NEHRU & NEGATIONISM
WHAT IS NEGATIONISM? “Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as the holocaust…”
—Koenraad Elst
Negationism is an illegitimate and deliberate distortion, or denial, of historical fact or record. In the Indian context, it is the denial and/or dilution and/or deliberate misinterpretation and/or rationalisation of the terrible, dastardly and inhuman crimes spread over roughly a millennium against Hindus by the Muslims who invaded and ruled India. That millennium of Hindu holocaust, many times worse than the Jewish holocaust, has yet to be exhaustively documented.
WHAT THEY DID? — AS DESCRIBED BY HISTORIANS
As per an article on www.JewsNews.Co.il :
“The genocide suffered by the Hindus of India at the hands of Arab, Turkish, Mughal and Afghan occupying forces for a period of 800 years is as yet formally unrecognised by the World… The holocaust of the Hindus in India was of even greater proportions, the only difference was that it continued for 800 years, till the brutal regimes were effectively overpowered in a life and death struggle by the Sikhs in the Panjab and the Hindu Maratha armies in other parts of India in the late 1700s.
“We have elaborate literary evidence of the World’s biggest holocaust from existing historical contemporary eyewitness accounts. The historians and biographers of the invading armies and subsequent rulers of India have left quite detailed records of the atrocities they committed in their day-to- day encounters with India’s Hindus.
“These contemporary records boasted about and glorified the crimes that were committed—and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, mass rapes of Hindu women and the destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu/Buddhist temples and libraries have been well documented and provide solid proof of the World’s biggest holocaust…
“Francois Gautier in his book ‘Rewriting Indian History’ (1996) wrote: ‘The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.’…”
“Alain Danielou in his book, Histoire de l’ Inde writes: ‘From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races.’”
“The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously at Thanesar that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its purity, and people were unable to drink it. The Sultan returned with plunder which is impossible to count.”
—Tarikh-i-Yamini of Utbi, Mahmud Ghaznavi’s Secretary
“There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam… The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 CE); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526 CE)… Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate ,…”
“Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, ‘Indian mountain’, was renamed Hindu Kush , ‘Hindu-killer’, when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99 CE), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia…”
—Koenraad Elst
“Starting with Al-Bilãdhurî who wrote in Arabic in the second half of the ninth century, and coming down to Syed Mahmudul Hasan who wrote in English in the fourth decade of the twentieth, we have cited from eighty histories spanning a period of more than twelve hundred years. Our citations mention sixty-one kings, sixty-three military commanders and fourteen sufis who destroyed Hindu temples in one hundred and fifty-four localities, big and small, spread from Khurasan in the West to Tripura in the East, and from Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, over a period of eleven hundred years. In most cases the destruction of temples was followed by erection of mosques, madrasas and khãnqãhs, etc., on the temple sites and, frequently, with temple materials. Allãh was thanked every time for enabling the iconoclast concerned to render service to the religion of Muhammad by means of this pious performance..”
—Sita Ram Goel
“Amîr Khusrû [poet] describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, along with those of the other infidels whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra…”
—Sita Ram Goel
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
—Will Durant
“In the aftermath of invasion, in the ancient cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, …, and Dwarka, not one temple survived whole and intact. This is the equivalent of an army marching into Paris, Rome, Florence and Oxford, and razing their architectural treasures to the ground. It is an act beyond nihilism; it is an outright negativism, a hatred of what is cultured and civilized.”
—David J. Jonsson
“Literary evidence of Islamic iconoclasm vis-a-vis Hindu places of worship is far more extensive. It covers a longer span of time, from the fifth decade of the 7th century to the closing years of the eighteenth. It also embraces a larger space, from Transoxiana in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, and from Afghanistan in the west to Assam in the east… Archaeological explorations in modern times have, however, provided physical proofs of literary descriptions. The vast cradle of Hindu culture is literally littered with ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all sects of Sanatana Dharma—Buddhist, Jain, Saiva, Shakta, Vaishnava and the rest. Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory: (1)The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals. (2)Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down. (3)Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a)the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b)the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad. (4)There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat. (5)Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered. (6)Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt. (7)Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials. (8)Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.
