Hindu holocaust museum

Hindu holocaust museum
Sultan M Hali
A fundraiser in New Jersey, USA on August 16, 2009 raised $50,000 for a “Hindu Holocaust” museum to be built in Pune, India. The museum is the brainchild of a Frenchman, Francois Gautier, and is under the auspices of the Viraat Hindu Sabha (VHS), The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), a sister organization of the fanatic Hindu militant outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
They claim that over the past thousand years, millions of Hindus were killed, with the intention to wipe Hindus off the map. It is to be “dedicated to the many millions of Hindu lives lost, to the loss of cultural and spiritual institutions, temples and burning of scriptures by Islamic and Christian invaders to Bharatvarsha (India) who even today, and with government sanction, seek to finally convert every last Hindu and prays for the complete extinction of the oldest religion known to mankind, Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism).”
The perpetrators of the Hindu Holocaust Museum claim that the genocide suffered by the Hindu Community at the hands of the Muslim occupying forces in India for a period of 1100 years is as yet formally undocumented. They reiterate that the only similar genocide in the recent past was that of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis; and of the Africans during the slave trade perpetrated by the Arab Muslim slave traders and later by the European colonialists as also the almost total wiping out of native populations like the Maoris in Australia and the Red Indians, (Aztecs, Incas, etc.) in North and South America. It has been estimated that in all, millions of African men, women and children died throughout the trade and more than 75% of the native Americans were wiped out. They assert that the holocaust of the Hindus was of similar proportions, the only difference was that it started in the year 715 C.E. with the Arab Muslim invasion of Sindh and continued for 1100 years, i.e. for more than a millennium, till the brutal Muslims were effectively overpowered by the Hindu Marathas in 1720 C.E. The extremist Hindu historians declare that since times immemorial India had been invaded by many people from different parts of the globe. But what contrasted the pre-Muslim invaders from the Muslims was that after their initial clash with Hindu military power, the pre-Muslim invaders merged into the general mainstream and even the memory of their having come as invaders itself disappeared. They do not consider Emperors like Kanishka (a Ku Shan or Kushana), Milinda (an Indo-Greek), Rudradaman (a Shaka or Scythian from pre-Muslim Iran) to be non-Indians.
These invaders have merged into today’s general Hindu population. But the Muslims with their barrack like lifestyle and their contempt for everything non-Islamic have left a wounded civilization in India. The brutal Muslim tyranny has till today left a split in India’s national character, even after the country was vivisected into two parts – to create Pakistan as a state for Indian Muslims. But in spite of the division of this country to create a separate homeland for the Muslims in 1947, many of them preferred to stay back and today account for the recurrent communal riots, the killings of Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir and the renewed demand for special status and for the Islamization of India. The question here arises why Francois Gautier has been professing The Hindu Holocaust Museum and earning his bread and butter by flaming hatred for Indian Muslims? Professor Vijay Prashad, Professor of South Asian History Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut, in his article ‘Hindu holocaust’ (News India Times, Sept. 25, 2009) sheds some light on Gautier’s rationale for purporting the idea of a Hindu holocaust museum. He says that Gautier came to India from France about 30 years ago, and settled in Pondicherry. His work reads like another European apologist for extreme Hindutva, Koenraad Elst. Both went to strict Catholic schools and now hold a deep animus against Christian missionaries, but seem to take their venom out mainly against Islam. Gautier and Elst want to make plain the “Muslim genocide against Hindus.”
But neither is a serious student of history, with little idea of how to read historical texts. They draw more from a misplaced passion than from a real, sober scientific exploration of the facts. That they are taken seriously is a sign of the degradation of reason in the world of Hindutva. The idea of the Hindu Holocaust casts the Hindu as history’s victim, who should now become history’s aggressor to avenge the past. But the Hindu was not always the victim. If you read the historical records carefully, you will find that many Hindus participated in the slaughter of other Hindus, and that the Hindu-Buddhist battles of the ancient world were perhaps more bloody than anything that comes afterward. Or indeed, that the systematic violence against Dalits and other subordinate castes should hold our attention far more than it does. Between Hindus and Muslims there has not been an endless rivalry for social power.
When Islam enters the subcontinent, it does not come in the saddlebags of the Ghaznis or the Ghouris, but amongst the rumble of goods brought by traders. Early conversions are not by the sword but by the merchants. There was killing, but that was as much for reasons of warfare and plunder as for reasons of God and tradition. An interested reader might want to look at the distinguished historian Romila Thapar’s superb book “Somnatha: The Many Voices of a History” (Penguin, 2005). There, Professor Thapar shows us that Mahmud Ghazni’s destruction of the Shiva temple in 1026 was driven not so much by a fanatical religious belief but because his father, Subuktigin, needed money to sustain his faltering kingdom in Central Asia. It is heartrending that one of the worst butchers of humanity, who showed their true colors during the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 by planned genocide of the Muslims, later, massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent Kashmiris and Muslims in Gujarat and Mumbai should be talking of a “Hindu holocaust museum”.