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Why are Indian historians in denial mode? – David Frawley

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Indus Script

It is time for deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India. … Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Dr. David Frawley

India today is a strange country in that, uniquely among the nations of the world, it seems to be afraid of its own history.

If we study current historical accounts, particularly by India’s academic Left, the most important fact about the history of India is that there is no real history of India. This is because such scholars are unable to see the existence of any cohesive entity called India before 1947.

India as a real country in their view is attributed mainly to Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers after independence on a region that, though previously under the umbrella of British rule, was otherwise lacking in unity, continuity or perhaps even civilisational depth.

Such historians are happy to negate the history of their own country. Their accounts of India’s history are largely denials of any enduring country, civilisation or culture worthy of the name. Their history of India is one of foreign invasions, temporary or vanished empires, internal social divisions and conflicts, and a disparate and confused cultural diversity. They regard India as a melting pot or conglomeration of widely separated peoples and cultures coming together by the accident of geography that hardly constitutes any united country or national identity.

Unfortunately, such Indian historians, particularly with political alliances with Left historians in UK and US, are introducing their anti-India ideas into Western academia, which still does not understand India’s very different civilisational model.

Such studies forget that national identity is cultural, not simply political. India did not become a British state under British rule or an Islamic state under Muslim rule. The older Indian/Bharatiya culture continued.

These anti-India views are easily countered by a number of historical facts.

The first is that outside people and countries have long recognised a civilisation called India.

After Alexander the Great came to India in the fourth century BCE, the Greek historian Megasthenes wrote a book on the region called Indika, in which he noted an existing tradition in the country of 153 kings going back over 6,400 years. The Greeks overall lauded the civilisation of India.

Buddhist pilgrims in the ancient and medieval period, particularly from China, honoured India and its great culture during their travels. India’s cultural influence spread to Indonesia and Indochina in the East and into Central Asia, extending on a religious level to China and Japan.

The ancient Romans lost much of their wealth in a one-sided trade with India and the Europeans long sought the riches of India. Columbus, of course, found America by chance while looking for a more direct sea route to India.

Second, India, like many countries, has more than one name. The Indian Constitution says the “India that is Bharat”. Bharat is the main ancient name for the region going back to King Bharat, an ancient ruler long before Rama, Krishna or Buddha.

The Bharatas were the main people of the ancient Rig Veda, who ruled from the Sarasvati region. They eventually split into several groups, one of which, the Kurus, became dominant in late ancient times, as the main people of the Mahabharata.

Modern historians can more easily deny history to the name India than to Bharat and so ignore the other name of the country.

Third, India has probably the oldest, largest and most continuous literature of any civilisation. The Vedas with their many thousands of pages dwarf anything from the Middle East, Egypt or Greece of the ancient period.

Geography is an important topic in these texts. The Vedas speak of a land of seven rivers, Sapta Sindhu, extending to the ocean, of which the Sarasvati River was the most important. The Persians in their oldest Zend-Avesta remember the area as Hapta Hindu. Sindhu, Hindu and India are related terms.

The Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas outline a sacred geography of India/Bharat from Kailas in the north to Lanka in the south, Assam in the east to beyond the Indus in the west. Buddhist and Jain texts do the same, showing a common culture and geography.

Around this sacred geography, Indians built numerous temples and recognised numerous sacred sites, revealing this vast region and its cultural unity.

Along with these sacred sites are numerous festivals and pilgrimages. We see this in modern India, which has the largest tradition of pilgrimage in the world, notably the massive Kumbha Melas that bring in tens of millions of pilgrims. Pilgrims throughout India visit these sites, with South Indians commonly travelling as far as the Himalayan temples of the north. Festivals like Diwali are elaborately celebrated throughout the country.

Ancient Indian literature contains a calendar system still widely followed, the Panchanga. Indian calendars extend from historical time of thousands of years to cosmic time of billions of years.

Fourth, extensive new evidence of archaeology upholds the cultural continuity of the region. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims that in the Haryana/Kurukshetra/Sarasvati river area there is evidence of a continual development of agriculture and civilisation from 8000 BCE, extending through the Harappan urban era. This area hosts Rakhigarhi, the largest Harappan site, more extensive than Mohenjodaro or Harappa.

The Harappan Civilization—also called the Indus Valley or Saraswati Civilisation—is the largest and most uniform urban civilisation of the ancient world in the third millennium BCE. It ended with the drying up of the Sarasvati River around 1900 BCE, which the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has verified. The Vedas refer to the different stages of the Sarasvati river from an ocean-going stream to drying up in the desert, showing they resided on the river long before its termination.

Consistent with their negative line of thought, Leftist historians ignore this information or accuse archaeologists of political bias in their findings.

Lastly, but equally important, the independence movement drew inspiration from the older history of India/Bharat, with such revered figures as Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo seeking to revive the ancient culture. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s mantra was Ram and his idea of India was Ram Rajya.

Not surprisingly, most of these independence leaders have been ignored by the same group of historians, who have made Nehru tower over them, with some afforded diminished roles and others forgotten altogether.

The Congress party, the main support for such historians, has since named every major institution or initiative in India possible after the three members of the Nehru family who became prime ministers. They have little regard for other Congress prime ministers like P.V. Narasimha Rao, whom they have also almost erased from history.

Yet at the same time today, India’s great culture and civilisation through Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance is once more influencing the entire world—expanding in spite of this historical denigration.

It is time for these deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India, because it is not a mere political formation but a vast spiritual culture.

Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Vedanet, 30 June 2016

›This article originally appeared in Swarajya Magazine. 

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a Vedacharya and includes in his unusual wide scope of studies Ayurveda, Yoga, Vedic astrology, and Indian History.

Mohenjo-daro Graphic

 

Chanakya: Why Devdutt Pattanaik’s pseudo-history falls apart – Prosenjit Nath

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Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for the modern political fantasist Devdutt Pattanaik. – Dr. Prosenjit Nath

I read Devdutt Pattanaik’s article “A fantasy called Chanakya” in The New Indian Express (9 Nov. 2025). Had Chanakya himself been alive, Pattanaik’s fantasies would have survived about as long as the kusa grass Chanakya famously uprooted when he vowed to destroy the Nandas. Beneath the polished prose and familiar rhetoric lies an old ideological trick: confuse the reader with multiple names, shout “interpolation” often enough, wrap it all in modern caste politics, and hope a historical figure vanishes.

But history does not work that way. The moment one actually looks at primary sources, Pattanaik’s thesis collapses flat.

Let us begin precisely where he does not want readers to look: the Arthaśāstra itself. The text explicitly identifies its author in unmistakable terms: “विष्णुगुप्तेन आर्यकौटिल्येन च सम्पादितम्”—compiled by Viśnugupta, the noble Kautilya. And again: “समाप्तं कौटिलीयम् अर्थशास्त्रम्”—here ends the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya.

Pattanaik’s sleight of hand rests on manufacturing two doubts. First that since the author is called “Kautilya”, Chanakya must be fictional. Second, that if the Arthaśāstra can be pushed centuries later, Chanakya cannot belong to the Mauryan age or guide Chandragupta Maurya. Both doubts evaporate the moment chronology is taken seriously.

Ashoka’s edicts from the 3rd century BCE describe an empire run through mahamatras, welfare officials, judicial ethics, administrative surveillance, animal-protection days, and moral governance—all core elements laid out systematically in the Arthaśāstra. The Mauryan state cannot be built on a Kautilyan framework if that framework supposedly did not exist until 500 CE. The empire itself is the evidence. Kautilya must predate Ashoka, exactly as tradition maintains—at least the late 4th century BCE.

Then comes the Spitzer Manuscript, the oldest known Sanskrit manuscript (1st–2nd century CE), which contains unmistakable references to the Arthaśāstra. Its discovery location is devastating for Pattanaik’s narrative: a Buddhist monastery in Kizil, Xinjiang—thousands of kilometres from any imagined “Brahmin power structure”. Why would Buddhist monks preserve and study a supposedly late “Brahminical propaganda text”? They would not, unless the text was already ancient, authoritative, and indispensable. This single fact shatters the claim that Kautilya was invented centuries later.