The literary sources, like epigraphic, provide evidence of the elation which Muslims felt while witnessing or narrating these ‘ pious deeds’. A few citations from Amir Khusru will illustrate the point…”
—Sita Ram Goel
“…historical distortion has been carried out with regard to Tipu Sultan, who in many ways is the Aurangzeb of the South. As the author of a book on Tipu Sultan (Tipu Sultan: The Tyrant of Mysore, Rare Publications, Chennai), I am both amused and amazed at the continuing efforts to paint him as a hero, patriot, and freedom fighter… His seventeen-year long regime was primarily a tenure of military and economic terror as far as Hindus were concerned. He razed entire cities literally to the ground and depopulated them… As representative samples, we can examine his raids in Kodagu (Coorg) and the Malabar for the extent and scale of sheer barbarism and large scale destruction… An excerpt from Bartholomew provides us a representative glimpse: ‘First a corps of 30,000 barbarians who butchered everybody on the way… followed by the field-gun unit… Tipu was riding on an elephant behind which another army of 30,000 soldiers followed. Most of the men and women were hanged in Calicut, first mothers were hanged with their children tied to necks of mothers. That barbarian Tipu Sultan tied the naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants to move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces. Temples and churches were ordered to be burned down, desecrated and destroyed. Christian and Hindu women were forced to marry Mohammadans and similarly their men were forced to marry Mohammadan women.1 Those Christians who refused to be honoured with Islam, were ordered to be killed by hanging immediately. These atrocities were told to me by the victims of Tipu Sultan who escaped from the clutches of his army and reached Varappuzha, which is the centre of Carmichael Christian Mission. I myself helped many victims to cross the Varappuzha River by boats.’… Tipu Sultan in letters to Syed Abdul Dulai and his officer Budruz Zaman Khan respectively, gloats thus: ‘With the grace of Prophet Mohammed and Allah, almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. Only on the borders of Cochin State a few are still not converted. I am determined to convert them also very soon. I consider this as Jehad to achieve that object.’”
—Sandeep Balakrishna
“Quiet hatred is the escape for the traumatised Hindu. Few Muslims realise how deeply they have wounded the Hindu psyche. The reason is that, unlike Christians in the crusades, Hindus have not paid back in the same coin. How then is the Muslim to know? Think of how much sound and fury did the Babri episode arouse. No Hindu however has said that 62 temples were desecrated in Bangladesh during 1990 alone; a good two years before Babri. Many more after 6th December, 1992. So has written Taslima Nasrin. In Pakistan, 178 temples met the same fate. Within India, in Kashmir to be precise, some 27 mandirs were destroyed … More recently, the Buddha was felled at Bamiyan.”
—Prafull Goradia, ‘Hindu Masjids’
Prafull Goradia’s book ‘Hindu Masjids’ lists places of Hindu worship desecrated in Kashmir: 46 in 1986, and 90 since 1990. It also lists province-wise names of a total of 59 Hindu temples destroyed in Pakistan.
Sita Ram Goel’s book ‘Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol-I’, Chapter-6 ‘Let the Mute Witnesses Speak’ lists “state-wise and district-wise, the particulars of Muslim monuments which stand on the sites and/or have been built with the materials of Hindu temples”: it is a long 93-pages (72-165) list comprising hundreds of monuments.
THE TERRIBLE RESULT
Even more disastrous than the holocaust and destruction of temples
described above was the destruction by the Muslim hordes of India’s economy and prosperity, and its grand educational system, universities, and rich culture of knowledge, and mass-scale murder of its intellectual-class.
