Sita Ram Goel

To me, Dharma had always been a matter of moral norms, external rules and regulations, do's and don'ts, enforced on life by an act of will. Now I was made to see Dharma as a multi dimensional movement of man's inner law of being, his psychic evolution, his spiritual growth, and his spontaneous building of an outer life for himself and the community in which he lived.

Sita Ram Goel (Devanāgarī: सीता राम गोयल, Sītā Rām Goyal) (16 October 1921 – 3 December 2003) was an Indian historian, author and publisher.

Quotes

Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief... Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense.

My heart sinks at the very idea of such a sinister scheme being sponsored by an educational agency set up by the government of a democratic country. It is an insidious attempt at thought-control and brainwashing.... The Ministry of Education of the Government of India has directed the education departments in the States to extend this experiment to school-level text-books of history. And this perverse programme of suppressing truth and spreading falsehood is being sponsored by a state which inscribes Satyameva Jayate on its emblem.

But what has happened is that the Indian State actively patronizes the exercise aimed at making all religions mean the same things, and persecutes those who defy the exercise. A whole army of 'secularist' scribes in the media and the academia has been employed and paid handsomely for whitewashing Islam and Christianity so that whatever is bigoted in the scriptures and blood-soaked histories of these creeds, is carefully exorcised.

No newspaper or periodical worth its name in India will publish what I write in the lines that follow. Not because the subject matter is seditious..., but simply because it defies the Emergency imposed on this country by Muslim theologians and politicians backed by 'secularist' intellectuals and politicians and riotous Muslim mobs and plain terrorists.

Confucianism also came from the same deepest source of the spirit, Taoism also came from the same source from which Sanatana Dharma springs, from which Jainism springs, from which Vaishnavism springs. All these are different names of the same spiritual message for mankind. I also talked to some people in Japan in order to find out if Buddhism came in conflict with Shintoism which is their ancient religion. They also said, no, the two religions never came into conflict. The two religions are co-existing in mutual harmony till today.

My only request is that you will not quote me at random, or selectively, or out of context.

All religions were equal. But Islam was more equal.

It is true that intellectuals who take pains to study every subject from its sources, are few and far between in this country. But it is also true that an intellectual culture cannot grow in an atmosphere where the media is controlled by purveyors of palpable falsehoods or bullied into abject surrender by the thought police of Nehruvian Secularism.

But that is about all that can be said in commendation of the scheme sanctioned by the National Integration Council and sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The rest is recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all.

They told me confidentially that my case was receiving attention from the Prime Minister himself.

• The RSS is the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history. (1989)
  The RSS is leading Hindu society into a trap from which it may not recover. (1994),
  Hindu society is doomed unless this RSS-BJP movement perishes. (2003).
  • Quotes by S.R. Goel on the RSS. As quoted in [1]

• Hindu society is an underground society.
  • Sita Ram Goel, quoted in Ayodhya Forever, K. Elst, 2023

• Our only weapon is the truth.
  • As quoted in Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015. Ch.9 Things to do for a Hindu Government

• It is my considered opinion that the so called Kashmir problem, we have been facing, since 1947 has never been viewed in a historical perspective. That is why it has defied solution so far, and its end is not in sight in the near future. Politicians at the helm of affairs during this nearly half a century have been living from hand to mouth and are waiting for Pakistan to face them with a fait accompli. Once againg they are out to hand over Kashmir and its people to the butchers who have devastated this fair land and destroyed its rich culture. ...
  It is therefore high time that we renounce this ritual and have a look at the problem in a historical perspective. I should like to warn that histories of Kashmir written by Kashmiri Hindus in modern times are worse than useless for this purpose. I have read almost all of them, only to be left wondering at the piteous state to which the Hindu mind in Kashmir has been reduced. I am not taking these histories into account except for bits and pieces which fall into the broad pattern. ...
  What distinguishes the Hindu rulers of Kashmir from Hindu rulers elsewhere is that they continued to recruit in their army Turks from Central Asia without realizing that the Turks had become Islamicized and as such were no longer mere wage earners. One of Kashmir's Hindu rulers Harsha (1089-1101 CE) was persuaded by his Muslim favourites to plunder temple properties and melt down icons made of precious metal. Apologists of Islam have been highlighting this isolated incident in order to cover up the iconoclastic record of Islam not only in Kashmir but also in the rest of Bharatvarsha. At the same time they conceal the fact that Kashmir passed under the heel of Islam not as a result of the labours of its missionaries but due to a coup staged by an Islamicised army. ...
  Small wonder that balance of forces in Kashmir should have continued to tilt in favour of Islamic imperialism till the last Hindu has been hounded out of his ancestral homeland. Small wonder that the hoodlums strut around not only in the valley but in the capital city of Delhi with airs of injured innocence. Small wonder that the Marxist-Muslim combine of scribes who dominate the media blame Jagmohan for arranging an overnight and enmasse exodus of the Hindus from the valley. (They cannot forgive Jagmohan for bringing back Kashmir to India at a time when the combine was hoping that Pakistan would face India with an accomplished fact.) Small wonder that what Arun Shourie has aptly described as the "Formula Factory" - the Nayars, the Puris, the Kotharis, the Dhars, the Haksars, the Tarkundes - should be busy devising ways for handing over the Kashmir Hindus to their age-old oppressors.
  • Kashmir: The Problem is Muslim Extremism by Sita Ram Goel

1980s

• Recently I was traveling in the Far East and met some Buddhist monks from China. I said to them: 'Buddhism came to China from outside. But you had ancient religions of your own. You had Confucianism. You had Taoism. Did Buddhism come in conflict with Confucianism, or Taoism?' They said: 'No, never.' There was not a single instance of conflict because Confucianism also came from the same deepest source of the spirit, because Taoism also came from the same source from which Sanatana Dharma springs, from which Jainism springs, from which Vaishnavism springs. All these are different names of the same spiritual message for mankind. I also talked to some people in Japan in order to find out if Buddhism came in conflict with Shintoism which is their ancient religion. They also said, no, the two religions never came into conflict. The two religions are co-existing in mutual harmony till today. I met a taxi driver who was quite an intelligent man. He said: 'I am both a Shintoist and a Buddhist.' So also in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, in the whole ancient world, all over Asia and Europe.
  • The Emerging National Vision, 4 December 1983, Calcutta.

• Kautilya has elaborated in his Arthashastra the psychological principles which alienate some people from their own society, and lead them straight into the lap of those who are out to subvert that society. The first group of people who can be alienated are the maneevarga, that is, those who are conceited and complain that they have been denied what is their due on account of birth, brains or qualities of character. (...) the Church was instinctively employing the psychological principles propounded by Kautilya. ...Christian missionaries could find quite a few and easy converts amongst these upper classes precisely because the Church had declared war on their society. ... By the time the French, the British and the Dutch appeared on the Eastern scene, Christianity had been found out in the West for what it had always been in facto power-hungry politics masquerading as religion. The later-day European imperialists, therefore, had only a marginal use for the Christian missionary. He could be used to beguile the natives. But he could not be allowed to dictate the parallel politics of imperialism. ... The field for the Christian politics of conversion has become considerably smaller in Asia due to the resurgence of Islam, and the triumph of Communism... It is only in India, Ceylon and Japan that the missionary continues to practice his profession effectively.
  • Genesis and History of the Politics of Conversion, in Christianity, and Imperialist ideology. 1983.

• The story of how anti-­Hindu laws were enacted... is long. In summary form, it consists of 1) banishing Brahmins on pain of being made prisoners on the galleys; 2) confiscating the properties of those Hindus who sent their families to neighbouring lands for fear of conversion; 3) prohibiting the performance of Hindu rites and ceremonies; 4) banning Hindu priests and preachers from doing their religious duties; 5) compelling Hindus to attend church services and listen to Christian doctrines; 6) depriving Hindus of their traditional rights and privileges in village communities; 7) forcing the baptism of Hindu orphans; and 8) ordering Hindus not to ride on horseback or in palanquins. The laws were so designed as to humiliate the Hindus in every conceivable manner... Missionary records, however, refer to many famous Hindu temples being converted into churches at these places... Even private temples in Hindu homes were prohibited and “transgressors” were severely punished...
  • St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission. 1985.

Hindu Society under Siege (1981, revised 1992)

• Thus Hindu society not only presents itself as a prey to these exclusive, intolerant and imperialist ideologies but also acts as a buffer between them. India is secular because India is Hindu. It can be added as a corollary that India is a democracy also because India is Hindu. If Hindu society permits this free for all any further, the days of Secularism and Democracy in this country are numbered. Let the Hindus unite and save themselves, their democratic polity, their secular state, and their Sanatana Dharma for a new cycle of civilization, not only for themselves but also the world.

• Greek historians who accompanied and followed Alexander tell us that before this adventurer led his short-lived raid against the republics on the Punjab and Sindh, only two other foreign invaders had had the courage to cast covetous eyes on India. Queen Semiramis of Babylonia in the 8th Century and Cyrus the Great of Iran in the 6th Century BC attacked India with vast armies but were defeated at the borders and made to flee with very few survivors. Plutarch leaves us in no doubt that Alexander himself had to beat a hasty retreat from the banks of the river Beas which, baffled by the brave resistance from a series of small republics, his armies refused to cross. And his successor in East Asia, Seleucus Nicator, was soon humbled and not only made to cede conquered Indian territory but also pay homage to the Indian emperor by a matrimonial alliance. But the wheel of time turns. The Hindus lost some of their vigour and vitality and vigilance, and neglected the art of warfare which was acquiring new dimensions in neighbouring lands. The Scythians, the Kushanas and the Hunas who stormed in after the disintegration of the Mauryan and the Gupta empires did succeed in conquering and ruling over large parts of northern and western India. This spell of foreign rule, however, was rather short-lived.

• Another side of the same strategy has been worked out to neutralise, paralyse and blacken or pamper different sections of Hindu society so that the road is cleared for the forward march of Islamism. Some salient features of this secondary strategy can be outlined as follows: 1. The concept of Secularism which is enshrined in the Constitution of India and which has become the most sacred slogan for all our political parties should be distorted, misinterpreted and misused to the maximum to block out the least little expression of Hindu culture in the state apparatus and public life of India; 2. The terms “communal” and “communalism” which have become terms of abuse in India’s political parlance, should be carefully cultivated and more and more mystified to malign all those organisations, institutions and parties which do not serve Islamism, directly and/or indirectly; (...)

• This influx of Arab money is a natural and inevitable phenomenon because, in the last analysis, Islamism is only another name for Arab imperialism which had, at one stage of its history, pillaged and populated with its own progeny many foreign lands and which even today keeps many non-Arab nations spiritually enslaved.

• India provides a particularly soft target. The Christian missions are welcome to open their purse strings in the Islamic and Communist countries of Asia. But the missions there are barred from winning new converts. Hindu India, drowned in poverty and suffering from cultural self-forgetfulness, is the only country in Asia which provides the quid pro quo.

• Islamism immediately revived the lost cause of Urdu behind the smoke-screen of this Communist campaign against Hindi. It lauded loudly when progressive Urdu poets like Firaq Gorakhpuri lampooned Hindi in a language which was largely unprintable. Simultaneously, Islamism started parading Urdu as the great language of culture and refinement which will be lost to India for good if Urdu was allowed to go under. No Communist came forward to examine this “culture and refinement as a legacy of decadent Muslim courts and a frivolous Muslim aristocracy. No Communist questioned the heavy Persianisation and Arabicisation of Urdu which made it incomprehensible even to educated people, leave alone the man in Chandni Chowk. The recognition of Urdu as a second language has today become a sine qua non of Secularism.

• That brings us to the second subject where the United Front between Islamism and Communism scored a notable victory-the subject of Secularism. They joined hands to jibe at Secularism till the concept was totally distorted and became a synonym for Islamic imperialism. Secularism as a state policy had been evolved in the modern West which had become sick of the contending theocratic claims of Christian churches. Theocracy had been as alien to Hindu state and society as it had been intrinsic to Christian and Islamic state and society. Secularism was, therefore, nothing new for the Hindus. ....

• But the death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which can no longer be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies.

How I became a Hindu (1982)

• To me, Dharma had always been a matter of moral norms, external rules and regulations, do's and don'ts, enforced on life by an act of will. Now I was made to see Dharma as a multi dimensional movement of man's inner law of being, his psychic evolution, his spiritual growth, and his spontaneous building of an outer life for himself and the community in which he lived.

• I had come back at last, come back to my spiritual home from which I had wandered away in self forgetfulness. But this coming back was no atavistic act. On the contrary, it was a reawakening to my ancestral heritage which was waiting all along for me to lay my claim on its largesses. It was also the heritage of all mankind as proved by the seers, sages and mystics of many a time and clime. It spoke in different languages to different people. To me it spoke in the language of Hindu spirituality and Hindu culture at their highest.

• The 16 August, 1946 communal riots broke out in Calcutta after a few days. I would have been killed by a Muslim mob in the early hours of that day as I walked back towards my home from the coffee house which I had found closed. My fluent Urdu and my Western dress saved me. My wife and two year old son had joined me a few days earlier in a small room in a big house bordering on a large Muslim locality. On the evening of the 17th we had to vacate that house and scale a wall at the back to escape murderous Muslim mobs advancing with firearms. Had not the army moved in immediately after, I would not have lived to write what I am writing today.

• I saw quite a bit of the Great Calcutta Killing of August 16-17, 1946 with my own eyes. There were a large number of dead bodies lying on the streets. There were many more floating down the Hooghly. I saw an extensive destruction of private and public property by fire as well as by mob fury. The death and desolation all around moved me to despair about human nature itself. But I did not try to find the causes of this holocaust or to fix its responsibility on the political movement which had provoked it. Instead, I wrote a long article, The Devil Dance In Calcutta, in which I held both Hindus and Muslims equally responsible for this meaningless massacre.

• Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.

• In my earlier days I had read the biography of Sri Ramakrishna written by Romain Rolland. I had read the talk which Vivekananda had delivered long ago about "My Master". I had visited Sri Ramakrishna's room at Dakshineshwar. I had also seen a Bengali film on his life. But what brought me into an intimate and living contact with this great mystic and bhakta and shakta and advaitin, was his Kathamrita. He had not used a single abstraction nor discussed any of the problems which pass as philosophy. His talks embodied expressions of a concrete consciousness which had dropped every trace of the dirt and dross and inertia which characterise what is known as normal human consciousness. The metaphors which sprang spontaneously from this purified consciousness were matchless in their aptness and illumined in a few words the knotted problems which many voluminous works had failed to solve. I was now having my first intimations of immortality towards which Kabir and Nanak and Sri Garibdas had inclined me earlier.

• Today, I view Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as a bloated Brown Sahib, and Nehruism as the combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies Islam, Christianity, White Man's Burden, and Communism that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions. And I do not have the least doubt in my mind that if India is to live, Nehruism must die. Of course, it is already dying under the weight of its sins against the Indian people, their country, their society, their economy, their environment, and their culture. What I plead is that a conscious rejection of Nehruism in all its forms will hasten its demise, and save us from the mischief which it is bound to create further if it is allowed to linger.

• I have no use for a Secularism which treats Hinduism as just another religion, and puts it on par with Islam and Christianity. For me, this concept of Secularism is a gross perversion of the concept which arose in the modem West as a revolt against Christianity and which should mean, in the Indian context, a revolt against Islam as well.

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1982, 1994)

• Some people are prone to confuse Islam with its victims, that is, the Muslims, and condemn the latter at the same time as they come to know the crudities of the former. This is a very serious confusion, which should be avoided by all those who believe in building up a broad-based human brotherhood as opposed to narrow, sectarian, self-centred, and chauvinistic nationalism or communalism.

• But so far as the Hindus are concerned, this period was a prolonged spell of darkness which ended only when the Marathas and the Jats and the Sikhs broke the back of Islamic imperialism in the middle of the 18th century.

• Hindus were so much impoverished that their wives had to work as servants in Muslim houses. The wives and children of Hindu merchants were kept as hostages at the capital to ensure that they brought regular supplies, which they had to sell at fixed prices to the Muslim rulers.

• The whole tenor of this tendentious scheme for "national integration" becomes fully explicit in the following fiat from the Ministry of Education: “Characterisation of the medieval period as a dark period or as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden. Historians cannot identify Muslims as rulers and Hindus as subjects. The state cannot be described as a theocracy, without examining the actual influence of religion. No exaggeration of the role of religion in political conflicts is permitted… Nor should there be neglect and omission of trends and processes of assimilation and synthesis.”

• We can now return to the NCERT guideline which proclaims that the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in medieval India shall be regarded as political rather than religious. There is no justification for such a characterisation of the conflict. The Muslims at least were convinced that they were waging a religious war against the Hindu infidels. The conflict can be regarded as political only if the NCERT accepts the very valid proposition that Islam has never been a religion, and that it started and has remained a political ideology of terrorism with unmistakable totalitarian trends and imperialist ambitions. The first premises as well as the procedures of Islam bear a very close resemblance to those of Communism and Nazism. Allah is only the predecessor of the Forces of Production invoked by the Communists, and of the Aryan Race invoked by the Nazis.
  My heart sinks at the very idea of such a sinister scheme being sponsored by an educational agency set up by the government of a democratic country. It is an insidious attempt at thought-control and brainwashing. Having been a student of these processes in Communist countries, I have a strong suspicion that this document has also sprung from the same sort of mind. This mind has presided for long over the University Grants Commission and other educational institutions, and has been aided and abetted by the residues of Islamic imperialism masquerading as secularists.

• The only way which this ruling sees out of what it calls “the communal strife” is that Hindu history should be substantially diluted and tailored to the needs of Islamic imperialism, and that Muslim history should be given a liberal coat of whitewash or even made to pass muster as national history. This has been the main plank in the platform for “national integration”. Hitherto this Experiment with Untruth was confined mainly to Muslim and Communist “historians” who have come to control the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and even the University Grants Commission. Now it has been taken up by the National Integration Council. The Ministry of Education of the Government of India has directed the education departments in the States to extend this experiment to school-level text-books of history. And this perverse programme of suppressing truth and spreading falsehood is being sponsored by a state which inscribes Satyameva Jayate on its emblem.

• But that is about all that can be said in commendation of the scheme sanctioned by the National Integration Council and sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The rest is recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all.

