to adopt a religion that wasn’t theirs. The Arabs were Pagans who worshipped many gods and tolerated many religions (Jews, Zoroastrians, various Christian Churches) in their midst. Mohammed made it his life’s work to destroy their multicultural society and replace it with a homogeneous Islamic one. Not exactly the syncretism which Dalrymple waxes so eloquent about.

 

Colonial “Orientalism”?

                Did Muslims “contribute” to Indian culture, as Dalrymple claims? Here too, we should distinguish between what Islam enjoins and what people who happen to be Muslims do. Thus, he says that Muslims contributed to Indian music. I am quite illiterate on art history, but I’ll take his word for it. However, if they did, they did it is spite of Islam, and not because of it. Mohammed closed his ears not to hear the music, and orthodox rulers like Aurangzeb and Ayatollah Khomeini issued measures against it. Likewise, the Moghul school of painting shows that human beings are inexorably fond of visual art, but does not disprove that Islam frowns on it.

Also, while some tourists fall for the Taj Mahal, which Naipaul so dislikes, the Indo-Saracenic architecture extant does not nullify the destruction of many more beautiful buildings which could have attracted far more tourists. In what sense is it a “contribution” anyway? Rather than filling a void, it is at best a replacement of existing Hindu architecture with new Muslim architecture. Similarly, if no Muslim music (or rather, music by Muslims) had entered India, then native Hindu music would have flourished more, and who is Dalrymple to say that Hindu music is inferior?                 

Another discursive strategy of the secularists, applied here by Dalrymple, is to blame the colonial view of history. Naipaul is said to be inspired by colonial Orientalists and to merely repeat their findings. This plays on the strong anti-Westernism among Indians. But it is factually incorrect: Naipaul cites earlier sources (e.g. Dalrymple omits Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveler who only described witnessed Sultanate cruelty to the Hindus with his own eyes) as well as the findings of contemporaneous archaeologists. Moreover, even the colonial historians only repeat what older native sources tell them. The destruction of Vijayanagar is a historical fact and an event that took place with no colonizers around. Unless you mean the Muslim rulers.

 

Negationism

In the West, we are familiar with the phenomenon of Holocaust negationism. While most people firmly disbelieve the negationists, some will at least appreciate their character: they are making a lot of financial, social and professional sacrifices for their beliefs. The ostracism they suffer is fierce. Even those who are skeptical of their position agree that negationists at least have the courage of their conviction.

In India, and increasingly also in the West and in international institutions, we are faced with a similar phenomenon, viz. Jihad negationism. This is the denial of aggression and atrocities motivated by Islam. Among the differences, we note those in social position of the deniers and those in the contents of the denial. Jihad deniers are not marginals who have sacrificed a career to their convictions, on the contrary; they serve their careers greatly by uttering the politically palatable “truth”. In India, any zero can become a celebrity overnight by publishing a condemnation of the “communalists” and taking a stand for Jihad denial and history distortion. The universities are full of them, while people who stand by genuine history are kept out. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, most of these negationists hold forth on the higher humbug (as historian Paul Johnson observed) and declare themselves “secular”.

Whereas the Holocaust lasted only four years and took place in war circumstances and largely in secret (historians are still troubled over the absence of an order by Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust, a fact which gives a handle to the deniers), Jihad started during the life of Mohammed and continues till today, entirely openly, proudly testified by the perpetrators themselves. From the biography and the biographical collections of the Prophet (Sira, Ahadith) through medieval chronicles and travel diaries down to the farewell letters or videos left by hundreds of suicide terrorists today, there are literally thousands of sources by Muslims attesting that Islam made them do it. But whereas I take Muslims seriously and believe them at their word when they explain their motivation, some people overrule this manifold testimony and decide that the Muslims concerned meant something else. 