The foundations of science and engineering is maths, and without the latter the former are not possible. India’s Hindu civilization and its built-in pursuit of knowledge produced math and astronomy geniuses. India gave to the world the Hindu (wrongly called Hindu-Arab) numerals 0 to 9, place- value system, decimal system, trigonometry, calculus, and so on (pl. watch videos of CK Raju, Ramprasad Soghal, and others). That the earth moves around the sun, the earth is a sphere, and is not flat, and many such revolutionary ideas were postulated by the Indian mathematicians and astronomers many centuries before they were floated in the West. Given India’s strong economy (27% of the World GDP in 1000 CE{W.e1} ) and industrial and agricultural foundations, its unparalleled prowess in maths and astronomy, its vast educational setup and unequalled knowledge, enquiry, and innovation culture thanks to its Hindu civilization—free from Muslim-Christian absolutist dogmas—India would have been a massive science and industrial powerhouse centuries before the West, had the Muslim hordes not set their foot in India. In fact, the industrial revolution in Britain was fuelled from the Indian loot (pl. see Blunder#89).
Wrote VS Naipaul:
“The invasions are in all the school books. But I don’t think people understand that every invasion, every war, every campaign, was accompanied by slaughter, a slaughter always of the most talented people in the country. So these wars, apart from everything else, led to a tremendous intellectual depletion of the country… That was ruin not by an act of nature, but by the hand of man. It is so painful that few Indians have begun to deal with it. It’s much easier to deal with British imperialism. That is a familiar topic, in India and Britain. What is much less familiar is the ravaging of India before the British. What happened from 1000 A.D. on, really, is such a wound that it is almost impossible to face. Certain wounds are so bad that they can’t be written about. You deal with that kind of pain by hiding from it. You retreat from reality… What I was saying is that you cannot deal with a wound so big. I do not think, for example, that people like the Incas of Peru or the native people of Mexico have ever got over their defeat by the Spaniards. In both places, the head was cut off…”
“‘Fractured past’ is too polite a way to describe India’s calamitous millennium. The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims ‘arriving’ in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees. The architectural evidence-the absence of Hindu monuments in the north-is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before.”
PROMOTION OF NEGATIONIST WRITING
“As a student of India’s history, ancient as well as medieval, I could see
quite clearly that they [Negationist-Marxist-Nehruvian Historians] were playing the Goebbelsian game of the Big Lie. But they could not be countered because they had come to dominate the academia and control the mass media during the heyday of the Nehru dynasty.”
—Sita Ram Goel
“The mention made by Maulana Abdul Hai of Hindu temples turned into mosques is only the tip of an iceberg. The iceberg itself lies submerged in the writings of medieval Muslim historians, accounts of foreign travellers and the reports of the Archaeological Survey of India. A hue and cry has been raised in the name of secularism and national integration whenever the iceberg has chanced to surface, in spite of hectic efforts to keep it suppressed. Marxist politicians masquerading as historians have been the major contributors to this conspiracy of silence.
“Muslim politicians and scholars in present-day India resent any reference whatsoever to the destruction of Hindu temples in medieval times… There was, however, a time, not so long ago, when their predecessors viewed the same performance as an act of piety and proclaimed it with considerable pride in inscriptions and literary compositions… Whatever evidence the ‘ Hindu communalists’ cite in this context comes entirely from Islamic sources, epigraphic and literary.”
—Sita Ram Goel
“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 pwill go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms.”
“Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib [father of Irfan Habib] launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict…”
“The Aligarh school has been emulated on a large scale. Soon its torch was taken over by Marxist historians, who were building a reputation for unscrupulous history-rewriting in accordance with the party-line.”
“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.”