• A healthy and humanitarian system of education would have placed all these facts before our young men and women coming from the Muslim community, and put to them the following proposition: These are the words and deeds credited to Muslim kings, saints, and theologians by the historians of Islam in medieval India;.... we do not want you to evaluate these words and deeds and tenets in terms of any non-Islamic religion or culture; our only appeal to you is to evaluate them in terms of natural human reason, man's natural moral sense, and elementary principles of human brotherhood without resort to the casuistry marshalled by the mullahs and sufis, or the apologetics propped up by the Aligarh and Stalinist schools of historians...

• It is this common consciousness of its history which prevents Hindu society from accepting the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Bahmanis, the Sharqis, the Sayyids, the Lodis, and the Mughals as native dynasties on par with the Mauryas, the Sungas, the Guptas, the Cholas, the Maukharis, the Pandyas, the Palas, the Rashtrakutas, the Yadavas, the Kaktiyas, the Hoysalas, the Sangamas, the Saluvas, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jats. Hindu society can never concede that Jaypala Shahiya of Kabul, Maharani Nayakidevi of Gujarat, Prithiviraj Chauhan of Delhi, Jayachandra Gahadvad of Kanauj, Singhanadeva of Devagiri, Vikrama Pandya of Madura, Prolaya Nayak of Andhra, Harihar and Bukka and Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, Maharanas Kumbha and Sanga and Pratap, Shivaji, Banda Bahadur, Maharajas Surajmal and Ranjit Singh, who resisted the Islamic invaders, were petty local chieftains conspiring for personal gains. Hindu society honours these heroes as freedom fighters against Islamic imperialism, in the same way as it honours its freedom fighters against British imperialism.

• ...except for the NCERT experts who specialise in making molehills of mountains, and vice versa.

• Looked at from the point of view of Islam, it was a dazzling period indeed. Islam acquired an empire over a large country full of unrivalled riches. Islam had the immense satisfaction of 1) sending millions of accursed kãfirs to hell in a continuous jihãd, 2) demolishing and desecrating thousands of idolatrous places of worship and pilgrimage, 3) killing thousands of Brahmins and Bhikshus and forcing the rest to eat beef, 4) collecting vast amounts of booty and distributing it among the mu’mins according to rules laid down by the Prophet, 5) capturing millions of men and women and children and selling them into slavery and concubinage in the far-flung Islamic world, 6) usurping power and privilege over a vast population which was reduced to serfdom, and 7) proving the superiority of Islamic scriptures by the power of the sword.

• In the records referring to the rise of Vijayanagara, the Marathas, and the Sikhs, the religious motive is brought into a sharper focus. These records leave us in no doubt that the defence of Hindu Dharma was uppermost in the minds of Madhava Vidyaranya, Samartha Ramdas, and Guru Tegh Bahadur. The purpose for which the sword was unsheathed by Harihar and Bukka, Shivaji and the Sikhs, becomes quite clear in many poems written in praise of these heroes by a number of Hindu poets. The purpose, we are told, was to save the cow, the Brahmin, the šikhã, the sûtra, the honour of Hindu women, and the sanctity of Hindu places of worship.

• On the other hand, many Muslim historians of medieval India have left for posterity some very detailed, many a time day-to-day, accounts of what happened during the endless encounters between Hindus and Muslims. The dominant theme in these accounts is of mu’mins (Muslims) martyred; of kãfirs (Hindus infidels) despatched to hell; of cities and citadels sacked; of citizens massacred; of Brahmins killed or forced to eat beef; of temples razed to the ground and mosques raised on their sites; of idols broken and their pieces taken to imperial headquarters for being trodden underfoot by the faithful on the steps of the main mosque; of booty captured and carried away on elephants, camels, horses, bullock carts, on the backs of sheep and goats, and even on the heads of Hindu prisoners of war; of beautiful Hindu maidens presented to the sultans and distributed among Muslim generals and nobles; of Hindu men, women and children sold into slavery in markets all over the Islamic world; and of kãfirs converted to the true faith at the point of the sword. The Muslim historians treat every war waged against the Hindus as a jihãd as enjoined by the Prophet and the Pious Caliphs.

• The evidence ... is always an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi. For instance, Aurangzeb’s petty donations to 2-3 Hindu temples patronized by some pet Hindu courtiers, are played up with great fanfare. But his systematic demolition of thousands of Hindu temples and defilement of countless images of Gods and Goddesses, throughout his long reign, is never mentioned. Such pitiable attempts at pitting molehills of munificence against mountains of malevolence, go against all sense of proportion in judging a whole period of Indian history.

• The magnitude of crimes credited to Muslim monarchs by the medieval Muslim historians, was beyond measure. With a few exceptions, Muslim kings and commanders were monsters who stopped at no crime when it came to their Hindu subjects. But what strikes as more significant is the broad pattern of those crimes. The pattern is that of a jihãd in which the ghãzîs of Islam 1) invade infidel lands; 2) massacre as many infidel men, women, and children, particularly Brahmins, as they like after winning a victory; 3) capture the survivors to be sold as slaves; 4) plunder every place and person; 5) demolish idolatrous places of worship and build mosques in their places; and 6) defile idols which are flung into public squares or made into steps leading to mosques.

• When Alexander had asked a Brahmin as to what they taught which inspired Hindu warriors to such high heroism, the Brahmin had replied in one sentence – “We teach our people to live with honour.”

• The voice which a Valmiki or a Vyasa would have raised for resistance to and destruction of the dasyu, marauder, and the ãtatãyî, gangster, is missing. Samartha Ramdas is the only exception.

• In this sterile statecraft, centred on the politics of the maNDalayoni, one’s neighbour was always an enemy, and the enemy of an enemy always a friend! Hindu princes, therefore, failed to hang together in the face of a common calamity. In the event, they were hanged separately.

• This vast land which Islam has dismembered in due course into the separate states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Hindustan, and Bangladesh had been a single indivisible whole since times immemorial. Bharatavarsha had been termed by the ancients as the cradle of varNãšrama-dharma, witness to the wheel of the caturyugas, and the kShetra for chakravãrtya, spiritual as well as political. This historical memory and cultural tradition was alive as late as the imperial Guptas. Kalidasa had clothed it in immortal poetry in his far-famed RaghuvaMša.

• The first need of the situation was a centre round which Hindus could rally, and from which Hindu resistance to the Islamic invasion could be directed. The effectiveness of such a centre was demonstrated first in Mewar under Maharana Pratap, secondly in the South under Vijayanagara, thirdly in Maharashtra under Shivaji, and lastly in the Punjab under Banda Bahadur. But these centres crystallised too late. A nationwide centre established earlier could have contained Islamic imperialism at the borders of Bharatavarsha, or defeated and driven it out from wherever it had secured a foothold. Chandragupta, Vikramaditya, and Skandagupta had headed such a centre, and saved the motherland by hurling back the barbarians as soon as they came.

• I am not commenting on the contradictions, prevarications, pretensions, and plain lies contained in these lines from a “learned historian” whose monograph was published by a prestigious British publisher. I am sure the readers will see for themselves the sheer scoundrelism of this apologetics. What I want to show in these quotations is the mind which the secularists in India have swallowed - hook, line, and sinker. It is this mind which our secularists have been cultivating over the years. And I am absolutely sure that the NCERT is out to patronise this mind.

• But in that case politics as well as religion miss their common parlance meanings, and become esoteric terms which scoundrels and secularists alone can decipher.

• I have never read Max Weber and do not know how he has arrived at the conclusion that “more tribals joined the Hindu mainstream as a result of the Muslim shock than the number of Hindus who were converted to Islam”. Perhaps he had in mind the people of Assam whom Bakhtyar Khalji and a few other Muslim invaders tried to subjugate, or the hill people all over our northern borders whom Muhammad Tughlaq tried to conquer but failed, or the Gonds who fought Akbar under Maharani Durgavati, or the Bhils who fought for freedom under Maharana Pratap, or the Mavlas who joined Shivaji at a later date. But the very fact that these so-called “tribals” fought spontaneously against the Muslim marauders rather than walk over to the winning side goes to prove that they shared a common culture with the rest of the natives.

• Hindu rulers on the eve of Muslim invasion had not totally forgotten the idea of the political unity of India. The ancient tradition enshrined in the Mahabharata and the Puranas and honoured by Indian emperors as late as Samudragupta, namely, that the whole of Bharatavarsha was a cakravartî-kshetra, was still smouldering when many princes joined the Hindu Shahiyas in their fight against Subuktigin. But the tradition had become greatly weakened, though it did not die till 1947 when we accepted Partition and conceded to the aggressor the fruits of his aggression. Of course, the ancient idea of political unity was not the same as that brought in by Islam which has always stood for a monolithic and militarised state serving a system of an incurable fanaticism. Our concept of sãmrajya was derived from Sanãtana Dharma and fostered a true federation of many janapadas enjoying swarãjya, local autonomy, on the basis of swadharma, local tradition and culture. Islam made no contribution to the unity of Bharatavarsha; on the contrary, it seriously damaged the deeper fabric of our national unity and, in the final outcome, dismembered the nation into fragments like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Hindustan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

• It cannot be maintained that Islam did not provide an ample opportunity to Hindu saints, philosophers and princes to understand its true character and role. Before the armies of Islam invaded India, the sufis had settled down in many parts of India, built mosque and khanqahs and started their work of conversion. They were the sappers and miners of Islamic invasions which followed in due course. Moinuddin Chishti was not the first 'saint' of Islam to send out an invitation to an Islamic invader to come and kill the kafirs, desecrate their shrines, and plunder their wealth.

• ...demolition of Hindu temples remained Aurangzeb’s pastime during his long campaign in the South... That was in 1687 AD. In 1690 AD, he ordered destruction of temples at Ellora, Trimbakeshwar, Narasinghpur, and Pandharpur. In 1698 AD, the story was repeated at Bijapur.

• Cow-slaughter at a temple site was a safeguard against Hindus rebuilding it on the same spot.

• Ilyas Shah of Bengal (1339-1379 AD) invaded Nepal and destroyed the temple of Svayambhunath at Kathmandu. He also invaded Orissa, demolished many temples, and plundered many places. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women, and children every year. They demolished and desecrated temples all over South India.

• Thus barring two every short-lived empires under the Khaljis and Muhammad bin Tughlaq… there was no Turkish empire in India. This state of things continued for nearly two centuries and a half till the Mughals established a stable and durable empire in the second half of the sixteenth century A.D.

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

• As one reads the scriptures of Christianity and Islam with a morally alert mind, one starts getting sick of the very sound of word ‘god’ which word is littered all over this literature like dead leaves in autumn. The deeds which are ascribed to or approved of by this God are quite often so cruel and obnoxious as to leave one wondering that if these are the doings of the Divine, what else is there which is left for the Devil to do.

• Sanãtana Dharma stands for self-exploration, self-purification, and self-transcendence.

• The West has repudiated Christianity and returned to rationalism, humanism and universalism, all of which are values cherished and promoted by the Hindu view of life. But the West does not realize that the massive finances which the Christian missions collect over there in the name of doing social service in 'a poor, starved, diseased and illiterate India' is used by the missions for the nefarious work of subverting the only sane society which has survived the depredations of genocidal creeds.

• Monotheism has manufactured a number of hate-filled words - infidel, kãfir, unbeliever, munkir, mushrik, heathen, heretic, hypocrite, polytheist, pantheist, pagan - which raise unbreakable barriers between brother and brother, and which divide the one human family into a number of warring camps.

• That explains why it is the seer and not the scholar who has all along dominated the scene in Sanãtana Dharma. That explains why it is the saint and not the pandit who has always sat at the centre of Hindu society. That explains why it is the mystic and not the man of letters who has ruled the roost in Hindu culture. The most honoured names in Hindu history, above even those of the heroes, are the names of seers, sages, saints, and mystics - Vyasa, Valmiki, Yajnavalkya, the Buddha, Bhagvan Mahavira, Shankara, Ramanuja, Gorakhnath, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsidas, Mira, Ramakrishna, Raman - to mention only the most notable in a galaxy of great names.

• A typical example of such sufism was Shykh Nuruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi (died 1234-35 AD), a disciple of Shykh Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (1144-1234 AD), and one of the founders of the Suhrawardia sufi silsilã in India. He propounded the doctrine of Dîn Panãhî, and presented it to Sultan Iltutmish (1210-36 AD)... Such statements from sufis can be multiplied. Amir Khusru, the dearest disciple of Nizamuddin Awliya (Chishtiyya luminary of Delhi), mourned loudly that if the Hanafi law (which accommodated Hindus as zimmîs) had not come in the way, the very name Hindu would not have survived.

• The confusion has by now become very widespread, and is symbolized by the sanctimonious slogan of sarva-dharma-samabhãva. This slogan was coined by Mahatma Gandhi and included in his MaNgala Prabhãta as one of the sixteen mahãvratas. The result was an unprecedented appeasement of Islam starting with the Mahatma’s support of the Khilafat movement. The Mahatma had believed sincerely that he could touch the heart of Islam and win over the Muslims to nationalism by paying handsome tributes to the Quran and the Prophet. But he also ended as a colossal failure like Kabir and Nanak. In the final upshot, he had to pay the price with his own life, and the nation had to suffer partition of the motherland.

• I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Secularism in its present Indian form is no more than an embodiment of anti-Hindu animus, and is supported by all those who want to destroy Hindu society and culture. Secularism is essentially a political concept which originated and took shape in nineteenth century Europe. ....It was in this atmosphere of revolt against Christianity and its closed culture that the concept of Secularism was evolved and employed in country after country in Europe. The secular power of the State was no longer to be the secular arm of the Church. It was to become secular on its own, that is, a power which secured equal rights to all its citizens without bothering about their beliefs. The Church was separated from the State which was no longer supposed to interfere with the religious life of the citizens, or to discriminate against any citizen on the basis of his on her religion or absence of it. Religion was now to be treated as a purely private matter in which the state was not supposed to pry, and which was not to be projected in public affairs.

• Evaluated by Sanãtana Dharma, Christianity and Islam turn out to be constructs of the outer human mind, drawing upon dark drives of the unregenerate unconscious. Sanãtana Dharma stands for self-exploration, self-purification, and self-transcendence, while Islam and Christianity stand for self-stupefaction, self-righteousness, and self-aggrandizement.

• India had never known a theocratic state till the advent of Islam in this country in the first quarter of the eighth century AD. Hindu Dharma has always been a pluralistic religion. Hindu culture and society too have been pluralistic throughout their hoary history. It was, therefore, impossible for the Hindus to erect an established church or to proclaim a state religion and call upon the State to impose it by force. The Hindu state extended its patronage to all religious sects equally, even when a king and his courtiers adhered to a particular sect in their private lives. Religious strife followed by bloodshed had never blackened the fair face of Hindu society. ...The Hindu experience of a theocratic state was a very painful experience, spread as it was over several centuries. Even so, the Hindus did not learn any lessons in theocracy. The Hindu states which re-emerged under the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jats were secular states....

• It was the same story all over again - music before a mosque, or a pig in a Muslim mohalla, or a private fracas between two toughs belonging to the two communities. The Muslims have never needed a more substantial excuse whenever they are in a nasty mood. Nor has the nasty mood been able to mend itself for long because of the continued Muslim failure to recapture power all over India and re-establish their ‘lost empire’. In case the Hindus failed to provide the necessary provocation, the Muslims could always slaughter a cow in the presence of Hindus, or abduct and molest a Hindu girl in keeping with the best behests of Islam, or take out a rowdy tãjiã procession through a thoroughfare thickly populated by Hindus.

• Hindu society has grown and shaped itself in the vision of Vyasa and Valmiki, Manu and Yajnavalkya, Narada and Vasistha, and a hundred other exponents of Sanãtana Dharma in all its dimensions and dynamics. Hindu society has been inspired through the ages by such mighty šãtras as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Jainagama, the Tripitaka, the various Yogasastras, the Vani of Siddhas and Sants, and the devotional outpourings of Alvars and Nayanars. Hindu society has been defended, during its days of distress, by such high-souled heroes as Chandragupta, Skandagupta, Vikramaditya, Yasodharman, Bapa Rawal, Jayapala, Bhojadeva, Prithiviraj, Prataparudra, Vir Pandya, Harihara and Rana Sanga. Hindu society has fought a long-drawn-out struggle for freedom against Islamic invaders under the leadership of such veterans as Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Maharaja Surajmal, Banda Bairagi, Lokmanya Tilak, Veer Savarkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sardar Patel.

• The first principle which Hindu society has to observe while preparing its defence is that it will stop processing and evaluating its own heritage in terms of ideas and ideals projected by closed creeds and pretentious ideologies. On the contrary, Hindu society will henceforward process and evaluate the heritage of these creeds and ideologies in terms of its own categories of thought, and find out the real worth of Christian, Islamic, Communist, and Modernist claims.

• The first need of the hour, therefore, is for Hindus to become aware of the fundamentals of their own faith (Hindu Spirituality), the premises on which their own society has evolved (Hindu Sociology), and the vicissitudes which their own society has experienced in the march of Time (Hindu History). These are the three domains in which the Hindu image has been distorted to the utmost by imperialist thought systems, resulting in a deep sense of inferiority from which Hindus suffer at present.

• Hindus have become devoid of self-confidence simply because they have ceased to take legitimate, well-informed, and conscious pride in their spiritual, cultural, and social heritage.

• This lack of pride has led to a serious weakening of the Hindu psyche. Hindus are no more prepared to stand up and fight for anything, because they no more believe or feel that anything is worth fighting for, not at least to the bitter end.

• The sworn enemies of Hindu society have taken advantage of this enervation of the Hindus. They feel instinctively that threats coupled with some show of violence are sure to frighten the Hindus out of their wits, and make them yield almost anything including precious parts of their homeland.

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1983, 1987)

• If the Hindus sang Vande Mãtaram in a public meeting, it was a ‘conspiracy’ to convert Muslims into kãfirs. If the Hindus blew a conch, or broke a coconut, or garlanded the portrait of a revered patriot, it was an attempt to ‘force’ Muslims into ‘idolatry’. If the Hindus spoke in any of their native languages, it was an ‘affront’ to the culture of Islam. If the Hindus took pride in their pre-Islamic heroes, it was a ‘devaluation’ of Islamic history. And so on, there were many more objections, major and minor, to every national self-expression. In short, it was a demand that Hindus should cease to be Hindus and become instead a faceless conglomeration of rootless individuals. On the other hand, the ‘minority community’ was not prepared to make the slightest concession in what they regarded as their religious and cultural rights. If the Hindus requested that cow-killing should stop, it was a demand for renouncing an ‘established Islamic practice’. If the Hindus objected to an open sale of beef in the bazars, it was an ‘encroachment’ on the ‘civil rights’ of the Muslims. If the Hindus demanded that cows meant for ritual slaughter should not be decorated and marched through Hindu localities, it was ‘trampling upon time-honoured Islamic traditions’. If the Hindus appealed that Hindu religious processions passing through a public thoroughfare should not be obstructed, it was an attempt to ‘disturb the peace of Muslim prayers’. If the Hindus wanted their native languages to attain an equal status with Urdu in the courts and the administration, it was an ‘assault on Muslim culture’. If the Hindus taught to their children the true history of Muslim tyrants, it was a ‘hate campaign against Islamic heroes’. And the ‘minority community’ was always ready to ‘defend’ its ‘religion and culture’ by taking recourse to street riots.