But the knockout punch arrives with the Kāmandakīya Nītiśāra (4th century CE), authored by the Buddhist scholar Kāmandaki. He explicitly and admiringly states that Viśnugupta/Kautilya—the author of the Arthaśāstra—was the very strategist who overthrew the Nandas and established Chandragupta Maurya. This is not a Hindu text, nor a Brahminical self-glorification exercise. A Buddhist intellectual, with no incentive to mythologise a Brahmin minister, identifies Kautilya and Chanakya as the same revolutionary statesman. That is the missing bridge Pattanaik refuses to acknowledge.

The convergence does not stop there. Buddhist sources such as the Mahāvaṃsa and Divyāvadāna describe Chandragupta’s Brahmin mentor. Jain texts like the Nisītha-Cūrṇi and Hemacandra’s Pariśiṣṭaparvan narrate the same overthrow of the Nandas by Chanakya for Chandragupta. Gupta-era dramas like Mudrārākṣasa assume the identity of Kautilya and Chanakya is already common knowledge. Kashmiri traditions such as the Tantrākhyāyikā immortalise Chanakya as the archetype of political genius. Across Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and regional traditions—often rivals, sometimes hostile—the same man performs the same acts under different names. That is not myth-making; it is historical convergence, the strongest form of evidence when dealing with antiquity.

Pattanaik makes much of multiple names, as if this were suspicious. It is not. In the ancient world, it was normal. Confucius was also Kong Qiu, Kongzi, and Zhongni. In India, Viśnugupta is the personal name, Kautilya the gotra or scholastic name, and Chanakya the patronymic. One man. Many names. Total consistency. Claiming otherwise is like arguing that Zhongni disproves Confucius.

The remaining tactics are equally flimsy. References to “China” and Roman dināra are used to push the Arthaśāstra centuries forward. Yet scholars like K.P. Jayaswal showed long ago that “Cina” refers to the Sina/Shina Himalayan region near Gilgit, not Han China—hence terms like kauseya and cinapatta, which are not Chinese words. Later interpolations do exist, just as they do in Homer, Euclid, or the Pentateuch. No serious scholar claims interpolations prove the author never existed. Pattanaik deploys this argument selectively because he needs the text to be late to sever it from Chanakya.

Finally, the caste obsession collapses entirely. The earliest sources identifying Chanakya as a Brahmin are Buddhist and Jain traditions—historically critical of Brahmin authority. If “Brahmins invented Chanakya”, why do rival traditions independently preserve the same identity centuries earlier? Because they were transmitting historical memory, not manufacturing propaganda.

To be clear: Chanakya, Kautilya, and Viśnugupta are not three different people. They are three traditional names for one historical genius—the architect of the Mauryan Empire. When multiple competing traditions over two millennia remember the same man overthrowing the same dynasty for the same emperor, coincidence becomes absurd. History, in this case, is unanimous.

Devdutt Pattanaik’s article is not courageous scholarship. It is ideological provocation dressed up as history—a soggy biscuit of pseudo-academia that dissolves the moment primary sources are allowed to speak. And they speak loudly: Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for modern political fantasies. – News18, 1 January 2026

› Prosenjit Nath is a technocrat, political analyst, and author. He writes on national, geopolitical, and social issues.

A Fantasy Called Chanakya by Devdutt Pattanaik

Vande Mataram: How an anti-British song became ‘anti-Muslim’ – Ibn Khaldun Bharati

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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

In the Islamic political praxis, Muslims are nationalist if they are in majority and the rule is theirs. But if they can’t rule the country, they can’t be nationalist either. – Ibn Khaldun Bharati

The Muslim opposition to Vande Mataram is well known. However, the reason behind it is not well understood. Actually, it’s beyond comprehension. Their objection to the national song is formulated in such abstruse theological terms that even an educated Muslim can’t grasp its esoteric nuance. In reality, it’s not so much an opposition to the song as to the idea behind it—the idea of India as a nation. It’s the idea that Hindus and Muslims become an organic whole to form an inseparable political community. The major Muslim ideologues insisted on their separateness, and separate they remain.

To say that saying Vande Mataram (Salutations, Oh Mother) evokes the imagery of idol worship is the kind of convoluted reasoning that defies common sense. Furthermore, to emphasise that the hostility to idol worship is the foundational creed of Islam, and that it’s incumbent on every Muslim to wear this abhorrence on sleeve, isn’t really conducive to diversity, pluralism, peaceful coexistence, and composite nationhood—the ideals in which the Muslims have greater stake than anyone else.

Recently, Maulana Mahmood Madani, the head of the largest organisation of ulema in India, Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, made a controversial speech, in which he stressed the imperative of jihad in India. He also said, “Murda qaumen mushkilaat mein mubtala nahin hotin. Wo to surrender kar deti hain. Wo kahenge ke Vande Mataram padho to padhna shuru kar denge.” (Dead communities don’t face any difficulty since they surrender readily. When asked to chant Vande Mataram, they willingly do that).

The ferocity with which these Muslims proclaim their revulsion for Vande Mataram, and the grim determination with which they threaten to go to war if its public singing were to be revived, makes one wonder if there is actually something so repugnant in the song that a Muslim can’t countenance it if he were to remain true to his faith.

Is there a problem?

Let’s see if there is anything in Vande Mataram that makes Muslims recoil in horror. Arif Mohammed Khan, the scholarly Governor of Bihar, translated into Urdu the two stanzas that have the status of the national song, and sent the same to one of the most prominent Islamic seminaries, the Nadwa, at Lucknow, for their opinion on it; specifically asking if there was anything in it that was contrary to Islam.

It was presented as an original composition, and not a translation. He had rendered the key words, Vande Mataram, as “Taslimaat, Maa, Taslimaat”. The ulema at Nadwa opined that there was nothing in the song that contravened Islam. One, however, suspects that if they knew it to be the translation of Vande Mataram, they might have had a different opinion. Such is politics and such is the power of narrative!

The reality behind the narrative

The root of the Sanskrit word ‘vande’ is ‘vand’. According to Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams, depending on the context, ‘vand’ means “to praise, celebrate, laud, extol, to show honour, do homage, salute respectfully; or, venerate, worship, adore”. The primary meaning is not worship; certainly, not the ritual worship. Even if it were, hasn’t Urdu poetry been more extravagant in such expressions. For example, Iqbal, the poet of Islamic revivalism, in one of his earlier poems, said, “Khaak-e watan ka mujhko har zarra devta hai” (Every particle of the country is a god unto me)”. Iqbal’s fans—quite a few of them being fundamentalist fanatics—never saw anything amiss in this.

Can there be a nation without a motherland?

As for mataram, i.e., mother—Mother India—Urdu has a beautiful term, madar-e-watan, the motherland. No Muslim ever found this concept contrary to Islam. In fact, the most literal and yet most exquisite rendition of Vande Mataram has been A.R. Rahman’s song Maa Tujhe Salaam.

There are numerous verses in the Quran (7:12, 23:12, 30:20, etc.) which say that we are made of earth, and it is the source of life and the place of origin. It’s implied that, in a deeper sense, the earth is the mother, and one’s own place is the motherland.

In a display of genius that is peculiar to them, the Muslim leaders espied the idol of a deity in the conception of motherland, and flinched from its adoration. Even in Pakistan—which broke away from us, on difference over the Indian nationhood, and the sacredness of the motherland—Asim Munir, the generalissimo, can be seen referring to his country as motherland.

Nowhere else in the world do Muslims have had any problem with the concepts of nationalism and the sacredness of the respective countries. The literal translation of the word ‘Pakistan’ is holy land, which in Hindi translates as punya bhumi. The Indian Muslims, however, can’t accord this status to their own country.

In the Islamic political praxis, Muslims are nationalist if they are in majority, and the rule is theirs. But if they can’t rule the country, they can’t be nationalist either. In a debate that raged between poet Muhammad Iqbal and Jawaharlal Nehru, the former candidly said, “In majority countries Islam accommodates nationalism; for there Islam and nationalism are practically identical; in minority countries it is justified in seeking self-determination as a cultural unit”. (Modern Review, Calcutta, 1934-35)

There’s a deeper reality. Without recognising the country as the motherland, there can’t be a nation. But can the people who came as invaders, conquered the country, and ruled it for centuries, ever accord the status of mother to the vanquished territory? Could the British ever regard India as mother?

The Muslim ideology has been in the hands of the elite descended from the old ruling class. The Muslim masses follow it uncritically because it’s couched in religious idiom, and religion is not to be questioned.