The most favoured explanation is that British colonialism and now American imperialism inflicted poverty on them and this made them do it, though they clothed it in Islamic discourse. You see, the billionaire Osama bin Laden, whose family has a long-standing friendship with the Bush family, was so poor that he saw no option but to hijack some airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center. What else was he to do? And Mohammed, way back in the 7^th century, already the ruler of Medina and much of the Arabian peninsula, just had to have his critics murdered or, as soon as he could afford it, formally executed. He had to take hostages and permit his men to rape them; nay, he just had to force the Jewish woman Rayhana into concubinage after murdering her relatives. If you don’t like what he did, blame Britain and America. Their colonialism and imperialism made him do it! Under the colonial dispensation which didn’t exist yet, he Muslim troops who were paid by the Vijayanagar emperor had no other option but to betray their employer and side with his opponents who, just by coincidence, happened to be Muslim as well. And if you don’t believe this, the secularists will come up with another story.

 

Conclusion

India is experiencing a regime of history denial. In this sense, the West is more and more becoming like India. There are some old professors of Islam or religion (and I know a few) who hold the historical view, viz. that Mohammed (if he existed at all) was mentally afflicted, that Islam consists of a manifold folie à deux (“madness with two”, where a wife supports and increasingly shares her husband’s self-delusion), and that it always was a political religion which spread by destroying other religions. But among the younger professors, it is hard to find any who are so forthright. There is a demand for reassurance about Islam, and universities only recruit personnel who provide that. Indeed, many teach false history in good faith, thinking that untruth about the past in this case is defensible because it fosters better interreligious relations in the present. Some even believe their own stories, just like the layman who is meant to lap them up. Such is also my impression of William Dalrymple.

 

 

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A debate with an eminent historian

Recently an e-mail exchange took place between my friend K. Venkat and the retired “eminent historian” Prof. Harbans Mukhia. Venkat himself gave a fitting reply to the august scholar’s opinions, which is circulating on the net (I received a copy on 9 Dec. 2012). Herewith I want to formulate my own comment.

Prof. Mukhia replied to a critical query about Islamic history in India: “If you derive all your knowledge of medieval Indian history from ‘historians’ like Sita Ram Goel and Koenraad Elst and so forth, this is the shoddy history you will land up with. Sita Ram Goel was a publisher and seller of RSS books and his knowledge of history was confined to what he had learnt in the RSS shakhas. And the Belgian Elst is an hony. member of the VHP and knows no Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, any Indian language, much less Persian, so essential for getting to know medieval Indian history. And since Persian is not taught in the shakhas, Goel had no inkling of it either.”

Let us first set the language allegation straight before addressing the historical and political issues. Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003) had Hindi as mother tongue, a language in which he published several historical novels that were praised precisely for their pure and imaginative language. He went to an Urdu-medium school where Persian was part of the curriculum. He graduated from Delhi University where he studied History through the medium of English, a language in which he published many books. After his studies he lived in Bengal for a decade and became fluent in Bengali. He also read the Mahabharata and other Hindu classics in the original Sanskrit. As for myself, since Harbans Mukhia is unimpressed by real-life experience, let me just point to the testimony of my diplomas: I studied Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian, apart from Chinese and a number of European languages. After health problems starting in 2000, I haven’t been to India much, so my colloquial Hindi has become distinctly rusty; but I can still consult writings in that language. I also learned a smattering of classical Tamil a few years ago as well as biblical Hebrew and modern Arabic in my student days, now all but forgotten but I still know the grammar and some religious terminology. In all more than enough to do history.

Sita Ram Goel was a lifelong critic of the RSS, but unlike Mukhia, he knew what he was talking about. Already as a student, he remarked that only mediocre fellow-students were going to shakhas whereas the brighter ones were concentrating on other pursuits or were seduced by Communism. Anyone who has read some of his work (but that is where the problem for Mukhia arises) has seen for himself that its message is quite different from the RSS line.   