• Hindu society as a whole has ceased to remember that Afghanistan rose on the ruins of Gandhara and Kamboja, the two ancient Janapadas of Bharatavarsha which had stood guard on our North-Western gateway for ages untold.

• Muslim spokesmen, no matter what political platform they use, have levelled the same sort of accusations... It is the Pirpur Report of the Muslim League, all over again.

• A few years ago, a Muslim spokesman [Imam Abdullah Bukhari of Jama Masjid, Delhi] had demanded that 20 percent seats in the Parliament and the State Assemblies should be reserved for members of his community. He also recommended that the remaining 80 percent seats should be filled only by those persons whose selection before elections had been cleared by the same community!

• Kerala has given a lead in carving out Muslim majority districts, leaving the local Hindu population at the mercy of Mullahs and Muslim hooligans. Bengal under anti-national Communists and U.P. under a crumbling Congress edifice are most likely to walk into this Islamic trap before long. Several enquiry commissions or their reports have been suppressed because the verdict was likely to go or had gone against the Muslims in fixing the responsibility for riots.

• The Mahabharata carries a complete picture of this cultural unity in its tîrtha-yãtrã-parva, which is part of the larger Vana-parva. The Pandavas accompany their Purohita, Dhaumya, on a long pilgrimage to all parts of Bharatavarsha. They pay their homage to many mountains, rivers, samgamas, lakes, tanks, forest groves and other sacred shrines which had become hallowed by association with Gods and Goddesses, rishis and munis, satees and sãdhvees, heroes and heroines. And they feel fulfilled as they never did before or after in their long lives. The same Pandavas made an imperial conquest of the whole country, not once but twice and performed a rãjasûya yajña at the end of each triumph. But the Pandava empire is a faint memory of the forgotten past. On the other hand, the sacred spots which the Pandavas visited during their one and only pilgrimage, draw millions of devotees in our own days as they did in the distant past, long before the Pandavas appeared on the scene.

• The very sound of ‘Indian sub-continent’ is shocking to the ears of those who have had the privilege of performing or participating in some Hindu samskãras. The wording of every samkalpa, starting with Jambudvîpe Bharatakhande, invokes the opposite vision of a single, though vast and variegated land, inhabited by a people who are proud of being born and having lived in it. The territorial unity and integrity of Bharatavarsha - the land that lies south of the Himalayas, east of Sakadvipa (Seistan), south-east of Vãhlîka (Balkh), west of Burma and between the two seas - was never a political contrivance created by the sword of a conqueror. On the contrary, it was meant and manifested by Mother Nature herself as the cradle of an incomparable culture - the culture of Sanãtana Dharma.

• The Ramayana, the Puranas and the Dharmashastras paint the same portrait of an ancient land, every spot of which is sacred to some cultural memory or the other. The Jainagama and the Tripitaka speak again and again of sixteen Mahajanapadas, which spanned the spread of Bharatavarsha in the life-time of Bhagvan Mahavira and the Buddha. Even a dry compendium on grammar, the Ashtadhyayi of Panini, provides a near complete count of all the Janapadas in ancient India-Gandhara and Kamboja, Sindhu and Sauvira, Kashmir and Kekaya, Madra and Trigarta, Kuru and Panchala, Kaushala and Kashi, Magadha and Videha, Anga and Vanga, Kirata and Kamarupa, Suhma and Udra, Vatsa and Matsya, Abhira and Avanti, Nishadha and Vidarbha, Dandakaranya and Andhra, Karnataka and Kerala, Chola and Pandya. The epic poetry poured out by Kalidasa, Magha, Bharavi and Sriharsha continues the same tradition of talking endlessly about Bharatavarsha as a single and indivisible geographical entity, as a karmabhûmi for Gods and Goddesses, Brahmarshis and Rajarshis, and as higher than heaven for all those who have had the good fortune of being born in it.

• It was this feeling of being at home everywhere in the country which took the Adi Shankaracharya from the southernmost tip to the farthest corners of Bharatavarsha in North and East and West and helped him found (or revive) the four foremost dhãmas at Badrinath, Dvaraka, Rameshvaram and Puri. There is no count of sadhus and sannyasins and house-holders who have travelled ever since on the trail blazed by that great acharya. Six and a half centuries later, Guru Nanak Dev followed in the footsteps of the Pandavas and the Shankaracharya in search of spiritual company.

• The image of the whole of Bharatavarsha being a chakravartikshetra is as old as the oldest Vedic literature. The Itihasa-Purana provide glorious accounts of many chakravartins-Ikshvaku, Puru, Prithu Vainya, Sivi Ausinara, Mandhata, Raghu and so on-who accompanied the ašvamedha horse demanding submission from all kingdoms and republics, big and small, spread all over the country. The rãjasûya yajña which was performed at the end of this campaign was more in the nature of a meeting of equals than a durbar held by a despot in order to humble or humiliate subordinate princes and patriarchs. Sri Krishna had demanded death for Jarasandha because the latter had violated this dharmic tradition of empire-building, and kept a hundred kings captive in his castle. The Nandas had won notoriety as an ignoble dynasty because they had also violated the standard code of conduct laid down by the rãjadharma for righteous emperors, destroyed many local dynasties, and reduced other princes to provincial satraps.

• Coming to the period following Islamic invasions, Hindu society did not bother to remember the Arabs, the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyads, the Lodis, and the Mughals. But it took pride in Bapa Raval who had humbled the Arabs; in Maharani Nayakidevi of Gujarat and Prithivi Raj Chauhan who had defeated Muhammad Ghuri again and again; in Gora and Badal who had rescued Rana Ratan Singh from the camp of Alauddin Khalji and then laid down their lives in defence of Padmini and her Chittor; in Harihara and Bukka who had founded the Vijayanagar Empire which stood like a rock against Islamic imperialism for more than two centuries; in Rana Sangram Singh who had crossed swords with Babur; in Maharana Pratap who had defied the mightiest Mughal in the midst of great adversity; in Durgadas Rathor who had despised the wrath of Aurangzeb in defence of his right to give refuge to a rebellious Mughal prince; in Chhatrapati Shivaji who devised a new diplomacy and innovated a new art of warfare which finally worsted the most powerful Muslim empire and rolled back the Islamic invasion; in Chhatrasal Bundela and Maharaja Surajmal who revived Hindu rule in the north; in Banda Bairagi who avenged the wrongs done by Muslim despots to Guru Arjun Deva, Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh; and in Maharaja Ranjit Singh who liberated the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province from Islamic stranglehold.

• But when the chips were down and the British got ready to go, all these mutual misgivings were overcome. All segments of Hindu society closed their ranks and stood united like a solid phalanx. It was only the Muslim community which stood apart and stuck out like a sore thumb. The British policy of divide-and-rule had failed everywhere except among the Muslims. We have to find out the facts and forces which made the difference.

• Long ago, some 12 or 13 years before Partition, I had a chance to pass by a meeting of Muslims in Delhi. The chaste Urdu and the weighty voice of the man making the speech at the moment, made me stand and stare. It was a bearded mullah wearing a fez. He was narrating some history which was new for me. The mullah mentioned several dates on which some decisive battles had been fought and won by the armies of Islam. ...There were repeated references to swords and spears and horses and hoofs and countless clashes in which human blood had flowed copiously. In between, some one from the audience stood up and shouted ‘nãra-i-takbîr’. And the whole assembly roared back Allãh-o-Akbar with full-throated frenzy. Then the speaker moved to Sind and Hind. ...And then, all of a sudden, the mullah’s voice sank and became almost a whimper. His face too must have fallen, though I could not see it from the distance at which I was standing. He was now telling, in very mournful tones, how Islam had failed to fulfil its mission in this ‘kambakht (unfortunate) mulk (country)’ which was still crawling with kufr (infidelism) in spite of all those arduous endeavours undertaken by the heroes of Islam. A funeral silence fell on the audience, and no one now stood up any more to invite another nãra-i-takbîr.

• Islam was getting raised from the status of an imperialist ideology to that of a religion. The residues of Islamic imperialism were now being rehabilitated as the representatives of a religious community which was in a ‘minority’ and which was trying to ‘save’ itself from the ‘domination of a majority’. The frantic efforts of a foreign fraternity to retain its unequal rights and privileges, earned during the days of its military domination, were now being described as ‘a minority’s struggle for self-identity’.

• And Hindu society which constitutes the nation has been driven into a corner. Hindu leaders have been made to cry that they are not communalists, that they have renounced revivalism, that they cherish Islam as a great religion, that they regard Islamic heroes as their own heroes, that they have no use for people who regard the prevalent mode of secularism as perverse, and that they are fed up with that ‘lunatic fringe’ which still continues to take pride in the national heritage. .... The nation will never be able to get out of this tight corner till it clears up the terminological confusion, stops making use of meaningless words like communalism and revivalism, and rewrites its books of history, politics, and sociology in an exact and appropriate language. This exact language will substitute Nationalism for Hindu Communalism, National Resurgence for Hindu Revivalism, Islamic Atavism for Muslim Revivalism, and Islamic Imperialism for Muslim Communalism. Then alone the various elements and forces struggling for supremacy in the country at present will fall into their proper places, and come out in their true colours.

• This was the behaviour pattern of hoodlums who got extremely annoyed with the donkey which had carried them so far but which did not have the strength left to carry the load any farther. This was the behaviour pattern of gangsters who felt frustrated because the victims of their deep-laid designs had seen through their wiles and refused to be duped any longer. But, at the same time, these Mullahs were in the forefront of Muslim society. Leading politicians like the Ali Brothers had bowed before them in reverence. The behaviour pattern of the exponents and custodians of Islam, therefore, cannot but lead us to the inescapable conclusion that Islam itself has always been, and remains, a thinly veiled theorisation of gangsterism.

• The national leadership could have avoided this calamitous course by going to the sources of Muslim separatism and by identifying the spearheads of this separatism as residues of Islamic imperialism rather than as leaders of a bonafide minority. That needed a historical perspective which the national leadership either did not possess, or did not entertain when it was presented to it by the more perspective analysts of the situation. The need for a historical perspective is as great today as it was at that time because the same Muslim separatism is still rampant in the guise of new slogans, and the same residues of Islamic imperialism are rising again to stake their claims for unjust privileges and unequal power. Their ultimate aim is to restore the power of Islam in the India that has survived Partition.

• In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves..... It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century. ... The British never attached more than a nuisance value to this noisy fraternity which had to be befriended or ignored according to the needs of British policy at any time. It was the national leadership which was impressed by this mobilisation of the ‘Muslim masses’ and the pathos of ‘Muslim plight’. They accepted not only separate electorates but also weightages for the ‘Muslim minority’ in many provinces.

• Another test came slightly later in Jammu and Kashmir which a Hindu prince had managed to save from the Islamic monster in spite of machinations by Mountbatten and British die-hards, and in the face of undisguised hostility from a Soviet stooge masquerading as the Prime Minister of India. But a large part of that precious patrimony was soon surrendered to Islamic imperialism in order to demonstrate India’s ‘democratic’ credentials before an international opinion which wondered for quite some time why India was smitten with such a grave sense of guilt. The rest of the region, which had been saved by a brave soldiery at the cost of so much blood and toil, was handed over to a haughty sheikh who had never hidden his intention of setting up a separate sultanate. The Valley was very soon barred even to the sons of the soil who had to flee from their homes in the Pakistan-occupied parts of Jammu and Kashmir.

• Hindu society may like to forget the first phase of this history during which it suffered defeat after defeat in spite of a succession of great heroes who tried to blunt the sword of Islam, and block the path of Islamic invasion. But Hindu society cannot help taking pride in the phase which opened with the rise of Shivaji, and unfolded further under Chhatrasal, Banda Bairagi, Surajmal and Ranjit Singh.

• It is in this stale atmosphere of sterile scholarship and sloganized politics that the book by Shri H.V. Seshadri has come like a breath of fresh breeze. The Tragic Story of Partition is not only the latest but also the best study of this subject made so far. It gives us all the facts included in the earlier studies. It also takes into account many known but neglected facts. But what distinguishes it from all other studies, is its deeper probe and wider perspective in the interpretation of all facts and episodes... This remarkable book has many facets, rich in ideological implications of a far-reaching import. We will take up those facets one by one in the chapters that follow.

• To start with, we want to take up what we consider to be its most important contribution, namely, the unravelling of two behaviour patterns - Muslim and National - which collaborated closely for years and precipitated Partition in the final round. The Muslim behaviour pattern was characterized by acrimony, accusations, complaints, demands, denunciations, and street riots. The National behaviour pattern, on the other hand, was characterized by acquiescence, assent, cajolery, concessions, cowardice, self-reproach, and surrender.

• The two behaviour patterns have remained intact and are still operative. That is why the Partition in 1947 cannot and should not be considered a closed chapter. Moreover, the two behaviour patterns provide the key not only to a correct understanding of the complexities of present-day politics in India, but also to an anticipation of political developments in days to come.

Perversion of India's Political Parlance (1984)

• The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.

• The Hindu leadership at present can be easily compared to the Maratha leadeship which came to the fore after the Third Battle of Panipat (1761). Like its predecessor, it has neither knowledge nor appreciation of Hindu spiritual vision, or Hindu culture, or Hindu history, or Hindu social philosophy. Hinduism for it is no more than a political card to be played for getting into power. Hindu culture and Hindu history mean nothing to it except some catch-phrases or patriotic rhetoric for collecting crowds and securing votes.

• The one lesson we learn from the freedom movement as a whole is that a religious and cultural awakening in Hindu society has to precede political awakening. The language of Indian nationalism has to be the language of Sanatana Dharma before it can challenge and defeat the various languages of imperialism. The more clearly Hindu society sees the universal truths of Hindu spirituality and culture, the more readily it will reject political ideologies masquerading as religion or promising a paradise on this earth.

History of Heroic Hindu Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders (1984; 2001)

• Let us not be taken in by the howls of contrived grievances which the spokesmen of Islam in India have started hawking in increasingly hysterical voices. In the history of Islam this has always been a prelude to predatory action. Hajjaj had hawked some grievances against Raja Dahir on the eve of equipping an armed force more formidable than any that had ever been sent against Sindh. The Pirpur Report of the Muslim League was only a preparation for the demand for Pakistan.

• On the other hand, we have come out of the latest contest more confused than ever before, so much so that while a highly humanitarian national culture gets condemned as a narrow and militant communalism, an ideology of totalitarian terror gets registered as a religion, a closed and theocratic creed struts about as secularism, and a fanatic fraternity addicted to frequent rounds of violence passes for a “poor and persecuted minority”. The situation is far from reassuring.

• Still more serious was the emergence of an insidious image of Hindu personality as a direct result of this loss of the national perspective on Indian history. In due course, most Hindus, particularly the English-educated Hindu elite, have been made to believe that a Hindu is not true to himself nor to his religion and culture unless he 1) honours as his own heroes all those invaders and crusaders who demolished his temples, desecrated the images of his Gods and Goddesses, burnt his Shãstras, humiliated his holy men, dishonoured his women, pillaged his property, massacred his countrymen en masse, sold his children into slavery, trampled upon every symbol of his religion and culture, and coerced his co-religionists to swear by an aggressive and intolerant dogma glorified as the Kalima; 2) shows reverence for an ideology of calculated and cold-blooded gangesterism masquerading as the only true religion; 3) pays homage to all those pretenders, scoundrels, and hoodlums which this ideology presents as its sufis, saints and heroes; 4) practises patience and tolerance towards those who vow openly and work ceaselessly to destroy his religion and culture, and to take forcible possession of his homeland; and 5) is always prepared to surrender everything he possesses or cherishes in order to avoid violence and bloodshed.

India's secularism, new name for national subversion (1985)

Goel, S. R. (2003). India's secularism, new name for national subversion. Hindi edition 1985. English translation edition 1999.

• Nehru ... simply picked up a prestigious word from the Western political parlance and made it mean the opposite of what it meant in the West. The outcome of this perversion proved disastrous.... In pre-Independence India, the "Muslim minority" had exercised a veto on who was to be hailed as "nationalist" and who was to be denounced as "Hindu communalist". Now the same "minority" reacquired the same veto on who was to be applauded as "secularist" and who was to be hounded out as "communalist". (Foreword)...After having studied Islamic scriptures and Islamic history as unfolded in my own country and abroad, I have reached the definite conclusion that Hindu society has committed a fundamental and suicidal blunder. ... The blunder is to recognize Islam as a dharma.(32)...It cannot be said that Islam had left anything undone in making itself well known. Slaughter of the defeated armies after they had surrendered, public auction abroad of thousands of men and women and children who had been captured and sent there, mass rape of helpless women, destruction of temples, burning of the sacred books of dharma, breaking of idols of the gods, plunder of all kinds of property - all these doings of the Islamized Arabs have been applauded by the Muslim theologians and historians and proclaimed as the great triumph of Islam. (33)...Nor is there any indication that anyone censured the swindlers known as sufis on account of their questionable character. ... In the khanqahs (monasteries) of these sufis, there were caged those helpless Hindu women who had been captured by Ghaznavi and presented to them as their reward. (35)...Most of the historical masjids and khanqahs found in India today, have been built by destroying Hindu temples... many other atrocities - rape of helpless women, dishonouring and killing of sadhus and saints, cold-blooded slaughter of people defeated in war including the young and the aged, capture and sale of Hindu men and women and children as slaves, ...... (38)...But no Hindu took the trouble to know the fact that practising deception with the Kafirs was sanctioned by the scriptures of Islam... But Gandhi's slogan of sarva dharma samabhava, had sent the country into a deep slumber. (47) ... Some of them joined the Communist Party, and began to advance the designs of Islam behind the smoke-screen of progressivism. (47)

Papacy: Its doctrine and history (1986)

Goel, S. R. (1986). Papacy: Its doctrine and history.