Is Anandmath anti-Muslim?

Regarding Vande Mataram being a part of the novel Anandmath; well, it’s true that the poem, though independently written, has been interpolated in the book. It’s also true that the theme of the book is the Sannyasi Rebellion of 1770s, which was an uprising against the oppressive Muslim rule, and therefore, some passages have clear anti–Muslim overtones. But isn’t it equally true that those Muslim rulers were oppressors, and their religious hostility toward the Hindu peasants was an added factor in oppression? So, why shouldn’t the rebellion against them be seen as a class war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and the fulmination against them should be seen in perspective, and not misconstrued as invective against ordinary Muslims who belonged to the same class as them? Haven’t we seen this kind of class analysis about the Moplah “Rebellion”?

But, it’s not possible despite the fact that a large number of Marxist historians have been Muslim. That’s because, these historians, when it suits them, treat Muslims as a monolith, ignoring their socioeconomic diversities. Thus, a justified diatribe against the Nawabi system is seen as a tirade against ordinary Muslims. What if Indian Christians were to see in the criticism of the British rule the condemnation of ordinary Christians?

By the way, no Indian ever rejected the popular patriotic song Saare Jahan Se Achha just because it’s from the pen of Iqbal, the separatist ideologue.

The genesis

Vande Mataram, set to tune by Rabindranath Tagore, had been sung in the Congress sessions since 1896. No Muslim leader ever found it antithetical to their religion. Even during the Swadeshi Movement, which was a response to the Partition of Bengal (1905), when this song became the anthem of resistance to the British, one doesn’t hear of any objection to its purported polytheistic imagery. This was despite the fact the division of Bengal was on religious lines, and it supposedly favoured the Muslim majority of East Bengal. Even Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the great Islamic scholar and thinker, who claims to have joined the underground revolutionary movement of the Bengali youth, doesn’t record any religious objections to it.

Even during the Khilafat Movement (1919-24), when the Congress was working on pan-Islamist agenda, Vande Mataram continued to be sung in its gatherings, in the presence of the leading Khilafatist maulanas, who, then, dominated its proceedings.

How an anti-British song became ‘anti-Muslim’

From 1896 to 1937, Vande Mataram was the staple for the Congress. And then, elections were held under the Government of India Act, 1935; and Congress ministries were formed in provinces. After centuries, the natives of India, the Hindus, were in power. The Muslim ruling class could endure British rule, but seeing their former subjects becoming rulers was beyond their endurance. For centuries, they had been conditioned to look down upon the Hindus, and now the same Hindus were ministers. They freaked out, and began hallucinating about the Hindu oppression. As they upped the ante for a desperate fight, their glance fell upon the “Durga” and “Lakshmi” in Vande Mataram, and the Islam-in-danger bogey became ever more palpable.

This situation has been best summarised by a nationalist Muslim, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. In a statement that was published in The Pioneer on 19 October 1937, that merits in-extenso reproduction, he said, “Mr. Jinnah characterises Vande Mataram as an anti-Islamic song. Mr Jinnah had been a devoted and enthusiastic member of the Congress and of its chief executive, the All-India Congress Committee, for a number of years. Every year, the session of the Congress opened with the singing of this song, and every year he was seen on the platform listening to the song with the attention of a devotee. Did he ever protest? Mr Jinnah left the Congress, not because he thought the Vande Mataram was an anti-Islamic song, but because he had found the idea of swaraj unacceptable.”

Nehru is both Churchill and Chamberlain

The Muslim League, having suffered a rout in the 1937 elections, and further failing to force its way into the government in the United Provinces—not on the basis of the seats won, but as an entitlement for having once been the rulers—suddenly realised that Vande Mataram was idolatrous, and raised a war cry against it.

In the book Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya details the debates in the Congress, and the correspondence between Nehru, Bose, and Rabindranath Tagore. Nehru’s first reaction was: “The present outcry against Bande Mataram is to a large extent a manufactured one by the communalists.” However, soon, in order to appease the communalists, he said that having read the English translation of Anandmath, he was of the opinion that it was “likely to irritate the Muslims”. And so, he set out “to meet real grievances where they exist(ed).” That is how the Congress Working Committee, on 26 October 1937 (just days after Kidwai’s remonstrance), decided to truncate the song, and adopt only the first two stanzas as they were “unobjectionable”.

Such bending backward before the communalists recalls to mind what Atal Bihari Vajpayee once told Nehru about the streak of appeasement in him: “In you, there are both Churchill and Chamberlain”.

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya narrates how this concession couldn’t satisfy the Muslim League, as they insisted on the deletion of Vande Mataram in toto. Jinnah wrote, “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be unaware that Muslims all over have refused to accept the Vande Mataram or any expurgated edition of the anti-Muslim song as a binding National Anthem”.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is right in his analysis that the mutilation of Vande Mataram whetted the appetite of the Muslim League, and became the prelude to the partition of India. It is in the logic of appeasement that instead of resolving an issue, it exacerbates it.

Even now, the Muslim leadership remains as staunchly against Vande Mataram as it was during Jinnah’s time. So, what is gained by cutting out the better part of the song; and, what’s been gained by acquiescing to the partition?

The way forward

Since 2014, because of the conducive atmosphere provided, the Muslims have been showing an unprecedented fondness for the Constitution, and the sacred symbols of the nation. The Independence and Republic Days are celebrated with gaiety in Muslim institutions, including madrasas; and the national anthem is sung with gusto. Many a time, one can see the national flag waving from the high minaret of a mosque. If a better atmosphere is conduced, the Muslims will sing Vande Mataram with as much fervour as anyone else. – The Print, 12 December 2025

› Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. 

Chhattisgarh Waqf Board orders all mosques and madrasas to hoist the Indian flag on Independence Day.

Rushdie’s Duplicity: A victim of Islamist violence makes Hindu nationalism an easy target – Utpal Kumar

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Salman Rushdie

To watch Rushdie reprimand “Hindu nationalism” after surviving a near-fatal Islamist attack is therefore to witness a tragic spectacle: a man shaped by fear into criticising the safest opponent available. – Utpal Kumar

Soon after Salman Rushdie was stabbed by an Islamist madman in New York in August 2022, Gopalkrishna Gandhi wrote an article in the Hindustan Times, ‘The scorching truth of Rushdie’s ordeal’. While examining the Rushdie stabbing, Gandhi seemed oblivious to the attacker’s identity—the writer didn’t mention even once why the novelist was attacked, who the attacker was, or why Rushdie was forced to stay under cover for years despite issuing several apologies. Instead, he invoked Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu in 1948. His verdict became intriguingly problematic when he wrote, “The attack on Rushdie comes from the same source?”

Really!

Salman Rushdie’s latest warning about the “rise of Hindu nationalism” in Bharat seems to follow the same Left-‘liberal’ pattern—of, first, denying or at least minimising the scale of Islamist violence; and, second, if the scale of violence is too vast to ignore, creating an equivalence in Hinduism. It reads less like a principled stand and more like a man barking up the only tree that never bit him while fastidiously avoiding the forest of blades that left him with one eye less and a badly damaged liver.

The documented record of violence against Rushdie is neither vague nor debatable. It is exhaustively chronicled by many scholars, including Daniel Pipes, who, in his book The Rushdie Affair (1990), coined the term “Rushdie Rules” to describe how “editors, newspapers, publishers, and academic teachers abide by a new set of rules—new to modern Westerners at least—which limit the freedom to discuss Islam with the same methods, terminology and frank inquisitiveness that are considered normal in discussing Christianity or Hinduism”. Rushdie had himself written extensively about this in his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton.

It was Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that sent Rushdie into hiding. Then, there was the selective killing of no less than 45 people worldwide associated in one way or the other with The Satanic Verses—this included the murder of its Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, in 1991. Many were stabbed, including an Italian translator of the book in Milan; a Norwegian publisher was shot in Oslo. And, finally, it was an Islamist radical, Hadi Matar, who in 2022 stormed a stage in New York and plunged a knife repeatedly into Rushdie’s neck and abdomen, leaving him almost dead. All this is a living testament to the fact that Khomeini’s decree, as Daniel Pipes emphasises, “was never simply a religious opinion, but a death sentence with no expiry date”.

