106 quotes found
"Violence broke out on 27 February in Godhra, a district headquarters in eastern Gujarat. Fifty-seven Hindus were killed, including 25 women and 14 children, who were burned alive aboard the Sabarmati Express [...] Those who were originally from Gujarat and were returning home aboard the Sabarmati Express had gathered together in a few coaches. They chanted Hindu nationalist songs and slogans throughout the entire voyage, all the while harassing Muslim passengers. One family was even made to get off the train for refusing to utter the karsevaks war cry: "Jai Shri Ram!" (Glory to Lord Ram!). More abuse occurred at the stop in Godhra: a Muslim shopkeeper was also ordered to shout "Jai Shri Ram!" He refused, and was assaulted until the kar sevaks turned on a Muslim woman with her two daughters. One of them was forced to board the train before it started going again... The anti-Hindu riot was thus a reaction to provocation from Hindu nationalist activists. The aftermath of the events clearly showed that the violence reached unprecedented proportions precisely because of the political strategy these Hindu nationalists employ."
"You were merely asked to bend, but you chose to crawl."
"Every ban and censorship hurt. But banishment hurts the most. Banishment took away the ground from beneath my feet. What I need now most is a firm footing to stand up somewhere to fight for the freedom of expression. I was banished from both East and West Bengal."
"Many of my books are banned in Bangladesh. My book was banned in West Bengal too. Its government not only banned my book, it forced me to leave the state too. The new government banned the release of my book Nirbasan in 2012 and a few months ago forced a TV channel called Akash Ath to stop telecast of a mega serial I wrote. The serial was about women’s struggle and how three sisters living in Calcutta fight against patriarchal oppression to live their lives with dignity and honour. She (Mamata Banerjee) banned me to appease some misogynist mullahs."
"I had expected that the situation in West Bengal will change after Mamata came to power. But I was wrong. I found her harsher than the earlier Left Front government... Politicians are all on the same platform when it comes down to me. I think it’s because they think that if they can satisfy the Muslim fundamentalists they will get votes. I believe I am a victim of votebank politics. This also shows that how weak the democracy is and politicians ask votes by banning a writer ... Even though I am not staying there, she (Banerjee) has not allowed my book ‘Nirbasan’ to be published. Also, she has stopped the broadcast of a TV serial scripted by me after Muslim fundamentalists objected to it. She is not allowing me to enter the state… This is a dangerous opposition ... I wrote to Mamata Banerjee. But there was no response to that… No I am not going to write to her again. I do not think she will consider my request. I feel very hopeless because I expected something positive. I think when it comes down to me, she has similar vision like that of the Left leaders."
"It was not long before I was visited by officers of the Crimes Department, and not only from Delhi. I was accused of causing communal discord, and threatening the peace of the land. I was arrested, and ordered to seek bail.... I had been arrested in the classic case of Ram Swarup's documented study, "Understanding Islam through Hadis: Religious Faith or Fanaticism?"... There had been loud talk in the book market at Delhi that this book was going to be banned... The Delhi Administration issued a notification in November, 1991, stating that the Hindi translation will stand banned whenever it is published. In March 1992, the same Administration banned the English original also."
"Conversely, banning this book [Hindu View of Christianity and Islam by Ram Swarup] would send a signal that the present establishment will do what it can to prevent Hinduism from rising up, from regaining self-confidence, from facing the challenge of hostile ideologies."
"A consequence of the negationist orientation of the Indian state's religious policy, is the readiness to ban books critical of Islam at the slightest suggestion by some mullah or Muslim politician. It is symptomatic that India was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, at the insistence of Syed Shahabuddin, MP (in exchange, with some other concessions, for his calling off a march on Ayodhya)."
"The problem of book-banning and censorship on Islam criticism is compounded by the related problem of self- censorship. Thus, when in late 1992, the famous columnist Arun Shourie wanted to publish a collection of his columns on Islamic fundamentalism, esp. the Rushdie and Ayodhya affairs (Indian Controversies), the publisher withdrew at the last moment, afraid of administrative or physical reprisals, and the printer also backed out. Earlier, Shourie had been lucky to find one paper willing to publish these columns, for most Indian newspapers strictly keep the lid on Islam criticism. Hindu society is a terrorized society."
"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"... 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."
"Such superstitions which are in flagrant conflict with scientific universalism, should be dealt with by intellectuals, and the state will have done more than its share if it does not impede the broadcasting of their criticism of these superstitions. The state should just refrain from banning books eventhough they hurt the feelings of those steeped in the said superstitions. It should refrain from pressurizing or boycotting or prosecuting people who perform their legitimate task of educating people concerning such superstitions. It should refrain from imposing history-distortions on schoolbooks, i.e. from concealing the truth about the evil effects of such superstitions. (That the Indian state is so far not secular enough to refrain from this sabotage of the intellectual struggle against superstition, is shown in ch. 12)"
"[He] 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..."
"They rely on intimidation, It is exactly by tactics of this kind that an earlier book of Mr. Swarup - Understanding Islam Through Hadis - was put out of circulation... November 27, 1990, under the influence of the same intimidation the Delhi Administration declared that, contrary to what it had itself twice decreed, the book was not only objectionable, was deliberately and malicious so!.... Our response should be three fold. First, whenever an attempt such as this from quarters such as Mr. Shahabuddin is made to stifle free speech, to kill even scholarly inquiry, we must go out of our way and immediately obtain the book.... Secondly, whenever the intimidators prevail and such a book actually comes to be banned large numbers should take to reprinting it, photocopying it, to circulating it, and discussing its contents. The third thing is more necessary, and in the long run will be the complete answer to the intimidators. As long as scholars like Mr. Swarup are few, intimidators can bully weak governments into shutting them one by one. But what will they do if 1,000, scholars are to do work of the same order? This is the way to deal with intimidators. Let 1,000 scholars carry on work Mr. Swarup has pioneered."
