CHAPTER TWO - NEGATIONISM IN INDIA

Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to rewrite history and to deny the millennium-long attack of Islam on Hinduism. Today, most politicians and English- writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of communal amity between Hindus and Muslims.

2.1 HINDU VS. MUSLIM

The American historian Will Durant summed it up like this:"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization 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."

Only off and on did this persecution have the intensity of a genocide, but it was sustained much longer and spread out much wider geographically than the Nazi massacre. Whereas the Germans including most members of the Nazi party, were horrified at the Nazi crimes against humanity within a few years, the Muslims, for whom Gott mit uns (God with us) was not a slogan but a religious certainty, managed to keep a good conscience for centuries. We will encounter similarities as well as differences between Nazi and Islamic crimes against humanity, but the most striking difference is definitely the persistence with which Islamic persecutions have continued for 14 centuries. This is because it had more spine, a more powerful psychological grip on its adherents than Nazism.

The ideological foundation of the Islamic campaign was similar to the Nazi ideology. The Muslium invaders (as we can read in numerous documents which they left us, from the Quran and the Hadith onwards) distinguished between three kinds of people: first of all the Muslims, the Herrenvolk (master nation) to which Allah had promised the world; secondly the Jews and Christians, who could live on under Muslim rule but only as third-class citizens, just like the Slavic Untermenschen (inferior people) in Hitler's planned new order, thirdly the species to be eliminated, the real Pagans who had to disappear from the face of the earth.

Different from Hitler's victims, the non-combatants among the unbelievers often got a chance to opt for conversion rather than death. What Mohammed (imitated by his successors) wanted, was his recognition as God's final prophet, so he preferred people to live and give him this recognition (by pronouncing the Islamic creed, i.e. converting), and only those who refused him this recognition were to be killed. Still, conversion often came too late to save defeated Pagans from slavery. At this point, Mohammed deserves comparison with Stalin: unlike Hitler, he killed people not for their race but for their opinions. But one can hardly say that the one totalitarianism is better than the other.

The Blitzkrieg of the Muslim armies in the first decades after the birth of their religion had such enduring results precisely because the Pagan populations in West- and Central-Asia had no choice (except death) but to convert. Whatever the converts' own resentment, their children grew up as Muslims and gradually identified with this religion. Within a few generations the initial resistance against these forcible converions was forgotten, and these areas became heidenfrei (free from Pagans, cfr. judenfrei). In India it didn't go like that, because the Muslims needed five centuries of attempts at invasion before they could catch hold of large parts of India, and even then they encountered endless resistance, so that they often had to settle for a compromise.

The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated. And so on.

As a contribution to research on the quantity of the Islamic crimes against humanity, we may mention Prof. K.S.Lal's estimates about the population figures in medieval India (Growth of Muslim Population in India). According to his calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate). More research is needed before we can settle for a quantitatively accurate evaluation of Muslim rule in India, but at least we know for sure that the term crime against humanity is not exaggerated.

But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the (in India dominant) Hanifite school of Islamic law made possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the school of Hanifa gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but to allow them toleration as zimmis (protected ones) living under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya (toleration tax) from them. Normally the zimmi status was only open to Jews and Christians (and even that concession was condemned by jurists of the Hanbalite school like lbn Taymiya), which explains why these communities have survived in Muslim countries while most other religions have not. On these conditions some of the higher Hindu castes could be found willing to collaborate, so that a more or less stable polity could be set up. Even then, the collaboration of the Rajputs with the Moghul rulers, or of the Kayasthas with the Nawab dynasty, one became a smooth arrangement when enlightened rulers like Akbar (whom orthodox Muslims consider an apostate) cancelled these humiliating conditions and the jizya tax.

It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs). Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests, Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous kingdoms, and were content to extract the jizya tax, and to limit their conversion effort to material incentives and support to the missionary campaigns of sufis and mullahs (in fact, for less zealous rulers, the jizya was an incentive to discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of revenue). The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.

The last jihad against the Hindus before the full establishment of British rule was waged by Tipu Sultan at the end of the 18th century. In the rebellion of 1857, the near-defunct Muslim dynasties (Moghuls, Nawabs) tried to curry favour with their Hindu subjects and neighbours, in order to launch a joint effort to re-establish their rule. For instance, the Nawab promised to give the Hindus the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid site back, in an effort to quench their anti-Muslim animosity and redirect their attention towards the new common enemy from Britain. This is the only instance in modern history when Muslims offered concessions to the Hindus; after that, all the concessions made for the sake of communal harmony were a one-way traffic from Hindu to Muslim.

After the British had crushed the rebellion of 1857, the Indian Muslims fell into a state of depression, increasing backwardness due to their refusal of British education, and nostalgia for the past. While the Hindu elites took to Western notions like secular nationalism, the Muslims remained locked up in their communal separateness. As soon as the British drew them into the political process (founding of Muslim League in 1906) in order to use them as a counter-weight against the Indian National Congress, they immediately made heavy and hurtful demands on the Hindus, such as the unlimited right to slaughter cows, and they started working for political separation. First they obtained separate electorates where Muslim candidates would only have to please Muslim voters, and later they would succeed in separating a Muslim state from India.

By the twenties, they took to the unscrupled use of muscle power in a big way, creating street riots and outright pogroms. If Hindus retaliated in kind, it was a welcome help in instilling the separate communal identity into the ordinary Muslim, who would have preferred to coexist with his Hindu neighbours in peace. By creating riots and provoking relatiatory violence, the Muslim League managed to swing the vast majority of the Muslim electorate towards supporting its demand for the partition of India. The roughly 600,000 victims of the violence accompanying the Partition were the price which the Muslim League was willing to pay for its Islamic state of Pakistan. While every Hindu and Muslim who took part in the violence is responsible for his own excesses, the over-all responsibility for this mass- slaughter lies squarely with the Muslim leadership.

After independence, the Islamic persecution of Hindus has continued in different degrees of intensity, in Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Kashmir (as well as heavy discrimination in Malaysia). This is not the place for detailing these facts, which the international media have been ignoring completely. What may cut short all denials of this continued pestering of Hindus in Muslim states, are the resulting migration figures: in 1948, Hindus formed 23% of the population of Bangla Desh (then East Pakistan), in 1971 the figure was down to 15%, and today it stands at about 8%. No journalist or human rights body goes in to ask the minority Hindus for their opinion about the treatment they get from the Muslim authorities and populations; but they vote with their feet.

In the first months of 1990, the entire Hindu population (about 2 lakhs) was forcibly driven from the Kashmir Valley, which used to be advertised as a showpiece of communal harmony. Muslim newspapers and mosque loudspeakers had warned the Hindus to leave the valley or face bullets. After the Islamic conquest of Kabul in April 1992, 50,000 Hindus had to flee Afghanistan (with the Indian government unwilling to extend help, and Inder Kumar Gujral denying that the expulsion of Indians had a communal motive). The pogroms in Pakistan and Bangladesh after the demolition of the Babri Masjid left 50,000 Hindus homeless in Bangladesh and triggered another wave of refugees from both countries towards India. In Pakistan, 245 Hindu temples were demolished, in Bangladesh a similar number was attacked, and even in England some temples were set on fire by Muslim mobs. And then we haven't even mentioned the recurrent attacks on Hindu processions and on police stations.

It will now be evident that the Hindu psyche has very little sympathy for Islam. Doing something about this was the chief motive for negationism.

2.2 NEGATIONISM AND THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS

This was a miscalculation: the khilafat movement intensified the Islamic sense of communal identity (therefore the rejection of Indian nationalism), and added considerably to Muslim separatism and the Pakistan ideology. But before 1923, when the Turks themselves abolished the caliphate so that the movement lost its raison d'etre (and got transmuted into pogroms against the Hindus), there was great expectation in Congress circles. Therefore, Congress people were willing to go to any length to iron out the differences between Hindus and Muslims, including the invention of centuries of communal amity.

At that time, the Congress leders were not yet actively involved in the rewriting of history. They were satisfied to quietly ignore the true history of Hindu-Muslim relations. After the communal riots of Kanpur in 1931, a Congress report advised the elimination of the mutual enemy- image by changing the contents of the history-books.

The next generation of political leaders, especially the left-wing that was to gain control of Congress in the thirties, and complete control in the fifties, would profess negationism very explicitly. The radical humanist (i.e. bourgeois Marxist) M.N. Roy wrote that Islam had fulfilled a historic mission of equality and abolition of discrimination, and that for this, Islam had been welcomed into India by the lower castes. If at all any violence had occurred, it was as a matter of justified class struggle by the progressive forces against the reactionary forces, meaning the fedual Hindu upper castes.

