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  I am always troubled to read about ‘communally sensitive areas’ in matters of and law and order issues. At what point of inflection does an area become ‘sensitive’ and why? Why Hindus cannot celebrate their festivals or take out religious processions in such ‘sensitive’ areas? Why is no Hindu majority area ‘sensitive’? What kind of politics has created this sense of isolation amongst minorities? Obviously in Muslim dominated areas RSS would be weak, so it has no power to convert such areas into sensitive areas.

  If Muslims or Christians are treated as minorities in various states, why are Hindus not given special status in state of Jammu &Kashmir, states of North East region where they are in a minority? Any sense of natural secular justice would assume a uniform application of laws.

  Why can Hindu religious institutions be taken over with impunity and even allowed to have trustees from other religions, while no government touches any minority institution or tries to take over the management of their places of worship? How does our secular polity justify diverting funds of these trusts donated by pious Hindus to other communities rather than use it for the betterment of the followers of that religion? His Holiness Shri Shri Ravi Shankar has got the data compiled and brought it to public attention.

  Why is it that the Hindu community’s grievances are heard on matters like wrongful presentation of its faith in the US, and force its education department to make changes in their school curricula, while the community has no voice in India on the negative presentation of Hinduism’s universal philosophy across educational curricula?

  Why a law like ‘Freedom of Religion Bill’ becomes a ‘controversial’ issue? This bill is nothing but a reassertion of Indian philosophy that a person is free to choose his or her belief system, as one among many paths. Such bills only state that conversion cannot be done through lure or misrepresentation of facts. (Interestingly, it was the Congress government of Madhya Pradesh that decades back first saw the danger of such mass conversions to exclusivist monotheist religions and appointed the ‘Neogi Commission’ to establish the seriousness of this issue.)

  Why is a call for Uniform Civil Code communal in a country being run on the basis of a secular constitution that has put it in its “directive principles”?

  How come according to critics of RSS, ‘semitisation’ of Hindu society, allegedly tried unsuccessfully by RSS is bad; but these same critics certify the ‘semetic’ religions as good with a straight face? If ‘semitisation’ is bad then how can the religions running on supposedly negative semetic principles be good? Is it purely a case of intellectual dishonesty or diabolic argument to keep Hindu society always in a state of internal conflict?

  This is not an exhaustive list of grievances of Hindu community, nor is it an attempt to promote a ‘divisive agenda’. I had to resort to this negative way to bring out the hypocrisy that has been internalised into our polity in the name of secularism, thus promoting a polity charged with negativity. For some, this way of relooking at many vexed issues through a different glasses may bring better clarity. Answers to such issues are obvious but reasons behind them are not so obvious.

  A truly secular government should assert that all citizens of this free country have an equal right to its resources, or that all deprived sections of the society should get a priority in distribution of resources. An atmosphere has been created that any pro-Hindu talk or any opposition to policies of appeasement of minority automatically becomes anti-minority, hence communal. The present political discourse has an in-built bias which is promoted by negationism of Indian society.

  Negationism of Hindu Society

  Koenrad Elst, the renowned Indologist, has written an illuminating book, “Negationism in India”. He cites examples on how the Hindu society wishes to forget its bitter past of being victims of violence, massacres, rapes and pillage; how it avoids the bitter truths and hence lessons from history to avoid pain; in the process inflicting more pain on self. I am quoting extensively but selectively from Koenrad Elst’s essays on negationism below -

  “Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as the Holocaust (Greek for fire sacrifice) or the Shoah (Hebrew for disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.”

  “…. Leftist negationism regarding the Nazi holocaust is, of course, only a footnote in the much more general negationism practiced by most leftists, hard and soft, regarding the crimes of Communist regimes.”

  It would be educative to note that number of people killed by the Soviet regime between 1917 and 1985 is estimated at between 34 million (on the basis of official figures), while Alexandra Solzhenitsyn puts the figure at 67 million. Around the same time, Mao Tse-Tung’s brand of communism – the Great leap and the Cultural Revolution – sets number of victims are estimated to be at some 30 million. Over a million Tibetans have died because of Communist massacres and organised famines; and forced sterilisations. These numbers are hotly debated or denied by its supporters.

  About Indian negationism, says Elst, “In my study of the Ayodhya controversy, I noticed that the frequent attempts to conceal or deny inconvenient evidence were an integral part of a larger effort to rewrite India’s history and to whitewash Islam. It struck me that this effort to deny the unpleasant facts of Islam’s destructive role in Indian history is similar to the attempts by some European writers to deny the Nazi holocaust. Its goal and methods are similar, even though its social position is very different: in Europe, Holocaust negationists are a fringe group shunned by respectable people, but in India, jihad negationists are in control of the academic establishment and of the press.”