• The missionaries who went with the Portuguese pirates to the various countries of Asia, could not match the performance of their brethren who were working with the Spaniards on the other side of the globe. The Asian countries were not inferior in the art of warfare on land. Nor could the guardians of great religions like Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Shintoism be easily confused by Christian casuistries. The missionaries could prescribe use of force only in small coastal pockets... (49)

• But when Vasco da Gama arrived in Cochin on November 1 1498, the Syrian Christians rallied round him in warm welcome. Some time earlier, Vasco da Gama had bombarded Calicut when the Samudrin (Zamorin) ruler of that place refused to be dictated by him. He had plundered the ships bringing rice to the city and cut off the ears, noses and hands of the crews. The Zamorin had sent to him a Brahmin envoy after securing Portuguese safe conduct. Vasco da Gama had cut off the nose, ears and hands of the Brahmin and strung them round his neck together with a palm-leaf on which a message was conveyed to the Indian king that he could cook and eat a curry made from his envoy's limbs. (53)

• The record in respect of how the Catholic Church was imposed upon India by papal Bulls and Portuguese bayonets, is equally impeccable, It can neither be wished away, nor tailored to the current needs of the Church. There was a time when the Popes and the kings of Portugal were not at all secretive about their plans and methods. (58-59)

• Frustrated on all sides, the missionaries advised their masters, the Pope and the king of Portugal, that the only way left for imposing Christianity firmly on Indian soil was the Rigour of Mercy to be employed wherever the Portuguese exercised absolute power over their subjects. This was a euphemism for the use of force for the spread of Christianity. The Pope agreed and the king of Portugal issued orders accordingly. Once again, it is a very well-documented story. Hundreds of Hindu temples in Portuguese possessions were demolished and churches were built out of the debris The lands and other incomes attached to temples were transferred to the churches. It was made a crime punishable with confiscation of property and imprisonment to make images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses or to worship them even in private homes. Hindus were prohibited to celebrate their religious and social ceremonies. Hindu sannyasins and yogis were forbidden to enter Portuguese territories. Brahmins were forced to attend church services compulsorily on Sundays. It was made increasingly difficult for Hindus to live in their ancestral homes by depriving them of the means of livelihood. Their places in trade and services were reserved for converts who were provided with many other incentives. Hindu laws of inheritance were altered so that a convert could claim a share of the parents” Properties during their life-time. Hindu Women who married Christians and got pouverted were offered rich dowries, Those who deserted their husbands for the new faith could get a share in the family Property. Every Hindu child whose father died was declared an orphan and taken away forcibly by the friars, Mothers and relatives refusing to part with the infants or hiding them away were severely punished. Hindus who removed their images to neighbouring Kingdoms or went to Worship them outside Portuguese Possessions Were liable to lose their civic tights and Properties. There were many other ways in which Hindus were humiliated and converts enabled to strut around as lords of all they surveyed. (p 62)

• The missionaries had sensed from the very first that it was the Brahmin who stood in their way of breaking the barriers of Hindu society. But it was St. Xavier who made anti-Brahminism the central theme of his missionary thrust. ... After that, the killing and persecuting of Brahmins became the principal programme of the Portuguese. It became such a scandal as to be noticed specifically in the treaty which the Nayakas of Keladi in Karnatak signed with the Portuguese in 1671. The treaty laid own that the Portuguese shall not force conversions, nor take orphans, nor kill Brahmins. (64)

• There is, in fact, no end to the deceptions being designed by the Mission to pass off Christianity as a native creed, while more and more Hindus are being alienated from their ancestral faith and society and turned into instruments of Western imperialism. (71)

• The Pope could not proclaim immediately that he was planning to take over the missions all over the world. Spain and Portugal were bound to protest and make things difficult for him. The new Congregation was supposed to supervise the missions and coordinate their activities. In due course, it came to be known as Propaganda from its Latin name—Propaganda di Fide, An otherwise innocent word was to acquire a bad odour in succeeding centuries because of its association with Popery. Though this department is still an integral part of the Pope's establishment at Rome, it has been renamed the Sacred Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples. The shame which this set-up has brought upon the Pope by its close cooperation with Western imperialism for four-and-a-half centuries, is being sought to be hidden by a bit of linguistic surgery.(71)

• The 19th century has been called the Great Century for Christian missions... It was so because it was the Great Century for Western imperialism. (73-4)

• The Mission in its pristine purity could always be met in the Seminaries which trained team after team of native converts and turned them into saboteurs for Western imperialism. The brainwashed fanatics fanned out to every nook and corner of the country, manning mission stations and directing the task force behind the smoke-screen of services. They exploited every weakness in Hindu society and probed every soft spot in the Hindu psyche for promoting the Mission. (76)

• Why does the West continue to maintain a museum piece like the Pope for whose sanctimonious postures the West itself finds it difficult to contain its contempt ?
  Why does the West spend such staggering sums of money on propagating in Asia and Africa, a creed for which the West itself has no use ?
  Why does the West let loose on the poor and unsuspecting peoples of Asia and Africa, whole platoons of priests and monks and nuns whom the West itself views as worse than a plague?
  Why does the West proliferate in Asia and Africa a monolith like the Catholic Church which the West knows from its own experience as the worst repository of superstitions and totalitarian tyrannies ?
  These are weighty questions for which the peoples of Asia and Africa have to find adequate answers. (111)

• The people of Asia and Africa have to be vigilant when the Pope pays his highly publicised visits to them and delivers his sanctimonius sermons to captive audiences of the Catholic Church. The words he speaks may sound sweet. The smiles he wears may seem innocent. Bu he stands for nothing except mischief.
  The Pope is propped up by Western imperialism. He will collapse like ninepins the day the West renounces imperialism or the people of Asia and Africa make it known that they have seen through the game. (118)

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

The logic which declares Tengiri to be a satan and denounces Chengiz Khan as an archcriminal but which, in the same breath, proclaims Allah as divine and hails the Ghaznavis, Ghuris, Timurs and Baburs as heroes, is, to the say the least, worse than casuistry.

• We do not stand for a ban on the publication of the Quran. We take this opportunity to state unambiguously that we regard banning of books, religious or otherwise, as counterproductive. In the case of the Quran, we believe and advocate that more and more non-Muslims should read it so that they know first hand the quality of its teachings.

• Let it be realized by everybody concerned that India has always been and remains, the citadel of the most bigoted and bloodthirsty zealotry of Islam. The historical reasons for why it is so, are many. I do not have the time to detail them here. The main reason may be told. Islam in India has been what it has been because India has continued to stare at Islam as its greatest failure. Islam in India has never been able to relax, as it could do in countries which it converted completely. And it will not relax till Hindus learn to knock out its ideological fangs which are rooted in the Quran.

• The only voice which was heard against this nation-wide exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in the field of medieval Indian history, was that of the veteran historian, R.C. Majumdar. For him, this “national integration” based on a wilful blindness to recorded history of the havoc wrought by Islam in India, could lead only to national suicide. He tried his best to arrest the trend by presenting Islamic imperialism in medieval India as it was, and not as the politicians in league with Stalinist and Muslim historians were tailoring it to become.

• Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers.”

• This caravan loaded with synthetic merchandise has, however, continued to move forward. Eight years later (1982), it was reported that “History and Language textbooks for schools all over India will soon be revised radically. In collaboration with various state governments the Ministry of Education has begun a phased programme to weed out undesirable textbooks and remove matter which is prejudicial to national integration and unity and which does not promote social cohesion. The Ministry of Education’s decision to re-evaluate textbooks was taken in the light of the recommendations of the National Integration Council of which the Prime Minister [Indira Gandhi] is Chairman. The Ministry’s view was that history had often been used to serve narrow, sectarian and chauvinistic ends.”

• There is plenty of primary literature available in Arabic and Persian regarding the rise, development, and doings of numerous sufi silsilas in India. Some of this literature has been translated into Urdu and English as well. A study of this literature leaves little doubt that sufis were the most fanatic and fundamentalist elements in the Islamic establishment in medieval times. Hindus should go to this literature rather than fall for latter-day Islamic propaganda. The ruin of Hindus and Hinduism in Kashmir in particular, can be safely credited to sufis who functioned there from the early thirteenth century onwards.

• The logic which declares Tengiri to be a satan and denounces Chengiz Khan as an archcriminal but which, in the same breath, proclaims Allah as divine and hails the Ghaznavis, Ghuris, Timurs and Baburs as heroes, is, to the say the least, worse than casuistry.

• Muslims in India have often sought shelter under Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code (I.P.C.) for preventing every public discussion of their creed in general and of their prophet in particular.1 Quite a few publications which examine critically the sayings and doings of the Prophet or other idolized personalities of Islam, have been proscribed under Section 95 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.P.C.) as a result of pressure exerted by vociferous, very often violent Muslim protests. Little did they suspect that the same provisions of the law could be invoked for seeking a ban on their holy book, the Quran. The credit for this turning of tables goes to Chandmal Chopra of Calcutta.

• The case had caused considerable excitement among the “believers” (Mu'mins) and interest among the “infidels” (KAfirs) in April-May, 1985. The press in India and abroad gave many headlines to what was rightly regarded as an unprecedented event in the history of religion. It was the first time that a Pagan had questioned the character of a document hailed as the very Word of God by a People of the Book. The roles now stood reversed. So far it had been the privilege of the Peoples of the Book to ban and burn the sacred literature of the Pagans.

• The Telegraph dated May 14 carried a PTI report datelined Islamabad, May 13: “Pakistan’s minister of state for religious and minority affairs, Mr. Maqbool Ahmed Khan, said today that the petition against the Quran moved in the Calcutta high court was the ‘worst example of religious intolerance.’ The Pakistan President. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, was quoted by an Urdu daily as saying that the facts of the case were being ascertained. Mr. Khan alleged that religion and life and property of minorities were unsafe in India and urged the Indian government to ‘follow the example of Pakistan’ in ensuring freedom of religion....Thus the theocratic state of Pakistan made it an occasion for delivering lectures to Indians on the subject of religious freedom and the rights of minorities. Nobody who was anybody in India at that time is known to have reacted to this assault from an Islamic state which had driven out most of its Hindu minority, and was treating the rest as non-citizens.

• The panic on the part of the State and Union governments could not but produce some more unsavoury results. Muslim mobs in India and elsewhere had been incited by all those who mattered in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They started taking to the streets and turning violent. The Statesman dated May 13 published the following news date-lined Dhaka, May 12: “At least 12 people were killed and 100 wounded when Bangladesh police fired on a demonstration yesterday in the border town of Chepal Nawabgunj, 320 km. from here. Some 1000 demonstrators, belonging to the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami, were protesting against a case filed by two Indian civilians in Calcutta High Court calling for a ban on the Quran in India. The town chief administrator said today that the police opened fire in self-defence when the demonstrators went on a rampage throwing missiles and setting ablaze government property. Yesterday’s incident followed a demonstration by at least 20,000 Jamaat-i-Islami supporters in the capital on Friday {May 10}.” The demonstrators in Dhaka, according to other reports, were trying to storm the office of India’s High Commission when they were stopped by the police.

• The metropolitan magistrate,... pronounced on 31 July 1986, “With due regard, to the Holy Book of ‘Quran Majeed’, a close perusal of the Ayets shows that the same are harmful and teach hatred and are likely to create differences between Mohammedans on one hand and the remaining communities on the other.”

• Much water has gone down the Ganges after Lammens wrote in 1929. Islamic Apologetics in India since then has progressed by leaps and bounds. The Quran has been roped in to prove that Islam stands for equality of all religions and religious tolerance.

• The same logic leads to another and a very ominous conclusion. JihAd cannot be regarded as something which happened only in the past. On the contrary, it is an ever-present possibility in India. The Quran will create a jihAd whenever and wherever the “infidels” provide an opportunity. Pious Muslims in every place and at all times, are taught to see, or seek, or provoke situations in which solutions prescribed by the Quran can be practised.

• Starting with the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, this flattering of Muslims by praising Islam culminated in Mahatma Gandhi’s sarva-dharma-samabhava - the opiate which lulled the Hindus into a deep slumber such as they had never known vis-à-vis Muslim aggression....Anyone who questioned the pious proposition that the Quran was as good as the Vedas and the Puranas, ran the risk of being nailed down as an “enemy of communal harmony”.....That part of the “Muslim minority” which had voted for Pakistan but had chosen to stay in India, restarted the old game when India was proclaimed a secular state pledged to freedom of propagation for all religions. It revived its tried and tested trick of masquerading as a “poor and persecuted minority”. It cooked up any number of Pirpur Reports. The wail went up that the “lives, liberties and honour of the Muslims were not safe” in India, in spite of India’s “secular pretensions”. At the same time, street riots were staged on every possible pretext. The “communal situation” started becoming critical once again. .... And once again, the political leadership came out with a make-belief. The big-wigs from all political parties were collected in a “National Integration Council”. It was pointed out by the leftist professors that the major cause of “communal trouble” was the “bad habit” of living in the past on the part of “our people”. Most of the politicians knew no history and no religion for that matter. They all agreed with one voice that Indian history, particularly that of the “medieval Muslim period”, should be re-written. That, they pleaded, was the royal road to “national integration”.

• Though, by the logic of this tribe, the best promoters of India’s unity were the British. They did far more and succeeded to a much greater extent in imposing a unity on India. By that logic, General Dyer of the Jallianwala Bagh fame comes out with flying colours as the foremost builder of an Indian nation. He was also very ruthless in gunning down unarmed people who were not impressed by the “benefits of the British Raj”.

• It was not so long ago that the Bible enjoyed a stranglehold similar to that of the Quran over vast populations in the West. The theocracies propped up by the Bible in Europe and America had enacted similar sagas of slaughter and pillage for several centuries. But a sustained Western scholarship showed up the Bible for what it was. “It would be more consistent,” proclaimed Thomas Paine, “that we call it [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God.” The spell of Jehovah was broken. ... The rest is history. Christianity is now seeking a refuge in countries like India where its rout in the West remains unknown.

• It is only in one respect that the Quran revealed by Tengiri might have differed from the Quran revealed by Allah. It seems that, quite unlike Allah, Tengiri was not intolerant towards revelations other than his own.

• The one name which Muslims hate and fear most is that of Chengiz Khan. He is a spectre which has haunted Muslim historians for centuries. He swept like a tornado over the then most powerful and extensive Islamic empire of Khwarazm. In a short span of five years (1219-1224 CE), he slaughtered millions of Muslims, forced many others including women and children into slavery, and razed to the ground quite a few of the most populous and prosperous cities of the Muslim world at that time.

• The scholars of European Enlightenment who were influenced by Hindu, Chinese, Greek and Roman traditions of spirituality and culture, have judged Jehovah quite correctly and identified him as the main source of darkness which prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages. But they have so far neglected Allah of the Quran and not weighed him in the same balance of rationalism, humanism and universalism on which Jehovah was weighed and found wanting.

Catholic Ashrams (1988, 1994)

• Fundamentalism is as foreign to Hinduism as honesty is to Christian missions.

• It is useless to tell the missionaries that Hindu sâdhanâ has nothing to do with buying a piece of land, building some stylised houses on it, exhibiting pretentious signboards, putting on a particular type of dress, and performing certain rituals in a particular way. Hindu sâdhanâ has been and remains a far deeper and difficult undertaking. It means being busy with one's own self rather than with saving others. It means clearing the dirt and dross within one's own self rather than calling on others to swear by a totem trotted out as the only saviour. It has no place for abominable superstitions like the atoning death of a so-called Christ. Above all, it is not consistent with double-talk-harbouring one motive in the heart and mouthing another. A counterfeit must remain a counterfeit, howsoever loudly and lavishly advertised. It is a sacrilege that those who are out to cheat and deceive should use the word "sâdhanâ" for their evil exercise.

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989, 1996)

• It had become their whole time occupation to keep Hindus on the defensive, while the Christian missionary reaped his harvest of converts. It never occurred to these knaves and fools that the Christian missionary whom they were aping and helping was viewed in the modern West as a maniac whom it was better to dump abroad with a bag of money.

• In the case of Islam, our effort aims at raising the dialogue from the street level to the level of scholarly platforms. For a long time, Hindus have been flattering Muslims by seeing nothing wrong in the doctrine of Islam. For a long time, Muslims have been taking to the streets and shedding blood whenever and wherever Hindus object to their behaviour pattern. Muslims have never been asked by Hindus to reflect on the dogmas of Islam, and revise them wherever they go against peaceful coexistence. We are appealing to Hindus to start asking some questions about Islam so that Muslims are made to rethink. If asking questions with a view to holding a dialogue is provoking violence, we plead guilty again. Hindus had a long tradition of asking questions even about their own cherished doctrines. I wonder if you are well-acquainted with our acharyas - Brahmanic, Buddhist and the rest. It was only with the advent of Islam and, later on, Christianity that Hindus were terrorised into the habit of remaining silent when faced with wild claims and not asking any questions. We are trying to revive the ancient Hindu tradition.

• Meanwhile, please pardon us for saying that we have found no music in the language of your letter, no rhyme in your reasoning, no value in your judgments, and no art or education in your performance as a whole.

• It may be noted that some of the Christian correspondents objected to Ram Swarup’s article being published in The Times of India. The plea sounds strange, to say the least. The Christians in this country own and control a large-sized press which includes several daily newspapers and many periodicals. The language which is used in this media vis-a-vis Hinduism is not always decorous; quite often, it is intemperate. Besides, the Christians get ample space in the press which is supposed to be owned and controlled by the Hindus. It is only once in a while that an article critical, of Christian dogmas and/or missions, gets through. That, too, when the editor concerned finds that the facts cited and the conclusions drawn deserve the attention of his countrymen. The Christians who object to such articles being published at all have to think calmly and coolly whether their attitude reflects tolerance or otherwise. They have been telling us for many years now that they want and are prepared for a dialogue. We hope that the word “dialogue” in their current dictionary does not mean a monologue, as it did in past.

• Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour. The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam. They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.

• The point that all of you are trying to make is that Hindus should not stand up and speak in defence of their own religion and culture, that Hindus should not try to analyse and understand the factors and forces in the field around them, in short, that Hindus should remain at the receiving end for all time to come. We are sorry we have to reject your advice.

• The significant point to be noted about the Syrian Christians, however, is their sudden change of colour as soon as the Portuguese arrived on the scene. They immediately rallied round the Portuguese and against their Hindu neighbours, and when the Portuguese started pressurizing the Hindu Rajas for extraterritorial rights so that their co-religionists could be “protected”, the Syrian Christians evinced great enthusiasm everywhere.