This is a modern myth springing from an incorrect and much too grim picture of the caste system, a back-projection of modern ideas of class struggle, and an uncritical swallowing of contemporary Islamic apologetics, which has incorporated some voguish socialist values. There is no record anywhere of low-caste people welcoming the Muslims as liberators. Just like in their homeland, the Muslim generals had nothing but contempt for the common people, and all the more so because these were idolaters. They made no distinction between rich Pagans and poor Pagans: in the Quran, Allah had promised the same fate to all idolaters.

By contrast, there is plenty of testimony that these common people rose in revolt, not against their high-caste co-religionists, but against the Muslim rulers. And not only against heavy new taxes (50% of the land revenue for Alauddin Khilji, whom the negationists hail as the precursor of socialism) and land expropriations, but especially against the rape and abduction of women and children and the destruction of their idols, acts which have been recorded with so much glee by the Muslim chroniclers, without anywhere mentioning a separate treatment of Hindu rich and Hindu poor, upper-caste Kafir or low-caste Kafir. Even when some of the high-caste people started collaborating, the common people gave the invaders no rest, attacking them from hiding-places in the forests. The conversion of low-caste people only began when Muslim rulers were safely in power and in a position to reward and encourage conversion by means of tax discrimination, legal discrimination (win the dispute with your neighbour if you convert), handing out posts to converts, and simple coercion. Nevertheless, the myth which M.N. Roy spread, has gained wide currency.

The best-known propounder of negationism was certainly Jawarharlal Nehru. He was rather illiterate concerning Indian culture and history, so his admirers may invoke for him the benefit of doubt. At any rate, his writings contain some crude cases of glorification of Muslim tyrants and concealment or denial of their crimes. Witness his assessment of Mahmud Ghaznavi, who, according to his chronicler Utbi, sang the praise of the temple complex at Mathura and then immediately proceeded to destroy it. Nehru writes: "Building interested Mahmud, and he was much impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi". About this he wrote: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of dinars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of 200 years." And that is all: Nehru described the destroyer of Mathura as an admirer of Mathura, apparently without noticing the gory sarcasm in Ghaznavi's eulogy.

Moreover, Nehru denied that Mahmud had committed his acts of destruction out of any religious motive: "Mahmud was not a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, but that was just by the way. He was in the first place a soldier, and a brilliant soldier." That Mahmud was definitely a religious man, and that he had religious motives for his campaigns against the Hindus, is quite clear from Utbi's contemporary chronicle. Every night Mahmud copied from the Quran for the benefit of his soul. He risked his life several times for the sake of destroying and desecrating temples in which there was nothing to plunder, just to terrorize and humiliate the Pagans. In his campaigns, he never neglected to invoke the appropriate Quran verses. In venerating Mahmud as a pious hero of Islam, Indian Muslims are quite faithful to history: unlike Nehru, the ordinary Muslim refuses to practise negationism.

With Nehru, negationmism became the official line of the Indian National Congress, and after Independence also of the Indian state and government.

2.3 THE ALIGARH SCHOOL

The Deoband school was (and is) orthodox-Islamic, and rejected modern values like nationalism and democracy. It simply observed that India had once been a Dar-ul-Islam (house of Islam), and that therefore it had to be brought back under Muslim control. The fact that the majority of the population consisted of non-Muslims was not important: in the medieval Muslim empires the Muslims had not been in a majority either, and moreover, demography and conversion could yet transform the Muslim minority into a majority.

Among the scions of the Deoband school we find Maulana Maudoodi, the chief ideologue of modern fundamentalism. He opposed the Pakistan scheme and demanded the Islamization of all of British India. After independence, he settled in Pakistan and agitated for the full Islamization of the (still too British) polity. Shortly before his death in 1979, his demands were largely met when general Zia launched his Islamization policy.

Outsiders will be surprised to find that the same school of which Maudoodi was a faithful spokesman, also brought forth Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was Congress president for several terms and who was to become minister of Education in free India. Understandably but unjustifiably, Azad has often been described as as moderate and nationalist Muslim: he rejected the Partition of India and the foundation of Pakistan, not because he rejected the idea of a Muslim state, but because he wanted all of India to become a Muslim state in time.

When in the forties the Partition seemed unavoidable, Azad patronized proposals to preserve India's unity, stipulating that half of all members of parliament and of the government had to be Muslims (then 24% of the population), with the other half to be divided between Hindus, Ambedkarites, Christians, and the rest. Short, a state in which Muslims would rule and non-Muslims would be second-class citizens electorally and politically. The Cabinet Mission Plan, proposed by the British as the ultimate sop for the Muslim League, equally promised an effective parity between Muslims and non-Muslims at the Central Government level and a veto right for the Muslim minority. Without Gandhiji's and other Congress leaders' knowing, Congress president Azad assured the British negotiators that he would get the plan accepted by the Congress. When he was caught in the act of lying to the Mahatma about the plan and his assurance, he lost some credit even among the naive Hindus who considered him a moderate. But he retained his position of trust in Nehru's cabinet, and continued his work for the ultimate transformation of India into a Muslim State.

Maulana Azad's pleas for Hindu-Muslim co-operation had an esoteric meaning, clear enough for Muslims but invisible for wilfully gullible non-Muslims like his colleagues in the Congress leadership. Azad declared that Hindu-Muslim co- operation was in complete conformity with the Prophet's vision, for "Mohammed had also made a treaty with the Jews of Madina". He certainly had, but the practical impact of this treaty was that within a few years, two of the three Jewish clans in Medina had ben chased away, and the third clan had been massacred to the last man (the second clan had only been saved by the intervention of other Medinese leaders, for Mohammed had wanted to kill them too). Maulana Azad could mention Mohammed's treaty with the Jews as a model for Hindu-Muslim co-operation only because he was confident that few Hindus were aware of the end of the story, and that better-informed Hindus honoured a kind of taboo on criticism of Islam and its Prophet.

This parenthesis about Maulana Azad may help clear up some illusions which Hindus and Westerners fondly entertain about the possibility of Islamic moderacy. The Deoband school was as fundamentalist in its Azad face as it was in its Maudoodi heart, and its spokesmen had no problems with the horrors of Islamic history, nor did they make attempts to rewrite it. That Muslims had persecuted and massacred Hindus, counted as the fulfilment of Allah's salvation plan to transform the whole world into a Dar-ul-Islam. As Mohammed Iqbal wrote: "All land belongs to the Muslims, because it belongs to their God." (Iqbal would, however, end up in the Aligarh camp, cfr. infra) Maulana Azad shared this view of history. He condemned Moghul emperor Akbar's tolerant rule as the near-suicide of Indian Islam, and praised fanatics like the theologian Ahmad Sirhindi, who through his opposition to Akbar's tolerance had brought the Moghul dynasty back on the right track of Hind-persecution.

Unlike the Deoband school, the Aligarh school tried to reconcile Islam with modern culture. It understood the principles of democracy and majority rule, and recognized that a modern democracy would be incompatible with the transformation of India into an Islamic state as long as Muslims only formed a minority. The tactical opposition against the disadvantageous system of democracy was underpinned ideologically by Mohammed Iqbal, who criticized it as a system in which heads are counted but not weighed. But Iqbal understood that democracy was the wave of the near future, and, together with more modern and sincerely democracy-minded people in the Muslim intelligentsia, he faced the logical consequence that the Muslims had to give up the ambition of gaining control over all of India immediately. Instead they should create a separate state out of the Muslim-majority areas of India: Pakistan. The ideal of Pakistan was launched by Iqbal in 1930, and in 1940 it became the official political goal of the Muslim League. Aligarh Muslim University has often been described as the cradle of Pakistan.

From their better knowledge of and appreciation for modern culture, the Aligarh thinkers accepted the modern value of religious tolerance. Not to the extent that they would be willing to co-exist with the Hindus in a single post-colonial state, but at least to this extent that they wanted to do something about the imge of intolerance which Islam had come to carry. Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict. The main points of his version of history are the following.

Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction of their women and children, and the destruction of their places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib, these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us. At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this convenient hypothesis with a single fact.

Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors. Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.

Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from the steppes who would need several centuries before getting civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.

Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India. What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smrti) and Muslim law (shariat), it chose the latter.

Mohammed Habib's excise in history-rewriting cannot stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi (997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of devastating raids in Sindh, Gujrat and Punjab. This Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature (including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his anti-Hindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic stock. His massacres and acts of destruction were merely a replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in Sindh in 712-15. He didn't care for material gain: he left rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a huge ransom: "I prefer to appear on Judgement Day as an idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller." The one explanation that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.

There is no record of his being welcomed by urban artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all Muslims.