In contrast, Rushdie’s affair with Hindu nationalism is not only bloodless, it is anti-climactic in many ways. When he mocked Bal Thackeray and caricatured Hindu figures in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the much-anticipated Hindutva havoc never materialised. Thackeray, far from issuing anything resembling a fatwa, responded with a shrug and the suggestion that his secretary could read the book for him.

This civilisational lopsidedness was noted by Koenraad Elst in his preface to The Rushdie Affair, where he contrasted the Ayatollahs’ unforgiving wrath despite Rushdie’s repeated apology with the quick closure of the Shivaji Maharaj controversy when Khushwant Singh apologised for calling the Maratha hero “a bastard”. In the Hindu case, an apology ended the matter. In the Islamist case, apology merely confirmed guilt. The difference is civilisational, not rhetorical.

Given this stark historical-civilisational difference, Rushdie’s latest denunciation of “Hindu nationalism” appears less like conviction and more like reflex—the reflex of a man who has learnt, through his own bloody experience, which ideologies kill and which merely complain. It is psychologically understandable, even if morally disappointing and intellectually dishonest.

A traumatised man avoids the bully but lectures the weak and gentle. Writers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali have described this phenomenon as the “fear-shaped silence” that hangs over critiques of Islamism. Rushdie may not be totally silent, but he is certainly cautious, careful to look for the safer target while framing his criticisms of Islamism within layers of diplomatic phrasing. He is well aware, better than anyone else, of the one ideology that puts a global contract on life that never gets revoked.

To watch Rushdie reprimand “Hindu nationalism” after surviving a near-fatal Islamist attack is therefore to witness a tragic spectacle: a man shaped by fear into criticising the safest opponent available. It is not courage; it is self-preservation masquerading as principle. And it underscores a deeper truth about our intellectual climate—the willingness of cultural elites to condemn, even cut, the tree that never struck them while tiptoeing around the jungle that nearly swallowed one of their own.

Rushdie’s warning about Hindu nationalism may win him applause in Left-‘liberal’ salons, but it is a misdirection that obscures the true, documented, bloodstained threat that has shadowed him for the past 36 years. If he is barking, he is barking up the wrong tree—and perhaps the only one that never bared its teeth.

Hindu nationalism, after all, did not force Rushdie into hiding. Hindu nationalism did not murder his colleagues. Hindu nationalism did not stab him on an American stage. Hindu nationalism did not declare that repentance is insufficient and that the sentence is eternal. Islamism did all of this, openly and repeatedly—an ideology that celebrates the likes of Hadi Matar.

Perhaps Rushdie the rebel, which he was once in the 1980s, is no more, as he himself had suggested in Joseph Anton. Recalling the moment in 1989 when a fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah of Iran, he remembered receiving a call from a woman BBC reporter who asked, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but Rushdie had never felt the world so dark. “It doesn’t feel good,” he replied, though inwardly he thought, “I’m a dead man.”

Rushdie, the rebel writer, is long dead. Long live Rushdie! – Firstpost, 9 December 2025

› Utpal Kumar is Opinion Editor at Firstpost and News18 and is the author of the book “Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History”.

Nehru, Patel and the Babri Masjid: Rajnath Singh exposes Nehruvian double-speak – Utpal Kumar

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Nehru & Patel

Rajnath Singh’s remarks on Nehru, Patel, Somnath and Babri Masjid, rather than being fabrications or distortions of history, reflect realities that were suppressed later by the Nehruvian ecosystem. – Utpal Kumar

Truth can often be stranger than fiction. This became obvious when Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s recent statement about Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the Babri Masjid opened a Pandora’s box, pushing the country to revisit the uneasy truths of its early years as an independent entity.

The Congress, quite expectedly and duly supported by its ecosystem, has strongly denied Singh’s assertions, calling them “lies” devoid of archival backing. Yet, when one turns to the memoirs, diaries, and biographies written by contemporaries of Nehru and Patel, a more complex picture emerges—one that suggests history is more often than not written by victors, which in the country’s case were Nehru and his acolytes.

Rajnath Singh’s intervention touches on two sensitive issues: one, whether Nehru had proposed using government funds to build the Babri Masjid; and two, the first prime minister’s alleged reluctance to support a national memorial for Sardar Patel. Contrary to claims that Singh is distorting or inventing history, the fact is that these incidents were explicitly recorded in books and personal documents from the 1950s and 1960s.

The Babri Masjid Question

The most striking material comes from the diary of Maniben Patel, Sardar Patel’s daughter. In one of her entries, she notes that Nehru had raised the question of the Babri Masjid and its reconstruction. According to her account, Sardar Patel immediately made it clear that the government could not spend public money to build or rebuild a mosque. He also reminded Nehru that the case of the Somnath temple had been entirely different. In her entry dated September 20, 1950, Maniben Patel writes,

“Bapu (Sardar) said (the) government cannot give money for building a mosque? He knew it very well so that Junagadh was taken over well in advance, and land [was] obtained from [the] Junagadh government for Somnath, and a trust was created and credited Rs 30 lakh. Panditji wrote a chit to Munshi that [the] government cannot spend money on Somnath, as ours is a secular state. Munshi transferred [it] to him (Bapu). He replied that this is a trust of which Jamshed is chairman and Munshi a member and no government money is going to be used in it. He (PM) was silenced then.”

This diary entry is significant because it directly contradicts the categorical denials made today that Nehru ever entertained any proposal regarding government involvement with the Babri Masjid. It also supports Rajnath Singh’s remark that Patel had explicitly opposed such an idea. The suggestion that Nehru even considered using public funds for the mosque complicates the popular portrayal of him as a secularist who maintained a firm line separating religion and state.

The Somnath Saga

The Nehruvian double standard becomes more acute when one looks at the Somnath temple reconstruction episode. In his book Pilgrimage to Freedom, K.M. Munshi, a key leader in the Somnath project, recounts that when Junagadh acceded to India, Sardar Patel, as deputy prime minister, pledged the government to rebuild the temple. Munshi writes that the Union Cabinet, with Nehru presiding, initially approved the reconstruction at government expense.

It was Mahatma Gandhi, not Nehru, who advised that the temple must be rebuilt not with state funds but with voluntary contributions from Hindus. Sardar Patel accepted Gandhi’s advice and swiftly set in motion the creation of a trust to oversee public fundraising. Munshi himself was appointed chairman of the advisory committee for reconstruction.

What surprised Munshi was Nehru’s conduct after Sardar Patel’s death. He records that Nehru repeatedly criticised him for his involvement, despite the fact that the early Cabinet decision had Nehru’s own assent. Munshi writes that he had to remind the prime minister in a detailed letter that “everything was done … in accordance with the decision of the Cabinet taken under his guidance”.

The Somnath saga thus exposes another, little-known aspect of Nehruvian hostility to things Hindu—that the first prime minister’s opposition to state involvement in temple reconstruction was not a position he held from the start; it emerged only later, especially when he became all-powerful after the death of Sardar Patel. And, more damningly, this secular posturing did not stop him from discussing public support for the Babri Masjid, as Maniben Patel’s diary shows.

The Unfinished Legacy of Sardar Patel

The second part of Rajnath Singh’s critique concerns the systematic neglect of Sardar Patel’s memory and legacy after his death. Here, too, the archival material is extensive.

In his book The Sardar of India, P.N. Chopra describes how a plan to build a national memorial for Patel was approved by the Congress Working Committee. The target was Rs 1 crore. Industrialist G.D. Birla, a close aide of both Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, raised Rs 50 lakh and handed it to the All-India Congress Committee, while state units began collecting contributions.

Yet the project stalled. According to S.K. Patil, a Congressman, as quoted by Chopra, Nehru “remained passive throughout” and eventually suggested that since Patel had been an “agriculturist” and “friend of villagers”, the collected money should be used instead for digging wells and constructing village roads. S.K. Patil found the suggestion “nonsensical”, as “digging of wells and constructing roads was the normal responsibility of the government. That responsibility could not be shared by the memorial fund”.

Chopra also records that Nehru objected even to raising Patel’s statue at Vijay Chowk. Only after much difficulty was a new site secured on Parliament Street, funded not by the Congress’s official memorial fund but by money raised separately in Bombay, now Mumbai.