• Hindus have a saying that even a castor plant can pass as a tree in a land devoid of real trees. Jesus can pass as God only among people who have never known what constitutes Godhood.

• Compared to the South, the progress of Christianity has been very, very slow in the North. The credit for reversing the trend in the North goes overwhelmingly to the lead given by Maharshi Dayananda and the Arya Samaj he founded.

• For all practical purposes no other country has bid goodbye to Gandhiji to the same extent as the country where he was born and from which he drew all his inspiration. In the world outside he is honoured as a great Hindu and an outstanding exponent of Hinduism at its best, both in word and deed. His philosophy of life, based on Hinduism, is inviting serious attention from the intellectual elite in America, Europe and Japan. In his own country, however, he has been disfigured into the patron saint of a Secularism which decries Hinduism as “communalism” and goes out of its way to give protection to closed theologies of aggression, ideological as well as physical.

• Thus it can be maintained no longer that the Portuguese and British imperialists alone were responsible for the expansion of Christianity in India. The native Indian rulers have proved far more helpful to the Christian missions. They have provided constitutional protection to Christian propaganda. They have made it possible for the missions to enter into areas from where the British had kept them out. What is most important, in the years since independence Christianity has come to acquire a prestige which it had enjoyed never before in this country. It cannot be said that the country has not faced problems created by Christian missions. Converts to Christianity in the North East and Central India have constantly evinced separatist and secessionist tendencies.

• What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power. In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march.

• What has caused confusion and misunderstanding about his Hinduism is the concept of sarva-dharma-samabhava (equal regard for all religions) which he had developed after deep reflection. Christian and Muslim missionaries have interpreted it to mean that a Hindu can go over to Christianity or Islam without suffering any spiritual loss. They are also using it as a shield against every critique of their closed and aggressive creeds. The new rulers of India, on the other hand, cite it in order to prop up the Nehruvian version of Secularism which is only a euphemism for anti-Hindu animus shared in common by Christians, Muslims, Marxists and those who are Hindus only by accident of birth. For Gandhiji, however, sarva-dharma-samabhava was only a restatement of the age-old Hindu tradition of tolerance in matters of belief. Hinduism has always adjudged a man’s faith in terms of his Adhara (receptivity) and adhikara (aptitude). It has never prescribed a uniform system of belief or behavior for everyone because, according to it, different persons are in different stages of spiritual development and need different prescriptions for further progress. Everyone, says Hinduism, should be left alone to work out one’s own salvation through one’s own inner seeking and evolution. Any imposition of belief or behaviour from the outside is, therefore, a mechanical exercise which can only do injury to one’s spiritual growth. Preaching to those who have not invited it is nothing short of aggression born out of self-righteousness. That is why Gandhiji took a firm and uncompromising stand against proselytisation by preaching and gave no quarters to the Christian mission’s mercenary methods of spreading the gospel.

• Sarva-dharma-samabhava was unknown to mainstream Hinduism before Mahatma Gandhi presented it as one of the sixteen mahavratas (great vows). in his booklet, Mangala-PrabhAta. It is true that mainstream Hinduism had always stood for tolerance towards all metaphysical points of view and ways of worship except that which led to Atatayi-Achara (gangsterism). But that tolerance had never become samabhAva, equal respect for all points of view. The acharyas of the different schools of Sanatana Dharma were all along engaged in debates over differences in various approaches to Sreyas (the Great Good). No Buddhist acharya is known to have equated the way of the Buddha to that of the Gita and vice versa, for instance. It is also true that overawed by the armed might of Islam, and deceived by the tall talk of the sufis, some Hindu saints in medieval India had equated Rama with Rahim, Krishna with Karim, Kashi with Kaba, the Brahmana with the Mullah, puja with namaz, and so on. But, the sects founded by these saints had continued to function on the fringes of Hindu society while the mainstream followed the saints and acharyas who never recognized Islam as a dharma. In modern times also, movements like the Brahmo Samaj which recognised Islam and Christianity as dharmas had failed to influence mainstream Hinduism, while Maharshi Dayananda and Swami Vivekananda who upheld the Veda and despised the Bible and the Quran, had had a great impact. This being the hoary Hindu tradition, Mahatma Gandhi’s recognition of Christianity and Islam not only as dharmas but also as equal to Sanatana Dharma was fraught with great mischief. For, unlike the earlier Hindu advocates of Islam and Christianity as dharmas, Mahatma Gandhi made himself known and became known as belonging to mainstream Hinduism.

• No other slogan has proved more mischievous for Hinduism than the mindless slogan of Sarva-dharma-samabhAva vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam.

• This was the Swadeshi Movement led by Sri Aurobindo. It was renascent India’s first experiment in mass mobilization. Powerful mantras such as svadeshi and svarajya, first invoked by Maharshi Dayananda, came to the fore and fired the people’s imagination. The struggle against Western imperialism in all its forms including Christianity became linked with the earlier struggle against Islamic imperialism. Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Guru Govind Singh and Banda Bairagi resumed their full stature as national heroes after having suffered an eclipse in the national memory.

• It is true that intellectuals who take pains to study every subject from its sources, are few and far between in this country. But it is also true that an intellectual culture cannot grow in an atmosphere where the media is controlled by purveyors of palpable falsehoods or bullied into abject surrender by the thought police of Nehruvian Secularism.

1990s

• I have not the slightest doubt that what passes for Hindu tolerance vis-a-vis Islam is no more than a combination of ignorance and cowardice.
  • Islam vis-a-vis Hindu temples. (1993)

• The puzzle gets solved when one contemplates the character of Indian Secularism and finds that is no more than a smokescreen used by the Muslim-Christian-Communist combine in order to keep India's national society and culture at bay. ... They are simply projecting their self-images on to those whom they view as their enemies. .... I have documented elsewhere how Pandit Nehru hounded out or silenced everyone... whom he suspected of having some Hindu feeling or sympathy for some Hindu cause... and how he objected to every Hindu symbol in India's public life. The country had been partitioned by the remnants of Islamic imperialism. But he blamed it on "communalism", a word by which he always meant Hinduism.
  • Hindu and Hinduism, Manipulation of meanings, 1993.

• My only request is that you will not quote me at random, or selectively, or out of context. I have noticed again and again that the average scholar from the West is very scrupulous when it comes to presenting other people's point of view. But I cannot say the same about Western scholars with a conscious Christian bias. Very recently I had a shocking experience from the Southeast Asia correspondent of the Time magazine. I found him absolutely dishonest.
  • Jesus Christ, Artifice for Aggression, 1994

• I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. ... Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'...
  I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies." The girl was in tears.
  • Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. [2] [3] [4]

• Tampering with recorded history had failed in achieving Hindu-Muslim unity. But the misguided attempt had set an evil precedent, namely, that history could be tampered with for political purposes. That gave an opportunity go the Marxist brigade to launch their insidious operation. ... The large exercise in suppressio veri, suggestio falsi remains incomparable... The most amazing spectacle, however, is that these merchants of the most mendacious lies insist on their version of India's history to be recognized as the only version worth teaching.
  • Sita Ram Goel in Foreword to S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

We learn from literary and epigraphic sources, accounts of foreign travellers in medieval times, and modern archaeological explorations that, on the eve of the Islamic invasion, the cradle of Hindu culture was honeycombed with temples and monasteries, in many shapes and sizes.

• 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, inspite of hectic efforts to keep it suppressed. Marxist politicians masquerading as historians have been the major contributors to this conspiracy of silence. .... 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. ... The story of how Islamic invaders sought to destroy the very foundations of Hindu society and culture is long and extremely painful. It would certainly be better for everybody to forget the past, but for the prescriptions of Islamic theology which remain intact and make it obligatory for believers to destroy idols and idol temples.

• This chapter [of the destruction of temples], however, though significant, was only a part of the Muslim behaviour-pattern as recorded by Muslim historians of medieval India. The other parts were:
  1) mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam had emerged victorious;
  2) capture of large numbers of non-combatant men, women and children as booty and their sale as slaves all over the Islamic world;
  3) forcible conversion to Islam of people who were in no position to resist;
  4) reduction to the status of zimmis or non-citizens of all those who could not be converted and imposition of inhuman disabilities on them;
  5) emasculation of the zimmis by preventing them from possessing arms;
  6) impoverishment of the zimmis through heavy discriminatory taxes and misappropriation of a major part of what the peasants produced;
  7) ruination of the native and national culture of the zimmis by suppressing and holding in contempt all its institutions and expressions.

• In dealing with its subject, [this book] exercises complete fidelity to truth; unlike secularist and Marxist writers, it does not believe in re-writing and fabricating history. Its aim is to raise the informational level of our people and to make them better aware of the more persistent ideological forces at work.

• We learn from literary and epigraphic sources, accounts of foreign travellers in medieval times, and modern archaeological explorations that, on the eve of the Islamic invasion, the cradle of Hindu culture was honeycombed with temples and monasteries, in many shapes and sizes.

• 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.

• Muslim historians, in India and abroad, have written hundreds of accounts in which the progress of Islamic armies across the cradle of Hindu culture is narrated, stage by stage and period by period. A pronounced feature of these Muslim histories is a description-in smaller or greater detail but always with considerable pride-of how the Hindus were slaughtered en masse or converted by force, how hundreds of thousands of Hindu men and women and children were captured as booty and sold into slavery, how Hindu temples and monasteries were razed to the ground or burnt down, and how images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses were destroyed or desecrated. Commandments of Allah (Quran) and precedents set by the Prophet (Sunnah) are frequently cited by the authors in support of what the swordsmen and demolition squads of Islam did with extraordinary zeal, not only in the midst of war but also, and more thoroughly, after Islamic rule had been firmly established.

• Muslim historians credit all their heroes with many expeditions each of which “laid waste” this or that province or region or city or countryside. The foremost heroes of the imperial line at Delhi and Agra such as Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak (1192-1210 A.D.), Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (1210-36 A.D.), Ghiyãsu’d-Dîn Balban (1246-66 A D.), Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî (1296-1316 A.D.), Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325-51 A.D.), Fîruz Shãh Tughlaq (135188 A.D.) Sikandar Lodî (1489-1519 A.D.), Bãbar (1519-26 A.D.) and Aurangzeb (1658-1707 A.D.) have been specially hailed for “hunting the peasantry like wild beasts”, or for seeing to it that “no lamp is lighted for hundreds of miles”, or for “destroying the dens of idolatry and God-pluralism” wherever their writ ran. The sultans of the provincial Muslim dynasties-Malwa, Gujarat, Sindh, Deccan, Jaunpur, Bengal-were not far behind, if not ahead, of what the imperial pioneers had done or were doing; quite often their performance put the imperial pioneers to shame. No study has yet been made of how much the human population declined due to repeated genocides committed by the swordsmen of Islam. But the count of cities and towns and villages which simply disappeared during the Muslim rule leaves little doubt that the loss of life suffered by the cradle of Hindu culture was colossal.

• But in the second half of the twelfth century A.D., we find a new type of Muslim saint appearing on the scene and dominating it in subsequent centuries. That was the sufi joined to a silsila. This is not the place to discuss the character of some outstanding sufis (...) The common name which is used for these early sufis as well as for the teeming breed belonging to the latter-day silsilas, has caused no end of confusion. So far as India is concerned, it is difficult to find a sufi whose consciousness harboured even a trace of any spirituality. By and large, the sufis that functioned in this country were the most fanatic and fundamentalist activists of Islamic imperialism, the same as the latter-day Christian missionaries in the context of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism.

• Small wonder that we find them flocking everywhere ahead or with or in the wake of Islamic armies. Sufis of the Chishtîyya silsila in particular excelled in going ahead of these armies and acting as eyes and ears of the Islamic establishment. The Hindus in places where these sufis settled, particularly in the South, failed to understand the true character of these saints till it was too late. The invasions of South India by the armies of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî and Muhammad bin Tughlaq can be placed in their proper perspective only when we survey the sufi network in the South. Many sufis were sent in all directions by Nizãmu’d-Dîn Awliyã, the Chistîyya luminary of Delhi; all of them actively participated in jihãds against the local population. Nizãmu’d-Dîn’s leading disciple, Nasîru’d-Dîn Chirãg-i-Dihlî, exhorted the sufis to serve the Islamic state. “The essence of sufism,” he versified, “is not an external garment. Gird up your loins to serve the Sultãn and be a sufi.” Nasîru’d-Dîn’s leading disciple, Syed Muhammad Husainî Banda Nawãz Gesûdarãz (1321-1422 A.D.), went to Gulbarga for helping the contemporary Bahmani sultan in consolidating Islamic power in the Deccan. Shykh Nizãmu’d-Dîn Awliyã’s dargãh in Delhi continued to be and remains till today the most important centre of Islamic fundamentalism in India. (...)

• The court scribe pays fulsome homage to the sufis who “planted firmly the Faith of Islam” in this region. The pride of place goes to Hazrat Natthar Wali who took over by force the main temple at Tiruchirapalli and converted it into his khãnqãh. Referring to the destruction of the Sivalinga in the temple, he observes: “The monster was slain and sent to the house of perdition. His image namely but-ling worshipped by the unbelievers was cut and the head separated from the body. A portion of the body went into the ground. Over that spot is the tomb of WalI shedding rediance till this day.” Another sufi, Qãyim Shãh, who came to the same place at a later stage, “was the cause of the destruction of twelve temples.” At Vellore, Hazrat Nûr Muhammad Qãdirî, “the most unique man regarded as the invaluable person of his age,” was the “cause of the ruin of temples” which “he laid waste.” He chose to be buried “in the vicinity of the temple” which he had replaced with his khãnqãh.

• It was clear that no amount of evidence could ever satisfy the likes of Shahabuddin and the Stalinist gang. They were playing a well calculated game of keeping Hindus on the defensive, reserving for themselves the right to ask any number of fraudulent questions and making it obligatory for Hindus to go on providing the answers.

• The Stalinist gang which advertised itself as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) historians had been carrying on a campaign for quite some time on points that were totally irrelevant to the central issue.

• In the current political parlance Islamic imperialism masquerades as secularism, while Indian nationalism gets branded as "Hindu communalism".

• There is no evidence that Hindus, by the large, ever accepted Islam as a religion or the medieval Muslim rule as a native dispensation, before the advent of the Freedom Movement... Why should Islam be allowed to impose an emergency in India..?

• Today the entire academia and media in India are under the stranglehold of this state-sponsored version of India's history which is eulogized as the secular version, and is supposed to promote national integration. Voices of dissent are met not with solid evidence or straight logic but with a swearology coined by subversive politics.

• Meanwhile, the Stalinist "historians" led by Romila Thapar and S. Gopal (son of the late President of India, Dr. Radhakrishanan) had jumped into the fray. A letter written by this gang had been published in The Times of India, New Delhi, on 2 October 1986 accusing the daily of "giving a communal twist to news items and even editorial comments". The "provocation" for their outburst had been provided by two photos which had been front-paged by the newspapers in August and September, 1986. The first photo was of two stones from the Kutub Minar at Delhi depicting defaced carvings of Hindu deities. The editorial comment had said that the stones were found with their faces turned inwards during repairs of a wall of the Minar. The second photo was that of Aurangzeb's Idgah on the Katra Mound at Mathura standing on the site and built with the rubble of a pre-existing Kesavadeva Temple. The editorial comment was that a Committee had been formed at Mathura for the liberation of Srikrishnajanmabhumi. I was told that the photos had been displayed by Arun Shoruie who had joined The Times of India a few month earlier to take over as Chief Editor from Girilal lain who had decided to retire soon. His appointment had been -approved by Girilal lain as lain himself told me.
  • Meanwhile, the Stalinist historians had jumped into the fray. A letter written by this gang [was] accusing the daily of "giving a communal twist to news items and even editorial comments."

• The Stalinists had proclaimed that the Kesavadeva Temple which had been destroyed by Aurangzeb for rich booty as well as for being a centre of Hindu rebellions, was built at first during the reign of Jahangir and occupied the site of a Buddhist monastery destroyed by Hindus. They had questioned the historicity of Sri Krishna and Sri Rama and contended that, according to a Persian text, the Babri Masjid did not occupy the site of a pre-existing Rama Temple. At the same time, they had accused Hindus of having destroyed Buddhist and lain monuments and pre-Hindu animist shrines. The letter was in keeping with the concocted history which the Stalinists had been selling for quite some time through the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and the National Council of Educational.Research and Training, all of which they had come to control progressively during the period of dominance by the Soviet stooge, Pandit ]awaharlal Nehru, and his daughter Indira Gandhi. Pandit Nehru had gone further and rewritten the history of medieval India in both his Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India. Several Hindu scholars, including myself, wrote letters to The Times of India refuting the Stalinist canards, A to Z. But Girilal Jain refused to publish them, and thus let the Stalinist accusation stand that The Times of India had become a mouthpiece of 'Hindu communalism'. I visited Arun Shourie in his office at the newspaper to find out why our letters had been held up. He told me that he had been sidelined and no work was being sent to his desk any longer. A few days later it was announced in the newspaper that Dilip Padgaonkar, a Hindu-baiter to boot, had been promoted to as the Executive Editor of The Times of India. The rumour went round that Padgaonkar and not Arun Shourie was going to succeed Girilal Jain. The rest is history. Fortunately for Hindus, Arun Shourie had meanwhile received an offer to take over as Editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, and joined it after resigning from The Times of India.

• I was busy putting together the material when I saw the Indian Express of 5 February 1989 carrying an article by Arun Shourie-'Hideaway Communalism'. It told the story of how a book written in Arabic and Urdu by a rector of the adawatul-Ulama at Lucknow mentioned several historical mosques which had replaced pre-existing Hindu temples, and how the references to this replacement had been omitted in the English translation of the same book published by the rector's son, Ali Mian, the present rector and Chairman of the Muslim Personal Law Board. Arun Shourie's article in a major newspaper was the first of its kind after a long time. It had violated a taboo placed by the mass media and the academia on any unfavourable narration of the history of Islam since the days when Mahatma Gandhi took command of the Indian National Congress and launched his first no-cooperation movement in support of the Turkish Khilafat. The correct thing since that time had been to praise Islam and its heroes, and not to ask any inconvenient questions about its belief system or its deeds or its goals. In fact, Islam had imposed an Emergency on India and enforced it by means of terror, verbal as well as physical. Hindus were free to praise Islam but if they asked any inconvenient questions, they invited not only swear- words form all respectable quarters but also the assassin's dagger.
  • • [The Stalinists at the same time] accused Hindus of having destroyed Buddhist and Jain monuments... The letter was in keeping with the concocted history which the Stalinists had been selling for quite some time through the Indian History Council of Historical Research, and the National Council of Educational Research and Training, all of which they had come to control...
  • [Arun Shourie's article 'Hideaway Communalism'] had violated a taboo placed by the mass media and the academia on any unfavourable narration of the history of Islam since the days when Mahatma Gandhi took command of the Indian National Congress and launched his first non-cooperation movement in support of the Turkish Khilafat.