Another ruler, Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1351-88), personally confirms that the descruction of Pagan temples was done out of piety, not out of greed: "The Hindus had accepted the zimmi status and the concomitant jizya tax in exchange for safety. But now they built idol temples in the city, in defiance of the Prophet's law which forbids such temples. Under divine leadership I destroyed these buildings, and killed the leaders of idolatry, and the common followers received physical chastisement, until this abomination had been banned completely." When Firuz heard that a Pagan festival was going on, he reacted forcefully: "My religious feelings exhorted me to finish off this scandal, this insult to Islam. On the day of the festival I went there myself, I ordered the execution of the leaders and practitioners of this abomination... I destroyed their idol temples and built mosques in their places."

The contention that Hindus stored their riches in temples is completely plucked out of thin air (though some of the richer temples contained golden statues, which were temple property): it is one among many ad hoc hypotheses which make Habib's theory a methodologically indefensible construction. In fact, Habib is proclaining a grand conspiracy theory: all the hundreds of Islamic authors who declared unanimously that what they reported was a war of Islam against Infidelity, would all have co-ordinated one single fake scenario to deceive us.

This is not to say that the entire report which the Muslim chroniclers have left us, should be accepted at face value. For instance, writers like Ghaznavi's contemporary Utbi give the impression that the raids on, and ultimate conquest of Hindustan were a walk-over. Closer study of all the source material shows that the Muslim armies had a very tough time in India. From Muslim chronicles one only gets a faint glimpse of the intensity with which the Hindus kept on offering resistance, and of the precariousness of the Muslim grip on Hindistan through the Muslim period. The Muslim chroniclers have not been caught in the act of lying very often, but some of them distort the proportions of victory and defeat a bit. This is quite common among partisan historians everywhere, and a modern historian knows how to take such minor distortions into account. The unanimous and entirely coherent testimony that the wars in Hindustan were religious wars of Muslims against Kafirs is a different matter altogether: denying this testimony is not a matter of small adjustments, but of replacing the well-attested historical facts with their diametrical opposite.

Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam.

2.4 NEGATIONISM RAMPANT: THE MARXISTS

In this context, one should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies.

Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories. They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be reduced to economic and class contradictions. They also adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always refer to conscious Hindus as the communal forces or elements (Marxism dehumanizes people to impersonal pawns, or forces, in the hands of god History). The Marxist historians had the field all to themselves, and they set to work to decommunalize Indian history-writing, i.e. to erase the importance of Islam as a factor of conflict.

In Communalism and the Writing of indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at Jawaharlal Nehry University (JNU, the Mecca of secularism and negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of medieval wars as religious conflicts is in fact a back- projection of contemporary religious conflict artificially created for political purposes. In Bipan Chandra's famous formula, communalism is not a dinosaur, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. They explicitly deny that before the modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity or Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between Hindus and Muslims, only between rulers or classes who incidentally also belonged to one religious community or the other. They point to the conflicts within the communities and to alliances across community boundaries.

It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with the Muslim rulers, but that also counted for the British colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw the Nazis employed Jewish guards, in their search for absconding Jews they employed Jewish informers, and in their policy of deportation they even sought the co-operation of the Zionist movement: none of this can disprove Nazi- Jewish enmity. It is also a fact that the Muslim rulers sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who fought some wars on Indian territory: they were just as much part of a single colonial movement with a common colonial ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the enemies of the indian freedom movement. Even in the history of the Crusades, that paradigm of religious war, we hear a lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization of the Crusades as a war between Christians and Muslims (triggered by the destruction of Christian churches by Muslims).

After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they incited the communal separateness. As the example par excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th -century 8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a concoction by the British historians: as the title of their work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers, most of them Muslims.

Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a secularist. It became a central part of the negationist argument in the debate over the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid issue. Time and again, the negationist historians (including Bipan Chandra, K.N. Panikkar, S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey, Sushil Srivastava, Asghar Ali Engineer, as well as the Islamic politician Syed Shahabuddin) have asserted that the tradition according to which the Babri mosque forcibly replaced a Hindu temple, is nothing but a myth purposely created in the 19th century. To explain the popularity of the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th century, most of them say it was a deliberate British concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule- policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow citing, from the copious archives which the British administration in India has left behind, any kind of positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would base his assertions, especially in such controversial questions.

They have kept on taking this stand even after five documents by local Muslims outside the British sphere in the 19th century, two documents by Muslim officials from the early 18th century, and two documents by European travellers from the 18th and 17th century, as well as the extant revenue records, all confirming the temple destruction scenario, were brought to the public's notice in 1990. In their pamphlets and books, the negationists simply kept on ignoring most or all of this evidence, defiantly disregarding historical fact as well as academic deontology.

Concerning the Ayodhya debate, 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 penpushers in the Indian press, have tried to raise suspicions against the professinal honesty of Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P. Gupta, the archaeologists who have unearthed evidence for the existence of a Hindu temple at the Babri Masjid site. Rebuttals by these two and a number of other archaelogists hae received coverage in the secularist press.

In February 1991, Irfan Habib give his infamous speech to the Aligarh Muslim University historians, in which he made personal attacks on the scholars who took part in the government-sponsored debate on Ayodhya in defence of the Hindu claim, and on Prof. B.B. Lal. In this case, the weekly Sunday did publish a lengthy reply by the deputy superintending archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of India, A.K. Sinha. The contents of this reply are very relevant, but it is a bit technical (i.e. not adapted to the medium of a weekly for the general public) and written in clumsy English, which gives a poor over-all impression.

Actually, I speculate that the Sunday-editor may well have selected it for publication precisely because of these flaws. The practice is well-known in the treatment of letters to the editor: those defending the wrong viewpoint only get published if they are somewhat funny or otherwise harmless. I cannot be sure about this particular case, but it is a general fact that from their power positions, the negationists use every means at their disposal to create a negative image for the Hindu opponents of Islamic imperialism, including the selective highlighting of the most clumsy and least convincing formulations of the Hindu viewpoint.

In his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy, the Islamic apologist Ali Asghar Engineer has also selected a few incomplete and less convincing statements of the Hindu position, in order to create a semblance of willingness to hear the Hindu viewpoint while at the same time denying the Hindu side any publicity for its strongest arguments. He has kept the most decisive pieces of evidence entirely out of the readers' view, but has covered this deliberate distortion of the picture behind a semblance of even- handedness. In Anatomy of a Confrontation, the JNU historians do not even mention the powerful argumentation by Prof. A.R. Khan, while Prof. Harsh Narain and Mr. A.K. Chatterjee's presentation authentic testimonies (in Indian Express, republished by Voice of India in Hindu Temples, What happened to Them and in History vs. Casuistry) are only mentioned but not detailed and discussed, let alone refuted; but clumsy RSS pamphlets and improvised statements by BJP orators are quoted and analyzed at length.

The concluding paragraph of A.K.Sinha's rebuttal to Irfan Habib's speech points out the contradiction between the earlier work of even Marxist historians about ancient India (in which they treat the epics as sources of history, not mere fable) and their recent Babri-politicized stand: "Today, even taking the name of Mahabharata and Ramayana is considered as anti-national and communal by the communist leaders, Babri Masjid Action Committee historians and the pseudo-secularists. What do they propose to do with all that has been published so far in [this] context by the Marxists themselves, notably D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, K.M. Shrimali, D.N. Jha and others? I have been thinking about the behavious of our Marxist friends and historians, their unprovoked slander campaign against many colleagues, hurling abuses and convicting anyone and everyone even before the charges could be framed and proved. Their latest target is [so] sobre and highly respected a person as prof. B.B. Lal, who has all his life (now he is nearing 70) never involved himself in petty politics or in the groupism [which is] so favourite a sport among the so- called Marxist intellectuals of this country. But then [slander] is a well-practised art among the Marxists."

Another trick which a student of Holocaust negationism will readily recognize in the pro-Babri campaign of the Indian negationists, is that truly daring form of amnipulation: selectively quoting an authority to make him say the opposite of his own considered opinion. When the JNU historians started slandering Prof. B.B. Lal as a turncoat hired by the VHP, this was a panic reaction after their earlier tactic had been exposed (though only in Indian Express, but the negationist front will not tolerate even one hole in the cordon of information control). Until then, they had been using B.B. Lal's fame to suport their own position that the Babri Masjid had not replaced a temple.

In their pamphlet The Political Abuse of History, the JNU historians had quoted from a brief summary, published by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1980, of Prof. B.B. Lal's report on his excavations in Ayodhya and other Ramayana sites. They knew this report perfectly well, for they had gleefully quoted its finding that the excavations just near the Babri Masjid had not yielded any remains pre- dating the 9th century BC. But then they had gone on to state that there was no archeological indication for a pre- Masjid temple on that controversial site at all, even when the same report had cursorily mentioned the remains of a building dated to the 11th century AD. Later on, they have quoted the same summary as saying that the later period was devoid of any interest, suggesting that nothing of any importance dating from the medieval period had been found.