—Koenraad Elst
Negationism with respect to Islamic conquest of India, and the consequent terrible atrocities committed for about a millennium, comprises the following tactics by the Nehruvian-Marxist historians and Left-Fiberals (Fake Liberals): (1)Simply deny or rubbish the facts. (2)Make sweeping assertions without sufficient evidence, or even despite the evidence to the contrary. (3)Suppress or distort or purposely misinterpret the facts of history for supposedly noble cause of communal harmony—as if the people are fools, and the truth would not be known. (4)Where the position is indefensible, deny the motive, and attribute the causes to something else. (5)Where the evidence of the historical facts stare you in the face, and it is impossible to ignore or suppress or misinterpret the same, try and minimise those facts, and try to pass them on as outliers, exceptional or one-off. (6)Where none of these dishonest tactics can work, try whitewashing. (7)Where even whitewashing is not possible, try whataboutery—if Muslim invaders were so, what about …; and try and show the other party in worse light. (8)If none of these may work, try invectives: the party daring to question the negationists is fascist and/or racist and/or communalist—in a true-blue Marxist-Communist style of labelling and abusing their opposers.
BLATANT EXAMPLES OF NEGATIONISM IN INDIA
Here are telling examples from Arun Shourie’s book ‘Eminent Historians’ :
“Their [Marxist-Negationist historians like Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Suraj Bhan, RS Sharma, etc.] deceitful role in Ayodhya [Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid controversy]…was just symptomatic. For fifty years this bunch has been suppressing facts and inventing lies. How concerned they pretend to be today about the objective of ICHR— to promote objective and rational research into events of our past! How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal Government [Board of Secondary Education Circular] in 1989 which ‘Outlook’ itself had quoted—’Muslim rule [in India]should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned’? But incorporating their wholesale fabrications of the destruction of Buddhist Vihars, about the non-existent ‘Aryan invasion’, that is mandatory—to question [these liars] is communal, chauvinist…”
The following extracts are from Arun Shourie’s book ‘Eminent Historians’ and his b log:
Concerned teachers in West Bengal have been so kind as to send me the circular relating to textbooks for class IX dated 28 April, 1989. It is issued by the West Bengal Secondary Board. It is in Bengali, and carries the number ‘Syl/89/1’. ‘All the West Bengal Government recognised secondary school Headmasters are being informed,’ it begins, ‘that in History textbooks recommended by this Board for Class IX the following amendments to the chapter on the medieval period have been decided after due discussions and review by experts… The accompanying pages contain two columns: aushuddho —impurity, or error—and shuddho …’
[Select Samples:]
Book : Bharat Katha…
Page 140: Aushuddho : “In Sindhudesh the Arabs did not describe Hindus as Kafir. They had banned cow-slaughter.” Shuddho : “Delete, ‘They had banned cow-slaughter’.”
Page 141 : Aushuddho — “Fourthly, using force to destroy Hindu temples was also an expression of aggression. Fifthly, forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema.” Shuddho : though the column reproduces the sentences only from “Fourthly….”, the Board directs that the entire matter from “Secondly…. to ulema” be deleted.
…
Book : Bharatvarsher Itihash…
Page 89: Aushuddho : “Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion.” Shuddho : “There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud.” That is, no reference to killing, no reference to forcible conversions.
Page 89: Aushuddho : “He looted valuables worth 2 crore dirham from the Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.”
Shuddho : “Delete ‘and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.'” Page 112: Aushuddho : “Hindu-Muslim relations of the medieval ages is a very sensitive issue. The non- believers had to embrace Islam or death.” Shuddho : All matter on pages 112-13 to be deleted.
…
Book: Bharuter Itihash, by Shobhankar Chattopadhyaya, published by Narmada Publishers.
Page 181 : Aushuddho : “To prevent Hindu women from being seen by Muslims, they were directed to remain indoors.” Shuddho :- Delete.
…
Book: Itihasher Kahini, by Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, published by B. B. Kumar.
Page 154: Aushuddho : “As dictated by Islam, there were three options for non-Muslims : get yourself converted to Islam; pay jaziya; accept death. In an Islamic State non-Muslims had to accept one of these three options.” Shuddho : Delete.