  “… A section of the Indian intelligentsia is still trying to erase from the Hindus’ memory, the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam. The number of victims of this persecution surpasses that of the Nazi crimes. The Islamic campaign to wipe out Paganism could not be equally thorough, but it has continued for centuries without any moral doubts arising in the minds of the persecutors and their chroniclers. The Islamic reports on the massacres of Hindus, destruction of Hindu temples, the abduction of Hindu women and forced conversions, invariably express great glee and pride. They leave no doubt that the destruction of Paganism by every means, was considered the God-ordained duty of the Moslem community. Yet, today many Indian historians, journalists and politicians, deny that there ever was a Hindu-Moslem conflict. They shamelessly rewrite history and conjure up centuries of Hindu-Moslem amity. Now a growing section of the public in India and the West only knows their negationist version of history. It is not a pleasant task to rudely shake people out of their delusions, especially if these have been willfully created.”

  The American historian Will Durant summed it up thus: “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

  Suppressing and Negating Historical Facts

  Sitaram Goel has written some thoroughly researched books on Indian history. One of the books, ‘Hindu Temples – What happened to them’ would rattle your views about history, or rather the falsification of history being perpetrated by the lobby of historians who are controlling the academia for years now. Whenever such evidence is discovered or brought to light, it is ridiculed by established lobbies; if not possible then it is hushed up as being ‘sensitive’. In the previous chapters I have quoted Dharampal and Claude Alvares extensively and noted how historians controlling the establishment try to brush aside or hush up such information.

  The first volume of the ‘Hindu Temples�
�� book subtitled ‘A Preliminary Survey’, was published in 1990 and played an important role in the political debate over the controversial Ram temple in Ayodhya. It contains a competently compiled list of about 2000 mosques in India that have forcibly replaced Hindu temples. This list is not complete, and does not cover Pakistan and other countries where temples have been violently replaced with mosques. Moreover, the number of temples of which material has been used in these 2000 mosques far exceeds 2000. For the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, has an inscription at the entrance which proudly proclaims, 27 Hindu temples had been destroyed. These 2000 are only the tip of an iceberg. Muslims have raised a hue and cry over the demolition of the Babri structure (which they had not used since decades), but few people seem to realise that destruction of the religious places of minorities is a routine affair in Islamic states.

  This book also contains articles by Ram Swarup, Jay Dubashi, Prof Harsh Narain, and Arun Shourie. Ram Swarup, like editor Sitaram Goel, traces the incidents of Islamic intolerance and iconoclasm to the exclusivist theology of the Quran and the Sunnah (tradition). He also deals with the role of Marxism in recent negationist efforts: “Marxists have taken to rewriting Indian history on a large scale and it has meant its systematic falsification. The Marxists’ contempt for India, particularly the India of religion, culture and philosophy, is deep and theoretically fortified. It exceeds the contempt ever shown by the most die-hard imperialists. Marx ruled out self-rule for India altogether and in this matter gave her no choice. Marxism idealises old imperialism and prepares a people for a new one. Its moving power is deep-rooted self-alienation and its greatest ally is cultural and spiritual illiteracy. No true history of India is possible without countering their philosophy, ideas and influence.”

  The second volume of Sitaram Goel’s book, subtitled ‘The Islamic Evidence’, and published in May 1991, takes a step further with its revelations of the Islamic campaign to destroy Hinduism. It deals with the controversies over Krishna’s birthplace temple in Mathura and the Rudramahaalaya temple complex in Sidhpur in Gujarat, both forcibly replaced with Islamic structures and exposes the negationists’ machinations to distort or conceal the facts. The chapter ‘From the Horse’s Mouth’ provides quotations from Muslim documents that describe and glorify the destruction of Hindu temples very explicitly. Elst feels, “It is only an anthology, and the already very impressive material collected in this chapter is again only the tip of an iceberg.”

  We know of Ram Mandir agitation and how Hindus are eternally shamed for the destruction of the Babri structure. But, the facts are being glossed over. It was agreed that if the structure below Babri is found to be a temple, it will be handed over to Hindus. But, when the scientific ASI led research under the supervision of Allahabad High Court resulted in a report that pointed to a large number of properly laid out pillars of typically Hindu designs discovered under the mound that proved the existence of a temple, the report was quietly buried by media till it was resurrected with the Allahabad High Court judgement delivered on 30-9-2010 on the matter.

  To quote Elst again, “It is worth recalling that the negationists have also resorted to another tactic so familiar to our European negationists, and to all defenders of untenable positions: personal attacks on their opponents, in order to pull the public’s attention away from the available evidence. In December 1990, the leading JNU historians and several allied scholars, followed by the herd of secularist pen pushers in the Indian press, have tried to raise suspicions against the professional honesty of Prof B B Lal and Dr S P Gupta, the archeologists with impeccable credentials, who have unearthed evidence for the existence of a Hindu temple at the Babri Masjid site.”

  We have to accept Koenrad Elst’s criticism that there has been very little intellectual exercise by major sections of Hindutva School to counter the leftist secular onslaught on history and their efforts creating a negative image of Hinduism. Nor have there been enough efforts to sift truth about its so called myths and realities. It has not been pro-active and has not been able to support people bringing out historical and scientific facts about ancient India and Hindu contribution to world in various fields whole heartedly.