"A case in which the English version of a major book by a renowned Muslim scholar, the fourth Rector of one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning in India, listing some of the mosques, including the Babri Masjid, which were built on the sites and foundations of temples, using their stones and structures, is found to have the tell-tale passages censored out; The book is said to have become difficult to get;... Evasion, concealment, have become a national habit. And they have terrible consequences... Each reference to each of these mosques having been constructed on the sites of temples with, as in the case of the mosque at Benaras, the stones of the very temple which was demolished for that very purpose have been censored out of the English version of the book! Each one of the passages on each one of the seven mosques! No accident that... why would anyone have thought it necessary to remove these passages from the English version-that is the version which was more likely to be read by persons other than the faithful?... . Those who proceed by such cynical calculations sow havoc for all of us, for Muslims, for Hindus, for all. Those who remain silent in the face of such cynicism, such calculations help them sow the havoc. Will we shed our evasions and concealments? Will we at last learn to speak and face the whole truth?"
"The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on ‘Aurangzeb’s policy on religion’. Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule – to spread the sway of Islam – are directed to be excised from the book... In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam! Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away. Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, ‘Communal rewriting of history’."
"How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal government... - "Muslim rule should never atttact any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned?"
"Ram Swarup, now in his seventies, is a scholar of the first rank... Today, anyone reading those critiques would characterise them as prophetic. But thirty years ago so noxious was the intellectual climate in India that all he got was abuse, and ostracisation... His work on Hinduism and on Islam and Christianity has been equally scholarly. And what is more pertinent to the point I want to urge, it has been equally prophetic. No one has ever refuted him on facts, but many have sought to smear him and his writing. They have thereby transmuted the work from mere scholarship into warning. ... Newspapers carried a little paragraph a fortnight ago that his book.. had been banned, and all its copies forfeited, on the ground that it "deliberately and maliciously" outrages "the religious feelings of the Muslims by insulting their religion and their religious beliefs." The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which had landed us where we are: where intellectual inquiry is shut out; where our traditions are not examined, and reassessed; and where as a consequence there is no dialogue. It is exactly the sort of thing too which foments reaction. (...)"Freedom of expression which is legitimate and constitutionally protected," it [the Supreme Court] declared last year, "cannot be held to ransom by an intolerant group or people." To curtail it in the face of threats of demonstrations and processions or threats of violence "would amount," the Court said, "to the negation of the rule of law and surrender to blackmail and intimidation."
"There has for some time past been in evidence a sinister move in certain quarters to suppress, conceal or eliminate primary sources in Arabic, Persian and Urdu testifying to the temple demolition. ... The Urdu version is found to have been withdrawn from circulation and even removed from several libraries. There is an English translation also, with which undue liberties have been taken. ... An Urdu translation of the work was published ... at least two more editions came out in 1979 and 1981 respectively... [but] the account ... is conspicuous by its absence in the 1981 edition. ... Dr. Kakorawi rightly laments that 'suppression of any part of any old composition or compilation like this can create difficulties and misunderstandings for future historians and researchers. ... The original edition of Mirza Rajab ... contained a reference to the demolition of the Rama temple. Sayyid Masud Hasan Rizwi Adib omitted the reference altogether in its second edition.... As a matter of fact, black-out of well documented, acutely argued contributions ... continues with renewed vigour. A certain leading library of the country of late instituted an enquiry as to how a particular book came to be utilized by the Vishva Hindu Parishad."
"It is a pity that thanks to our thoughtless 'secularism' and waning sense of history, such primary sources of medieval history .. are presently in danger of suppression or total extinction. Instead of launching sustained search and research in this behalf, 'secular' historians are going about dismissing relevant data out of hand, imputing unfounded motive to the recorders themselves. The state in general and the universites in particular must do something to protect and retrieve such invaluable documents from unscrupulous hands."
"Press censorship seems to be back with a vengeance in India, this time imposed not by direct government fiat but by powerful private owners and politicians."
"For example in Pakistan, as recently as October 31, 1991, all the five judges of the Highest Islamic Court ruled that the punishment for defiling the Rasul was death and not life imprisonment as the prevailing penal law provided. But in countries like India where the Shariat law no longer prevails, but where Muslim opinion counts, any critical discussion of the Prophet and Islam is regarded as lacking in good taste. It is unsecular, a great lapse from accepted ideological morality. Critical writings are as a rule edited out and even often banned."
"Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned."
"Not long ago, all the copies of the Hindi edition of my book, Understanding Islam Through Hadis, were confiscated by the police. ... The civil liberties wallahs, otherwise a vocal lot, have been eloquently silent on this and similar bans. But then they are active only in certain preferred directions, on behalf of certain preferred sections and for the benefit of certain preferred ideas."
"Because of that law (Citizenship Amendment Act) these people had faith that we would come. What would have happened to these people if that law had not been there? Sometimes we politicise everything, this is not a matter of politics but a matter of humanity. Who could have left these people in that situation?"
"I wanted to meet the Sikhs who have come to India from Afghanistan and understand their issues. They have some problems regarding visas and citizenship. We will address the issues that they have discussed with us. Some people are still waiting to get their citizenship. We will provide all possible help regarding citizenship and visas. It is our responsibility to help them out."
"Provided that any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014 and who has been exempted by the Central Government by or under clause (c) of sub-section (2) of section 3 of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 or from the application of the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 or any rule or order made thereunder, shall not be treated as illegal migrant for the purposes of this Act;[101]"
"On humanitarian grounds, it is India’s moral duty to accommodate such people who have no place to go. I want to ask those who talk of minority rights, is it not our moral duty to provide a helping hand to persecuted minorities in our neighbourhood? We are concerned about all minorities who live there… whether Christians, Parsis, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists or Hindus. The atrocities against these minorities are forcing them to flee to India. This has been the situation since 1947. They have no rights. We will have to come up with a solution."