…
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by P. Maiti, Sreedhar Prakashini.
Page 139: Ashuddho : “There was a sense of aristocratic superiority in the purdah system. That is why upper-class Hindus adopted this system from upper-class Muslims. Another opinion has it that purdah came into practice to save Hindu women from Muslims. Most probably, purdah came into vogue because of both factors.” Shuddho : delete.
…
The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on “Aurangzeb’s policy on religion”. Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule—to spread the sway of Islam—are directed to be excised from the book…
Book : Swadesho Shobhyota, by Dr. P. K. Basu and S. B. Ghatak, Abhinav Prakashan.
Page 145: Ashuddho : “Apart from this, because Islam used extreme inhuman means to establish itself in India, this became an obstacle for the coming together of Indian and Islamic cultures.” Shuddho : Delete.
…
In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam!
Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.
Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the scream, “Communal rewriting of history”.
But there isn’t just whitewash of Islam. For after Islam came another great emancipatory ideology: Marxism–Leninism.
The teachers furnish extracts from the textbook for Class V.
“…. in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and in other East European countries, the workers and peasants are ruling the country after capturing power, whereas in U.S.A., England, France and Germany the owners of mills and factories are ruling the country.”
“…. after the Revolution in Russia the first exploitation-free society was established.”
“…. Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated man with honour and equality….”
“Thus, not just whitewash, there is hogwash too…”
Wrote Dr BR Ambedkar : “There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans. Islam came out as the enemy of the ‘But’. The word ‘But’ as everybody knows, is the Arabic word and means an idol… The [Islamic] mission to break the idols thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went… The Mussalman invaders sacked the Buddhist universities of Nalanda, Vikramshila, Jagaddala, Odantapuri to name only a few. They razed to the ground Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. A very large number were killed outright by the Muslim commanders. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians themselves…”
Arun Shourie, however, states: “But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus… Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate their concoction…”
The following is based on Arun Shourie’s “Eminent Historians”. Wrote Satish Chandra, one of the “eminent” Negationist-Marxist historian of the Nehru-dynasty stable, in an NCERT Class-IX book on ‘Medieval India’ that he authored: “Thus, there was no atmosphere of confrontation between the Sikhs and the Mughal rulers during the period, nor was there any systematic persecution of the Hindus, and hence, no occasion for the Sikhs or any group or sect to stand forth as the champion of the Hindus against religious prosecution…” In sharp contrast, Sri Guru Nanak, a witness to the Mughal mayhem, cried to God: “Having lifted Islam to the head, You (God) have engulfed Hindustan in dread… Such cruelties have been inflicted [by the Mughals], and yet Your mercy remains unmoved… O’Lord, these dogs have destroyed this diamond-like Hindustan…”
“…that the spirit of perverting history to suit political views is no longer confined to politicians, but has definitely spread even among professional historians… It is painful to mention, though impossible to ignore, the fact that there is a distinct and conscious attempt to rewrite the whole chapter of the bigotry and intolerance of the Muslim rulers towards Hindu religion… A history written under the auspices of the Indian National Congress sought to repudiate the charge that the Muslim rulers broke Hindu temples, and asserted that they were the most tolerant in matters of religion. Following in its footsteps, a noted historian has sought to exonerate Mahmud of Ghazni’s bigotry and fanaticism, and several writers in India have come forward to defend Aurangzeb against Jadunath Sarkar’s charge of religious intolerance…”
—RC Majumdar
NEGATIONISM & CREATIVITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHY: WHY UNPROFESSIONAL & DANGEROUS
People like Nehru had strangely erroneous notions on how history should or should not be written. If writing of what actually happened in the past could adversely affect (in their wrong opinion) the present, then give it a spin—that was their view. So, be creative with history: bury or bend or ignore facts, if so warranted—a thoroughly mistaken notion! Why? First , it is a false notion to presume such adverse effects. Second , if different writers presume or interpret differently, should each write a distorted history in his or her own way? Third , what really happened would anyway be known through other sources, so why play with facts. When original sources and the writings by the contemporaries are available—those who actually witnessed what happened and wrote about them, like Alberuni and others—why would those who care for history be misled by today’s creative writers of history? Fourth , it is an insult to the intelligence of the general public and readers to be presumed to be gullible enough to swallow wholesale what these creative writers dish out. Fifth , it is thoroughly unprofessional to take such liberties with writing of history. It is unwise to try and mould history to suit one’s ideological bend or bias, or for political or religious or social or cultural purposes.