• Shahabuddin went on shifting his ground and indulging in a lot of casuistry in a series of letters published in the Indian Express in response to the evidence provided by Dr. Harsh Narain and A.K. Chatterjee. Now he asked for evidence from Babar's own time. Hindu scholars, I could see, had walked into a trap-Muslims and Stalinists demanding more and more evidence about a pre-existing Rama Temple and even about the historicity of Sri Rama, and Hindus coming forward with it. It was clear that no amount of evidence could ever satisfy the likes of Shahabuddin and the Stalinist gang. They were playing a well calculated game of keeping Hindus on the defensive, reserving for themselves the right to ask any number of fraudulent questions and making it obligatory for Hindus to go on providing the answers. I, therefore, decided to shift the focus from Ayodhya and revert to what I had done earlier in my articles - marshalling evidence of large-scale Islamic iconoclasm inspired by a belief system. I put together whatever evidence I had collected about Muslim monuments standing on the site and or built with the materials of Hindu temples, all over India. From my point of view it was a very small list-only the tip of an iceberg. But it proved formidable for the Shahabuddins and the Stalinists. I had just completed this article when A. Ghosh (Houston, Texas, USA) sent to me a list of Hindu temples and monasteries destroyed or desecrated by Muslim mobs in Bangladesh in October-November 1989 as a reaction to the hila Puja Yatra and Shilanyasa ceremony from September 30 to November 1989 performed by the VHP. Hindus were molested, even killed and their properties destroyed on some scale all over Bangladesh.

• It is intriguing that the Marxist professors never mention the destruction of Buddhist and Jain establishments in Transoxiana, Sinkiang, Seistan and India which on the eve of the Islamic invasion included present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Every historian and archaeologist of that period knows that the vast Buddhist and Jain establishments at Bukhara, Samarkand, Khotan, Balkh, Bamian, Begram, Jalalabad, Peshawar, Takshasila, Mirpur-Khas, Nagar-Parkar, Sringar, Sialkot, Agroha, Mathura, Hastinapur, Kanauj, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Sarnath, Nalanda, Vikramsila, Vaishali, Rajgir, Odantpuri, Bharhut, Paharpur, Jagaddala, Jajnagar, Nagarjunikonda, Amaravati, Kanchi, Dwarasamudra, Bharuch Valabhi, Palitana, Girnar, Patan, Jalor, Chandrawati, Bhinmal, Didwana, Nagaur, Osian, Bairat, Gwalior and Mandu were destroyed by the swordsmen of Islam. Smaller establishments of these faiths, which met the same fate, add up to several hundred.

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

• A court order in 1986 threw open for Hindu worship the gates of the temple-turned-mosque at the Rãmajanmabhûmi at Ayodhya. Hindus were overjoyed, and started looking forward to the coming up of a grand Rãma Mandir at the sacred site. But they were counting without the stalwarts of Secularism in the Nehruvian establishment. It was not long before a hysterical cry was heard – “Secularism in danger!” (Preface, Volume II)

• What was uncovered at Sidhpur only to be covered up again was verily the tip of an iceberg which remains submerged in hundreds of histories written by Muslim historians, in Hindu literary sources which are slowly coming to light, in the accounts of foreign travellers who visited India and the neighbouring lands during medieval and modern times, and above all in the reports of the archaeological surveys carried out in all those countries which had been for long the cradles of Hindu culture. No systematic effort has yet been made by scholars to see the iceberg emerge from the dark depths and tell its own story in a simple and straight-forward manner. Rare is the historian or archaeologist who had related this vandalism to the theology of Islam based on the Qur’ãn and the Sunnah of the Prophet. On the contrary, the subject has been politicised by the votaries of Secularism who become hysterical by the very mention of the untold story. Politicians in power have made and are making frantic efforts to suppress every tip of the iceberg which chances to surface in spite, of the conspiracy to keep it out of sight. Some of these politicians are masquerading as academicians and selling far-fetched and fantastic apologies for the havoc caused by Islamic iconoclasm.

• It was only in the nineteenth century that Western Indologists and Christian missionaries separated the Buddhists, the Jains, and the Sikhs from the Hindus who, in their turn, were defined as only those subscribing to Brahmanical sects.... Nowhere in the voluminous Muslim chronicles do we find the natives of this country known by a name other than Hindu. There were some Jews, and Christians, and Zoroastrians settled here and there... The chronicles distinguish these communities from the Muslims on the one hand, and from the natives of this country on the other. It is only when they come to the natives that no more distinctions are noticed; all natives are identified as ahl-i-Hunûd-Hindu!... In all their narratives, all natives are attacked as Hindus, massacred as Hindus, plundered as Hindus, converted forcibly as Hindus, captured and sold in slave markets as Hindus, and subjected to all sorts of malice and molestation as Hindus. The Muslims never came to know, nor cared to know, as to which temple housed what idol. For them all temples were Hindu but-khãnas, to be desecrated or destroyed as such. They never bothered to distinguish the idol of one God or Goddess from that of another. All idols were broken or burnt by them as so many buts, or deposited in the royal treasury if made of precious metals, or strewn at the door-steps of the mosques if fashion from inferior stuff. In like manner, all priests and monks, no matter to what school or order they belonged, were for the Muslims so many “wicked Brahmans” to be slaughtered or molested as such. In short, the word “Hindu” acquired a religious connotation for the first time within the frontiers of this country. The credit for this turn-out goes to the Muslim conquerors. With the coming of Islam to this country all schools and sects of Sanãtana Dharma acquired a common denominator - Hindu!... Once again, it goes to the credit of the Muslim conquerors that the word “Hindu” acquired a national connotation within the borders of this country.

• Nehru’s daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, carried her father’s game much farther. In her fight for a monopoly of power, she split the Congress Party, and made a common cause with the Communists. Well-known Communists and fellow-travellers were given positions of power in the ruling Congress Party, in the Government at the Centre as well in the States, and in prestigious institutions all over the country. The Muslim-Marxist combine of “historians” had already captured the Indian History Congress during the days of Pandit Nehru, and many honest historians had been hounded out of it. Now this combine was placed in control of the Indian Council of Historical Research and entrusted with extensive patronage. The combine took over the National Council of Educational Research and Training also, and laid down the guidelines for producing school textbooks on various subjects. The Jawaharlal Nehru University was created and financed on a fabulous scale in order to collect Communist professors from all over the country, and form them into a frontline brigade for launching all sorts of anti-Hindu campaigns. The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of Secularism which nobody was supposed to question, or examine as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine. In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired, became blackned as “Communalism”. Small wonder that the word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media.

• If the professors fail to come out with answers to questions posed by us, and to present the evidence in support of their statements, we shall be forced to conclude that far from being serious academicians, they are cynical politicians hawking ad hoc or plausible explanations in the service of a party line. In fact, we shall be justified in saying that they are not Marxists but Stalinists. Marxism is a serious system of thought which offers consistent explanations. Stalinism, on the other hand, is an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in pursuit of a particular end.

• I know that the evidence demanded by me does not exist. It is a Big Lie being spread by Hindu-baiters. Hindus have never done what they are being accused of. My only point in mentioning the incident is that even honest people can become victims of hostile propaganda which is not countered in good time.

• It is nobody’s case that there was never any conflict among the sects and sub-sects of Sanãtana Dharma. Some instances of persecution were indeed there. Our plea is that they should be seen in a proper perspective, and not exaggerated in order to whitewash or counter-balance the record of Islamic intolerance. Firstly, the instances are few and far between when compared to those listed in Islamic annals. Secondly, those instances are spread over several millennia while the fourteen centuries of Islam stand crowded with religious crimes of all sorts. Thirdly, none of those instances were inspired by a theology, while in the case of Islam a theology of intolerance has continued to question the character of Muslim kings who happened to be tolerant. Fourthly, Jains were not always the victims of persecution; they were persecutors as well once in a while. Lastly, no king or commander or saint who showed intolerance has been a Hindu hero, while Islam has hailed as heroes only those characters who excelled in intolerance.

• She would do well to read some histories of Buddhism and Jainism in this country to know that 1) Buddhism was flourishing all over the country when the Islamic invaders arrived on the scene; 2) both Buddhism and Jainism were being patronised by kings whom the Marxist label as Hindus; 3) Buddhist monks fled to Nepal and Tibet only after thousands of them were massacred, and their monasteries destroyed by the Islamic marauders; 4) Buddhism continued to flourish all over Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka till attacked by the armies of Islam in the fourteenth century; 5) Buddhism did not survive the Islamic assault because, unlike Brahmanism and Jainism, it was centred round monasteries and monks; 6) Jainism has continued to flourish till today all over north India, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat as it did in the pre-Islamic period, in spite of prolonged Islamic persecution; and 7) there is evidence of a large number of Jain temples being destroyed in the Muslim invasions of southern Bihar and Jharkhand as well as of western and northern Bengal, during the thirteenth and subsequent centuries.

• There was, however, a time not so long ago when Muslim theologians prescribed and Muslim swordsmen practised destruction of Hindu temples on a large scale. Hundreds of Muslim historians have credited their heroes with what they rightly regarded as a pious performance according to the principal tenets of Islam. Most of these histories, written in India as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world, have been printed and translated in one or more of the modern languages. They are on the shelves of public and private libraries all over the world. Then there are inscriptions in Arabic and Persian which proclaim the destruction of Hindu temples or their conversion into mosques with considerable pride. These, too, have been deciphered, translated and published by archaeological surveys covering India, Central Asia, Eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They leave us in no doubt about one of the favourite pastimes of pious Muslim princes in all these countries which constituted at one time the vast cradle of Hindu culture.

• Secularism arose in the modern West as a revolt against the closed theology of Christianity which had acquired a stranglehold on the State; in India, unfortunately, Secularism has become the biggest single protector of closed theologies promoted by Christianity and Islam.

• Similar inscriptions are known to exist in some mosques which are still in use. But they cannot be copied because they have been covered with plaster. Years ago, Dr. Bloch had seen an inscription in the Patthar-kî-Masjid at Patna, the capital of Bihar, stating that the materials for the mosque were obtained from a Hindu temple at Majhauli (now in the Gorakhpur District of Uttar Pradesh).11 The temple was demolished in AH 1036 (AD 1626) by Prince Parwiz, a son of the Mughal emperor Jahãngîr. “I made the car stop,” writes Syed Hasan Askari, “and took my friends to the upper part of the historic Patthar-ki-Masjid. One of my American friends was an Arabist, but there was nothing for him to read, for the demoralised custodians had the inscription plastered with cement, considering that it contained provocative references.”12 Some friends of this author who visited the Jãmi‘ Masjid at Sambhal in the Moradabad District of Uttar Pradesh had the same experience when they expressed a desire to have a look at the inscriptions. This mosque was built in AD 1526 by an officer of Bãbur on the site and from the materials of the local Hari Mandir.

• Three conclusions can be safely drawn from a study of these 21 inscriptions. Firstly, the destruction of Hindu temples continued throughout the Muslim rule, from the date of its first establishment at Delhi in AD 1192 to its downfall with the death of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah in 1748. Secondly, the destruction took place all over India and was undertaken by rulers belonging to all Muslim dynasties, imperial as well as provincial. Thirdly, the destruction had no economic or political motive as has been proposed by Marxist scholars and Muslim apologists; it was inspired by religious zeal and regarded as a pious performance by Muslim kings and commanders, all of whom took considerable pride in it and sought blessing from Allãh and the Prophet. The iconoclasts, it may be added, have been idolised all along as paragons of faith, virtue, justice and generosity. These conclusions become clearer still when we come to evidence from Islamic literary sources.

• Islamic literary sources provide far more extensive evidence of temple destruction by the Muslim invaders of India in medieval times. They also cover a larger area, from Sinkiang and Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, and from the Seistan province of present-day Iran in the West to Assam in the East. As we wade through this evidence, we can visualise how this vast area, which was for long the cradle of Hindu culture, came to be literally littered with the ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all schools of Sanãtana Dharma-Bauddha, Jaina, Šaiva, Šãkta, VaishNava and the rest. Archaeological explorations and excavations in modern times have proved unmistakably that most of the mosques, mazãrs, ziãrats and dargãhs which were built in this area in medieval times, stood on the sites of and were made from the materials of deliberately demolished Hindu monuments.

• All this was being done by [Nehru] in the name of Secularism, which concept he had picked up from the modern West and perverted to mean the opposite of what it meant there.

• It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his policy of sulh-i-kul, at least among the learned Hindus. It is no more remembered that to start with he was also a pious Muslim who had viewed as jihãd his sack of Chittor. Nor is it understood by the learned Hindus that his policy of sulh-i-kul was motivated mainly by his bid to free himself from the stranglehold of the orthodox ‘Ulamã, and that any benefit which Hindus derived from it was no more than a by-product. Akbar never failed to demand daughters of the Rajput kings for his harem. Moreover, as our citations show, he was not able to control the religious zeal of his functionaries at the lower levels so far as Hindu temples were concerned. Jahãngîr, like many other Muslim kings, was essentially a pleasure-seeking person. He, however, became a pious Muslim when it came to Hindu temples of which he destroyed quite a few. Shãh Jahãn did not hide what he wanted to do to the Hindus and their places of worship. His Islamic record on this score was much better than that of Jahãngîr. The reversal of Akbar’s policy thus started by his two immediate successors reached its apotheosis in the reign of Aurangzeb, the paragon of Islamic piety in the minds of India’s Muslims. What is more significant, Akbar has never been forgiven by those who have regarded themselves as custodians of Islam, right upto our own times; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is a typical example. In any case one swallow has never made a summer.

• So the temples were attacked “all along the way” as the armies of Islam advanced; they were “robbed of their sculptural wealth”, “pulled down”, “laid waste”, “burnt with naptha”, “trodden under horse’s hoofs”, and “destroyed from their very foundations”, till “not a trace of them remained”. Mahmûd of Ghazni robbed and burnt down 1,000 temples at Mathura, and 10,000 in and around Kanauj. One of his successors, Ibrãhîm, demolished 1,000 temples each in Hindustan (Ganga-Yamuna Doab) and Malwa. Muhammad Ghûrî destroyed another 1,000 at Varanasi. Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak employed elephants for pulling down 1,000 temples in Delhi. “Alî I ‘Ãdil Shãh of Bijapur destroyed 200 to 300 temples in Karnataka. A sufi, Qãyim Shãh, destroyed 12 temples at Tiruchirapalli. Such exact or approximate counts, however, are available only in a few cases. Most of the time we are informed that “many strong temples which would have remained unshaken even by the trumpets blown on the Day of Judgment, were levelled with the ground when swept by the wind of Islãm”. (also quoted in Ibn Warraq, Defending the West)

• Our citations have a lot to tell about how the votaries of Islam viewed the idols of Gods and Goddesses enshrined in the temples. Though the Arabic word used in the Qur’ãn for idols is Sanam, we find our historians using the word but which they had borrowed form the Persians. The Persian word was a corruption of the Sanskrit word “Buddha”, with which the Persians had been familiar for a long time because there were many Buddhist temples in Seistan, Khurasan and Transoxiana. The word “budd” has actually been used in some of the histories when referring to idols which were burnt or which the infidels were prevented from worshipping. Small wonder that the temples which enshrined statues of the Buddha became special targets for the Islamic iconoclasts. We shall deal with this subject in greater detail at a later stage in this series; for now, it is sufficient to say that the deathblow to Buddhism, a religion centred round temples and monasteries and monks, was delivered by the armies of Islam and not by the much-maligned “Brahmanical reaction” as our Marxist “historians” are never tired of telling the world.

• The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. Our citations contain only stray references to the Brahmans because they have been compiled primarily with reference to the destruction of temples. Even so, they provide the broad contours of another chapter in the history of medieval India, a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû 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. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless BrãhmaNa priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.”

• The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.

• It cannot be said that at the time these inscriptions were set up at ANhilwãD Pãtan, Prabhas Patan, Khambat, Junagadh and other places, the Hindus of Gujarat had had no taste of what Islam had in store for them, their women, their children, their cities, their temples, their idols, their priests, and their properties. The invasion of Ulugh Khãn that was to subjugate Gujarat to a long spell of Muslim rule, was the eighth in a series which started within a few years after the Prophet’s death at Medina in AD 632. Five Islamic invasions had been mounted on Gujarat before Siddharãja JayasiMha ascended the throne of that kingdom in AD 1094 - first in AD 636 on Broach by sea; second in AD 732-35 by land; third and fourth in AD 756 and 776 by sea; and fifth by Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026. Two others had materialised by the time the Muslim ship-owner set up his inscription in AD 1264 on a mosque at Prabhas Patan. The sixth invasion was by Muhammad Ghûrî in AD 1178, and the seventh was by Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak in AD 1197. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that either the Hindus of Gujarat had a very short memory or that they did not understand at all the inspiration at the back of these invasions. The temple of Somnath which stood, after the invasion of Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026, as a grim reminder of the character of Islam, had also failed to teach them any worthwhile lesson. Nor did they visualize that the Muslim settlements in their midst could play a role other than that of carrying on trade and commerce.

• The Hindus of this region had been victims of Muslim high-handedness for a long time, particularly in respect of their women. Murshid Qulî Khãn, the faujdãr of Mathura who died in 1638, was notorious for seizing “all their most beautiful women” and forcing them into his harem. “On the birthday of Krishna,” narrates Ma’sîr-ul-Umara, “a vast gathering of Hindu men and women takes place at Govardhan on the Jumna opposite Mathura. The Khan, painting his forehead and wearing dhoti like a Hindu, used to walk up and down in the crowd. Whenever he saw a woman whose beauty filled even the moon with envy, he snatched her away like a wolf pouncing upon a flock, and placing her in the boat which his men kept ready on the bank, he sped to Agra. The Hindu [for shame] never divulged what had happened to his daughter.” Another notorious faujdãr of Mathura was Abdu’n Nabî Khãn. He plundered the people unscrupulously and amassed great wealth. But his worst offence was the pulling down of the foremost Hindu temple in the heart of Mathura and building a Jãmi‘ Masjid on its site. This he did in AD 1660-61. Soon after, in 1665, Aurangzeb imposed a pilgrim tax on the Hindus. In 1668, he prohibited celebration of all Hindu festivals, particularly Holi and Diwali. The Jats who rightly regarded themselves as the defenders of Hindu hounour were no longer in a mood to take it lying.

