Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity), BS Murthy [microsoft ebook reader .TXT] 📗

idol of iron, and that the ingenious builder had skillfully contrived that the magnet should not exercise a greater force on any one side - hence the idol was suspended in the middle. Some coincided others differed. Permission was obtained from the Sultan to remove some stones from the top of the canopy to settle the point. When two stones were removed from the summit the idol swerved on one side, when more were taken away it inclined still further, until at last it rested on the ground.”

Shocked did Mahmud the Hindus into dejection, as Romila Thapar picks up the historical debris of Somnath thus:

“The raids of Mahmud did not make India aware of the world to her northwest or of the events taking place there. Confederacies had been formed, but not with a view to organizing defence on a national scale, utilizing resources from various parts of the subcontinent or even northern India. Defence was linked to the immediate purpose of assisting kings to maintain their kingdoms; the significance of Mahmud’s raids as paving the way in northern India for further attacks from the north-west was not fully grasped. Mahmud was just another mlechchha as had been the Shakas and the Huns. They had been absorbed and forgotten, as so too presumably would Mahmud and his armies.

The death of Mahmud in any case removed the need for vigilance on the north-west, especially as his successors were less interested in the plains of northern India. The Indian rulers returned to their internal squabbles. When the second attack came from the north-west under the leadership of Muhammad Ghuri at the end of the twelfth century India was, for all practical purposes, as unprepared as she had been for meeting the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni.”

Besides, what Alberuni saw around the time of Mahmud’s onslaught on India corroborates Thapar’s account of it.

“… From that time dates their aversion towards the countries of Khurasan. But then came Islam; the Persian empire perished, and the repugnance of the Hindus against foreigners increased more and more when the Muslims began to make their inroads into their country; for Muhammad Ibn Elkasim Ibn Elmunabbih entered Sindh from the side of Sijistan (Sakastene) and conquered the cities of Bahmanwa and Mulasthana, the former of which he called Al-mansura, the latter Al-mamura. He entered India proper, and penetrated even as far as Kanauj, marched through the country of Gandhara, and on his way back, through the confines of Kashmir, sometimes fighting sword in hand, sometimes gaining his ends by treaties, leaving to the people their ancient belief, except in the case of those who wanted to become Muslims. All these events planted a deeply rooted hatred in their hearts.

Now in the following times no Muslim conqueror passed beyond the frontier of Kabul and the river Sindh until the days of the Turks, when they seized the power in Ghazna under the Samani dynasty, and the supreme power fell to the lot of Nasir- addaula Sabuktagin. This prince chose the holy war as his calling, and therefore called himself Al-Ghazi (i.e. warring on the road of Allah). In the interest of his successors he constructed, in order to weaken the Indian frontier, those roads on which afterwards his son Yamin-addaula Mahmud marched into India during a period of thirty years and more. God be merciful to both father and Son!

Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims. This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places. And there the antagonism between them and all foreigners receives more and more nourishment both from political and religious sources.”

Well, to add to this tale, there was the old Muslim misconception about Hinduism as an idol worshipping paganism, against which Muhammad infused hatred amongst the believers that the umma came to nurse. Hence, once Islam happened to reach the other side of the Hindukush, it was in no mood to either suffer the scent of the sanctums sanctorum of the Hindu deities or allow the kafirs a free reign over their monumental mandirs across those mountain ranges. So, again and again, for the satiation of the greed of the Ghazanis and the Ghuris, the marauders of a Muslamans, Hindustan became a logical destination for rapine and rape not to speak of manslaughter. Thus, over time, Arya Varta, the Hindu karma bhōmi, was reduced into fiefdoms of the Musalman Sultans and Nawabs.

The unique features of faith, as well as prejudice, are that they are subject to the cascading effect brought about by the tendency of the protagonists for enthusiastic one-upmanship. If the Islamic faith became a dogma of the Musalmans akin to paranoia, then the Brahman haughtiness was transformed into the Hindu insensitivity. The fate meted out by the insensitive Hindu polity, moulded in Brahman orthodoxy, to those of their ilk taken as prisoners by the Musalmans in the battles for the domain of Hindustan would illustrate the tragedy of the times. That these valiant men, who staked their lives in guarding their ancient land from falling into the alien Muslim hands, were not readmitted into the parent fold even after their release by, or escape from, their captors for their association with the mlecĥās, their enforced confinement occasioned! And those valiant men, rendered hapless by the prejudices of the Brahmans, had nowhere else to go in their own land but to the Islamic camp. What rank Hindu ingratitude to those patriots out to protect their motherland and its ancient way of life! Wonder if there is any parallel of such a social cruelty in the annals of human history!

