"The BJP’s India was one where Hindus had lived in harmony with each other until outsiders—Muslims and then the British—had arrived to damage and divide up Indian society through pillage, plunder, and forcible conversions. The new textbooks dwelled on the sins of the outsiders but were largely silent on the often brutal deeds of Hindu rulers. Moreover, the texts ignored the copious evidence that, down through the centuries, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs—indeed, adherents of all religions—had for the most part lived peaceably side by side, borrowing and learning from each other. While Muslim invaders had brought Mughal and Persian styles in the arts into India, those styles had been absorbed and influenced by those already existing in India. The great Mughal emperor Akbar had been fascinated by other religions and had tried, unsuccessfully, to found a syncretic religion that incorporated elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. In independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, had stood firmly for secularism and tolerance in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith India. None of this appeared in the Hindutva version of India’s past. Rather, Muslims had always been enemies of Hindus and always would be until they were converted or otherwise dealt with. Historians who pointed out the manifest flaws in this picture of India’s past were condemned as Marxists or simply as bad Indians. It was a pity, said one fundamentalist, that there was no fatwa in Hinduism. In fact, extreme Hindu nationalists behaved as though there were. Scholars, including Romila Thapar, who published work that was at variance with the Hindutva orthodoxy, received hate mail and even death threats. Expatriates, as is so often the case, were particularly vociferous in their defence of what they claimed was India’s true history and culture."