More startling is the account related by R.L. Handa in his book Rajendra Prasad: Twelve Years of Triumph and Despair. Handa, who was the press secretary to President Rajendra Prasad, writes that upon Patel’s death in 1950, Nehru issued a direction to ministers and secretaries asking them not to go to Bombay for the funeral. When he requested President Rajendra Prasad to avoid attending as well, Prasad refused. Durga Das, in his book India: From Curzon to Nehru and After, corroborates this, noting that Prasad felt Nehru was attempting to diminish Patel’s stature.

These testimonies strengthen Rajnath Singh’s argument that there was a concerned attempt to diminish Patel’s legacy in the years following Independence—an observation shared not merely by modern political actors but by several of Sardar Patel’s contemporaries.

Rajnath Singh’s remarks, rather than being fabrications or distortions of history, reflect realities that were suppressed later by the Nehruvian ecosystem. They show that the early years of the republic were far from monolithic, carved from Nehruvian stone, as is being projected today, and that the country’s slide towards amoral, soulless secularism detached from ageless Sanatana ethos was neither inevitable nor uncontested. In that sense, the ongoing debate sparked by Rajnath Singh has reopened a window onto a past that continues to challenge our assumptions, proving yet again that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. – News18,

› Utpal Kumar is Opinion Editor at Firstpost and News18 and is the author of the book Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History.

Colonised Minds: Modi didn’t speak the whole truth at Ayodhya – Balbir Punj

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PM Modi raising the flag over the Ram Temple at Ayodhya (Nov.25, 2025).

What Modi said at Ayodhya about the Macaulay mindset is true, but unfortunately not the whole truth. India’s influential political, intellectual, and social elite has long been influenced not only by Macaulay but also by the ideological legacy of Karl Marx. Since independence, this powerful network has worked tirelessly—both jointly and separately—to carry forward the unfinished agenda of these two, who never met but shared a hatred for India’s timeless civilisation. – Balbir Punj

Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to liberate India completely from the Macaulayite mindset. In his words:

“Alongside pride in our heritage, one more task is equally vital-and that is the complete eradication of the mindset of servitude. Nearly 190 years ago, in 1835, a Briton named Macaulay sowed the seeds of uprooting India from her civilisational roots. It was Macaulay who laid the foundation of India’s mental colonisation. Ten years from now, in 2035, that unfortunate episode will complete two hundred years. Only a few days ago, at another event, I urged the nation to adopt the coming decade as a mission-a resolve that in these ten years, we shall free India entirely from this mindset of slavery.”

PM Modi hit the nail on the head, and what better place than Ayodhya to do so. The seven-decade delay in building the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple symbolises the lingering scars of colonised mindsets. The temple could have been constructed soon after independence and marked the conclusion of India’s struggle to reclaim its self-respect and identity.

However, opposition driven by Macaulay-Marxist influences turned it into a Hindu-Muslim issue. Their colonial mindset created misleading narratives, resulting in endless litigation, damage to Hindu-Muslim relations, and the loss of many innocent lives and properties. I have explored this topic in detail in my book Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India.

What Modi said about the Macaulay mindset is true, but unfortunately not the whole truth. India’s influential political, intellectual, and social elite has long been influenced not only by Macaulay but also by the ideological legacy of Karl Marx. Since independence, this powerful network has worked tirelessly—both jointly and separately—to carry forward the unfinished agenda of these two, who never met but shared a hatred for India’s timeless civilisation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a staunch capitalist and imperialist. In contrast, Karl Marx was the pioneer of Leftist ideology, focusing on class struggle while sharply criticising capitalism. Despite their ideological differences, both shared a common goal: to diminish India’s presence in the minds and hearts of its people. As a result, when the British, in collusion with the Muslim League, moved the subcontinent towards an inevitable partition, the contemporary Left intelligentsia not only justified it but also mused about breaking India into more than fifteen smaller pieces.

Macaulay’s 1835 education policy aimed at shaping a class of Indians who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”-a group that would support British rule. His policies encouraged Indians to look down on their own civilisational roots and to detach mentally from their cultural foundations. So strong was his disdain that he famously claimed the entire “native literature of India” and learning was not “worth” even a “single shelf of a good European library”.

Macaulay’s project was not merely colonial; it was deeply evangelical. Writing to his father on  October  12, 1836, he declared:

“… Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully… The effect of this education on the Hindoos is prodigious. No Hindoo who has received an English education ever continues to be sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy, and some embrace Christianity… It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. …”

Macaulay’s thoughts aligned with the 1813 Charter Act of the East India Company, which encouraged European missionaries’ evangelical efforts in India. From this colonial origin, divisive ideas like the Aryan Invasion Theory, the Dravidian Movement, and the claim that “India is not a nation” arose, still influencing Indian politics and academia.

British rule in India, ironically, fulfilled Marx’s worldview, at least in one way. His satisfaction is evident in his column—“The Future Results of British Rule in India” published on 8 August 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune, where he wrote:

“The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindoo civilisation. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society.”

Mark these words, “… they destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry…” This sentence by Marx, over 170 years old, summarises how India was culturally and economically destroyed by colonial powers. Marx celebrated this destruction of Indian culture and industry as necessary for revolution, as culture and economics are intertwined—destroying one kills the other.

He further added in “The Future Results of British Rule in India”:

“England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”

Marx’s contempt for Indian traditions was further exposed in another New York Daily Tribune article “The British Rule in India,” dated 25 June 1853:

“… We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never-changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabala, the cow. …”

Marx authored this caricature without visiting India, yet many of his ideological successors spread this disdain in independent India. Sanatan philosophy views man as part of the cosmic order, not its master. India’s Vedic culture, with deep roots, supported a thriving economy from the first to the seventeenth century, acknowledged by global research.

The liberation from the colonial Macaulay-Marx mindset—an emancipation that should have started immediately after independence—only gained momentum after 2014, with some exceptions. The Guardian’s May 18, 2014 editorial highlighted this shift:

”Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent. India under the Congress party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means. The last of midnight’s children are now a dwindling handful of almost 70-year-olds, but it is not the passing of the independence generation that makes the difference.”

Post-independence, there was a unanimous demand in Ayodhya from civil society, the political leadership of United Provinces (as Uttar Pradesh was called then), and the top echelons of state bureaucracy for handing over the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi site to Hindus, but the colonialists led by the then Prime Minister Nehru wouldn’t let that happen.

In this context, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple in Ayodhya stands as a living symbol of Sanatan resurgence and a national resolve to break free from colonial consciousness.

When, amid Vedic rituals on  November 25, the PM raised the standard of Sanatan in Ayodhya, it was a definitive statement about India’s civilisational renaissance and its quest to dismantle the colonial mindset. No wonder the Macaulay-Marxist pack is in a funk.

› Balbir Punj is an eminent columnist and the author of “Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India” and “Narrative ka Mayajaal”.

K.K. Muhammed: Muslims should hand over the Gyanvapi and Mathura sites to Hindus – BT & India Today

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K. K. Muhammed

Former Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) regional director K.K. Muhammed has accused the Centre of neglecting conservation, delaying critical excavations and failing to protect India’s cultural legacy. – Business Today

Former Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) regional director K.K. Muhammed has described the last eleven years under the BJP government as a “dark age” for the country’s premier heritage body. He accused the Centre of neglecting conservation, delaying critical excavations and failing to protect India’s cultural legacy.

Speaking to India Today [see video below], the veteran archaeologist said the expectations he and others had from the government on cultural preservation “did not materialise”.

“We all expected a lot from the BJP government when it came to power. So, we thought there would be a kind of … the protection would be more from the side of these people, and they would be taking a lot of interest in culture, but it was not like that,” he said. “We call it the dark age of the period of the BJP for the last 11 years. It is the dark age of the Archaeological Survey of India.”

Pressed on why he believes this has happened, Muhammed pointed to stalled conservation work, including at the Bateshwar temple complex in Chambal, where he had previously overseen a major restoration effort.

“For example, my own Bateshwar Temples, where I had worked. Along with the Chambal decoits there we have been able to reconstruct near about 90 temples. But during the BJP’s 11 years, only 10 temples were reconstructed, and that too after trying a lot. I had to do a lot of exercise for that, otherwise even that would not have happened.”

He also criticised the government for halting significant excavations across several sites, including Delhi’s Purana Qila. “Purana Qila excavation should have continued. Dr Vasant Kumar Swarnkar was excavating it. He has not got the permission for that. That should have been done,” Muhammed said. “And similarly, excavations in various other parts also. It should have been taken up by the government, but they are not.”