"“For them (opposition), they are Muslims. For us, they are all Indians. The Act does not affect any Indian.”... “I want to clearly state that with the CAA coming, there will be no impact on any citizen of India, practising any faith. CAA does not affect any Indian, it doesn’t harm minority interests,”... “Pandit Nehru himself was in favour of protecting minorities in Pakistan, I want to ask Congress, was Pandit Nehru communal? Did he want a Hindu Rashtra?” ... [much has been said about Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) by those who] “love getting photographed with the group of people who want ‘Tukde Tukde’ of India.”... “There has been talk of ‘save constitution’. I agree, Congress should say this 100 times in a day. Maybe they will realize their past mistakes. Did you forget this slogan during emergency? When state Governments were dismissed? When cabinet resolutions were torn?”"
"An atmosphere of hate was systematically built up. The whole purpose of it was to suggest that only one community has a veto over decision-making in India."
"The facts here are very clear, but rest assured that they will be contested. Like most Hindu-Muslim riots, this riot started as a Muslim pogrom on Hindus, with some spectacular killings of Hindu policemen, but then Hindus started striking back, and ultimately the Muslim death toll surpassed the Hindu one. ... Major media have been caught in the act of fabricating fake news... Same manipulation in Wikipedia, which suppressed corrections; or how blatantly fake news was quickly turned into the received wisdom."
"There is nothing anti-Muslim about CAA but it is anti-Hindu not to recognize the suffering and oppression Hindus in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have had to endure, as well as the other religious minorities in these Islamic states."
"The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act violates India’s international obligations to prevent deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin as found in the and other human rights treaties that India has ratified. The 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities calls on governments to protect the existence and identity of religious minorities within their territories and to adopt the appropriate measures to achieve this end. Governments are obligated to ensure that people belonging to , including , may exercise their human rights without discrimination and in full . Governments also have an obligation to ensure . To the extent that the process has a disproportionately harmful impact on the citizenship rights of women and girls, it also violates the ."
"The citizenship law and verification process are contrary to the basic principles of secularism and equality enshrined in the Indian constitution and in domestic law. Indian authorities should immediately reverse course and adopt rights-respecting laws and policies regarding citizenship. They should also uphold the rights to freedom of expression and to peaceful assembly."
"I think it is, without exaggeration, probably the most dangerous piece of that we've had because it amounts to truly destroying the very character of the Indian state and the constitution. [...] Central to the idea was that your would be irrelevant to your belonging, and it's that which is being turned on its head. It's extremely worrying."
"What exactly did I say that Ankit Sharma was stabbed 400 times? Or that Shahrukh picked up gun and roamed about on the streets of Delhi? What made them collect petrol bombs and acid on the roofs? And more importantly, there are no riots when people chant ‘Bharat tere tukde honge’ or ‘Afzal hum sharminda hai’, painting Khilafat 2.0 on Jamia walls is not considered provocative nor is giving a call to hit the streets. But my request to the police to get the road opened is considered provocative."
"I asked the ruling government in the Parliament whether they had the numbers or data to prove that there was pervasive persecution of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Sikhs, and Christians. Amit Shah said ‘lakhon-crorodon’ (lakhs and crores) – which is a very tall and unverified claim and not even remotely substantiated. I asked him for the exact number, broken down nation-wise between the three Islamic nations, and there was no answer given."
"A global coalition has unleashed a campaign to overthrow the elected government of Narendra Modi and prominent academics privately hint at the need for his removal, along with Home Minister, Amit Shah, by any means. These luminaries include some of the most celebrated Indian-origin academics in the world’s leading institutions, one of whom once proposed the ceding of J&K to Pakistan in the presence of the bureaucrat who went on to become India’s Prime Minister. The same academic advised the government of Tony Blair in London to refuse engagement with the Vajpayee administration after the 1998 nuclear tests. Some of these individuals are indubitably engaged with foreign security services of hostile countries and conspire with their arms-length intelligence operations through media assets in New York, Washington and London. Unfortunately, the narrative on India is completely beyond the sway of the Indian authorities and their official and unofficial spokespersons. The latter apparently have neither the intellectual skills to prevail in the deadly contest of fabricated insinuation nor the political will or means to gain access to major media outlets abroad. There can be no starker instance of the dismal situation than their total inability to refute the outrageous portrayal of India’s humane CAA legislation as discriminatory and unjust. The shocking intellectual nullity and illiteracy of the putative nationalist agents deputed abroad, many of them, it is suspected, compromised with foreign governments as well, is a cause for utter dismay."
"Gautam Sen Jun 13 2020 Faltering India"
"You don’t know how the whole world is spitting on India because of this law. Think of it this way: your neighbour has a servant who is ill-behaved and a thief. And now I am bringing that thief to my house and giving him a job."
"After winning the election, we shall make a memorial for the anti-CAA people’s movement that has been ongoing in Assam over the last few years. The memorial shall remember the people’s struggle and sacrifices, protest songs and paintings."
"In the coming months, Guwahati will see a new landmark — a grand memorial in memory of the anti-CAA movement to be built by the incoming Congress government. This will be the state’s message to BJP. No CAA in Assam."
"The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Congress promises to build a memorial for the anti-CAA movement after winning the election. Assam doesn’t want CAA."
"We want to make sure that future generations remember how the people stood up to the autocratic rule of the BJP and its imposition of an anti-Assamese law."
"Whatever happens, we will not allow them (BJP) to implement the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)."
"Nationalism, far from being reversed, made further headway. The biggest and most frightening setback came in India, where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir – a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship."
"Hindu extremists were unquestionably involved in the attacks against Muslims in Gujarat. Furthermore, the Modi government willfully neglected its duty to protect the rights and lives of its citizens and promoted further communal polarization in a state with already tense communal relations."