Mukhia continues: “In the shakhas, they do tell you that Aurangzeb demolished temples and erected mosques in lieu of them (which he did at Mathura and Varanasi), but they never tell you that he was also giving monetary and land grants to other Hindu temples, including some in Varanasi itself, the original document for which is on display at the Bharat Kala Bhavan on BHU campus. Historians KK Datta and Jnana Prakash have also published numerous documents of Aurangzeb giving such grants to temples, maths and other Hindu institutions, and many more remain unpublished. Naturally ‘historians’ like Goel and Elst wouldn't know of them, nor would care to know.”

It is not only in the shakhas that they tell you this. Aurangzeb himself gave orders for a general destruction of temples and literally demolished thousands of them. Many other Muslim rulers acted likewise. No amount of special pleading by the eminent historians can change Islam’s record in this regard. It is possible that earlier, Aurangzeb gave some grants to Hindu institutions, as had been the Moghul dynasty’s policy since Akbar. We should of course not take Mukhia’s word for it (the eminent historians have a well-established reputation for mendaciousness), and “numerous” is certainly an exaggeration, but it remains possible. This only shows the inertia of changing a policy, as well as Aurangzeb’s increase in devotion to Islam, from a compromise-prone successor of Akbar to a zealous activist for Islam, which does not tolerate idolatry.

One issue where the much-maligned RSS is clearly wrong in its assessment of Aurangzeb, is its condemnation of him as a fanatic person. The said grants to temples, if true, may further prove a point that I have had to make repeatedly: it is not true that Aurangzeb was a cruel character, he was not more so than his less notorious predecessors. If he was cruel and fatatic, it was because he started taking the core doctrine of Islam to his heart. He was a pious person, more than is good for a ruler, so he became increasingly averse to the religious compromise on which his great-grandfather Akbar had built the Moghul empire. So at some point in his advancing years, not his personal predilection but his growing commitment to Islam took over. That is when he ordered all Pagan temples destroyed: when the Moghul empire became truly Islamic at last. But the RSS is fearful to say this, so it tells itself and its listeners that Islam is okay but that Aurangzeb “misunderstood” his religion due to his cruel and fanatic personality.

 The professor has some advice for my friend: “If you really want to study history look at the works of professional historians -- Tara Chand, RP Tripathi, Mohd. Habib, ABM Habibullah, Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, RM Eaton, Cynthia Talbot and many other stalwarts who gave their life time to studying medieval history from the original Persian sources, not from third rate and motivated translations like History of India as Told by its Own Historians. Motivated? Sir Henry Elliott, who compiled this 8-volume series, wrote in his Preface: The series is being compiled ‘to let the bombastic babus of India know how terrible Indians' life was until the British came to their rescue’!! So, Sir Elliott translated only those passages from the Persian language chronicles of medieval India which spoke of Muslims' atrocities on the Hindus!! He will tell you that Aurangzeb demolished temples, but not that he also patronised them!!! Much like the RSS does now and chaps like Goel and Elst follow in their footsteps.”

See, the eminent historians are as good at the use of exclamation marks as your average Hindutva internet warrior. And yes, Elliott was guilty of espousing the same theory which the eminent historians have been spreading, viz. that the British took India from the Moghuls, omitting the successful Hindu effort to liberate most of India from Muslim occupation and then succumbing to the British. But that doesn’t make his translations wrong. He selected those parts which would be most telling for the atrocities undergone by the Hindus under Muslim rule so that they would appreciate British rule by contrast – and then translated these faithfully. He reminded his Hindu readers that their “own historians” (meaning India-based Muslim chroniclers) had reported these Islamic atrocities. Anyway, I would like to see the secular improvement, e.g. how do you translate the frequently-used Arabic verb q-t-l, Persian kushtan, both meaning “kill”. There aren’t too many nuances to that, are there?

Elliott’s translations were correct, but yes, they were selective. Secularists would have preferred to plough through an 88-volume rather than an 8-volume translation. But they are at liberty to go through all the untranslated parts and try to find a refutation there of what was described so explicitly in the translated parts. The Muslim chroniclers were in no mind to undo all the destruction they had evoked, so in the less dramatic parts of their work, they explored more leisurely subjects but refrained from trying their hand at what the secularists would like to read there, viz. any refutation of the grim picture they had first painted, and which Elliott and others have ably translated.