In fact, this remark only proves that the ASI summarizer saw no reason to give (or saw reasons not to give) details about the uninteresting but nonetheless existing medieval findings. But in autumn 1990, some of these details have been made public and they turned out to be of decisive importance in the Ram Janmabhoomi debate. Prof.K.N. Panikkar (in Anatomy of a Confrontation) suggests that, if these relevant details were not recently thought up to suit the theories of the RSS, they must have been deliberately concealed at that time (late seventies) by the ASI summarizer. The latter possibility means that negationists are active in the ASI publishing section, editing archaeological reports to suit the negationist campaign. The implied allegation is so serious that K.N. Panikkar expects the reader to assume the other alternative, viz. an RSS concoction. But he may well have hit the nail on its head with his suggestion that negationists in the ASI are doing exactly the same thing that they are doing in all Indian institutions and media: misusing their positions to distort information.

At any rate, the details of the full report were given in articles by Dr. S.P. Gupta and by Prof. B.B. Lal himself (and independently by other archaeologists in talks and letters to Indian Express) in late 1990. The pillar-bases of an 11th century building, aligned to the Babri Masjid walls, were presented by Prof. B.B. Lal and Dr. S.P.Gupta in separate filmed interviews with the BBC. There could be no doubt about it anymore: Prof. B.B. Lal had arrived at a conclusion opposite to the one ascribed to him by a number of Marxist historians (not only from JNU).

That is why is early December 1990 several of the most vocal Marxist historians suddenly took to slander and accused Prof. B.B. Lal of having changed his opinion in order to suit the VHP's political needs. Now that they could no longer use Prof. Lal's reputation for their own ends, they decided to try and destroy it. In the case of Dr. S.P. Gupta, they have not taken back their ridiculous allegation that he had falsely claimed participation in the Ramayana sites excavations. But with a big name like B.B. Lal, an impeccable academic of world fame, they had to be careful, because slander against him might somehow backfire. That is why they have nor pressed the point, and why a number of Marxist historians and other participants in the Ayodhya debate have quitely reverted to the earlier tactic of selectively quoting from the ASI summary of Prof. B.B. Lal's report, and acting as if the great archaeologist has supported and even proven their own position. As the press had given minimum coverage to B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta's revelations, many people would not suspect the truth.

Another trick from the negationists' book that has been very much in evidence during the Ayodhya debate, consists in focusing all attention on the pieces of evidence given by those who upheld the historical truth,, and trying to find fault with them as valid evidence. Thus, at the press conference (19 Dec. 1992) where Dr. S.P. Gupta and other historians presented photographs of an inscription found during the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which proved once more that a temple had stood on the site, and that it was specifically a birthplace temple for "Vishnu Hari who defeated Bali and the ten-headed king [Ravana]", some journalists heckled the speakers with remarks that "because of the demolition, the inscription was not in situ and therefore not valid as evidence", and similar feats of petty fault-finding.

A few days later, a group of 70 archaeologists and historians, mostly names who had not taken a prominent role in this debate so far, brought shame on themselves by pronouncing judgement on this piece of evidence without even seeing, let alone studying it. They demanded not that the government look into this new evidence, as would be proper for representatives of the scientific spirit, but that it trace down from which museum the planted evidence had been stolen and brought to Ayodhya. In doing history falsification, it is best to remain on the attack, and to put the bonafide historians on the defensive by accusing them first.

After dozens of pieces of evidence for the forcible replacement of temple with mosque scenario had been given, the Babri negationists had never come up with a single piece of counter- evidence (i.e. positive evidence for an alternative scenario); they could not do better than keep silent over the most striking evidence, and otherwise scream at the top of their voice that evidence A did not count, evidence B was not valid, evidence C was flawed, evidence D was fabricated. In 1992 alone, in the clearing operations near the Janmabhoomi site in June, during several visits of experts, and during the demolition on 6 December, more than 200 pieces of archaeological evidence for the pre-existent Vaishnava temple had been found, but these 70 scholars preferred to disregard all them. This time, the suggestion was that in the middle of the kar seva, the inscription had been planted there. You could just as well join the Holocaust negationists and say that the gas chambers found in 1945 had been a Hollywood mise-en-scene. Picking at a single testimony as if the whole case depends on it has been a favourite technique of the negationists to distract attention from the larger picture, to make people forget that even if this one piece of evidence were flawed, this would not invalidate the general conclusions built on a whole corpus of evidence.

A final point of similarity between the Marxist involvement in the Babri Masjid case and the techniques of Holocaust negationism is the fact that there was a Babri Masjid debate in the first place. Indeed, postulating doubt and the need for a debate is the first step of denial. The tradition that the Babri Masjid had forcibly replaced a temple was firmly established ad supported by sources otherwise accepted as authoritative; when it was challenged, this was not on the basis of newfound material which justified a re-examination of the historical position. The correct procedure would have been that the deniers of the established view come up with some positive evidence for their innovative position: until then, there was simply no reason for a debate. Instead, they started demanding that the other side give proof of what had been known all along, and forced a debate on something that was really a matter of consensus. Subsequently, instead of entering the ring, attacking or countering their opponents' case with positive evidence of their own, the challengers set themselves up as judges of the other side's argumentation. This is indeed reminiscent of the negationist Institute for Historical Review announcing a prize for whomever could prove that the Holocaust had taken place.

There is yet another trick from the negationist arsenal which has been tried in India: find a witness from the victims' camp to testify to the aggressor's innocence. Of course there are not witnesses around who lived through Aurangzeb's terror, but there are many who lived through the horrors of Partition. It is nobody's case that the killings wich Jinnah considered a fair price for his Muslim state, never took place. But the negationists have spent a lot of effort on proving the next best thing: that the guilt was spread evently among Hindus and Muslims.

The Communist novelist Bhishma Sahni has used the novel Tamas to point the Hindus as the villains in the Partition violence. The interesting thing is that Bhishma Sahni's own family was among the Hindu refugees hounded out or Pakistan. His anti-Hindu bias, coming from a man who would have more reason for an anti-Muslim animus, is a gift from heaven for the Hindu-baiters. Marxist Professor Bipan Chandra parades a similar character in his paper: Communalism - the Way Out (published together with two lectures by KJhushwant Singh as: Many Faces of Communalism). One of his students had survived the terror of Partition in Rawalpindi, losing 7 family members. Bud he did not have any animus against the Muslims, for he said: "Very early I realized that my parents had not been killed by the Muslims, they had been kiled by communalism." Coming from a victim of Muslim violence, this is excellent material for those who want to apportion equal blame to Hindus nd Muslims.

Of course, Bipan Chandra's student was right. The cause of Partition and of its accompanying violence was not the Muslims, but communalism, i.e. the belief that people with a common religion form a separate social and political entity. This belief is not fostered by Hinduism, but it is central to Islam ever since Mohammed founded his first Islamic state in Medina. It is true that some Hindu groups (most conspicuously the Sikhs) have recently adopted some Islamic elements, including the communalist belief that a religious group forms a separate nation entitled to a separate state. But the source of this communalist poison in India is and remains Islam. Therefore, Bipan Chandra's student has in fact said: "My family was not killed by the Muslims, but by Islam."

It is a different matter that Muslims are the most likely carriers of the Islamic disease called communalism, and that they had massively voted for the commnalist project of creating a separate Muslim state. The culprit was Islam, and concerning the positions of the Muslims in the light of the fanatical nature of Islam, I would quote Bipan Chandra's own simile for understanding the difference between communalism and its adherents: when a patient suffers from a terrible disease, you don't kill him, but cure him. The victims of Islamic indoctrination should not be the target of Hindu revenge, as they were in large numbers in 1947. Don't kill the patient, kill the disease. Remove Islam from the Muslims' minds through education and India's communal problem will be as good as solved.

At this point we may take a second look at the Marxist position, mentioned above, that the Hindu community is a recent invention. The observations which I just made concerning the Islamic provenance of communalism might seem to confirm that there was no Hindu communal identity. However, the authentic sources from the medieval period are unanimous about the sharp realization of a separate communal identity as Muslims and as Hindus, overwhelmingly on the Muslim side, but also on the Hindu side. We know for instance that Shivaji, who turned the tide of the Muslim offensive in the late 17th centure, was a conscious partisan of an all-Hindu liberation war against Muslim rule (Hindu Pad Padashahi). The same counts for Rana Pratap and many other Hindu leaders, and there cannot be any doubt that the Vijayanagar empire was conscious of its role as the last fortress of Hindu civilization.

It is true that some Hindu kings attacked neighbouring Hindu states in the back when these were attacked by the Muslim invaders. They were at first not aware that these Islamic newcomers were a common enemy, motivated by hatred against all non-Muslims; but their lack of insight into the character of Islam in no way disproves their awareness of a common Hindu identity. The fact that they were acutely aware of their internal political rivalries, does not exclude that they were aware of a more fundamental common identity, which was not at stake in these internecine feuds, but which they defended together once they realized that it was the target of this new kind of ideologically motivated aggressor, Islam. Brothers are aware that they have a lot in common, and this is not disproven by the fact that, when left to themselves, they also quarrel with each other.

If at all some Hindus had at first only been conscious of their own caste or sect rather than of the Hindu commonwealth, the Muslim persecutions of all Hindus without distinction certainly made them aware of their common identity and interest. So, if the Marxists perforce want to deny the common culture and value system underlying the diversity of the Hindu commonwealth, then let them apply some of their own dialectics instead. "It is in their common struggle aginst the Islamic aggressors, that the disparate sections of the native Indian society have forged their common identity as Hindus": I do not agree with this statement which posits a negative and reactive basis for a common Hindu identity, but it must be accepted if one labours under the assumption that there never had been a positive common identity before. It is unreasonable to expect the Indian Pagans to be lumped together as Hindus for centuries on end, to be uniformly made the target of one neverending aggression by Islam, to be subjected to the same humiliations and the same jizya tax, and yet not become conscious of a common interest. This common interest would then give rise to unifying cultural superstructure. That is how the sustained and uniform Islamic attack on all India Pagans would inevitably have given rise to at least a measure of common Hindu identity if this had not previously existed.

In his Communal History and Rama's Ayodhya (1990), the Marxist Professor R.S. Sharma argues that the medieval Hindus did not see the Muslims as a distinct religious entity, but as an ethnic group, the Turks. His proof: the Gahadvala dynasty levied a tax called Turushkadanda, tax financing the war effort against the Turks. But this does not prove what Sharma thinks it proves.

The Muslims called the Pagans of India sometimes Kafirs, unbelievers, i.e. a religious designation; but often they called them Hindus inhabitants of Hindustan, i.e. an ethnic-geographical designation (from Hind, the Persian equivalent of Sindh). And they gave religious contents to this geographical term, which it has kept till today: so it is correct that the Hindus never defined themselves as Hindus, as this was the Persian and later the Muslim term for the Indian Pagans adhering to Sanatana Dharma. But that was only a terminological matter, the fundamental religious unity of the Sanatana Dharmis was just as much a fact. Similarly, the Hindus called these newcomers Turks, but this does not exclude recognition of their religious specificity. On the contrary, even Teimur the Terrible, who made it absolutely clear in his memoirs that he came to India to wage a religious war against the Pagans, and who freed the Muslim captives from a conquered city before putting the Hindu remainder to the sword, referred to his own forces as the Turks. Conversely, the Hindus describe as the typical Turkish behavious pattern that which is enjoined by Islam.

While it is true that the Hindus have been much too slow (till today) in studying the religious foundation of the barbaric behavious which they experienced at the hands of the Turushkas, at least they soon found out that for these invaders religion was the professed motive of their inhuman behavious. Prof. Sharma's piece of evidence, the institution of a Turushkandana, does however prove very clearly that the Islamic threat was extraordinary: the normal armed forces and war credits were not sufficient to deal with this threat which was in a class by itself.

The original source material leaves us in no doubt that conflicts often erupted on purely religious grounds, even against the political and economical interests of the contending parties. The negationists' tactic therefore consists in keeping this original testimony out of view. A good example is Prof. Gyanendra Pandey's recent book, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. As the title clearly says, Pandey asserts that communalism (the Hindu-Muslim conflict) had been constructed by the British for colonial purposes anmd out of colonial prejuidices, was later interiorized by Indians looking for new, politically profitable forms of organization in modern colonial society. This is like saying that anti-Judaism is a construction of modern capitalists to divide the working class (the standard Marxist explanation for all kinds of racism), while concealing the copious medieval testimony of anti-Judaism on undeniably non-capitalist grounds. Prof. Pandey effectively denies a millenniumful of testimonies to Islamic persecution of the Indian (Hindu) Kafirs.

Another example is prof. K.N. Panikkar's work on the Moplah rebellion,,, a pofgrom against the Hindus by the Malabar (Kerala) Muslims in the margin of the khilafat movement in 1921 (official death toll 2,339). Panikkar takes the orthodox Marxist position that this was not a communal but a class conflict, not between Hindus and Muslims but between workers who happened to be Muslims and landlords who happened to be Hindus. In reality the communal character of the massacre was so evident that even Mahatma Gandhi recognized it as terrible blow for his ideal of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is quite possible that the occasion was used to settle scores with landlords and money- lenders (that stereotype of anti-Hindu as well as of anti- Jewish sloganeering), but the mullahs exhorted their flock to attack all Hindus, and added in so many words that not only the landlords but all the Hindus were their enemies. The poison of Islamic fanaticism is such that it turns any kind of conflict into an attack on the non-Muslims.

More Marxist wisdom we encounter in Romila Thapar's theory (in her contribution to S. Gopal's book on the Ayodhya affair, Anatomy of a Confrontation) that the current Hindu movement wants to unite all Hindus, not because the Hindus feel besieged by hostile forces, not because they have a memory of centuries of jihad, but because "a monolithic religion is more compatible with capitalism" (to borrow the formulation of a reviewer). She thinks that the political Hindu movement is merely a concoction by Hindu capitalists, or in her own words "part of the attempt to redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization by the middle class", in which "modernization is seen as linked to the growth of capitalism". She reads the mind behind the capitalist conspiracy to reform Hinduism thus: "Capitalism is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if capitalism is to succeed in India, then Hinduism would also have to be moulded in a Semitic form".

It is always interesting to see how Communists presuppose the superiority of Hinduism by denouncing Hindu militancy as the semiticization or islamization of Hinduism. But the point is that the political mobilization of Hindu society under the increasing pressure of hostile forces is explained away as merely a camouflage of economic forces. One smiles about such simplistic subjection of unwilling facts of Marxist dogma. Especially because such analyses were still being made in 1991, and are still being made today: in India it has not yet dawned on the dominant intelligentsia that Marxism has failed not only as a political and economical system, but also as a socialogical model of explanation. On the contrary, Indian Marxists even manage to make foreign correspondents for non- Marxist media swallow their analysis, e.g. after the Babri Masjid demolition, even the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Seitung explained Hindu fundamentalism in the same socio-economical terms, complete with urban traders who are looking for an identity etc.

Incidentally, Romila Thapar is right in observing that certain Hindu revivalists ae trying to "find parallels with the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary for the future of Hinduism" (though her attempt to force the Ram Janmabhoomi movement into this mould, with Rama being turned into a prophet and the Ramayana into the sole revealed Scripture etc., is completely unfounded and another pathetic case of trying to force unwilling facts into a pre- conceived scheme). She sounds like favouring a renewed emphasis on "the fact that the religious experience of Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched together under the label of Hindu are distinctively different from that of the Semitic".

It is true that some Hindu revivalist movements have tried to redefine Hinduism in terms borrowed from monotheism, with rudiments of notions like an infallible Scripture (back to the Vedas: the Arya Samaj), iconoclastic monotheism (Arya Samaj, Akali neo-Sikhs), or a monolithic hierarchic organization (the RSS). But the reason for this development cannot with any stretch of the imagination be deduced from the exigencies of capitalism. An honest analysis of this tendency in Hinduism to imitate the Christian-Islamic model will demonstrate that a psychology of tactical imitation as a way of self-defence against these aggressive Semitic religions was at work. The tendency cannot possibly be reduced to the socio- economical categories dear to Marxism, but springs from the terror which Islam (not fedualism or capitalism, but Islam) had struck in the Hindu mind, and which was subsequently fortified with an intellectual dimension by the Christian missionary propaganda against primitive polytheism. Those Hindus who were waging the struggle for survival against the Islamic and Christian onslaught have come to resemble their enemies a bit, and have interiorized a lot of the aggressors' contempt for typical Hindu things, such as idol- worship, doctrinal pluralism, social decentralization. It is for Hindu society to reflect on whether this imitation was the right course, and whether it has not been self- defeating in some respects.

At any rate, the very existence of this psychological need among some militant Hindus to imitate the prophetic- monotheistic religions is a symptom of an already old polarization between Hinduism and aggressive monotheism, especially Islam. Bipan Chandra's chronology of communalism as a 20th century phenomenon cannot explain the communal polarization of which Sikhism and the Arya Samaj were manifestations. These can only be understood from the centuries oif active hostility between Islam and Hinduism. Shivaji was not a herald of capitalism, nor a product of British divide and rule policy, but a participant in an ongoing war between Hindu civilization and Islamic aggression.

Since the 1950s the history market is being flooded with publications conveying the negationist version to a greater or lesser extent. The public is fed negationist TV serials like The Sword of Tipu Sultan, an exercise in whitewashing the arch-fanatic last Muslim ruler. Most general readers and many serious students only get to know about Indian history through negationist glasses. In India, the negationists have managed what European negationists can only dream of: turn the tables on honest historians and marginalize them. People who have specialized in adapting history to the party-line, are lecturing others about the political abuse of history. By contrast, geunine historians who have refused to tamper with the record of Islam (like Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, K.S. Lal) are held us as examples of communalist historywriting in textbooks which are required reading in all history departments in India.

But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy.

Now that Marxism is no longer the fashion of the day, it is very easy to expose the shameless dishonesty of many vocal Marxist intellectuals. It is time to go through the record and see what they have said about the "economic successes" of the Soviet Union, the enthusiasm of the Chinese people for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the Communist involvement in crimes like Katyn, and about the lies put out by the CIA-sponsored dissidents and camp survivors. Their Islam negationism is by far not their first systematic falsification of a chapter of history.

When the Marxists start lecturing Hindus about tolerance and the respect for Barbar's mosque, it is easy to put them on the defensive by asking what happened to churches, mosques and temples when Mao took over. Communist regimes' treatment of religion has been similar to Islam's treatment of infidelity. Either religious people had the zimmi status, i.e. they were suffered to exist but at the cost of career prospects, benefit of social or material benefits, always under the watchful eye of police informers, and of course without the right to convert or to object to state atheism's conversion efforts (according to the chinese Constitution, there is a right to practise religion and a right to practise and propagete atheism); or they were simply persecuted, their religious education forbidden (in the Soviet Union, many people have spent years in jail for transporting Bibles or teaching Hebrew), their places of worship demolished or expropriated for secular use. Communism and Islam are truly comrades in intolerance.

Certainly some statements can be dug up of Indian Communists defending the Cultural Revolution in which so many thousands of places of worship were destroyed and their personnel brutalized or killed. When the Khumar Rouge were in power, less that 1,000 of the 65,000 Buddhist monks managed to survive : what did the Indian Marxists (card- carrying and other) say then? The bigger part of the Marxists' success was in their aggressiveness: as long as they remained on the offensive, everyone tried to live up to the norms they prescribed. Now it is time to put them to scrutiny.

2.5 FOREIGN SUPPORT FOR INDIAN NEGATIONISM

This is a repetition of the thesis defended by Zahiruddin Faruki in his "Aurangzeb and his times" (1935), recently taken up again by S.N.M. Abdi in Illustrated Weekly of India (5/12/1992), who claims that Aurangzeb was not anti-Hindu, and that the Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri (made available to the public by the Royal Society of Bengal and translated by Jadunath Sarkar), which lists Aurangzeb's temple- destroying activities from day to day, is a forgery. Faruki and Abdi count on the public's limited zeal for checking the sources, when they falsely claim that "apart from the Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri, there is no other reference to the order for the destruction of temples", and that we do not hear of any protest which large-scale temple destruction would have caused.

Abdi thinks he can get away with claiming as evidence a stone slab allegedly seen by Faruki in the Gyanvapi mosque in Benares, mentioning a date (1659) that does not tally with the traditional date (1669) of the forcible replacement of the Kashi Vishvanath temple with this mosque; even while admitting that "the slab seen by Faruki has disappeared mysteriously, along with another significant piece of evidence". Without blinking, he then cites a theory that the Gyanvapi mosque already existed under Akbar, i.e. a century before either of the two dates. Further, he quotes as authority a local agitator who claims: "My research reveals that a Buddhist vihara was demolished to make way for a temple, which was subsequently pulled down and the Gyanvapi mosque constructed on its site." The first claim, in spite of flaunting the pretentious term research, in a plain lie; the second is of course true but contradicts the case which Mr. Abdi is building up. Such is the quality of the argument for Aurangzeb's tolerance and Hindu- friendliness.

What are the facts? In Beneras (Varanasi), Aurangzeb (1658-1707) did not just build an isolated mosque on a destroyed temple. He ordered all temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. All other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them; among them, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujrat, the Vishnu temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares, the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in 4, if not in 5 figures. According to the official court chronicle, Aurangzeb "ordered all provincial governors to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete end to all Pagan teachings and practices". The chronicle sums up the destructions like this: "Hasan Ali Khan came and said that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed... His majesty went to Chittor, and 63 temples were destroyed... Abu Tarab, appointed to destroy the idol-temples of Amber, reported that 66 temples had been razed to the ground".

In quite a number of cases, inscriptions on mosques and local tradition do confirm that Aurangzeb built them in forcible replacement of temples (some of these inscriptions have been quoted in Sitaram Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2, along with a number of independent written accounts). Aurangzeb's reign ws marked by never-ending unrest and rebellions, caused by his anti-Hindu policies, which included the reimposition of the jizya and other zimma rules, and indeed the demolition of temples.

Aurangzeb did not stop at razing temples: their users too were levelled. There were not just the classical massacres of thousands of resisters, Brahmins, Sikhs. What gives a more pointed proof of Aurangzeb's fanaticism, is the execution of specific individuals for specific reason of intolerance. To name the best-known ones: Aurangzeb's brother Dara Shikoh was executed because of apostasy (i.e. taking an interest in Hindu philosophy), and the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because of his objecting to Aurangzeb's policy of forcible conversions in general, and in particular for refusing to become a Muslim himself. Short, Percival Spear's statement that Aurangzeb's fanaticism is but a hostile legend, is a most serious case of negationism.

An example of a less blatant (i.e. more subtle) form of negationism in Western histories of India, is the India entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. Its chapter on the Sultanate period (which was much more bloody than even the Moghul period) does not mention any persecutions and massacres of Hindus by Muslims, except that Firuz Shah Tughlaq "made largely unsuccessful attempts to convert his Hindu subjects and sometimes persecuted them". The article effectively obeys the negationist directive that "characterization of the medieval period as a time of Hindu- Muslim conflict is forbidden".

It also contains blissful nonsense about communal amity in places where the original sources only mention enmity. Thus, it says that Bahmani sultan Tajuddin Firuz extracted tribute payments and the hand of the king's daughter from the Hindu bastion Vijayanagar after two military campaigns, and that this resulted in "the establishment of an apparently amicable relationship between the two rulers". Jawaharlal Nehru considered the induction of Hindu women in Muslim harems as the cradle of composite culture (his euphemism for Hindu humiliation), but it is worse if even the venerable Encyclopedia considers the terms of debate as a sign of friendship. At any rate, the article goes on to observe naively that peace lasted only for ten years, when Vijaynagar forces inflicted a crushing defeat on Firuz. In this case, the more circumspect form of negationism is at work: keeping the inconvenient facts out of the readers' view, and manipulating the terminology.

An American historian's book is introduced thus: "In this book [Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India], Sandra Freitag examines one of the central problems of modern Indian history, the Hindu-Muslim conflict, with new and provocative insight. She challenges long-standing interpretations by defining this conflict as a developing social process groups, not simply Hindu or Muslim, in highly specific local contexts bound together in a changing institutional order."

This sophisticated verbiage cannot conceal that the book's approach is merely the standard secularist version propagated by Indian establishment historians since decades. There is nothing new and provocative about a book that claims to explain communalism without touching on its single most important determinant, viz. the doctrine laid down in Islamic scripture, and that blurs the clear-cut process of India's communalization by Islam with the help of scapegoats like colonialism.

It is not entirely clear to what extent such Western authors are conscious accomplices in the intellectual crime of negationism, and to what extent they are just gullible copiers of the version given to them by English-speaking Indians. In the case of a historian invited by Penguin to write a History of India, it is hard to believe that he didn't know better.

Another case of malafide reporting is former Time correspondent Edward Desmond's lengthy review of JNU Professof S. Gopal's Anatomy of a Confrontation in the New York Review of Books. I know that Mr. Desmond had gone through the books stating the Hindu case on Ayodhya; he had talked to both Mr. Sitaram Goel and myself (by telephone); he knew about hard evidence for the temple that was forcibly replaced by the Babri Masjid, including Prof. B.B. Lal's filmed presentation of the archarological evidence. And yet, like Prof. Gopal, he strictly keeps the lid on the Hindu case, does not mention the extensive documentary evidence, and curtly dismisses the archaeological evidence as bogus. Here, the psychology at work is apparently that of status-consciousness: you wouldn't expect a senior correspondent of a big American magazine to prefer the company of marginal pro-Hindu writers to that of prestigious Stalinist professors of India's Harvard, would you?

On the other hand, in the day-to-day reporting on the communal situation in India, there is a lot of bonafide copying of the anti-Hindu views dominant in the Indian English-language press. A typical mixed case of some complicity and some gullibility was the TV documentary about Hindu fundamentalism made by BBC correspondent Brian Barron, and boradcase in the week of the first round of the Lok Sabha elections in May 1991. Brian Barron is an otherwise meritorious journalist, witness his revelations in October 1991 about the massacre of thousands of Buddhist monks in the early years of communist rule in Mongolia. But his programme about the Hindu movement was second-rate and biased. For a start, it contained some factual mistakes (like a map meant to show the trail of Hindu leader L.K. Advani's procession in support of the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, which drew a line unrelated to the actual trail, apart from placing Delhi on the Ganga river), exemplifying the carelessness which Western correspondents can afford when it comes to India reporting.

Barron said that India had already been partitioned because of religion. In fact, India has been partitioned because of Islam, against the will of other religions, and this seemingly small inaccuracy is an old trick to distribute the guilt of Islam in partitioning India over all religions equally. Barron made no attempt to seem impartial, and introduced BJP leader L.K. Advani as a demagogue. He asked Advani's declared enemy V.P. Singh whether Advani was not merely putting a humane mask on fanaticism. Easy, that way V.P. Singh only had to say yes. He failed to take the opportunity to question V.P. Singh about his political marriage with the Muslim fundamentalist leader Imam Bukhari, while that was a case of a Hindu promoting fundamentalism as well. He let Swami Agnivesh, a Marxist in ochre robe, accuse the BJP of mixing religion and politics, but neglected to inform the viewers that Swami Agnivesh has himself combining monkhood with being a Janata Dal candidate in the Lok Sabha elections.

When Barron asked Advani why he had allowed so much bloodshed on his procession (the rathyatra of October 1990), whereas in fact there had been no riots all along the path of his month-long journey, Advani correctly said: "You are taken in by a disinformation campaign." A serious journalist would have inquired deeper when his sources, with which the quality of his work stands or falls, are questioned so pointedly. When a sadhu said that Muslims refuse to respect Hindus and that Hindus are legally discriminated against, Barron did not inquire what these discriminations were. Like all western reporters, he has reported on Hindu fundamentalism without asking even once why this movement has emerged, instead relaying the Marxist line that it is all a camouflage for class (c.q. caste) interests, an artificial creation for petty political gain.

Barron interviewed prof. Romila Thapar, who accused the Hindu movement of aiming at a system in which some communities would be second-class citizens living in constant fear for their lives. From a spokeswoman of Marxism, which has held entire populations in constant fear and oppression, and which has killed numerous millions of "contrarevolutionary elements" (to use the criminalizing, dehumanizing Marxist term), the allegation sounds rather shameless. But the viewers were not told where Romila Thapar stands, they were led to believe that this was a neutral observer who had been asked for an objective explanation. The same thing has happened a number of times in both Time Magazine and Newsweek: Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and their comrades get quoted as if they are non-partisan authorities. Though anti-Communist in their general reporting, when it comes to India, these papers (unknowingly?) present the Marxists' viewpoint as objective in-depth background information.

Only ten years ago, the Left-oriented media in many Western countries freely attacked the really existing capitalism and also conjured up all kinds of fantastic CIA and neo-fascist conspiracies, but scrupulously shielded the really existing socialism from criticism. Similarly, Brian Barron gave Prof. Thapar the chance to say her thing about unproven sinister plans imputed to the Hindu movement, but scrupulously refrained from pointing out that Miss Thapar's picture of a theocratic society in which minorities are second-class citizens living in mortal fear, is already reallly existing in the neighbouring Islamic republic of Pakistan and in many Muslim states (and, mutatis mutandis in Communist countries).

These days, reporting on the communal in situation in India consists in highlighting the splinter in the Hindu eye and concealing the beam in the Muslim eye. At the time of the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, the German left-leaning weekly Der Spiegel summarized the communal riots in independent India as follows: "Since 1947, Indian statisticians have counted 11,000 riots with 12,000 Muslim victims." Hindu victims are not even mentioned, as if you were reading a fundamentalist paper like Muslim India or Radiance.

The Ayodhya conflict offers a good examples of the absurd standards applied by reporters. A Hindu sacred site, back in use as a Hindu temple (since 1949 with, since 1986 without restrictions) after centuries of Muslim occupation, is claimed by Muslim leaders, who also insist on continuing the occupation of two other sacred sites in Mathura and Kashi (and numerous other sites which the Hindu leaders are not even claiming back). Claiming the right to occupy other communities' sacred sites: if this is not fanatical, I don't know what is. Yet, the whole world press is one the side of the Muslims, and decries a Hindu plan to build proper temple architecture on the Ram Janmabhoomi site in Ayodhya as fanatical. These are not just double standards, but inverted standards.

The very fact that Muslims in India loudly complain about their situation (e.g. about their low educational level, which is 100% the fault of their own mullahs), proves that they are relatively well-off: as I have had the occasion to observe, Hindu visitors or refugees from Pakistan often do not dare to speak of the horrible conditions in which they are forced to live under Muslim rule, because they fear for their relatives, and because the constant terror has conditioned them never to raise any objections against the Muslim master race. Inside these Muslim states, the remaining Hindus are even more careful never to displease the Muslim masters. For unthinking journalists, their silence is proof that all is well for the minorities in Muslim states, and so they prefer to listen to the vocal malcontents who air the Muslim grievances in tolerant India. Whoever shouts loudest, will get our correspondents' attention, if only because India reporting is mostly of a very low professional quality.

An example of the slanted impression which the Nehruvian establishment creates about Hindu-Muslim relations, concerns the internationally highlighted martyrdom of the Flemish Jesuit Father Rasschaert, near Ranchi in 1964. Father Rasschaert's sister was a friend of my mother's, so as a child I have often heard the details of the story. The part which everybody knows, is that Muslims had fled into a mosque, where Hindus wanted to pursue them, when Father Rasschaert intervened to pacify the crowd, but was killed by the Hindus who subsequently massacred the Muslims.

But the start of the story, never highlighted and sometimes not even mentioned in the contemporary newspaper reports (much less in later references), was that the Hindus in the area had been angered by the sight of mutilated Hindus who had been brought by train from East Pakistan, where they had at least survived the massacres which many more had not. As always, Hindu violence was a retaliation against Muslim violence. No missionary has stepped in to defend the Hindus of Pakistan, in fact no missionary was around, as missions have a vey hard time in Pakistan. The missions in Islamic countries find their converts harassed and even killed by their own families, their schools and churches attacked on all kinds of pretexts, their graduates not given jobs. So, the missionary centres prefer to direct their energies to more hospitable countries like India. The fact that a missionary was killed by a Hindu while defending the Muslims, and not the other way round, proves in the first place that Catholic priests can function in India, much more than in Pakistan. A closer scrutiny of this one incidence of Hindu fanaticism reveals a background of much more systematic and institutionalized Muslim fanaticism.

There is a third aspect to the story, which is never mentioned at all. It is that the Hindus in Ranchi were desperate about their government's unwillingness to defend the Hindus in Pakistan. One of the chief culprits behind the massacre was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the patron of secularism, who used Father Rasschaert's death as yet another occasion to parade his concern for the minorities in India, and to put Hindus in the dock. He himself (and the entire secularist establishment till today) reneged on his duty to defend the Hindus surviving in the Islamic state which he had helped to create. By effectively condoning the persecution of Hindus in Pakistan, he was also responsible for the retalitory Hindu violence. But the international press has never thought the matter through, and confined its reporting on Father Rasschaert's death to condemning the Hindu fanatics, weeping for the Muslim victims, and praising Nehru as the voice of sanity amid the religious madness.

The way our journalists are led by the nose towards reporting Muslim grievances and ignoring grievances of Hindu minorities (and ridiculing the very real grievances of even the Hindu majority in India), is reminiscent of the sneaking bias in all non-rightist media in Western Europe about the Left-right conflict before the Gorbachov era. They all complied with Marxist-imposed terminology like dictator Pinochet but president Ceaucescu, or rightist rebels but leftist resistance. Criticism of the West was available in plenty, and given wide coverage, but the muted populations of the Soviet bloc were not heard, and little effort was made to go in and hear them. Those who supported the cause of freedom in the Soviet bloc were riduclued. Worse, when in 1968 the Russian physicist Sakharov had a report about massive human rights violations in the USSR published, leading intellectuals actually denied the existence of "that so-called Russian physicist invented by the reactionary forces to slander the glorious achievements of socialism in the USSR". Yes, so noxious was the intellectual atmosphere in the heyday of Marxism. In those days it was "better to be wrong with [communist] Sartre than to be right with [anti-communist] Aron".

When glasnost made clear just how strong the Soviet bloc populations' disgust with communalism really was, Western intellectuals and socialist parties seemed sincerely surprised. They themselves had so often pleaded that life in the Soviet system was not really worse than in the "so- called free" West. The press had never given us an adequate picture, not by telling outright lies, but by ignoring the muted voices which the communist dictators wanted us to ignore. At any rate, if there used to be far more demonstrations in the streets of the West than in the Soviet bloc, did it prove that there was less discontent in the latter? We now know better: there was more protest in the West than in the Soviet bloc because there was more freedom and less fear in the West, and in spite of deeper discontent in the Soviet bloc. There is no excuse for making the same mistake in our reporting on the situation of the minorities in India and in Muslim countries.

Without really noticing, the Western press has become the mouth-piece of the Marxist-Muslim alliance which dictates political parlance in India. I assume only a few frontline journalists are conscious participants in the ongoing disinformation campaign. Brian Barron, for one, has demonstrated to what extent he has interiorized the anti- Hindu bias of his Indian spokespersons, with a very little but truly unpardonable piece of disinformation. Reporting on the million-strong demonstration for the Ram Janmabhoomi temple (Delhi, 4 April 1991), he showed a monk carrying a saffron- coloured flag with a white swstika. And for the less perceptive viewers, he added in so many words that the Hindu movement carried the swastika. Of course he knew these two things: (1) most Western viewers know the swastika only as the symbol of Nazism; (2) most Indians know the swastika only as their own age-old symbol of good fortune (swasti = well-being). He must have known perfectly well that he was making the Western viewers read a message which the Hindu demonstrators never sent, viz. that the Hindu movement links up with Nazism. Regardless of the moral quality of such distortive reporting, it goes to show to what extent the negationist faction in the Indian media has managed to picture the Hindus as the bad guys in the eyes of the world.

A few more examples of how Western India-watchers swallow Indian secularist disinformation. The pro-Ram Janmabhoomi demonstration in Delhi on 4 April 1991 was not reported in 99% of the Western papers and electronic news channels. I have inquired among journalists about what they had received on their telexes concerning the largest-ever demonstration in the biggest democracy in the world. It turned out that these had mentioned 3 lakh demonstrators (when even the government-controlled police had given the estimate of 8 lakh), and not made the object of the demonstration clear at all. The Indian sources had deliberately blurred and minimized the information, so that the Western media had, in good faith, not deemed it worth mentioning. If six weeks later Brian Barron reported the number as more than a million demonstrators, it was not to correct this earlier lapse, but because of a different psychology. His aim was not to deny the importance and magnitude of the Hindu movement which he detests so much, but on the contrary to make it into a titillatingly gruesome dinosaur: the TV consumers have heard enough about Muslim fundamentalism, so if you want to get them interested in a new brand of fundamentalism, you have to make it extra big and colourful.

Another example is the news concerning the Indian attitude to the second Gulf War in early 1991. The Delhi correspondent for the Flemish radio station BRTN said that the Indian population was on the side of Saddam, against the Anglo-American forces (and their Saudi employers). That is just what the Times of india editorial had said a few days earlier. In fact, the Indian people was not on Saddam's side at all. The Hindus had always cheered for Israel in its wars with the Arabs, and now they were all for the defeat of this Arab Hitler who had announced he would "burn half of Israel with chemical weapons". The Muslim support for Saddam's jihad against the Crusaders was not exactly massive either. Firstly, millions of Indian Muslims personally suffered when they or their reltives lost their jobs in Iraq and Kuwait as a result of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait. Secondly, most Muslim leaders are financed by the Arab monarchies (including Kuwait), and they sided with their paymasters, either openly or by their quiet refusal to support Saddam. The only ones who supported Saddam were the hard core of the Nehruvian establishment (who forced the Chandra Shekhar government to stop allowing American war planes to land in Bombay), and the communists with their visceral anti-Americanism. A strike imposed on the communists with their visceral anti-Americanism. A strike imposed on the Calcutta dockers by the Communist trade-union was about the only sign of Indian support for Saddam, but our correspondent played it up as merely one example of a nation-wide movement. I hope it was in good faith on his part, but for the Times of India there cannot be such a benefit of the doubt.

Foreign correspondents in Delhi should realize that the Indian media and academia are entirely untrustworthy when it comes to reporting on the Hindu-Muslim conflict. When you report the truth about the democratic opposition in China or Tibet, you don't copy the People's Daily. When you want to know the truth about the Kurdish freedom struggle, you don't trust the Iraqi stae radio. So, when you want to understand the Hindu backlash, you don't believe strictly partisan sources like the Times of India, or party-line historians like those from JNU or AMU.

If a Mr. Vijay Singh writes in Le Monde Diplomatique an article full of secularist invective titled: Hindu Fundamentalism, a Menace for India, it is simply the reflection of a vested interest in blackening Hinduism, though it is sold as an in-depth comment by a first-hand observer. It so happens that the article is partly an unacknowledged quotation from the introductory chapter of the book "Understanding the Muslim Mind" by Rajmohan Gandhi, a party politician of Iman Bukhari's favourite Janata Dal (nicknamed Jinnah Dal). If in another issue of the same prestigious French monthly, Mrs. Francine R. Frankel mouths all the worn-out secularist slogans against what she calls the "Violent Offensive of Hindu Extremists", it merely proves her incapability of reading her Indian sources with the distance befitting partisan pamphlets. It is quite a shameful matter that Western media have swallowed and reproduced many similar motivated distortion.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign press provides the negationists with a strategic cover. Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they keep on believing this even in domains where the West is completely ignorant and incomponent. So the negationists feel supported in the back by an outside world which they can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's political configuration, it would have blown this cover away by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media, and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the Indian establishment.

In Great Britain and the United States, the anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim bias in India reporting can partly be explained by the political tilt towards Pakistan (now waning because of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions). Thus, the prestigious British weekly The Economist has, in a predictably negative article about nationalism and separatism, held up the creation of Pakistan as an undisputably justified case of separatism (small wonder that British Muslims are imitating their Indian Muslim grandfathers and demanding a separate "non-territorial state of British Muslims", justifiable on exactly the same grounds). A more universal reason is that they never get to know the Hindu viewpoint from competent and eloquent spokesmen: firstly, these have practically no access to the national English-language press, which Western correspondents in Delhi faithfully copy because they are too lazy to seek out news for themselves; secondly, the Hindus themselves have not yet suifficiently realized the importance of public relations.

The most important reason is probably the political atmosphere in Europe which demands that for the sake of anti-racism and multiculturalism, Islam as the most conspicuous and assertive guest culture in Europe gets painted in rosy colours. The result of this imperative not to expose Muslim fanaticism is that even avowedly Christian papers in the West keep silent about the ongoing persecution of Christian papers and other minorities in the Middle East. Christians cherish the illusion of a dialogue with Islam, so they will not offend their Muslim partners by raising incovenient issues like the status of religious minorities in Muslim countries. Now, if the West does not stand up for its persecuted Christian brethren, how much less will it be bothered about the idolatrous Hindus.

And so, Western India-watchers go on licking the boots of the aggressor, and keep on twisting contemporary news in the media, and to a lesser extent even historical facts in academic publications, to the advantage of the Muslim side. They have not invented the Indian brand of negationism, but they are amplifying and fortifying it.

2.6 BANNING INCONVENIENT BOOKS

In March 1991, Ram Swarup's book "Understanding Islam through Hadis" was banned, after the Hindi version had already been banned in 1990. This happened after two committees set up by the Delhi administration had screened the book and found it unobjectionable, and after the judge had dismissed the plea for prosecution of its publisher, under the pressure of Muslim demonstrations. This book is a faithful summary of the Sahih al-Muslim, one of the two most authoritative Hadis collections (acts of the Prophet). According to the fundamentalist party Jamaat-i Islami the book contained "distortion and slander", and as an example of this slanderous distortion, it mentions this passage: "Mohammed saw Zaynab in half-naked condition, and he fell in love with her". With this revelation, the fundamentalists managed to get some agitation going, and the book was banned.

The interesting thing is that the quoted passage comes straight from the original Hadis, and is not a slanderous distortion at all. The agitation against the book reveals an important fact about the Muslim community: the ordinary Muslim does not know the contents of Quran and Hadis, and projects on Mohammed his own moral ideals, which he largely shares with his non-Muslim fellow-men. Because of his attachment to the mental image of a morally perfect Mohammed, he is shocked when he gets confronted with the historical Mohammed. Among the many historical acts of Mohammed is his arranging the hand-over to himself of Zaynab, the beautiful wife of his sdopted son. The fact that a revelation from Allah came to legitimize the marriage between Mohammed and Zaynab (which was a breach of the tribal incest taboo), became the classic illustration of the view that the Quran is nothing but the self-interested product of Mohammed's own mind.

This ignorance about the historical Mohammed, both among the common Muslims and among the Hindus, is precisely what the banned book wanted to do something about, in keeping with the Indian Constitution's injuction to "develop the sci