Arguably, the curse of those hurt Hindu souls, which were cruelly driven into the Islamic bodies that could be forever restless in their Muslim graves, could be behind the tragedies the Hindus faced for centuries on. Oh, what an eternal shame and won’t the Hindus of the day, and those who would follow, owe an apology to the progeny of those. But then, even now do we really care for, much less value, our men in the uniform as we should be doing? Wish the Hindus, instead of gloating over the wisdom of the Upanishads that they fail to imbibe, any way, would try to develop a historical sense of their cultural aberrations for a social course correction.

While Ghazani and Ghuri subjected Hindustan to their raids and runs of plunder, the Sultans who came in their wake had set up their domains of self-aggrandizement. The wealth of the land was misused for the grandeur of their courts and the upkeep of their harems, needless to say, to the detriment of the populace. The opulent palaces built for their living and the grandiose mausoleums erected for their dead that dot the Indian subcontinent bear testimony to the callousness of these settlers of Musalman rulers. It is as if they hadn’t any value for life other than their own.

So, with the remnants of the Hindu State yielding ground, first to the Sultanates that eventually absorbed by the Mogul Empire and then to the British Raj, the swadharma of various varnas began to degenerate into varied caste creeds to the hurt of the Indian social unity and purpose. Thus, it can be said in hind sight that it was the concept of swadharma that was the undoing of India for it negated its dharmic unification, like Hindutva, for all to live by and die for. But it was the near millennia reign of the alien settler races, devoid of concern for the public good and lacking a stake in the welfare of the country, which for centuries on put India in a state of social coma. What is worse for the unfortunate citizens, as if the foreign rulers of yore had laid down the norms for ruling Arya Varta for all times to come, the politicians of free India have stuck to the ethos of the aliens in governing their own country.

 

Chapter 20

Double Jeopardy

 

It may be interesting to follow the Islamic fate of those unfortunate untouchables and other marginal caste groups of Hindustan, who had embraced the bigoted faith of Muhammad. True, the Hindu fringes, at last, got their God that the Brahmans so cruelly denied them, even one amongst their three crore deities, and what if Allah Ta’ala was an alien One for they were never allowed to feel like the coparceners of the land of their own forebears? Nevertheless, as the enshrined caste edifice was too strong even for the Almighty Allah to pull down, and since their Muhammadan masters would have only condescend to descended with them, the early converts might have been, to start with, tentative in their new faith. But yet, for the pain of circumcision, Islam afforded them the solace of faith and the hope of the ‘Hereafter’.

Moreover, for them the Sufi sop of allowing them to nourish their new Islamic credos in their old Hindu habitats was like having the cake and eating it too. But for the caste Hindus, they became mlecĥās, apart from being the outcasts that is even as the alien circumcision earned them the ridicule of a katua. And making matters worse for them, it was only time before the Wahabi zealots forced the progeny of the Sufis’ soft converts to shed their loose Hindu habits, and adopt the strict Muhammadan customs, which, to say the least, were cumbersome to the core. Thus, the double jeopardy of the Islamic religious rigidity and the Hindu caste prejudice would have insensibly pushed those hapless converts into the ‘circle of hazard’ of the life ‘here’, and, what is worse, tied their progeny to an alien lifestyle for all times to come.

This unjust happenstance should be a cause of regret for the caste Hindus that their progenitors so mistreated the forebears of these folks that forced them into an alien faith with a slavish ethos to the God and a narrow vision of life that is firmly coupled with burdensome religious precepts and practices. So, ironically, Islam, which attracted many outcastes of yore with its egalitarian tenets, had reduced their progeny into incorrigible obscurants of our times; whereas, their religiously removed caste cousins, aided by the times, are now riding on the high tide of modernity, be it those who had retained the identity of their progenitors or such who are resisting to be trapped into the Church by the wily Christian missionaries (may the Hindus be thankful to them). This alone calls for an unqualified apology from the Hindus to the Indian Musalmans and their sub-continental cousins before the Subramanian Swamys of the world want them to own up their Hindu origins to usher in the laudable integral Indian nationalism.

Whatever, the unabated profligacy of the Sultan-Nawab nexus of the Islamic order should have depressed the Indian economy sooner than later, which wouldn’t have improved the economic lot of the native converts for the alien rulers suffered no qualms for their lack of concern to the new but lowly additions to the grand umma, not to speak of their kafir subjects. But as the general economic condition of the Hindustan further deteriorated in time, being the poorest of the polity, the plight of the progeny of those converts would have only got worsened.

And yet, as the Islamic brainwash would have made them believe in their eternal bliss in the ‘Hereafter’, they could have derived a vicarious pleasure on account of the economic plight of their former tormentors ‘here’ as well for they had no scope to hope for the paradise that debars kafirs from entering its pristine precincts. And in the modern era, as the naivety of the