Truth should not be fiddled with. People should not be taken for granted or taken for fools that they would believe the junk written—like Nehru thought, or Nehruvian-leftist-Marxist historians or the fundamentalists think. There has to be professionalism in writing of history. If history is painful or unpalatable, so be it. It is better to know the truth, whether it is good or bad, palatable or obnoxious.
For example, should one obliterate from history or dilute or misrepresent the facts of the 1984-Anti-Sikh attacks; or the 2002-Godhra Train-Coach burning; or 2002-Post-Godhra Riots, just because they are unpalatable, or may cause enmity among communities?
People must learn to face the truth, and learn from history. In fact, the sense of what is good and what is bad also changes from time to time: should history then keep getting re-written? It is a misunderstanding of what the history-writing is all about, and silly, immature socialistic- leftist-‘holier-and-wiser-than-thou’-Nehruvian notions of “what is good for the people that leads to writing of creative and negationist history.
“It would normally be expected that historical writing on Muslim rule in medieval India would tell the tale of this discrimination and the sufferings of the people, their forced conversions, destruction of their temples, enslavement of their women and children, candidly and repeatedly mentioned by medieval Muslim chroniclers themselves. But curiously enough, in place of bringing such facts to light there is a tendency to gloss over them or even suppress them…
“History books are not written only in India; these are written in neighbouring countries also, and what is tried to be concealed here for the sake of [erroneous interpretation of the notion of] national integration, is mentioned with pride in the neighbouring Muslim countries…
“And yet some writers delude themselves with the mistaken belief that they can change their country’s history by distorting it, or brain-wash generations of young students, or humour fundamentalist politicians through such unethical exercise. To judge what happened in the past in the context of today’s cultural milieu and consciously hide the truth, is playing politics with history. Let history be accepted as a matter of fact without putting it to any subjective interpretations. Yesterday’s villains cannot be made today’s heroes, or, inversely, yesterday’s Islamic heroes cannot be made into robbers ransacking temples just for treasures. Nor can the medieval monuments be declared as national monuments as suggested in some naive ‘secularist’ quarters. They represent vandalism. No true Indian can be proud of such desecrated and indecorous evidence of ‘composite culture’…”
—KS Lal
“Gautier, in his book A History of India as it Happened—not as it has been written , tears into the questionable narratives of Marxist historians and quotes many examples of negationism. He says: ‘We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India. Finally, Gautier explains why negationism must be challenged. He says ‘it is not about vengeance, or of reawakening old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes ’.”
—A Surya Prakash
What happened centuries ago is no reflection on people now. Notions have changed. You insult people by twisting the facts. Should the plunder that Qasim, Ghazni, Ghori and other Islamic hordes carried out be swept under the carpet lest it should hurt the Muslims. If Hindu kings did something atrocious in the past, does it mean it should be suppressed, lest it should hurt the Hindus. Christians engaged in terrible atrocities during their campaigns of conversion, inquisitions and colonisation, including the Goa Inquisition. Should it be swept under the carpet? Germans educate their children on Nazi atrocities and holocaust—lest those horrid things be repeated . There has been the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission ” in South Africa to come out with the facts on the apartheid, express regrets, and provide for healing of old wounds. Truth must be known. Then only can one come to terms with the reality and ensure the mistakes are not repeated in the future.