• Allãh of the Qur’ãn now throws away the mask he has worn in order to pass as Allãh of the pagan Arabs. He comes out in his true colours. He is no other than the old Jehovah of the Bible, the hardened gangster we have met in the earlier section. And like his earlier incarnation, he, too, is a denizen of the dark depths in human nature. Only the situation in which Jehovah alias Allãh intends to operate this time is totally different. (Vol II, chapter 14)

• Urdu is truly an Islamic language.

• Shykh ‘Abû Bakr Tûsî Haidarî (Thirteenth Century AD). He was a qalandar (anchorite) of the Haidarî sect founded by a Turk named Haidar, who lived in Sawa in Kuhistan. His disciples migrated into India when the Mongols sacked their homeland. Delhi .“The most prominent Indian Haidari was Shaikh Abu Bakr Tusi Haidari, who settled in Delhi in the mid-thirteenth century. There he demolished a temple on a site on the banks of the Jamna where he built a khanqah and organized sama gathering. Shaikh Nizamu’d-Din Auliya’ was a frequent visitor of Abu Bakr as was Shaikh Jamalu’d-Din of Hansi when he was in Delhi. The latter gave Shaikh Abu Bakr the title Baz-i Safid (White Falcon) symbolizing his rare mystical achievements.” (…) Sufi Qãyim Shãh “Qayim Shah… came here from Hindustan. He was the cause for the destruction of twelve temples. He lived to an old age and passed away on the 17th Safar AH 1193.” (…) Sufi Nûr Muhammad Qãdirî. Vellore (Tamil Nadu) “Hazarat Nur Muhammad Qadiri was the most unique man regarded as an invaluable person of his age. Very often he was the cause of the ruin of temples. Some of these were laid waste. He selected his own burial ground in the vicinity of the temple. Although he lived five hundred years ago, people at large still remember his greatness.” (…) “…Originally there were five domes in the liwan all compiled of Hindu fragments, as is evident from their corbelled interiors…

About the book

• Goel’s elaborately argued thesis, tellingly left unmentioned here by Eaton, is precisely that Islamic iconoclasm in India follows a pattern set in the preceding centuries in West Asia and accepted as normative in Islamic doctrine. Eaton’s glaring omission of this all-important precedent makes his alternative explanation of Islamic iconoclasm in India suspect beforehand... This misrepresents the thrust of Goel’s book as being merely a morbid piling up of gruesome Muslim crimes rather than an insightful tracing of this behaviour pattern to its ideological roots. Goel’s long and unchallenged list of temple destruction data is explicitly offered as “a preliminary survey” in the smaller first volume before developing the book’s main thesis in the bigger second volume, viz. the explicit justification of iconoclasm by Islamic theology and the normative precedent set Prophet Mohammed... Contrary to the impression created in the secularist media, Prof. Eaton has not even begun to refute Sita Ram Goel’s thesis. He manages to leave all the arguments for Goel’s main thesis of an Islamic theology of iconoclasm undiscussed. Of Goel’s basic data in the fabled list of mosques standing on the ruins of temples, only a single one is mentioned: “an inscription dated 1455, found over the doorway of a tomb-shrine in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh” which mentions “the destruction of a Hindu temple by one Abdullah Shah Changal during the reign of Raja Bhoja, a renowned Paramara king who had ruled over the region from 1010 to 1053”... Either way, the inscription is considerably younger than the events recorded in it. In history, it is of course very common that strictly contemporary records of an event are missing, yet the event is known through secondary younger records. These have to be treated with caution (just like the strictly contemporary sources, written from a more lively knowledge of the event, but also often in a more distortive partisan involvement in it), yet they cannot be ignored. Eaton makes the most of this time distance, arguing that the inscription is “hardly contemporary” and “presents a richly textured legend elaborated over many generations of oral transmission until 1455”. Therefore, “we cannot know with certainty” whether the described temple destruction ever took place. So, at the time of my writing it has been twelve years since Goel published his list, and exactly one scholar has come forward to challenge exactly one item in the list; who, instead of proving it wrong, settles for the ever-safe suggestion that it could do with some extra research. Given the eagerness of a large and well-funded crowd of academics and intellectuals to prove Goel wrong, I would say that that meagre result amounts to a mighty vindication. And the fact remains that the one inscription that we do have on the early history of the Islamic shrine under discussion, does posit a temple destruction. So far, the balance of evidence is on the side of the temple destruction scenario, and if the evidence for it is merely non-contemporary, the evidence for the nondemolition scenario is simply non-existent... For the rest, all that Eaton has to show against Goel’s thesis is that it is based on “selective translations of premodem Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic data” However, the larger a body of evidence, the harder it becomes to credibly dismiss it as “selective”. Goel’s hundreds of convergent testimonies cannot be expelled from the discussion so lightly.
  • Elst K. Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple 2002, chapter 6

• Five date from the fourteenth century (phase one), six come from phase two, and nineteen date from 1565 to 1650 CE (phase three). The remaining thirty or so cases stem from the century after 1650, with a notable bunching of incidents in the late 1600s, when the Mughal empire was absorbing the former Qutb Shahi kingdom of Golconda.
  • about the list of destroyed temples (of Andhra Pradesh) in Hindu Temples, what happened to them. Cynthia Talbot. Inscribing the Other,Inscribing the Self:Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.37,No.4 (Oct. 1995).

Genesis and Growth of Nehruism (1993)

• I am placing this book before our people, as I did so many others, simply because I want to be true to my own impulse for action in terms of my own lights. Rest is in the hands of Him who sends Saviours as well as Scourges according to His own inscrutable Law.

• When Tibet was invaded by the Chinese Red Army in October 1950... the only reaction from Pandit Nehru was to start apologising for Peking immediately... Nothing could be done immediately to mobilise public opinion and put pressure on the Government of India to change its China policy... The meeting set up a Tibet Committee and announced a Tibet Day to be observed in September. But as soon as the news of this idea being mooted appeared in the press, the Prime Minister came out against it in a public statement issued the very next day. According to Hindustan Times dated August 26, "He referred to a report that some persons proposed to hold a Tibet Day. He thought that it was ill-advised and asked members not to take any interest in it." The Prime Minister felt annoyed with this effort. He put pressure on the press in New Delhi not to publish news of the Tibet Day demonstration and meeting... A few days later, the Prime Minister did something infinitely worse. Speaking on Foreign Affairs in the Rajya Sabha on September 23, he denounced and threatened the organisers of the Tibet Day in a language which was wild. ... This statement was full of insinuations. Here was the Prime Minister of a democratic country showing extreme intolerance for, and interfering publicly with other people's freedom to think and express opinion about matters which concerned the security of the nation.

• A larger effort along these line was launched by our group in March 1952 from a new platform suggestively named Society for Defence of Freedom in Asia (SDFA). ... It "placed anti-communism squarely on the map of political India"... A Tibet Committee was organised in August 1953 and a Tibet Day was observed in September that year when a demonstration and a meeting were organised in New Delhi...But the programme could not be carried further than that because Prime Minister Nehru sprang a surprise with his Panchshila surrender over Tibet in April 1954, and the Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai movement misled the whole country soon after... It was perhaps the most painful experience of our lives to see the Prime Minister of a democratic country openly patronising the Chinese lobby led by the Communist Party of India, and angrily denouncing tried and tested patriots of a long standing in India's freedom movement. The communist press in India and abroad came out against the SDFA since its very inception... The Russian and Chinese embassies started sending memoranda to our External Affairs Ministry protesting that their countries were being systematically "blackened" by the SDFA... H.D. Malaviya, editor of the official Congress fortnightly AICC Economic Review, had started heaping abuses on us under the pretext of reviewing some of our publications...Prem Bhatia of The Statesman, another spokesman for Soviet Russia, Red China and Krishna Menon in those days, had also displayed malice towards our work in the columns of that important daily. ..In August 1953, the SDFA organised a Tibet Committee which announced a Tibet Day to be observed in September. As many as 12 M.Ps including Professor N.G. Ranga were associated with the Committee. The Prime Minister came out against the Committee the day after it was formed. He called upon Congressmen not to associate with the Committee in any way...But since the SDFA could not be stopped from its own course of action, the Prime Minister used the floor of the Parliament to denounce the organisers of Tibet Day, and threatened them with Government action.... In February 1955, I received an invitation to attend the forthcoming Conference of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League in Formosa. I sent the entire correspondence - including a very warm letter written to me personally by President Chiang Kai-shek - to our External Affairs Ministry, saying that I would accept the invitation only under advice from them...Meanwhile, I had applied for a passport ...But when I approached the Bureau after more than two months to find out the status of my case, they told me confidentially that my case was receiving attention from the Prime Minister himself.

• It is a truism that every Indian who converts to Christianity or Islam becomes hostile to India's indegenous society and culture. Swami Vivekananda had observed long ago that every member of India's ancient society who converts to Christianity or Islam is not only one member less but one enemy more. He would have said the same, had he seen the latter-day converts to Communism. The hostility which a communist harbours towards everything authentically Indian has to be seen in order to be believed.

The fact is that Islam and Christianity and Communism are basically projections of the same poison in the human psyche which produces permanent enmity between a people's past and its present, between one section of that people and another, and between different peoples of the world. It is only the verbiage which they use for presenting their dogmas which sounds different. Christianity and Islam have snapped the ties which linked many people in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to their cultural past. They have created civil strife in every society they have visited. And they have led many imperialist onslaughts from the lands of the believers to those of the unbelievers. Communism did the same wherever it came to prevail. India under Pandit Nehru and his dynasty could not be an exception.

Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

• Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
  We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
  Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
  One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.

• The wealth of first-hand source materials presented in the articles that comprise this book, portray not only the base metal that was Tipu Sultan but also the components of that alchemy which has transmuted him into twenty-four carat gold.

• Unfortunately, there are no memorials erected anywhere in Kodungallur, or Trichur, or Alwaye to honour Dharma Raja who gave shelter in his state to thousands of Hindus escaping from the Islamic brutalities of the fanatic Tipu Sultan; or Ayyappan Marthanda Pillai who was the architect of the historic Nedumkotta; or Raja Keshavadas under whose direct command a comparatively small army humbled and defeated the invading army of Tipu Sultan; or scores of valiant Hindu soldiers who laid down their lives to protect their country and faith. The most despicable and shameful act of the anti-Hindu secularist government of Kerala since Independence was that instead of honouring the legendary heroes of the land, a memorial in the form of a flagstaff was erected near the historic Trichur Palace to perpetuate the memory of the Islamic bigot Tipu Sultan who was instrumental in the forcible mass circumcision and killing of Hindus, destruction of Hindu temples, and devastation of the Malabar, Trichur, Alwaye and Kodungallur regions.

Time for Stock-Taking (1997)

• The only substantial contribution was made by an RSS lawyer hailing from Anantnag in Kashmir. “I have studied Islam in depth,” he said, “and found it to be a great religion. I cannot understand anyone placing Islam in the dock.” Ironically enough this defender of Islam was literally the first to be shot dead when the ethnic cleansing started in the Valley in the winter of 1989.

Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)

• Ascribing human brotherhood, social justice, world peace, self-sacrifice and compassion to Christianity and Islam is tantamount to proclaiming that the wolf is a votary of vegetarianism.

• But what has happened is that the Indian State actively patronizes the exercise aimed at making all religions mean the same things, and persecutes those who defy the exercise. A whole army of 'secularist' scribes in the media and the academia has been employed and paid handsomely for whitewashing Islam and Christianity so that whatever is bigoted in the scriptures and blood-soaked histories of these creeds, is carefully exorcised. On the other hand, whatever is liberal and large-hearted, humane and civilized in the pluralistic spirituality of India is remorseless pruned to the prescribed and proper size. In the process, Christianity has been made to mean only the Sermon on the Mount, and Islam equated with two Quranic sentences torn out of context - "Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion" and "There is no compulsion in religion."

• For Leftists in general have always opposed Theocracy in Muslim and Christian countries. It is only in India that they have become its unrivalled champions.

• No newspaper or periodical worth its name in India will publish what I write in the lines that follow. Not because the subject matter is seditious..., but simply because it defies the Emergency imposed on this country by Muslim theologians and politicians backed by 'secularist' intellectuals and politicians and riotous Muslim mobs and plain terrorists.

• The Emergency which Islam had imposed after its advent in India and which had caused resentment among Hindus for a long time, now stood fully sanctioned by the Hindu elite. All religions were equal. But Islam was more equal.

• [Nehru's] animus against Hinduism was derived from his love for Communism. He knew next to nothing about Buddhism; the only reason be hailed it as well as its hero, Ashoka, was that in his perception Buddhism was a 'revolt' against 'reactionary' Brahminism. Had he known the truth about Buddhism, he would have dropped it like a hot potato. The same psychology made him fall for Islam. Otherwise he was equally ignorant of, and equally indifferent to all religions. The Secularism which he espoused was not borrowed from the modem West. For him, it was only a smokescreen for Hindu-baiting. The fashion was picked up fast by a servile intelligentsia and became a national cult.

• Gandhi's sarva-dharma-samabhâva did not stop at equal respect for all religions; it went much further and stood for equal validity of all religions. The Mahatma had spared no ink or breath to inculcate the belief that all religions embody the same truths, pursue the same goal, and lead to the same spiritual fulfilment.

• So we are left with Mahatma Gandhi as the first and real prophet of sarva-dharma-samabhâva. (...) The explanations for [Gandhi's] pervert behaviour can be many... Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that he bound the Hindus hands and feet with the shackles of his sarva-dharma-samabhâva, and made them helpless in the face of Islamic gangsterism. At the same time, [Gandhi] gave full freedom to Muslims to deal with Hindus as they pleased. The record of what Muslim did under the leadership of the mullahs and the Muslim League exists in cold print. It never occurred to him to appeal to Muslims even once to practise sarva-dharma-samabhâva vis-à-vis Hinduism. That he thought was against their religion with which he could not interfere. The dope was meant only for Hindus. (...) The temptation to become the spokesman of all religions was irresistible for him, as for many Hindu gurus before and after. He ended by being the spokesmen of none, and made a mess of whatever religion he touched. He never evolved a criterion for distinguishing dharma from adharma.

• Hindus are a terrorized society which has internalized and made a virtue out of a cowardly habit - the habit of surviving by flattering Islam and Muslims acquired during the long spell of Islamic invasions and rule. Mahatma Gandhi was the best representative of this damaged Hindu psyche.

• The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam. Both of these doctrines prescribe Theocracy under which the State serves as the secular arm of the Church or the Ummah, and society is regimented by the Sacred Canon or the Shariat.

• This fact is more than evident if we survey the history of Christianity till the French Revolution, and the practice which prevails in all Islamic states till today. It is a different matter that Christianity has reconciled itself to Secularism because of its steep decline in its traditional homelands - Europe and the Americas. The doctrine remains unchanged and Christianity will restore Theocracy if it were to acquire power again. Islam has yet to evince any sign of similar reconciliation with Secularism either in doctrine or in practice. In fact, the recent trend in most Islamic countries has been to revert to Theocracy in its pristine form, that is, as it existed under the four "rightly guided caliphs".

• It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India - Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs - cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism, the same way as the votaries of Communist totalitarianism coming out vociferously in defence of Democracy. The puzzle needs unravelling unless one is satisfied with the mere sound of the word 'secularism', and at the same time nails pluralistic Hinduism as a closed monotheism like Islam and Christianity as India-watchers in the West and their lickspittles in this country have been doing for a long time.

Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

• He told me that it was no more available in the Government shops because Christian missionaries had bought all available copies and destroyed them. Even in libraries, it was rarely available because the same missionaries had seen to it that copies were removed, or borrowed and not returned.

• The name of this volume which combines the reprint with an introduction has been suggested by Arun Shourie, as in the case of Hindu Temples: What Happened to them.

• The Vedic tradition advises people to be busy with themselves, that is, their own moral and spiritual improvement. Several disciplines have been evolved for this purpose tapas (austerity), yoga (meditation), jñAna (reflection), bhakti (devotion), etc. A seeker can take to (adhikAra) whichever discipline suits his adhAra (stage of moral-spiritual preparation). There is no uniform prescription for everybody, no coercion or allurement into a belief system, and no regimentation for aggression against others. The Biblical tradition, on the other hand, teaches people to be busy with others. One is supposed to have become a superior human being as soon as one confesses the ‘only true faith’. Thenceforward one stands qualified to ‘save’ others.

• The fourth phase which commenced with the coming of independence proved a boon for Christianity. The Christian right to convert Hindus was incorporated in the Constitution. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who dominated the scene for 17 long years, promoted every anti-Hindu ideology and movement behind the smokescreen of a counterfeit secularism. The regimes that followed continued to raise the spectre of ‘Hindu communalism’ as the most frightening phenomenon. Christian missionaries could now denounce as a Hindu communalist and chauvinist, even as a Hindu Nazi, any one who raised the slightest objection to their means and methods. All sorts of ‘secularists’ came forward to join the chorus. New theologies of Fulfilment, Indigenisation, Liberation, and Dialogue were evolved and put into action. The missionary apparatus multiplied fast and became pervasive. Christianity had never had it so good in the whole of its history in India. It now stood recognized as ‘an ancient Indian religion’ with every right to extend its field of operation and expand its flock. The only rift in the lute was K.M. Panikkar’s book, Asia and Western Dominance, published from London in 1953, the Niyogi Committee Report published by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1956, and Om Prakash Tyagi’s Bill on Freedom of Religion introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 1978.

• The Constitution of independent India adopted in January 1950 made things quite smooth for the Christian missions. They surged forward with renewed vigour. Nationalist resistance to what had been viewed as an imperialist incubus during the Struggle for Freedom from British rule, broke down when the very leaders who had frowned upon it started speaking in its favour. Voices which still remained ‘recalcitrant’ were sought to be silenced by being branded as those of ‘Hindu communalism’. Nehruvian Secularism had stolen a march under the smokescreen of Mahatma Gandhi’s sarva-dharma-samabhAva

• It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that the “architect of modern India” was no more than a combined embodiment of all imperialist ideologies which had flocked to this ancient land in the company of alien invaders Islam, Christianity, White Man’s Burden, and Communism.