  The acceptance by the ruling group of historians of evidence of ancient city of Dwarka has been rather reluctant. Doubts were raised about the academic qualifications of S R Rao too, who did the research. Even now, it has not been accorded the importance it should have been in revalidating Indian history through ancient Indian texts. When researchers like Dr S Kalyanaraman and N S Rajaram have researched extensively on subjects like Saraswati river and studies countering the theory of Aryan invasion, as these hold special significance to Vedic period, they have been thwarted by leftist and secular historians. If nothing, they found their scientific background objectionable.

  One of the first acts of Arjun Singh on his appointment as Human Resource D minister was to stop grants to Saraswati river research. I wonder what the Marxist-leaning historians are afraid of – that they sought the support of the government to suppress it. There is, now, enough new historical evidence to suggest that the story of Aryan invasion may not be the true account of history. Srikanth Talegari and S. R. Rao’s book “Aryan Invasion Theory (A Reappraisal)” is an important book on this subject. It is ironic that US academia provides an alternative view point about Aryan invasion theory, but Indian history books remain monochromatic. Elst asserts that the evidence available so far on which the edifice of this theory is built, can equally be used to provide convincing arguments why this violent aggression theory is flimsy. The latest study done by Indian scientists from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in collaboration of Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, on a common genealogy of Indians from all parts of India negates racist theory of Aryan aggressors from Europe. It demolishes with one scholarly stroke the mythical North South divide.

  Michel Danino, in his essay ‘Genetics and Aryan Invasion Debate, on archeologyonline.net concludes “None of the nine major studies quoted above lends any support to AIT, and none proposes to define a demarcation line between tribe and caste. The overall picture emerging from these studies is, first an unequivocal rejection of a 3500 BP arrival of a ’Caucasoid’ or Central Asian gene pool. Just as the imaginary Aryan invasion/migration left no trace in Indian literature, in the archaeological and the anthropological record, it is invisible in the genetic level. The agreement between these different fields is a remarkable by any standard and offers hope for a grand synthesis in the near future which will also integrate agriculture and linguistics.”

  We are aware how the Central government stonewalled a suggestion by Supreme Court of India to do an archeological survey of ‘Ram Setu’ and the possible ecological disaster it might entail. Compare this to the utter sense of supplication of the Central government and West Bengal government with which they agreed to change the alignment of the newly-constructed Kolkata airport runway as it had a small make shift, hardly in use, masjid on the proposed runway. The Indian Express report says that they spent crores of rupees to change the alignment and also change town planning of new upcoming buildings which came in way of the new alignment. The problem is not with this realignment but the difference in approach to problems which are similar in nature for respective communities, Will any intellectual of substance simply refuse to allow new facts to come to light? Why does the government want to steamroll an issue like the Ram Setu, which are very close to a Hindu’s hearts without any application of mind?

  Only those whose bread and butter depends on regurgitating the information created by colonial mindset, and who are now full of inertia, lack intellectual objectivity and integrity would oppose such exercises. The simple reason is that such discoveries would demolish their citadel built on outdated theories that the whole Vedic and Puranic literature is cock and bull story; or at the best, a bundle of mythical stories. It would open a flood gate of new truly Indian view of history that would
spell ‘finish’ to their cosy careers built painstakingly through JNU kind of networks.

  Many friends of my generation will recall how casually our college lecturers would tell us that ‘people consider Kalidasa as Shakespeare of India’, forgetting that Kalidasa was born nearly 1000 years before Shakespeare when English language was not even born. How we were given to understand that Mahabharata was probably influenced by Greek classics Iliad and Odyssey, forgetting that antiquity of Mahabharata far exceeded that of Iliad. In fact, both are classics in their own right. This mental slavery went to the extent that it used to be hinted that the Hindu concept of Trinity (Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh – signifying the supreme forces of birth, sustenance and destruction) was borrowed perhaps from the concept of ‘Trinity’ in Bible, conveniently overlooking the fact that Hindu civilisation was born thousands of years before Bible was written.

  A French journalist Francois Gautier has been pointing out, insistently, that the Hindu society carries deep scars because of its nearly 1000 years of subjugation under Mughal and British rules, because of which Hindus have developed an inferiority complex about their religion and nationality. They wish to put up a show of being a ‘good boy’, whatever the cost to the society or nation. This sense of guilt has been perpetrated by western historians and so called Indic scholars, most of whom had never referred to original Sanskrit texts or learnt Sanskrit, but depended on second hand translations by a very few people who had studied a little Sanskrit and did some half literate translations.

  Unless we face the bitter truths of history and then move on, we shall only be talking of cosmetic unity and not unity of heart. Francoise Gautier points out, “The argument that looking at one’s history will pit a community against the other does not hold either. French Catholics and Protestants, who share a very similar religion, fought each other bitterly. Catholics brutally murdered thousands of Protestants in the eighteenth century; yet today they live peacefully next to each other. France fought three wars with Germany in the last 150 years, yet they are great friends today.” Countries like Germany, Great Britain, the United States of America, Japan – all have faced bitter history, learned lessons, apologised to people, nation or communities where required and moved on together.”