"At most periods of her history India, though a cultural unit, has been torn by internecine war. In statecraft, her rulers were cunning and unscrupulous. Famine, flood and plague visited her from time to time, and killed millions of her people. Inequality of birth was given religious sanction, and the lot of the humble was generally hard. Yet our overall impression is that in no other part of the ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, so fair and humane. In no other early civilisation were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient lawbook are their rights so well protected as in the Arthasastra. No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu. In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non-combatants…There was sporadic cruelty and oppression no doubt, but, in comparison with conditions in other early cultures, it was mild. To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilisation is its humanity."
"It is highly regrettable that the Government of Pakistan have never appreciated our genuine feelings and efforts for safeguarding the interest of the minorities in this country. The paternal role which they seek to assume over the minorities in India is not only presumptuous but is also extremely ridiculous. On the contrary, what consideration has been weighing with Pakistan in squeezing out the minorities from their country? Apart from the large numbers of refugees who migrated to India from Pakistan earlier, the influx of nearly 1,80,000 refugees belonging to the different religious groups from East Pakistan to Assam during the period from January, 1964 to January, 1965 is a clear evidence of the oppressive treatment meted out to the minority communities in Pakistan. So far as the minorities in the State of Assam are concerned, I can boldly say that they are quite happy and secure. If the Government of Pakistan continues to indulge in mischievous propaganda with a view to undermining the secular policy of the Government of India while deliberately concealing their lapses in providing securities to the minorities, they will be only doing harm to both the countries. I wish the Government of Pakistan could see reasons and refrained from such malicious propaganda."
"Western human rights activists and non-Westerners trained and funded by them, go around the world creating new categories of ‘victims’ that can be used in divide-and-conquer strategies against other cultures. In India’s case, the largest funding of this type goes to middlemen who can deliver narratives about ‘abused’ Dalits and native (especially Hindu) women."
"One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma."
"India seems to have lost that urge to consistently relate to injustice as an assault on democracy. Be it plight of migrants or minorities, their failure to strike wider chord tells truths about us. [...] There was no public outcry over this human tragedy and the victims themselves chose to mostly suffer in silence. They may have grumbled, or cursed under their breath, but our democracy does not seem to have encouraged them to really assert or demand their rights. Not just migrants, minorities too have been subjected to the untold misery of being excluded from the idea of the public. And more routinely, women, rural poor, Dalits and Adivasis have been objects of humiliation."
"The approach of the Indian state to citizen participation has always been based on arrogance. It is also informed by overemphasis on the rhetoric of . The former leads the state to believe that citizens are not, and should not be, active agents. This means that citizens must wait for leaders to mobilise them and guide and supervise their actions. Similarly, citizens must depend on the largesse of the state in deciding what is good for them. This gives rise to the syndrome of government as caretaker/parent and leaders as political chaperons. The Indian state also privileges the idea of law and order. If a parental state negates the idea that people have agency, the emphasis on law and order legitimises that negation. Thus, the discourse of rights and individual dignity becomes permissible only if it is subservient to the statist idea of "order". Legislative imagination, judicial interpretation and public perception are all stacked against the idea of the citizen as protestor. In contrast to the legacy of the freedom movement, democracy and popular participation are seen, both theoretically and legally, as inconsistent with, and often even opposed to, an orderly society."
"The emphasis has been twofold: That the state knows, the state is right, the state must be privileged, and that citizen action is suspect, potentially disruptive and liable to punishment. It is in the backdrop of this subdued rights discourse and de-legitimised agency of the people that the current moment has unfolded wherein criticism is almost seditious, claiming rights for marginalised sections can be termed as waging war against the state and empathising with victims of social injustice is ridiculed or forbidden. The current regime has converted the penchant for sub-democratic state action into a fearsome art."
"This might appear ironic, but in spite of a comparatively higher degree of repression, the lack of popular protest is more because of the success of the regime in constructing and popularising a narrative that not just delegitimises but simply denies the existence of suffering, injustice and . This is the narrative of subverting reality into its opposite. In this world of alternative reality, the victim is the offender (as in case of Muslims), suffering is sacrifice if not ill-informed exaggeration (as in the case of migrants’ plight) and marginalisation or exclusion are outcomes of past politics (as in the case of Dalits or Adivasis). This narrative posits two contrasting social camps. One is the nation. It represents unity, progress and a possible millennium. All else is fragmentary and divisive. So any voice speaking of a particular group's suffering becomes a hurdle in the march of the nation; any coalition of the marginalised by definition assumes an anti-national tenor. Such is the power of the narrative that the facts of suffering, humiliation or injustice lose their evocative potential; they cease to scandalise, they are unable to evoke a moral response. Democracy can thus afford the co-existence of multiple injustices and a quiet citizenry when such narratives are able to reconstruct facts and convince the masses of the validity of that reconstruction. The silence today is a result of the popular acceptance of reconstructed reality and adherence to an alternative morality."
"You must make a difference between Hindu refugees and Muslim immigrants and the country must take responsibility of the refugees."
"I refuse the fact that we should not care about the Hindus of Pakistan since they are Pakistani citizens. Irrespective of citizenship of Pakistan’s Hindus, it is our duty to protect them like we protect Indian Muslims and Hindus."
"There were thousands of people standing out in the open here all night in the rain. Women were with babies in their arms. They could not lie down because the water came up to their knees in places. There was not enough shelter and in the morning there were always many sick and dying of pneumonia. We could not get out serious cholera cases to the hospital. And there was no one to take away the dead. They just lay around on the ground or in the water. High pressure syringes have speeded vaccination and reduced the cholera threat, but camp health officials have already counted about 500 dead and an estimated 35,000 have been stricken by the convulsive vomiting and diarrhea that accompany the diseases. Now officials fear that pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis will also begin to take a toll among the weakened refugees."
"The attack on Bangladeshi Hindus is a crime against humanity. In and of itself, it is severe enough to spur our moral outrage and cause us to take action to stop it. But to make matters worse, it has been spreading across that open border into West Bengal, India. One would think these Hindu victims of Islamist terror would find a safe haven in the largest Hindu nation on earth, but they have not."