• The Christian missionary orchestra in India after independence has continued to rise from one crescendo to another with the applause of the Nehruvian establishment manned by a brood of self-alienated Hindus spawned by missionary-macaulayite education. The only rift in the lute has been K.M. Panikkar’s Asia and Western Dominance published in 1953, the Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Committee Madhya Pradesh published in 1956, Om Prakash Tyagi’s Bill on Freedom of Religion introduced in the Lok Sabha in 1978, Arun Shourie’s Missionaries in India published in 1994 and the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Bill introduced in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly by Mangal Prabhat Lodha, M.L.A. on 20 December 1996.

• Secularism in the modern West had symbolized a humanist and rationalist revolt against the closed creed of Christianity and stood for pluralism such as has characterized Hinduism down the ages. But Pandit Nehru had perverted the word and turned it into a shield for protecting every closed creed prevailing in India at the dawn of independence in 1947 Islam, Christianity, Communism.

Attributed

• I was told by [Mohammed Habib] with considerable pride that Nehru had learnt the history of medieval India “at his feet.” I have yet to meet a more arrogant man whose manners were uglier than his syphilitic face. He was an ardent admirer of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. He lost his temper and asked me to “go away” when I told him that I did not accept Lenin’s theory of the state.
  • Sita Ram Goel, in an interview with Mohammad Habib at Mohammed Habib’s home in Aligarh in 1959. Quoted in S. Balakrishna : Tarikh-i-Habibi—Being the Partial Chronicle of Irfan Habib: The Progenitor, 2019

Quotes about S.R. Goel

• Trained as an historian at the University of Delhi, Sita Ram Goel had an active career as a social activist, fighting for various causes throughout his career. As he describes it, a narrow escape from a murderous Muslim mob in 1946 appears to have moved him in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to his views on Islam. After 1982, he became involved, with Swarup, in establishing Voice of India.
  • Chad Baumann, quoted from [Routledge Handbooks in Religion] Chad M. Bauman, Michelle Voss Roberts - The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations (2020, Routledge) 142 ff

• Christian mission based on exclusivist beliefs, with the consequent impulse to convert others, continues to be extremely problematic in India. Christian missionaries may now claim to be doing humanitarian work, but distrust of them is supported by more than a century of engagement. Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, two Hindu writers who studied the Christian gospels, concluded that Jesus could not be excluded from the responsibility for the type of Christian activities in India (and elsewhere). Goel even named one of his books, Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (Goel 1994). This polemic was based on the claims made by Jesus in the gospels, by the paucity of historical evidence to support them, and by the fundamentalist understanding of these claims that fueled aggressive proselytizing.
  • (Blackwell Companions to Religion) Delbert Burkett - The Blackwell Companion to Jesus -Wiley-Blackwell (2010)

• [Goel’s thesis is based on] “selective translations of premodern Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic data”.
  • Richard Eaton, quoted from Elst K. Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple 2002, chapter 6

• The importance of Ram Swarup's and Sita Ram Goel's work can hardly be over-estimated.... They are the first to give a first-hand "Pagan" reply to the versions of history and "comparative religion" imposed by the monotheist world-conquerors, both at the level of historical fact and of fundamental doctrine, both in terms of the specific Hindu experience and of a more generalized theory of religion free from prophetic-monotheistic bias.
  • K. Elst in India's only communalist, A short biography of Sita Ram Goel, India's Only Communalist: In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel (ed. Koenraad Elst, 2005)

• Once I had seen through the secularists, it was only logical that I would go and make my acquaintance with the people whom they always denounced with such holy indignation. Would those ugly Hindu monsters really be all that ugly? After reading the book History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, I sought out its author, and that's how I met Sita Ram Goel. Come to mention him, I found that in moral stature and depth of scholarship, he completely dwarfed the Stalinist "eminent historians" and other icons of "secularism". Which is why I cannot help frowning when I see Meera Nanda forget her limitations and berate a towering personality like Goel.
  • Koenraad Elst: Return of the Swastika, 2004: Hinduism, Environmentalism and the Nazi Bogey, A Preliminary Reply by Dr. Koenraad Elst to Ms. Meera Nanda,

• Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva". ... Indeed, if Meera Nanda had taken the trouble of reading them, she would have known that there has never been a fiercer critic of the RSS than Sita Ram Goel..
  • Elst, Koenraad. Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus Hindu Sanity (2007)

• Where and when have Mr. Goel’s arguments about Islamic doctrine and history been “refuted”? ... Ayub Khan seems to have a rather airy and self-serving understanding of the precise logical concept of “refutation”.
  • Elst K. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• To my knowledge, Goelji never ever applied the term "Hindutva" to his own thinking. But I've never been able to think up a term clearly pinpointing his own position in the ideological spectrum.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2012). The argumentative Hindu. New Delhi : Aditya Prakashan. 229

• She associates Sita Ram Goel repeatedly with “Hindutva”. But to my knowledge, Goelji never ever applied the term "Hindutva" to his own thinking. Though a freedom fighter (i.e., in India, an activist in the anti-colonial freedom movement) in his youth, he often explicitly rejected the nationalist paradigm, especially in contexts where the Sangh Parivar was using it as a ploy to skirt around the difficult ideological issues... In our first conversation, in 1989, he derided the RSS-BJP as "the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history". And in our last, in 2003 (in the presence of Prof. Saradindu Mukherji and Dr. David Frawley), he gloomily said: "Hinduism will not survive unless this RSS-BJP movement perishes." And in between, he said things like: "The RSS is leading Hindu society into a trap." [...] By contrast, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel had the real scientist’s mind. They questioned. In particular, they questioned the beliefs which are so obtrusively propagated, those of Christianity and Islam.
  • Koenraad Elst, The Argumentative Hindu (2012), Chapter 13

• On other occasions as well, Goel has sternly criticized the RSS and BJP for their policy of eschewing all serious discussion of Islamic doctrine. His book Time for Stock-Taking is the single most incisive critique of the RSS available; unlike the stereotyped and sloganeering tirades by Marxists like Chetan Bhatt, it is based on first-hand knowledge, including the testimonies by a number of disappointed RSS volunteers. In spite of this, political “scientists” like Bhatt can disregard all the evidence and label Goel as an RSS man.
  • Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002) by K. Elst

• Mr. Goel rarely speculated, he dealt in facts. His closeness to basic facts was to provide a refreshing contrast with the free-for-all of history-writing and wishful political analysis by the Nehruvian secularists, who always ignored the borderline data in favour of their own dogmas.
  • K. Elst, Some recollections from my acquaintance with Sita Ram Goel in Koenraad Elst, ed.: India’s Only Communalist. In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel, Voice of India, Delhi 2005

• H.K. Srivastava made a proposal to attack the problem of communal friction at what he apparently considered its roots. He wanted all press writing about the historical origins of temples and mosques to be banned. And it is true : the discussion of the origins of some mosques is fundamental to this whole issue. For, it reveals the actual workings of an ideology that, more than anything else, has caused countless violent confrontations between the religious communities. However, after the news of this proposal came, nothing was heard of it anymore. I surmise that the proposal was found to be juridically indefensible in that it effectively would prohibit history-writing, a recognized academic discipline of which journalism makes use routinely.... And I surmise that it was judged politically undesirable because it would counterproductively draw attention to this explosive topic.
  The real target of this proposal was the book Hindu Temples : What Happened to Them (A Preliminary Survey) by Arun Shourie and others. In the same period, there has been a proposal in the Rajya Sabha by Congress MP Mrs. Aliya to get this book banned, in spite of the fact that about half the book had already legally been published in different papers. The police dropped by the printer and later the publisher to get a few copies for closer inspection....The really hard part of the book is a list of some two thousand Muslim buildings that have been built on places of previous Hindu worship (and for which many more than two thousand temples have been demolished). In spite of the threat of a ban on raking up this discussion, on November 18 the U.P. daily Pioneer has published a review of this book, by Vimal Yogi Tiwari,.... "History is not just an exercise in collection of facts though, of course, facts have to be carefully sifted and authenticated as Mr. Sita Ram Goel has done in this case. History is primarily an exercise in self-awareness and reinforcement of that self-awareness. Such a historical assessment has by and large been missing in our country. This at once gives special significance to this book."
  • Koenraad Elst. Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society. 1991.

• In 1986, a book was published containing the court documents, with a scholarly introduction by Sita Ram Goel. The introduction says that of course no ban on the Quran was ever intended (since Scriptures and Classics are kept out of the purview of censorship legislation, there was no chance of obtaining such a ban), but that attention had to be drawn on the fact that, while some allegedly provocative books are being banned, a book is widely circulated and studied intensively in thousands of state-subsidized institutions, which makes far more explicit calls to communal strife than any banned book so far has done. They solution is not to ban the Quran, but on the contrary to honestly read it and judge it for yourself in the light of reason. For this book, the Calcutta police arrested Mr. Chandmal Chopra on August 31, 1987, accusing him of entering into a criminal conspiracy with Mr. Sita Ram Goel for publishing the book with the deliberate intention of provoking communal strife in Calcutta and West Bengal. His bail application was opposed vehemently by the public prosecutor. He was kept in police custody till September 8, so that the conspiracy could be "investigated without his coming in the way". Mr. Goel, "a co-accused still at large", applied for anticipatory bail. This was first postponed and then rejected. Mr. Goel had to abscond for a while to avoid being dragged to the Calcutta jail.... At any rate, Mr. Chopra and Mr. Goel got caught in a long-drawn-out legal battle, though the book itself was not banned.
  • Koenraad Elst. Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society. 1991. Ch. 12.

• In 1984 a citizen of India, H.K. Chakraborty, filed a petition with the West Bengal state government to ban the Quran... If the Indian laws prohibit communal hate propatganda, Mr. Chakraborty was right in considering the Quran as an excellent candidate for banning. But even after reminder-letters, the West Bengal authorities gave no response. At this stage, Mr. Chakraborty met Chandmal Chopra, an adherent of the extremely non-violent Jain sect, who had taken up the study of the Quran in order to understand the plight of the Hindus in Bangladesh, who are gradually being chased from their ancestral homeland by the Muslims. In 1985 Chandmal Chopra filed a petition with the Calcutta high Court, asking for a ban on the Quran.... The petition created a lot of furore in Calcutta and abroad. Muslims created street riots. The government intervened and put heavy pressure on the judicial process. The secret service was put to work to find possible objectionable biographical data of the petitioner. The court used some dirty tricks to disturb the peritioner's case, like changing dates and changing the object of a session to which the petitioner had been summoned, during the same session itself, with apparent foreknowldege of the government's counsel.... The petitioner has made it clear that he considers book-banning counterproductive, and that the controversial petition was meant to direct public attentiton towards the Quran's contents: people should read it, because Indian citizens have a right to know why their country is plagued with never-ending religious riots. When Chandmal Chopra had the documents of the legal dispute published, the administration decided to prosecute him and his publisher on the basis of the very same Penal Code articles which he had invoked to request a ban on the Quran...
  • Elst, Koenraad Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992

• In November 1990 there had been proposals in the national parliament and in the state parliament of Uttar Pradesh to ban this first volume of "Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them". This step was not taken, possibly because negationists thought the ban would be counter productive by drawing attention to the list of disputable mosques. None of the negationist historians has come forward with a reply or with the announcement that a mistake has been discovered in Mr. Goel's list of monuments of Islamic fanaticism. Manini Chatterjee, reviewer for The Telegraph, could do no more than calling it a "very bad book". Very bad for the negationists, indeed.... negationist historians will find it difficult to show their faces in public. They stand exposed, and only their control over the media can save their reputation by censoring this critique of their career-long efforts at history falsification.
  • Elst, Koenraad Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992

• Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva". The latter term was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, and though some contemporary RSS middle cadres try to push it as a synonym and replacement of "Hinduism", Savarkar himself had explicitly written that the two are not synonyms; in practical terms, "Hindutva" is a synonym of "Hindu nationalism", an ideology and behind that also a national sentiment, but not a religion in any usual sense of the word. "Hindutva" was the banner of the Hindu Mahasabha and was subsequently adopted by the RSS, organizations of which the said independent authors were never members nor camp-followers.
  Indeed, if Meera Nanda had taken the trouble of reading them, she would have known that there has never been a fiercer critic of the RSS than Sita Ram Goel, vide e.g. the book he edited: "Time for Stock-Taking", a collection of pro-Hindu anti-RSS papers (incidentally, I myself have also devoted a book, BJP vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence, and a book chapter in Decolonizing the Hindu Mind to criticism of the RSS Parivar). There is plenty of Hindu revivalism going on outside the RSS, and even before the RSS came into existence, but "secularists" always try to reduce the former to a ploy of the latter. This in application of the Marxist penchant for conspiracy theories, very handy explanatory models which eliminate reality as a factor of human perception and agency. Thus, when Hindus complain of factual problems such as missionary subversion or Muslim terrorism, it is always convenient to portray this spontaneous and truthful perception as an artefact of "RSS propaganda".
  • Koenraad Elst, "Hinduism, Environmentalism and the Nazi Bogey", in The Return of the Swastika

• Sitaram followed a strong rationalistic point of view that did not compromise the truth even for politeness sake. His intellectual rigor is quite unparalleled in Hindu circles.
  • David Frawley, How I Became A Hindu My Discover Of Vedic Dharma

• I can think of no other modern writer who better epitomizes this role of an intellectual kshatriya than Sitaram Goel.
  • David Frawley. Sitaram Goel: Modern India’s Greatest Intellectual Kshatriya

• My father started Biblia Impex from a small table in a friend's office. He would sit on one side of the table, and his typist would sit on the other side. He was one of the first Indian publishers to send books abroad without asking for advance payment. Other export businesses would never do this. They would always require money in advance. My father understood European integrity. He knew they were trustworthy.
  • 2004, Hinduism Today, Interview with Pradip Goel

• Many [Hindu revivalist writers] have notably gathered around the publishing house Voice of India of Sita Ram Goel, this new avatar of Hindu nationalism. He loses, in a way, any traditional side. He ... takes up all that is possible from secular and democratic polemicists ..
  • Heuze, Gerard (1993). Où va l'inde moderne?. Harmattan. ISBN 2738417558

• I did not know that you were a scholar, and had made such a deep study of Buddhism. And I have simply fallen for the beautiful (madhura) Hindi you write.
  • Jayaprakash Narayan quoted from Goel, S.R. How I became A Hindu (1982)

• Those who knew Goel were aware that he was what his son described him to be: 'Ardent atheist turned born-again Hindu' who 'committed the better part of his 82 years on earth to restoring Hindu dignity'.
  • M.V. Kamath A Hindu, communalist too!, 2005

• The Home Minister wants me to convey to you that if the work started by you is not encouraged and assisted right now, it will have to be done by the Indian Army one day.
  • Message from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950 conveyed by an official from the Home Ministry to Sita Ram Goel (Goel was at that time publishing works critical of communism) Swarajamag: Jawaharlal Nehru And How His Love For Marxism Affected India by Aravindan Neelakandan - Nov 14, 2018. Also quoted in S.R. Goel, Genesis and Growth of Nehruism, Vol I. First Preface.

• Sita Ramji had long ceased to be an individual; he had grown into an institution by himself. He was a veritable giant of an intellectual impossible to vanquish... The need of the hour is to have similar intellectual combatants in substantial numbers who can draw inspiration from his life.
  • K. S. Sudarshan, [5] Organiser Newspaper Reports on Sita Ram Goel

• As an intellectual Sita Ram Goel fought relentlessly for upholding certain values: honesty, rigour of thought and conscience, and a sublime disdain for dogma.
  • V. Sundaram V. Sundaram

• One final reason for being confident is that because of the work of Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Rajiv Malhotra the corpus is now reaching a critical mass. So, that we can think that within few years we will have a library for India and a library of India.
  • Arun Shourie Arun Shourie's lecture of Indra's Net.; Das, Sankhadip (3 March 2014). Transcript: Arun Shourie's Lecture on 'Indra's Net'. Hitchhiker's Guide to Rajiv Malhotra's Works. Retrieved on 24 March 2014..

• Today, India needs true karmayogis like Sita Ram Goel in every field of Indian culture and every socio-economic field.
  • Shrikant Talageri, quoted from M.V. Kamath in Organiser

• Sita Ram Goel is the most prolific of the Hindu nationalist writers on Hindu-Muslim relations.
  • C. Talbot in DAVID GILMARTIN, BRUCE B. LAWRENCE - Beyond Turk and Hindu_ Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia - 296

• Very few need introduction to this particular work. Suffice to say that not only does this great and unprecedented work gives a list of the most famous Hindu temples destroyed and by whom, it also discusses the mentality and the psyche which goes behind the destruction of such high quality of art. Hindus created these temples over generations with great care and sacrifice and Muslim invaders destroyed them in one go. What explains such psyche? This is one book to read before you die!
  • About the book Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them. Meenakshi Jain, 2020

• Sitaram Goel has written some thoroughly researched books on Indian history. One of the books, ‘Hindu Temples – What happened to them’ would rattle your views about history, or rather the falsification of history being perpetrated by the lobby of historians who are controlling the academia for years now. Whenever such evidence is discovered or brought to light, it is ridiculed by established lobbies; if not possible then it is hushed up as being ‘sensitive’.... The first volume of the ‘Hindu Temples’ book subtitled ‘A Preliminary Survey’, was published in 1990 and played an important role in the political debate over the controversial Ram temple in Ayodhya. It contains a competently compiled list of about 2000 mosques in India that have forcibly replaced Hindu temples.
  • Ratan Sharda - RSS 360 °_ Demystifying Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bloomsbury India (2018)

• Sita Ram Goel, a prominent Hindu scholar and historian, painstakingly traces the unpleasant acts of Christian missionaries in his scholarly works... in an attempt to show that the opposition to Christianity in India is a spontaneous response of Hindus to the bitter history of Western Christianity’s intolerance and ill portrayal of Hindu beliefs, social customs, and traditions.
  • Religious Conversion in India: The Niyogi Committee Report of Madhya Pradesh in 1956 and Its Continuing Impact on National Unity. Manohar James 2022. 31.

• Some of his publications are simply the best in their field, standing unchallenged by the historians of Mukhia’s school, who have never gotten farther than the kind of invective ad hominem which we find in the abovementioned texts by Romila Thapar, S. Subramaniam and Mukhia himself.
  • Elst K. Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple, chapter 4

• Sinclair claimed that this Kolkata based society and its associate publisher Sita Ram Goel were critical of Soviet policies and were working for genuine freedom and democracy. He stated that this group was being labelled as an “espionage centre for America" and Nehru had agreed to suppress it during his visits to Beijing and Moscow and their embassies had been pressing him for action.
  • Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Volume 31