According to him, the ruling party’s claim of being the “real owners of culture” has contributed to an atmosphere where oversight and criticism are weakened. “Because they claim that they are the real owners of the culture, but that is not so,” he said. He, however, acknowledged that at various places the work was happening, which was not the case during the Congress period. – Business Today, 1 December 2025

The monotheistic interpretation of Hinduism originates in colonial Hindumesia – Yogendra Singh Thakur

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Hindu Gods

The over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths … has at the very heart of it the belief that Hinduism is somehow inferior to the supremacist, monopolist and violent monotheistic religions. – Yogendra Singh Thakur

Some time ago, the former Lok Sabha Speaker and Union Minister Shivraj Patil claimed that Hinduism has a concept of “jihad” similar to the one in Islam. Patil, highlighting that there is a lot of discussion on jihad in Islam, said that “the concept comes to the fore when despite having the right intentions and doing the right thing, nobody understands or reciprocates, then it is said one can use force.”

“It is not just in Quran, but in Mahabharata also, the part in Gita, Shri Krishna also talks of jihad to Arjun and this thing is not just in Quran or Gita but also in Christianity,” he said adding further fuel to the fire.

Faced with the natural and correct backlash on the statement, Patil attempted to dress the wound with a clarification. But the dressing was evidently soaked in salt as the clarification only worsened the situation. Patil went on to say that just as Islam and Christianity, Hinduism too does not endorse many gods but only one. Such a god has “no colour, no shape and no form,” he said. Basically, the former Union Minister was pushing the monotheistic belief—the existence of one sole formless god—which is the very foundation of Abrahamic faiths. This is the same belief which has been at odds with polytheistic Hinduism for centuries, leading to the many wars initiated and instigated by Muslims and Christians, the ethnic genocides that these two religions have carried out worldwide and in India, and even caused the Partition of the country.

Some days ago, another political leader from the state of Karnataka, made an ill-intentioned remark on Hinduism, calling the word Hindu, “dirty”. The leader went on to remark that we should rise above the boundaries of religion and that “it is not appropriate to glorify anything related to Hinduism.” One wonders why it is always that Hindus and Hinduism are targeted whenever there is a call to rise above religion and religious identity, and that these calls are usually followed or accompanied by abusing only Hinduism and Hindus.

This idea about rising above religion or a notion that religion, when it comes to Hinduism, is something to be insecure about is not limited to the remarks of ignorant and mischievous political leaders alone. The Supreme Court has very famously stated that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. What this statement evidently implies is that Hinduism is a cultural belief system with rituals, festivals, and beliefs about life and death, and it does not contain any larger social regulation system, any system of doctrines or practices related to spirituality or worship, that it does not have anything to do with the sacred, holy, absolute, divine, and of special reverence, or that Hindus do not have ant political aspirations as a community. Hence in a scenario when such a system is built or such aspirations are formed, it becomes, by definition, “un-Hindu”: Hindus are merely amoebic, shape-shifting human beings in this conception of the Supreme Court of India.

This is what senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid asserted, when he claimed that Hindutva, which advocates for certain political interests of Hindu society, is similar to Boko Haram and ISIS terrorist outfits. But despite such cruel, false, and provocative comparisons drawn on the basis of “Hinduism is a way of life” notion, many do like to continue advocating it, including our current Prime Minister himself.

It is this notion alone which is at the heart of an advocacy that Hindus are not a people following one religion but a people identifying with a certain culture, irrespective of religious affiliations—the kind of advocacy which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief, Dr Mohan Bhagwat, does quite often. Dr Bhagwat often expresses that they “have been telling since 1925 (when the RSS was founded) that everyone living in India is a Hindu. Those who consider India as their ‘matrubhoomi’ (mother land) and want to live with a culture of unity in diversity and make efforts in this direction, irrespective of whatever religion, culture, language and food habit and ideology they follow, are Hindus.” He adds that everyone living inside the boundaries of his imagined 40,000-year-old Akhand Bharat are Hindus.

The over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths—by saying that the concept of jihad and a single formless god is in the core of Hinduism or that all people living in India and amidst Indian culture are Hindu—has this understanding at the very heart of it—that Hinduism is somehow inferior to the supremacist, monopolist, violent, and culturally, civilizationally, spiritually, and experientially different faiths. The unreasonable urge to “rise above religion,” or to not appreciate the aspects of Hinduism, is also driven by the same notion of relative inferiority. People possessed with such a notion do not seek to maintain the differences between a Pagan polytheistic faith like Hinduism and Abrahamic monotheistic faiths like Islam and Christianity; or even between the socio-cultural beliefs of Hinduism and the beliefs of Utilitarian globalists.

And why does this particular notion exist in the modern Hindu with such prominence? The answer to this can be traced back to the social reform movements in early modern British India.

The British Raj in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was undergoing a change in attitude towards India. One of the reasons for this change in attitude was the French Revolution, which seemed to inspire revolution around the world, particularly posing a threat to the colonial nations under the British, the long standing enemies of the French. In order to prepare themselves ahead of any French attempts or “inspiration” to destabilise the British Empire, the English from the College of Fort William pressed for a unified Hinduism. Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) and Lord Wellesley were central to these efforts [1].

Lord Wellesley was brother of the future Duke of Wellington (who later defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815) and spoke many a time against the French Revolution. As David Kopf notes [2], “a root cause of Wellesley’s actions was, by his own admission, his fear and hatred of France and the very real danger of French expansion into India” [3].

And thus from the College of Fort William commenced reformist interpretations of Hinduism, to turn it into a bulwark against possible “social activism, revolutionary tendencies and challenges to the status quo.”

Colebrooke wrote, under a substantial influence of Jesuit missionaries, that Hinduism was originally—and in its true form—a monotheistic religion with only a formless god at its center. It was thought that the diversity of Hinduism posed a threat to the stability of the British Empire in India in the post French Revolution era.

Hindu reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy followed Colebrooke and aggressively propagated the idea that Hinduism at its core is a monotheistic faith with no room for image worship or idolatry. Roy, walking in the footsteps of Colebrooke’s orientalism, divided the Hindu past into a “monotheistic true era” and the “polytheistic false era”. The latter era, according to him, was destroying “the texture of society” [4].

Later, Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj with the objective of institutionalising these reformist ideas and interpretations of and about Hinduism. In his attempt, Roy incorporated a large portion of Christian theology into Hinduism [5]. The motives of it, as popularly described by scholars, was to oppose Christian Jesuit activities. But as evidenced from his earlier writings, there was definitely a drive of the orientalist belief behind it which saw Hinduism as originally a monotheistic faith.

The implication of this monist/monotheistic view of Hinduism naturally resulted in attempts to essentially dissolve Hinduism as a separate theology and project it as just another branch of global universal theism. Ram Mohan Roy considered “different religions as national embodiment of universal theism and the Brahmo Samaj as a universalist church” [6].

The social reform movement was carried out against what the reformers deemed to be the backward aspects of Hindu culture, practices, and mores. The goal of the movement was a restructuring of Hindu institutions and beliefs. At the core of these reform movements was dislike or even hatred of polytheism, which is essentially the crux and whole of Hinduism. As a remedy for the ills in Hinduism, Ram Mohan Roy advocated a monotheistic Hinduism in which reason guides the adherent to “the Absolute Originator who is the first principle of all religions” [7]. Roy was essentially incorporating the core beliefs of an Abrahamic faith into a polytheistic religion, labelling it a guiding truth.

What was started by Ram Mohan Roy was taken to even greater lengths and to a much bigger audience by Dayananda Saraswati and his Arya Samaj (founded in 1875). Dayananda studied Vedic literature and aggressively propagated the monotheistic interpretation of Hinduism. Multiple gods, to Dayanand, were a Puranic corruption by the priestly class to control and mislead the masses. And all post-Vedic Hindu literature, including the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, were deemed inauthentic. “Go back to Vedas,” Dayanand proclaimed.

But amidst all this ground-breaking activism lay a highly prejudiced—and possibly Christian-centric—view of the Hindu past. Vedas speak proudly of many gods/deities with hymns dedicated to all of them. It is hard to imagine how this apparent fact could be interpreted into believing that the Vedas propagate monotheism, unless the interpreter has already concluded otherwise. Sure, the Vedas propound grand, cosmic speculation about the origins and nature of the cosmos, with the universe originating “through the evolution of an impersonal force manifested as male and female principles”. So, we find in the Vedas a “tension between visions of the highest reality as an impersonal force, or as a creator god, or as a group of gods with different jobs to do in the universe” [8].