For lack of facts, Prof. Mukhia likes to throw names around instead. But a real historian remains unimpressed by this show of name-dropping. The fact that Prof. Mukhia has many like-minded colleagues in academe while his opponents have to remain on the outside is not the result of better competence among his friends, but of a deliberate policy in university nominations. Any young historian who lets on too early that he has pro-Hindu convictions, will see his entry into academe barred. Word will spread around that this man is “dangerous to India’s secular fabric” and he will be excluded. There have been some old historians who entered the profession before their cards were on the table and who only became forthright critics of Islam at the end of their careers, the likes of Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. K.S. Lal, both since long deceased. Today among university historians, the school that sets the record on Islam straight is simply non-existent.

Fortunately, the political equation that makes the present secular-Islamic bias possible, is bound to come to an end one day. The elderly Prof. Mukhia won’t live to see that revolution anymore, but it is sure to happen. The truth which the eminent historians have long suppressed, will shine in the open. On that day, I wouldn’t like  to be called Harbans Mukhia.

The professor concludes: “I know this would have no effect on you. But just by chance if you can pick up enough courage to study history on your own and not parrot the history taught in the shakhas. Best wishes, Harbans Mukhia”

            It seems Harbans Mukhia mistook his correspondent for some fanatic Hindutvavadi, the kind who remains impervious to facts. Not that I know many such cases, for even the most extreme ones I’ve met remain true to a central fact that really occurred, viz. Islamic atrocities against Hindus. Some of them have personally lived through the Islamic carnage at the time of Partition or during the Bangladesh liberation war, massacres which completely dwarfed all Indian religious riots put together (including the largest of them all, the killing of three thousand Sikhs by Congress secularists in 1984). But this correspondent is a successful cyberprofessional in Silicon Valley, who has made a more sophisticated study of just what it was that Islam wrought in India.

            The greatest insult which the eminent historians could fling at Sita Ram Goel or myself is that we are “parroting history taught in the shakhas”. First off, I don’t even know what history they teach there. I have visited a few shakhas and can’t remember any history being taught there. I speculate it is streamlined to fit the Hindu and nationalist narrative, or at least that Mukhia wants to convey that impression. So be it, but historians have other sources for their history-writing and are not parrots of a party or movement. The main exception are the Indian secularists, whose conclusions are invariably those desired and taught by the Nehruvian rulers.

            A second mail by the professor starts out by ridiculing the RSS concept of history: “First, the RSS rant started in the 1960s with the figure of 300 temples destroyed by the Muslim rulers; then in the 70s another 0 was added. Yet another got added in the 80s. But by the 90s the Sangh Parivar ran out of 0s, so they adopted another arithmetical formula of multiplying by 2 and the figure now stood at a respectable 60,000.”

            This claim may be true or not, but I am not privy to RSS historiography. As a matter of fact, 60,000 may just happen to be a good number, for the documented cases of temple destruction (and they already run into the thousands) are necessarily only a fraction of the more everyday cases, which must have been even more numerous. But we as historians can only deal with documented cases, especially since these are difficult enough. Indeed, of the ca. 2,000 cases listed by Sita Ram Goel, and more than 20 years after having been out in the open, not one has been refuted by Prof. Mukhia and his school.

So, like most secularists, he goes hiding behind an American self-described Marxist, Prof. Richard Eaton: “RM Eaton, who would necessarily be suspect in your eyes because he is a an American historian, examined the number of temples destroyed in the whole expanse of medieval India from 1200 to 1760 and came to the figure of 80. He has located the exact source of information or each demolition and put all the information in a tabular form. His brilliant article is called ‘Temple Desecration in Medieval India'. By the way, Eaton is aware of the figure of 60,000 handed out to credulous people like Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst and yourself.”