"Immigration from Bangladesh is of two types. Firstly there are members of the minority communities fleeing occasional waves of persecution or the more general sense of being second-class citizens under the Islamic dispensation. Few Hindus would dispute their right to settle down in India. Secondly, there are Muslims seeking economic opportunities or sheer living space, which dirt-poor and intensely overcrowded Bangladesh cannot offer to the ever-larger numbers of newcomers on the housing and labour market... The BJP argues that refugees from persecution and illegal economic migrants merit a different treatment, as is assumed in the arrangements for refugee relief of most countries. But secularists see it differently, for "unlike the BJP, the Congress (I) views both Hindus and Muslim from Bangladesh as infiltrators". Terminology is a part of the problem here, with secularists systematically describing Hindu refugees as "migrants" if not "infiltrators", and Muslim illegal immigrants as "refugees"... The Hindu population in East Bengal had declined from 33% in 1901 to 28% in 1941. It fell to 22% by 1951 due to the Partition and the post-Partition exodus, and to 18.5% in 1961. By 1971, it had fallen to 13.5%, partly due to the 1971 massacre by the Pakistani Army, partly due to intermittent waves of emigration. The 1981 figure was 12.1%. In 1989 and 1990, due to "large-scale destruction, desecration and damage inflicted on Hindu temples and religious institutions", "clandestine migration by the Hindus to India went up"."
"In fact, India is by no means a Hindu state; it was not based on the refusal to co-exist with others, as Pakistan was; and it is not squeezing out its minorities, as Pakistan is. The best refutation is provided by the highly anti-symmetrical migration stream: the constant trickle of Hindu refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh is not matched by a similar trickle of Muslim refugees from India, but by a vast movement of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh illegally settling in India."
"Consider also the numbers: of thirty million Muslims in truncated India, four million moved to Pakistan, or less than one in seven; of twenty million Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, seven million fled to India, or more than one in three. Moreover, in the next decade, another four million Hindus fled East Pakistan."
"Most Westerners have never heard about the Hindu refugee problem, for most journalists including reputed India hands have simply kept it out of the picture."
"Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of sisters nowhere to go Millions of daughters walk in the mud Millions of children wash in the flood A Million girls vomit & groan Millions of families hopeless alone Millions of souls nineteen seventy one homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan Millions of babies in pain Millions of mothers in rain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of children nowhere to go"
"Sanjay Hazarika had pleaded: [A]s for the new exodus of Hindus from Bangladesh, they are true refugees, they are not migrants. They are as traumatised, frightened and brutalised as refugees in any other part of the world and this has been seen especially since the new government in Bangladesh took over."
"While discussing migration from Bangladesh to India, it is politically as well as ethically important to distinguish between refugees, i.e. Hindus, and infiltrators, i.e. Muslims. Circumstances of the 1947 Partition, assurances given by top-ranking political leaders of India to Hindus staying on in Pakistan (including East Bengal), and an uninterrupted squeezing out of Hindus from East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh since 1947 in contrast to the care with which Muslims are safeguarded in the secular-democratic polity of India, a contrast that is even compatible with the appeasement of, or blackmail by, minorities (mainly Muslims) in India—sustain this categorisation of migrants from Bangladesh into refugees and infiltrators."
"Needless to say that most of the refugees into Assam from East Pakistan were Bengali Hindus – the persecuted religious minority in Islamic Pakistan ruled by modern and politicised armed forces. The partition made their position extremely vulnerable. ...[T]heir existence with dignity, both actual and perceptional, propelled their movement across the border."
"There was not an inch of space to spare in West Bengal for the refugees from East Bengal."
"If we open the door [to the Bengali Hindu refugees], we all will sink."
"Someone is saying we are contemplating sending aid to help the Pakistani refugees. I hope to hell we’re not."
"The Indian prime minister’s secretariat knew that there was sure to be a rush of refugees, likely to overwhelm the local authorities in West Bengal. But the actual scale was a shock: the lieutenant governor of Tripura, an Indian state jutting deep into East Pakistan, alerted Gandhi to “the unexpectedly large influx of refugees.” As one of Gandhi’s senior aides remembered, her government now really began to worry. The expulsions seemed massive and systematic."
"One reputable Indian government official, himself a Bengali, relied on his local sources to remind Haksar what the refugees were fleeing: with encouragement from the Pakistan army, volunteers deliberately killed the Hindu men. He darkly wrote that it was not hard to imagine what had happened to the women. There were some Hindu families hidden in the granaries of “kind hearted Muslims who are against these deliberate atrocities but who find themselves entirely helpless.”"
"These kinds of stories were echoed six million times—the number of refugees that India officially estimated it was now sheltering. That number was, the Indian foreign ministry claimed, unparalleled in the world’s history."
"Anyway, the donations were, as Haksar told Gandhi, “very disappointing.” India would need some $400 million to look after these refugees for half a year, and more were coming every day. By the White House’s reckoning, the Indians netted merely about $20 million from the whole world, as well as roughly $12 million from the Soviet Union."
"It was Biblical,” remembers Sydney Schanberg, who reported on the refugees for the New York Times. Schanberg, steeped in the worst horrors of war from Vietnam and Cambodia, goes quiet at the memory of the desperate millions who fled into India. “You don’t tune out,” he says, “but there’s a numbness. Either that or you feel like crying. There was a tremendous loss of life on those treks out.” He remembers, “Their bodies have adjusted to those germs in their water, but suddenly they’re drinking different water with different germs. Suddenly they’ve got cholera. People were dying all around us. You’d see that someone had left a body on the side of the road, wrapped in pieces of bamboo, and there’d be a vulture trying to get inside to eat the body. You would come into a schoolyard, and a mother was losing her child. He was in her lap. He coughed and coughed and then died.” He pauses and composes himself. “They went through holy hell and back.”"