Later the Ramakrishna Mission furthered similar monistic views of Hinduism, terming Hinduism as a religion of all, irrespective of faith or god. The notion of one religion for all, an umbrella theological belief system that could create a universal brotherhood of faiths, was taken to its extreme by the Theosophical Society founded by the Russian spiritualist Madame H.P. Blavatsky and the American Col. H.S. Olcott in 1875. In just nine years the Society had around a hundred branches along with its global centre in Adyar. The Theosophical Society used unconventional and indirect ways to further its ideas of theological universalism and monism. It managed to influence many important personalities who would later go on to change India’s politics via the Indian National Congress. The Society opened many schools and colleges including the Central Hindu College at Banaras.

The British establishment, no doubt, supported, encouraged and institutionalized these reforms, albeit for its own good. With the advent of the eighteenth century, British attitude towards India—which was purely an evangelic utilitarian one—was to somehow do away with the stagnation in Indian society by the work of law and “education” in Christian principles. The zealous goal of these efforts, as Udayon Mishra notes [9], was the creation of a “Europeanised India” with substantial incorporation of Christian ideas and beliefs into Hinduism. Hindu reformer organizations like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, and others played that role exactly, knowingly or unknowingly, playing into the hands of British evangelicals.

This reformist approach of incorporating Christian core beliefs into Hinduism turned out to be a big help to the Christian missionaries and theologians. “By characterising Hinduism as a monistic religion, Christian theologians and apologists were able to criticise the mystical monism of Hinduism, thereby highlighting the moral superiority of Christianity,” Richard King notes. Christian theologians furthered the view that the enormous diversity of Hinduism—in gods, sects, and beliefs—was a sign of inferiority of the Indian stock, thereby making it a responsibility of the British to “educate, civilise, and save” Hindus and India.

“Educating” the Hindus on their so-called monotheistic core was also seen as a step that could help Britishers to club diverse Hindus into a group of single-minded people, easier to govern and less likely to start insurgencies. On the looming prospects of French expansion, an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety about the stability of British rule led to the furthering of reformed interpretations of Hinduism.

And thus, the anxiety caused by the French Revolution and the British evangelical utilitarian zeal to Christianise India, guided the reformist view of Hinduism. This over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths was born out of decades of colonial Hindumesia. – IndiaFacts, 15 December 2022

Footnotes

  1. Dhar, Niranjan, Vedanta and the Bengal Renaissance, Calcutta, Minerva Associates, 1977.
  2. As quoted by King, Richard A. H, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”, 1999, pp. 130.
  3. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernisation, 1773–1835, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 46-47.
  4. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
  5. Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Oxford University Press, 1964.
  6. Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, Socio-religious reform movements in British colonial India, International Journal of History 2020; 2(2): 38-45.
  7. Heitzman and Worden, eds., “India: A Country Study,” 1995.
  8. Bijoy Prasad Das, Rammohan Roy: Progressive Role as a Social Reforms and Movements for Social Justice, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention, Volume 10, Issue 6, pp. 57-59.
  9. Udayon Misra, “Nineteenth Century British Views of India: Crystallisation of Attitudes”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 19, no. 4, 1984, pp. 14–21.

› Yogendra Singh Thakur is a freelance columnist from Betul, Madhya Pradesh. He is pursuing his studies, majoring in History, Political Science, and Sociology.

Vedic Gods

Vande Mataram: Nationhood in conflict – Prafull Goradia

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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

“Vande Mataram” should not divide Indians; it should remind them of their shared soil and destiny. History may be scarred by conquest and division, but the future must rest on reason and reconciliation. – Prafull Goradia

Questions such as whether our Constitution is secular or whether “Vande Bharat” is a patriotic or political slogan are not merely contemporary concerns; they are rooted in centuries of Indian history. To understand current controversies, one must go back to AD 1194, when Mohammad Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan in the Second Battle of Tarain. Some trace the origins even further. Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah once claimed that Pakistan was born the day the first Hindu converted to Islam in the subcontinent.

Muslims came to India as conquerors, guests, or converts who could claim native descent. Among the rulers, some were benevolent, others harsh, and a few destructive. The brightest phase came under Emperor Akbar, whose long and liberal reign brought a rare harmony to India. In contrast, Aurangzeb’s intolerance marked the darkest chapter of Mughal rule.

A puzzling feature of Indian history is the absence of a united Hindu resistance to the Sultans and Badshahs of Delhi. Shivaji stands out for his courage and statecraft, yet his influence remained confined to the Deccan. Maharana Pratap, too, fought heroically against Akbar, but his struggle was limited to Mewar. A pan-Indian uprising never materialised. By the mid-18th century, the declining Mughal order gave way to new powers. The reckless Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, alienated his own officers and merchants, pushing them into alliance with the East India Company. Their support ensured Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757, which opened the gates of Bengal to British domination. Subsequent British victories-over Tipu Sultan in 1799 and the annexation of Awadh under Dalhousie-completed the dismantling of Muslim authority.

The Revolt of 1857 briefly shook British confidence. For a year, large parts of North India were aflame, but the uprising ended in defeat. In 1858, Queen Victoria assumed direct control, and two decades later, in 1877, she was proclaimed Empress of India. The British concluded that Muslims had been the principal instigators and punished them more severely than Hindus.

This perception deepened Muslim resentment and nostalgia for lost power. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh Movement, even argued that when the British eventually left, they should return India to the Muslims from whom they had taken it. Whether this was foresight or delusion remains debatable. Ironically, the Indian National Congress—often branded a “Hindu party”—was not formed by Hindus at all. It was founded in 1885 by a retired English civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume. Yet, by 1906, Muslims had established their own political platform, the All-India Muslim League, reinforcing the belief that while Hindus were traders and cultivators, Muslims were natural rulers. This sentiment persisted even after Mahatma Gandhi entered the scene in 1915.

Gandhi’s early political strategy was curious. To bridge Hindu-Muslim divides, he supported the Khilafat Movement, launched by the Ali brothers—Mohammad and Shaukat—to restore the Ottoman Caliphate after World War I. Astonishingly, Gandhi even became president of the Khilafat Committee, formed to defend a Turkish sultan thousands of miles away. Many observers saw this as proof that political power in India still revolved around Muslim leadership. Gandhi’s satyagraha, though morally compelling, appeared to many as nothing more than a moral appeal, not really a political challenge to imperial rule.

In 1940, at Lahore, Jinnah declared that Hindus and Muslims were “two distinct nations.” No strong Indian voice publicly disputed this claim. When the premiers of Punjab and Bengal initially opposed Partition, Congress leaders quietly welcomed their stance, believing Jinnah’s plan would fail. Yet, by May 1947, Mountbatten announced the Partition, confirming that Jinnah’s vision had prevailed. Once again, Muslim political will had triumphed. Partition’s aftermath was tragic and uneven. In Pakistan’s western wing, Hindus and Sikhs were virtually wiped out by 1948. The eastern wing—now Bangladesh—saw its Hindu population fall from 33 per cent to barely 8 per cent. Migration was overwhelmingly one-sided: millions of Hindus fled Pakistan, but few Muslims left India. The imbalance revealed the persistent perception that power and initiative in the subcontinent lay largely with Muslims, not Hindus.

This historical backdrop helps explain why, even today, debates such as the one surrounding “Vande Mataram” evoke old anxieties. Some Muslim leaders continue to act as if their community still sets the terms of national discourse. Such illusions are not merely harmless, they perpetuate misunderstanding and hinder social harmony.

India’s past is too complex to be reduced to communal binaries. Both Hindus and Muslims have shaped its destiny, for better and for worse. Yet, national progress demands a sober recognition of facts, not romanticised memories of lost empires or imagined privileges. True secularism lies not in appeasement but in equal accountability. The maturity of a nation is measured not by the volume of its grievances but by its capacity to face history without distortion.

In the final analysis, “Vande Mataram” should not divide Indians; it should remind them of their shared soil and destiny. History may be scarred by conquest and division, but the future must rest on reason and reconciliation. Every citizen—Hindu, Muslim, or otherwise—must realise that the power to shape India’s tomorrow lies not in nostalgia for the past, but in unity of purpose and respect for truth. Only then can the spirit of Vedanta, of oneness and universality, truly prevail. – The Pioneer, 12 November 2025

› Prafull Goradia is a former member of the Raja sabha and is currently the general secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Jan Sangh.