In several respects, Eaton’s count is incomplete. Muslims destroyed Hindu temples before 1200 and after 1760 too, witness the near-absence of the once-numerous Hindu temples in Pakistan, witness the regular occurrence of temple destruction in Bangla Desh. It is also seriously false that for this period, Eaton’s count is complete. How could it be? Off-hand, Venkat could name a few cases from his own Tamil village, which was only briefly touched by the Islamic invasions but nonetheless already lost several temples, and they don’t figure in Eaton’s list. Archeologists regularly find remains of destroyed temples, often underneath mosques, which do not and cannot figure in Eaton’s list. Finally, one item on Eaton’s list doesn’t mean one temple destroyed. The thousand temples destroyed in Varanasi during Mohammed Ghori’s advances ca. 1194 form only one item on his list. What Mukhia calls “eighty” is in fact thousands of temple demolitions. So in spite of his Islam-friendly intentions, Eaton has only proven what Hindus have been saying all along: Islam has destroyed thousands of temples. 

I had in fact answered Eaton’s list and explanation when they were published: “Vandalism sanctified by scripture”, Outlook India, 31 Aug. 2001 ( http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213030). Needless to say, my arguments have never been refuted by anyone. Secular historians are so sure about controlling the information flow through education and the media that they don’t bother to interfere when their falsehoods are exposed. In the article, I also mention Eaton’s sidekick Yoginder Sikand, then a furious Hindu-hater and secularist journalist. But in the meantime, he has recanted and exposed the whole self-serving buffoonery that does by the name secularism: “Why I Gave Up On 'Social Activism'”, Countercurrents.org, 19 April, 2012 (http://www.countercurrents.org/sikand190412.htm).

Prof. Mukhia goes on: “Incidentally, Hindu temples were also demolished by Hindu rulers long before Muslims came to India. King Harsha of Kashmir had appointed an officer, devopatananayaka (officer in-charge of uprooting of gods) as reported by Kalhana's Rajatarangini and mosques were also destroyed by the Hindu rulers in medieval India. Details of it can be found in my book, The Mughals of India. Incidentally, I have never been funded by any US agency, University or institution and all my education has been in India, and all schooling in Hindi medium. This is just to guard you against the stupidity of levying charges such as you have done against the most outstanding Indian historian of our time, Romila Thapar.”

As for Harsha, chronicler Kalhana says: “Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk.” It is simply not true that his case exemplifies a Hindu type of iconoclasm. On the contrary, he merely shows the influence of Islamic iconoclasm. Half-literate secularists keep on repeating this story a decade after it has been refuted in my paper “Harsha of Kashmir, a Hindu iconoclast?”, ch.4 of my book Ayodhya: the Case against the Temple (Delhi 2002; http://www.scribd.com/doc/10022510/Ayodhya-3-Books-by-Koenraad-Elst).
            It should be granted to Prof. Harbans Mukhia, as to his colleague Prof. Irfan Habib, that they have faithfully followed the old Nehruvian line of distrusting the “foreign hand”, particularly the Americans. This is very unlike their colleague Prof. Romila Thapar, who has been lavishly sponsored in Washington DC. And among their generation, this was still exceptional. Indian secularists were admired from afar, followed by the leading American scholars of India, like Prof. Paul Brass or Prof. Robert Frykenberg, but keeping their distance because of the reigning anti-Americanism. Now however, Indian academics of the right persuasion are openly courted and hosted by American colleagues.

 Returning to the subject-matter, the professor asks: “But the question is more complex: how is it that Aurangzeb, an orthodox Muslim on RSS account, waited for 21 years after coming to the throne to reimpose the jazia? You remember the date of its abolition by Akbar but not one of its reimposition which is 1679. How did he keep his religious zeal in check for 21 long years when he was the undisputed sovereign of India? And why was he giving grants to temples while he was keen on demolishing it? The questions is WHY?”

“The answer is that huge and complex empires are not governed by religious zeal of its rulers but by an enormously complex interaction of political, administrative, cultural, social and religious considerations. Remember Rajiv Gandhi passing a Bill in Parliament after the Shah Bano judgment of the Supreme Court and getting the doors to the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid disputed site opened almost simultaneously? Was he being a zealous Muslim or a zealous Hindu or just a clever political manipulator?”