"It was all too easy for Schanberg to fill the pages of the New York Times with horror. At a railway station, he was overcome by the sight of some five thousand refugees pressed together on the concrete floor: “someone vomits, someone moans. A baby wails. An old man lies writhing on his back on the floor, delirious, dying. Emaciated, fly-covered infants thrash and roll.” Filing from a border town in West Bengal, Schanberg reported the unclean sounds of the cholera epidemic: “coughing, vomiting, groaning and weeping.” An emaciated seventy-year-old man had just died. His son and granddaughter sat sobbing beside the body, as flies gathered. When a young mother died of cholera, her baby continued to nurse until a doctor pulled the infant away. The husband of that dead woman, a rice farmer, cried to Schanberg that the family had fled Pakistani soldiers who burned down their house. “My wife is dead,” he wailed. “Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?”"
"Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the gruff, battle-hardened chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, went to the border to watch the refugees streaming in. “It was terrible, pathetic,” he recalls. The displaced throngs inescapably called to mind nightmare memories of Partition in 1947, not so long before. “It’s a terrible human agony,” says Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was as if we were reliving the Partition.”"
"The Indian government, from Indira Gandhi on down, worked hard to hide an ugly reality from its own people: by an official reckoning, as many as 90 percent of the refugees were Hindus. This skew was the inevitable consequence of Pakistani targeting of Hindus in East Pakistan—what Archer Blood and his staffers had condemned as genocide. The population of East Pakistan was only 16 or 17 percent Hindu, but this minority comprised the overwhelming bulk of the refugees. India secretly recorded that by the middle of June, there were some 5,330,000 Hindus, as against 443,000 Muslims and 150,000 from other groups. Many Indian diplomats believed that the Hindus would be too afraid ever to go back... But the Indian government assiduously hid this stark fact from Indians. “In India we have tried to cover that up,” Swaran Singh candidly told a meeting of Indian diplomats in London, “but we have no hesitation in stating the figure to foreigners.” (Sydney Schanberg and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to India, separately highlighted the fact in the New York Times.) Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu[-]Muslim conflict. We should point out that there are Buddhists and Christians besides the Muslims among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of “every religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian.”... The Indian government feared that the plain truth would splinter its own country between Hindus and Muslims... And Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh party. From Moscow, D. P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, decried the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery,” but, fearing inflammatory politicking from “rightist reactionary Hindu chauvinist parties like Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicised in India.” ... Rather than basing this accusation primarily on the victimization of Hindus, India tended to focus on the decimation of the Bengalis as a group."
"Perhaps the most striking Indian policy was something that it did not do. India did not stop masses of Bengali refugees from flooding into India. Unimaginably huge numbers of Bengalis escaped into safety on Indian soil, eventually totaling as many as ten million—five times the number of people displaced in Bosnia in the 1990s. The needs of this new, desperate population were far beyond the capacities of the feeble governments of India’s border states, and Indira Gandhi’s government at the center. But at that overcharged moment, the Indian public would have found it hard to accept the sight of its own soldiers and border troops opening fire to keep out these desperate and terrified people. Here, at least, was something like real humanitarianism. As payment for this kindness, India found itself crushed under the unsustainable burden of one of the biggest refugee flows in world history—which galvanized the public and the government to new heights of self-righteous fury against Pakistan."
"By September, India estimated it had taken in some eight million refugees, with no end in sight. This represented as much as a tenth of the overall population of East Pakistan, by the CIA’s estimation. The economic and political consequences were dire... And as a result of the Pakistan army’s onslaught against Hindus, seven million out of over eight million refugees were Hindus."
"Kennedy earned his hero status with fervent speeches ripping into Pakistan’s repression. Jabbing at the Nixon administration’s underbelly, he said that Yahya’s terror had generated more refugees in less than two hundred days than the total from the entire Vietnam War."
"Kennedy brought along seasoned American experts on development and refugee relief. One of them was Nevin Scrimshaw, a nutrition professor at MIT who had done cutting-edge work fighting malnutrition in children in Guatemala and India. Scrimshaw had a clinical familiarity with what they saw. “Edema, profound apathy, hair loss, pallor of the hair, and so forth,” he recalls. “To me, what was so devastating was the scale.” It was worse than anything he had seen in his long years in the field, from Panama to Egypt. He was stunned at the size of the first camp they visited, near Calcutta, where some ten thousand refugees were sheltering. “Imagine looking out on a field, hundreds of people squatting, most of them with diarrhea,” he says, still appalled by the memory at the age of ninety-four. “Imagine the people politely inviting you into their tent, and while they’re talking, picking up a rag in a corner, and seeing a child that’s going to be dead in a few hours.”... Hundreds of people massed around the visitors, many carrying desperately malnourished children. “This was something beyond anything Kennedy had seen or imagined,” says Scrimshaw. The senator was visibly overwhelmed... Hiking along a road north of Calcutta, Kennedy heard stories of massacre from dozens of Bengali peasant farmers—a small sample of the seven thousand refugees along the banks of the river crossing to East Pakistan. There were children dying along the road as their parents pleaded for help. Many were obviously in shock, sitting in despair by the side of the road or wandering blindly. Most of them, he realized, were Hindus. Despite the efforts of the Indians, the camps were racked with despair and gloom. “The conditions in the tents, camps, makeshift shelters, were horrible,” says Scrimshaw. The whole state of West Bengal seemed like a huge refugee camp, with its muddy roads jammed with endless lines for inoculations or registration cards. The youngest children and the elderly had been the first to die. Again and again, Kennedy saw little ones, under the age of five, who would obviously be dead within days or hours. He saw dead children. When Kennedy asked the director of one of the refugee camps what he most urgently needed, he replied, “a crematorium.”"
