American Islamists are using the Babri mosque’s destruction 30 years ago to claim that Muslims in India are living under a growing threat of violence. In the lapidary phrase of the writer VS Naipaul, India is a “wounded civilization” because of the centuries of violence and mass killings that India’s indigenous Hindus endured at the hands of Muslim conquerors, beginning with the invasions by the Ghaznis. Now some Muslims in the United States are giving instigation to waging jihad in India targeting Hindus.
It may be mentioned here that, American Islamists describe Hindutva as “a shameless ideology, a hateful ideology”, and allude to its supporters as “fascists” and “Nazis”, Hindutva is simply the ideology of promoting Hindu interests and resisting the relentless aggressiveness of the Muslims who remain in India. It includes supporting the return of Hindus to parts of India where they have been chased out by Muslims.
Hindutva is an ideology of resistance to aggressive Muslims, to ensure that India remains the country where Hindus cannot be pushed around, discriminated against, even dispossessed and killed, as was the case when Muslims ruled until they were replaced by the British.
Commenting on such notorious actions of American Islamists, research-scholar and anti-jihad write Hugh Fitzgerald said:
The Islamic groups bewail their loss of the Babri Mosque, which Muslims had long ago built over the remains of a major Hindu temple at Ayodha that the Muslims had destroyed. This mosque was built on the site where Hindus believe the god Shri Ram (Lord Vishnu) was born. On December 6, 1992, Hindus assembled to pull down the mosque, revealing evidence of the Hindu temple underneath. Was this wrong? Should the Hindus not be allowed to recover one of the holiest of their sites, by rebuilding their temple at the site of Rama’s birth? Muslims did much the same with the Hagia Sophia, not in pulling it down but in repurposing it as a mosque. For centuries the Hagia Sophia had been the largest church in Christendom. Then, after the Fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the Muslim Turks turned that grandest of churches into a mosque, and it remained a mosque until 1934, when Ataturk turned it into a museum. That’s how things stood until Erdogan, a fervent Muslim intent on rolling back Ataturk’s secularist reforms, turned Hagia Sophia back into a mosque in July 2020.
Apparently when Muslims take over a structure belonging to another religion, and either declare that structure a mosque, as happened with the Hagia Sophia, or obliterate the non-Muslim structure and build a mosque upon it, as Muslims did when they destroyed the Hindu Ayodhya Temple, and built the Babri Mosque on its ruins, that is fine. It is only when non-Muslims attempt to reclaim their religious sites – the temple to Shri Ram at Ayodhya, the Hagia Sophia church – that we should, according to Muslims, be outraged.
It may be mentioned here that, just as the Muslim Arabs who conquered the Middle East and North Africa destroyed thousands of churches, synagogues, and Zoroastrian fire temples, the Muslims who swooped down on India from the north and conquered most of the country between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries for Islam destroyed more than 36,000 Hindu temples.
While Hindus are willing to acknowledge the intercommunal violence that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque, during which 2,000 Hindus and Muslims were killed, the Muslims continue to deny that underneath the Babri Mosque was all the evidence needed to show convincingly that it had been deliberately built on top of one of the holiest sites in Hinduism. Why are Muslims, including the members of the Indian-American Muslim Council, silent on the subject of the Islamic jihad terror that continues to plague India? Why do American Muslim groups such as Palestinian mega-terror outfit Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) falsely paint Muslims as victims of one-sided aggression by “Hindutva extremists”?
Ever since the Muslim invaders arrived in India, beginning with the Arabs who invaded in 711 A.D. and seized Sindh, they made savage war on Hindus and on Hinduism. They destroyed over 36,000 Hindu temples and temple complexes. They killed tens of millions of Hindus during the 250 years of Mughal rule. Indian historians, such as KS Lal, estimate that Muslims were responsible over the centuries for the deaths of 70-80 million Hindus. Other tens of millions of Hindus converted to Islam in order to stay alive, and their descendants are the Muslims that we find today not just in India, but in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
India is the “land of the Hindus” just as Arabia is the “land of the Arabs” and Eretz Israel “the land of the Jews”.
While American Islamists are continuing notorious agenda against India and Hindu, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi or Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee would continue their Muslim appeasement policies, similarly as MK Gandhi. From historical fact we can know, Gandhi never understood just how the Muslim conquest of India had made it, in Naipaul’s words, a “wounded civilization.” He was soft on Muslims and radical Islam. His political naivete was also deeply offensive; one of his most infamous remarks was his “advice” to Jews. In 1947, interviewed by Louis Fischer, author of The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi said: “Hitler killed five [sic] million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves in the sea from cliffs….
It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions”.
Satyagraha – non-violence? Yes, we can all imagine the effect that such a demonstration of nonviolent resistance would have changed the minds of Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, and Adolf Hitler himself. Gandhi is not a reliable guide to anything, least of all to how Hindus can best protect themselves and their country from Muslim aggression. He never grasped the enormity of the Muslim threat to his own country.
It is not Hindutva that is a “hateful extremist ideology”, but rather radical Islam itself that inculcates in Believers the notion that they are the “best of peoples” (Qur’an 3:110) and non-Muslims the “most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6). It is radical Islam that throughout the Qur’an prescribes violence against the Infidels (see, for example, 2:191-193, 3:151, 4:89, 8:12, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4).
Hindutva does not promote Hindu supremacism; it merely resists radical Islamic supremacism, which is a different thing. Its adherents defend the right of Hindus to continue to exist, as practicing Hindus, in their own country, and not to be subdued by the violent votaries of radical Islam. It is radical Islam, not Hindutva, that reminds us of Fascism and Nazism, in its clear intent to conquer the world, so that Islam, sharia and caliphate dominate everywhere, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
Hindutva is nothing more than the conviction that Hindus can and should fight back to protect themselves and their country, India, from the radical Muslims who so obviously wish them ill. Hindutva does not imply that all Muslims must be expelled from India. It does mean that Muslims cannot be allowed to wantonly attack Hindus as they have been doing wherever and whenever they can in the subcontinent, most recently in Jammu & Kashmir, where as many as 200,000 Hindu pandits were killed or driven out by Muslims in the early 1990s. That is what Hindutva is all about: taking pride in India’s Hindu civilization, a desire to preserve that civilization, and to live freely, without fear of Muslim aggression, as Hindus in their own country.