Strictly speaking, not the Government but the Court opened the locks of the Ayodhya building. But it stands to reason that the two played together, and that the Court executed the policy desired by the Government. At any rate, yes, Rajiv Gandhi was a clever manipulator, zealous only in furthering his personal power and wealth. He intended to solve the communal situation bloodlessly by handing the Hindus full control of Ayodhya (including the right to rebuild a temple instead of the Babri Masjid) and giving the Muslims other goodies, such as a Sharia-inspired change in the law  on Muslim divorce or the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. This not-so-principled but very practical policy, typical of the “Congress culture”, would have succeeded but for the intervention of the eminent historians and like-minded intellectuals: they raised the stakes on Ayodhya and the Babri Masjid (“the bulwark of India’s secular polity”, etc.) so much that the Government could no longer pursue its pragmatic give-and-take plan. The result was endless religious riots, the surreptitious demolition, and more riots culminating in the Muslim bomb attacks on Mumbai of 12 March 1993, which pioneered a new Muslim tactic repeated in many other bomb attacks including those on the US of 11 September 2001. The eminent historians have blod on their hands. 

It is also true that the Moghul empire was based on a religious compromise, that Aurangzeb’s conversion to a more principled Islamic policy jeopardized this compromise, and thereby endangered the empire itself. At the end of his life, amid Hindu rebellions, Aurangzeb understood this well enough. But he was too much of a pious Muslim to turn the clock back.

“As for Sita Ram Goel -- he used to rant regularly in the Indian Express about the little that RSS had taught him of history: Islam teaches you intolerance, every Muslim ruler was inspired by Islam to destroy Hindu temples and Hindu society etc. etc. and how Marxist historians cannot face up to the truth of all his rants. You obviously read all this avidly. You obviously did not read 'Reflections of the Past' in the same paper dated 30.4.1989 by a non-descript historian called Harbans Mukhia. Since that date, Sita Ram Goel did not write a thing at least in the Indian Express. Please check it out; it should be available on the IE website. If not, you will find it in the same non-descript historian's book Issues in Indian History, Politics and Society, pp. 31-34. Please forgive me for advertising my own writings; I avoided reference to myself in my earlier response, but since you were out to challenge us secular historians, I felt compelled to reverse my earlier decision. In any case you wouldn't have heard of many historians anyway; the RSS never lets you know that they exist.”

Well, I didn’t know about this episode. 1989 is the year when I first met Sita Ram Goel, at the end of the year. Arun Shourie was then the editor of Indian Express, and in that capacity, he published a number of articles that went against the secularist opinion. In his books on religion and communalism, he made use of insight he had learned from Goel. It is very much news to me, and does indeed sound highly unlikely, that Shourie would have censored Goel. And it sounds completely ridiculous to assume that Goel laid his pen aside because of what an eminent historian wrote. For the next 14 years, Goel keept on writing forcefully against all anti-Hindu forces including those represented by Mukhia.

As a parting-shot, the eminent historian informs us a bit more about his locus standi regarding translations: “By the way, the translations of the medieval Indian Persian texts are quite often atrocious. I happen to know because my doctorate at Delhi University back in 1969 was an evaluation of these texts. It is called Historians and Historiography During the Reign of Akbar.”

As already said, “killing” is something that happened frequently when Muslims encountered Hindus, and the Muslim chroniclers thus had to describe this process quite often. Harbans Mukhia has not convinced us that under the hands of the translators, “killing” only got mentioned as a mistranslation of, say, “tolerating”. Maybe the more abstruse elements in the narrative were subject to mistranslation, but the relation between Hindus and Muslims was pretty straightforward and hard to mistake for friendship.

The august professor bids us goodbye: “Voila, this is my last intervention in this so-called debate. I have better things to do than rectifying the RSS version of history. Best wishes, Harbans Mukhia”. Amen to that.

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