"He had just witnessed, he told the Beltway crowd at the National Press Club, “the most appalling tide of human misery in modern times.” He unsparingly told of hearing “stories of atrocities, of slaughter, of looting and burning.” He was harrowed by seeing listless infants with “skin hanging loosely in folds from their tiny bones,” children with “legs and feet swollen from edema and malnutrition, limp in the arms of their mothers,” and, worst of all, “the corpse of the child who died just the night before.” He could not forget “the look on the face of a child paralyzed from the waist down, never to walk again; or a child quivering in fear on a mat in a small tent still in shock from seeing his parents, his brothers and his sisters executed before his eyes; or the anxiety of a 10-year-old girl out foraging for something to cover the body of her baby brother who had died of cholera a few moments before our arrival.” This, he thundered, was what the United States was supporting. This misery should “particularly distress Americans, since it is our military hardware—our guns and tanks and aircraft delivered over a decade—which are contributing substantially to the suffering.”"
"But this U.S. aid was overshadowed by something approaching ten million refugees. India was buckling under that burden, which cost far more than anything on offer from the United States, or any outside power. By a White House account, the expense of the refugees was by now roughly between $700 million and $1 billion annually—at least a sixth of India’s normal spending on development for its own people. To date, the United States had met perhaps a tenth of the cost of looking after the refugees for this year only, and the rest of the world had covered another tenth—leaving roughly 80 percent of the expense on poverty-stricken India. And this was at the peak of international concern for the refugees, before the world’s attention inevitably moved on to other matters, leaving India to cope alone."
"In addition to these parallels, Israel and India share the distinction of being targets of political manipulation by powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their funders, which operate outside the democratic process, with no checks and balances. These activities, although often presented in altruistic and moral terms – such as peace, human rights, economic development, and humanitarian aid – are widely perceived in both countries as a form of neo-colonialism. NGO power is also enhanced by an image of altruism and morality (known as the “halo effect”) that protects the organisations and their funders from critical analysis. International journalists, diplomats, and academics give NGOs automatic support, without examining details and hidden agendas, which undermine hard-won national sovereignty and independence."
"Responding to these concerns, in 2010, India passed legislation known as the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA), which prohibits the use of overseas funds for “activities detrimental to the national interest.” Criticism was directed at groups such as the Ford Foundation, which, according to the claim, were using the cover of economic development to manipulate Indian culture. Christian aid groups were also suspected of proselytising activities. For example, in March 2017, US-based Compassion International, which funds child development projects in India, was accused of missionary-like activities by the Indian government and has been blocked in its ability to fund projects and placed on the list of organisations requiring “prior permission to bring in funds from overseas” (Mohan, 2017). Similarly, in 2016, the FCRA refused the registration renewal of the Indian Social Action Forum (Insaf), which is funded in part by “Brotfuer die Welt” (a major Protestant aid group) and by a French government “solidarity” organisation."
"It is always easy to blame the state and the men in uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian Pakistani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not spoken out against the religious persecutions in his homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality. The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attitude among sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine."
"Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think-tanks and institutions of higher learning. They have rarely been set up in order to serve some imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature to justify the treatment of Indians as backwards in need of tutelage. But today, this “native barbarism” has been redefined in terms of human rights. American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s many oppressed categories have been waiting for."
"Most of these 'leftist' human rights organizations, with their predilection for stout defence of the 'human rights' of predator entities, are, more often than not, financed mainly by American sources linked with rightist 'international' American foundations and organizations promoting rightist American agendas. So it cannot basically be a 'left' versus 'right' issue"
"Some folks I know made pretty neat fortunes this way, setting up NGOs and 'think-tanks' ostensibly to study and 'work with' 'oppressed communities', and raked in vast amounts of money from gullible foreign donors. In fact, barring a few really committed souls, a whole host of 'progressives' in the NGO, academic and media world, made their living out of the misery of the 'oppressed', earning in this way not just their daily bread but also the really serious money that they needed to buy their cars and houses and to send their children to the 'best' English-medium schools and then for higher studies to the USA (which they never tired of reviling in public, of course), where they, too, would often sojourn when their 'social activism' became just a bit too tiring, boring or bothersome. Not many of them, who never ceased showing-off their 'commitment' to the 'oppressed' communities and their visceral hatred for 'oppressor' castes, would, I suspect, want to be treated in an Adivasi-run nursing home or to send their children to a Muslim-run school."
"Today, the Khanna project is widely seen, as historian Matthew Connolly puts it, as an example of ‘American social science at its most hubristic’… The Khanna study took place in the early 1950s. Its failure – the fact that its results confirmed the exact opposite of what researchers hoped – led the Rockefeller Foundation to distance itself from its methodology, but not from its objectives. In years ahead, the foundation funded numerous anti-fertility programmes in India and elsewhere, earning the growing animosity of physicians and poverty activists who felt that the foundation’s efforts to control population growth ignored the realities of the persistent poverty that makes large families so indispensable to Indian villagers."
"Aug. 5, marks exactly one year since New Delhi revoked Indian-administered Kashmir's special status, splitting the state into two union territories— and Ladakh. [...] One year on, where do things stand? While New Delhi's move remains popular among an increasingly nationalistic Indian citizenry, a dispassionate assessment of the decision will show that few of its objectives have been achieved. S. Jaishankar, who argued last year that the old status quo "denied economic opportunities and social gains for the masses," would struggle to make the case today that things have gotten better. A promised summit to encourage investment in Kashmir still hasn't taken place. The coronavirus pandemic has made any reforms difficult to implement, but even before the nationwide shutdown in March, there had been little progress."
"Information has been difficult to come by. Local media are often harassed by the police, and international reporters have struggled to get inside. Authorities barred internet access for several months after Aug. 5. While it returned in March, mostly at lowered speeds, the has once again banned high-speed internet for the next few weeks, ostensibly to curb protests and reporting from the region. A survey of Kashmiri college students found 90 percent were in favor of a complete withdrawal of Indian troops. Kashmiri leaders who have expressed anger over the abrogation remain under house arrest, including former Chief Minister ."