Bharat Mata by M.F Huisain

Islam is a religion of violence – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

VOI

Madrasa with Student

The view that the ideology of radical Islam is rooted in Islamic scripture understands fully the cause of terrorism; it takes religious arguments seriously, and does not view them as a mere smokescreen for underlying “real” motivations, such as socio-economic grievances. This school of thought understands that the problem of radicalization begins long before a suicide bomber straps on his vest or a militant picks up his machine gun; it begins in mosques and schools where imams preach hate, intolerance, and adherence to Medina Islam. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In the 14 years since the attacks of 9/11 brought Islamic terrorism to the forefront of American and Western awareness and then-President George W. Bush launched the “Global War on Terror,” the violent strain of Islam appears to have metastasized. With tracts of Syria and Iraq in the hands of the self-styled Islamic State, Libya and Somalia engulfed in anarchy, Yemen being torn apart by civil war, the Taliban resurging in Afghanistan, and Boko Haram terrorizing Nigeria, policymakers are farther away from eliminating the threat of violent Islamism than they were when they began the effort. In fact, Western countries are increasingly witnessing domestic attacks such as the murder of British military drummer Lee Rigby and the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the shootings at Parliament Hill in Canada in 2014, the attacks at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a Jewish supermarket in Paris this past January, and most recently the terrorist attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on a military recruiting center and Naval compound.

But does this violent extremism stem from Islam’s sacred texts? Or is it the product of circumstance, which has twisted and contorted Islam’s foundations?

To answer this, it’s worth first drawing the important distinction between Islam as a set of ideas and Muslims as adherents. The socio-economic, political, and cultural circumstances of Muslims are varied across the globe, but I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims in the world today based on how they envision and practice their faith.

The first group is the most problematic—the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Sharia, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else. I call them “Medina Muslims,” in that they see the forcible imposition of Sharia as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Mohammed when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Sharia law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance towards non-Muslims. I call this group “Mecca Muslims.” The fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.

More recently, and corresponding with the rise of Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam—Muslim reformers or, as I call them, “Modifying Muslims”—who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.

The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups—the Medina Muslims and the reformers—wins the support of the Meccan majority. That is why focusing on “violent extremism” is to focus on a symptom of a much more profound ideological epidemic that has its root causes in Islamic doctrine.

To understand whether violence is inherent in the doctrine of Islam, it is important to look at the example of the founding father of Islam, Mohammed, and the passages in the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence used to justify the violence we currently see in so many parts of the Muslim world. In Mecca, Mohammed preached to his fellow tribesmen to abandon their gods and accept his. He preached about charity and the conditions of widows and orphans. (This method of proselytizing or persuasion, called dawa in Arabic, remains an important component of Islam to this day.) However, during his time in Mecca, Mohammed and his small band of believers had little success in converting others to this new religion. So, a decade after Mohammed first began preaching, he fled to Medina. Over time he cobbled together a militia and began to wage wars.

Anyone seeking support for armed jihad in the name of Allah will find ample support in the passages in the Quran and Hadith that relate to Mohammed’s Medina period. For example, Q4:95 states, “Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home).” Q8:60 advises Muslims “to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know.” Finally, Q9:29 instructs Muslims: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence continues to maintain that the so-called “sword verses” (9:5 and 9:29) have “abrogated, canceled, and replaced” those verses in the Quran that call for “tolerance, compassion, and peace.”

As for the example of Mohammed, Sahih Muslim, one of the six major authoritative Hadith collections, claims the Prophet Mohammed undertook no fewer than 19 military expeditions, personally fighting in eight of them. In the aftermath of the 627CE Battle of the Trench, “Mohammed felt free to deal harshly with the Banu Qurayza, executing their men and selling their women and children into slavery,” according to Yale Professor of Religious Studies Gerhard Bowering in his book Islamic Political Thought. As the Princeton scholar Michael Cook observed in his book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, “the historical salience of warfare against unbelievers … was thus written into the foundational texts” of Islam.

There lies the duality within Islam. It’s possible to claim, following Mohammed’s example in Mecca, that Islam is a religion of peace. But it’s also possible to claim, as the Islamic State does, that a revelation was sent to Mohammed commanding Muslims to wage jihad until every human being on the planet accepts Islam or a state of subservience, on the basis of his legacy in Medina.

The key question is not whether Islam is a religion of peace, but rather, whether Muslims follow the Mohammed of Medina, regardless of whether they are Sunni or Shiite.

Today, the West is still struggling to understand the religious justification for the Medina ideology, which is growing, and the links between nonviolence and violence within it. Two main viewpoints have emerged in the debate on the causes of violent extremism in Islam. The difference between them is reflected in the different terminology used by proponents of the rival views.

Popular academics such as John Esposito at Georgetown and author Karen Armstrong believe that religion—Islam, in this case—is the “circumstantial” bit and that the real causes of Islamist violence are poverty, political marginalization, cultural isolation, and other forms of alienation, including real or perceived discrimination against Muslims. These apologists for Islam use words such as “radicalism,” “violent extremism,” and “terrorism” to describe the various attacks around the world committed in the name of Islam. If Islam is mentioned at all, it is to say that Islam is being perverted, or hijacked. They are quick to assert that Islam is no different from any other religion, that there are terrible aspects to other religions, and that Islam is in no way unique. That view is more or less the “official” view of policymakers, not only of the U.S. government, but also of most Western countries (though policy changes are beginning to appear on this front in some countries such as the U.K., Canada, and Australia).

But the apologists’ position has been a complete policy failure because it denies the religious justifications the Quran and the Hadith provide for violence, gender inequality, and discrimination against other religions.

Proponents of the alternative view, such as the late academic Patricia Crone and author Paul Berman, rely on different terms such as “political Islam,” Islamism, Salafism, Wahhabism, and Jihadism. All of these terms are designed to convey the religious basis of the phenomenon. The argument is that an ideological movement to impose Sharia law, by force if necessary, is gaining ground across the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and even in Europe. In a speech this past July, British Prime Minister David Cameron said: “Simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims. The fact is from Woolwich to Tunisia, from Ottawa to Bali, these murderers all spout the same twisted narrative, one that claims to be based on a particular faith. Now, it is an exercise in futility to deny that.” I agree.

The view that the ideology of radical Islam is rooted in Islamic scripture understands fully the cause of terrorism; it takes religious arguments seriously, and does not view them as a mere smokescreen for underlying “real” motivations, such as socio-economic grievances. This school of thought understands that the problem of radicalization begins long before a suicide bomber straps on his vest or a militant picks up his machine gun; it begins in mosques and schools where imams preach hate, intolerance, and adherence to Medina Islam.

Western governments have tried to engage with “Moderate Muslims”: imams and community leaders who denounce terrorist attacks and claim to represent the true, peaceful Islam. But this has not amounted to meaningful ideological engagement. These so-called moderate representatives of Islam insist that violence has nothing to do with Islam and as a result the intolerant and violent aspects of the Quran and the Hadith are never acknowledged or rejected. There is never any discussion about change within Islam to bring the morally outdated parts of the religion in line with modernity or genuine tolerance for those who believe differently.

Despotic governments, civil war, anarchy, economic despair—all of these factors doubtless contribute to the spread of the Islamist movement. But it is only after the West and, more importantly, Muslims themselves recognize and defeat the religious ideology on which this movement rests that its spread will be arrested. And if we are to defeat the ideology we cannot focus only on violent extremism. We need to confront the non-violent preaching of Sharia and martyrdom that precedes all acts of jihad.

We will not win against the Medina ideology by stopping the suicide bomber just before he detonates himself, wherever he may be; another will soon take his (or her) place. We will not win by stamping out the Islamic State or al Qaeda or Boko Haram or al-Shabab; a new radical group will just pop up somewhere else. We will win only if we engage with the ideology of Islamist extremism, and counter the message of death, intolerance, and the pursuit of the afterlife with our own far preferable message of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. – USIP, 9 November 2015

› Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch and American writer, activist, conservative thinker and former politician. She is a critic of Islam, and an advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women.

S.R. Goel Quote