"It is indeed creditable that the government has ensured that all this has been achieved within a span of 12 months. For the first time after seven decades, the Indian Constitution and all the 890 Central laws are fully applicable to J&K.... The question we need to ask is why the leadership of the Congress, Left parties and the state parties did not allow such crucial laws which protect the Dalits and other disadvantaged groups to be implemented in the erstwhile state for all these years. Another discriminatory legal provision, which prevented women in J&K from retaining their rights if they married outside the state, has been put to an end... Apart from these initiatives, the last 12 months have seen several other momentous developments. The first of these is the rehabilitation of the Kashmiri Pandits, who were hounded out of the Valley 30 years ago by militants. The ethnic cleansing of nearly four lakh Kashmiris belonging to the Hindu minority remained a blot on India’s secular credentials. In the year gone by, 4,000 of them have got jobs in the UT and many others are listed for employment. Also, over 20,000 refugees from West Pakistan, who were treated as aliens in their own country and denied all rights, have been given domicile rights and financial assistance of Rs 5.50 lakh per family."
"One year ago, the CPM described the abrogation as “an attack on democracy, secularism and the Constitution”. Equally amusing was the statement of the Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi that “the nation is made by its people, not plots of land”. Really? If so, are not the Kashmiri Pandits, Dalits, tribal folk, municipal workers, people? As one sees the fundamental changes brought about in the two UTs, they remind us of the monstrous failure of the Congress leadership which lacked the courage and confidence to correct these wrongs and hence chose to tout pusillanimity as an act of great statesmanship. As a result, J&K slipped away from the liberal, secular and democratic traditions that India stood for. But that is now a thing of the past. It is now time to celebrate the new beginning."
"The question, however, is whether Modi had any choice in Kashmir and whether, over time, the revocation of an article conceived as temporary breaks the Kashmiri logjam, pries open the stranglehold of corrupt local elites and offers a better future. I think it might. .... “We revoked a temporary constitutional provision that slowed down development, created alienation, led to separatism, fed terrorism and ended up as a deadly national security problem,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the external affairs minister of India, told me. “We know the last 70 years did not work in Kashmir. It has bled us. It would be Einsteinian insanity to do the same thing and expect a different result.”... Modi will not turn back from his elimination of Kashmir’s autonomy. That phase of Indian history is over. Trump and Modi are both forceful, media-savvy politicians. But they are not alike. Modi, a self-made man from a poor family, is measured, ascetic, not driven by impulse. Trump was born on third base. He’s erratic, guided by the devouring needs of his ego. I’d bet on Modi to transform India, all of it, including the newly integrated Kashmir region."
"Most countries have a UCC as a matter of course. But would they support India if it introduces the same thing? Compare with the normalisation of Kashmir's status in 2019. Save for Pakistan, all countries accepted this without any ado. Not only was it an internal matter, but it abolished something that they themselves would never accept either: a separate status for one of their provinces, excluding their citizens from owning property there. Yet, the international media still portrayed it as an anti-Muslim act of oppression, adding to their usual narrative of poor hapless Muslims being constantly persecuted by the ugly vicious Hindus. The issue was not important enough for swaying governments against India, but regarding UCC this may be different. It is likely that both Indian and foreign media will raise a storm if the separate Islamic law is threatened; and that the ruling party is not ready to take this heat."
"I then burnt the city and put everything to sword, and for days continuously the people shed blood. Wherever they were found and caught, no life was spared to any Musalman, and their mosques were filled up and set on fire. We counted 6,000 dead bodies. It was, my Lord, a great deed, well fought and well finished."
"I leave no town or building of the Mussalmans. Those who are taken alive, I order them to be roasted…"
"There has always been much discussion regarding the question of Akbar’s persecution of the Muslims. ‘Akbar showed bitter hostility to the faith of his fathers and his own youth, and actually perpetrated a persecution of Islam’, says Dr. Smith ‘In the latter part of his life’, says Sir Wolsley Haig, ‘he persecuted its followers and destroyed its places of worship’. These are grave charges and, made by serious students of history, they compel examination..."
"Afonso Dalboquerque told the captains to reconnoitre the whole of the island and to put to the sword all the Moors, men, women and children, that should be found,. and to give no quarter to any one of them; for his determination was to leave no seed of this race throughout the whole of the: island. And he did this, not only because it was necessary for the security of the land that there should be none but Hindoos within it, but also as a punishment for the treachery of which the Moors had been guilty when he took the city for the first time. And for four days continuously they poured out the blood of the Moors who were found therein; and it was ascertained that of men, women, and children, the number exceeded six thousand."
"Towards the Mahommedans the attitude of the Portuguese was one of inveterate hostility. Their one idea was to root out the trade of the Moors and to destroy the Mahommedans as a race so far as possible. This was not only due to commercial rivalry, but to a hostility which the Iberian Powers had inherited from their long-drawn out fight with the Moors in Spain and Africa. Whenever a Moor was captured the most barbarous tortures were inflicted on him and he was either killed or made a slave. The whole history of the Portuguese in India is nothing but a commentary on the statement of Barroes that the Moors were the “Enemies of God”."
"In March, 1671, it was reported that a Muslim officer who had been, sent to demolish the Hindu temples in and around Ujjain was killed with many of his followers in the riot that had followed his attempts at destroying the temples there. He had succeeded in destroying some of the temples, but in one place, a Rajput chief had opposed this wanton destruction of his religious places. He overpowered the Mughal forces and destroyed its leader and many of his men. In Gujarat somewhere near Ahmedabad, Kolis seem to have taken possession of a mosque probably built on the site of a temple and prevented reading of Friday prayers there. Imperial orders were thereupon issued to the provincial officers in Gujarat to secure the use of the mosque for Friday prayers."
"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."
"In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence."