Category india

The Fallacy of Hope – Carlo Pizzati

VOI

Hope

Hope, in the end, is not liberation but one of its obstacles; the belief that tomorrow will redeem us, that history has a direction; that our suffering serves a purpose; that the arc of the universe bends towards anything at all. – Carlo Pizzati

Hopelessness exists only for those addicted to hope. If you avoid falling in the traps of hope, you will be safe from hopelessness. Then you will discover there can be serenity and even happiness. Without hope. Asian thought has preached this for centuries, yet, lately, some Asian thinkers seem to forget this important lesson. They seem to stumble more and more often on the allure of hope, which is also the typical feeling that can emerge when a year ends and a new one begins, and we feel compelled to hope for a better one.

However, even some European thinkers have long been aware of the dangers of a path strewn with the blossoms of hope. When asked why he had declared that as you age you become more cheerful, Italian poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini answered: “Because when you have less of a future, you have less hope, and this gives you great relief.”

Hope is not universal. It’s a strongly Western construct, rooted in a prevail­ing branch of Christian theology and on the Enlightenment’s faith in progress.

To embrace hope as a moral obliga­tion is to remain captive to frameworks that mistake their own psychological architecture for human nature.

The true heroic act is the non-hopeful, clear-eyed confrontation with the pres­ent, rather than the hopeful quest for an imagined future victory.

Hope, as the West understands it, de­scends from Christian eschatology. It’s the promise of salvation, the kingdom to come, the resurrection that redeems all suffering.

In Christianity, hope has become a value that is not merely permitted but commanded. It’s the theological virtue that bridges the chasm between a fallen present and a perfected future. Saint Paul wrote that “hope does not disappoint,” binding the faithful to what is not yet, tied to a tomorrow that justifies today’s pain.

This Christian temporality, or the con­stant deferral of fulfilment, permeates sec­ular Western thought with the persistence of a genetic code. Enlightenment philoso­phies of progress, Hegelian dialectics, Marxist visions of historical materialism, even liberal dreams of expanding rights and freedoms: these are all structured by hope, by the conviction that history moves towards something better, that our striv­ing will be rewarded in time.

Yet for much of the world’s philo­sophical traditions, hope is not a virtue but a trap, not a solution but the prob­lem itself. In Buddhism, hope—asa—is a form of tanha, the craving or thirst that generates suffering. The Second Noble Truth teaches that suffering arises from desire, from our insistence that reality should be other than it is.

Hope is simply desire projected into the future. It’s the refusal to accept the present moment in its fullness and its pain. The Buddhist path does not run through hope but through its dissolu­tion. Liberation, nirvana, comes not from hoping for a better future but from extin­guishing the very mechanism of craving that makes hope possible. The Dham­mapada states: “Those who are free from selfish attachments, who have mastered their senses and passions, enjoy peace.” This peace is fundamentally incompat­ible with hope, which always involves attachment to what is not yet, to what may never be.

Daoist philosophy offers a parallel in­sight, though in a different key. The Da­odejing teaches wu wei, effortless action, the art of responding to circumstances without imposing desires upon them. To hope is to assert the ego’s will against the flow of dao, to demand that reality conform to our expectations rather than dancing with what is.

Zhuangzi wrote of the sage who “roams freely” precisely because he has no fixed outcomes in mind, no hopes to defend or mourn. Freedom, in this view, is not found through hoping for change but through releasing the need for any particular change to occur.

In Vedantic philosophy, hope is part of the illusion of maya, the veil that keeps us from recognising the eternal present of brahman. So long as we hope, we are locked in the world of becoming, blind to the truth of being. Nisargadatta Maharaj taught: “Wisdom lies in never forgetting the Self as the ever-present Source of both the experiencer and his experience.” To hope is to forget this, to imagine that ful­filment lies somewhere other than here, sometime other than now.

When we hope, we project ourselves out of the present and into an imagined future. We do not inhabit what is; we dwell in what we wish will be. Consider the mechanics: I love you, but you want to return to your ex. I hope you’ll come back to me. This hope is not love; it is suffering disguised as love, desire masquerading as devotion

These are not nihilistic philosophies, despite how they may sound to Western ears trained to hear any critique of hope as some form of depressing and fatalistic de­spair. Rather, they describe a different re­lationship to action and to the world: one that does not require the fiction of hope to sustain ethical life. They propose that we can act, create, resist, and love without the crutch of believing things will improve, without the narcotic of imagining our­selves on the right side of history.

Hope operates through temporal displacement, and this is its fundamen­tal violence. When we hope, we project ourselves out of the present and into an imagined future. We do not inhabit what is; we dwell in what we wish will be. Consider the mechanics: I love you, but you want to return to your ex. I hope you’ll come back to me. This hope is not love; it is suffering disguised as love, desire masquerading as devotion. I lack what I desire, and in my imagination, I possess what I might gain.

Hope keeps me suspended in this lack, unable to accept the present real­ity, unable to live without the fantasy of fulfilment. People who hope are never where they are; they are always some­where else, in a future that doesn’t exist, nursing a possibility that may be noth­ing more than self-deception.

This is how hope always functions, in love and in politics, in personal life and in collective struggle. It trains us to wait rather than to act, to defer rather than to engage. In hoping, we exchange the challenging work of presence for the seductive comfort of fantasy.

Hope is sort of a spiritual credit card: we purchase emotional comfort now by mortgaging the present to an imagined future, ac­cumulating a debt that can never be repaid because the future never actually arrives. It is always coming, always just beyond reach, always justifying today’s inaction or today’s endurance of the unendurable.

Hope is a concept which has been misconstrued within Christian theol­ogy as well. In the Bible, Jesus Christ often speaks of faith and love, but he is never recorded as having pronounced the word ‘hope’.

One could argue that hope actually undermines the acceptance dictated by faith in the divine. Ital­ian poet Dante Alighieri understood something that modernity has forgot­ten, something that sits uncomfortably with our compulsory optimism. In Paradise in the Divine Comedy the blessed do not hope. They contemplate the present beauty of God without reference to past regret or future longing. They are be­atified not because they hope for some­thing beyond themselves but because they are fully rooted in the now.

We can act because the action itself is right, because it expresses our values in this moment, because it is the response that the present demands according to our set of values, not because we hope it will produce a particular future. This is the difference between hope-driven action and what might be called present action.

Beatitude does not come through hope but through its transcendence, through the capacity to notice, accept, and celebrate what is, even when what is includes pain. The blessed have moved beyond hoping because they have dis­covered something hope always ob­scures: the sufficiency of the present moment.

Similarly, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna doesn’t tell Arjuna to “hope for the best.” He tells him to act without attachment to outcomes, nishkama karma. Devotional traditions like Bhakti allow hope in di­vine grace, but the ideal is surrender, not at all the anx­ious expectations feeding Western neurosis. Hindu texts like the Vivekachuda­mani suggest that the pin­nacle of spiritual existence is to be “perfectly hopeless”, without expectation for a separate, eternal life in the material sense. It is not despair, but a state of complete detachment, vairagya, and self-sufficiency, where one is not bound by the anxiety of what the future may bring.

Even in circumstances of great suffer­ing, perhaps especially then, it remains possible to act without hope. When the present is agonising, when injustice seems insurmountable, we can still respond. But our response need not be grounded in the belief that things will improve, that history bends towards justice, that our efforts will be rewarded. This is the great lie that hope tells: that action requires the promise of success, that resistance needs the guarantee of victory, that we cannot stand for justice unless we believe justice will prevail.

We can act because the action itself is right, because it expresses our values in this moment, because it is the response that the present demands according to our set of values, not because we hope it will produce a particular future.

This is the difference between hope-driven action and what might be called present action: the former is always held hostage by outcomes, always vulnerable to despair when things don’t improve; the latter is free, autonomous, complete in itself. The lover who can remain pres­ent without hoping for reciprocation is blessed. The activist who can resist op­pression without hoping for victory is free. The artist who can create without hoping for recognition inhabits a dif­ferent quality of life. These are not ex­amples of resignation or passivity. They describe a more radical engagement with reality, one that does not require the crutch of hope to justify itself, one that finds its meaning in the act rather than in the outcome.

What would it mean to resist with­out hoping? To create without the prom­ise of success? To act justly without the consolation that justice will prevail? It would mean confronting the present in its full reality, without the analgesic of future redemption. It would mean rec­ognising that the anguish we feel when watching images from Gaza, witness­ing the failures of institutions, living through the collapse of old certainties is itself the truth we must inhabit, not a problem that hope will solve.

The anguish is the message. The hor­ror is the reality. And no amount of hop­ing will change this; hope only distances us from what is actually happening, allows us to look away by focusing on what might be.

This is harder than hoping. Although when our perception of reality is filled with anxieties this seems counterin­tuitive, in reality hope is easy, because it allows us to look away from what is by focusing on what might be. Presence is difficult; it requires us to bear what we see, to act without guarantee, to love without possession, to resist without the promise of victory. Hope offers comfort; presence offers only clarity. But only in this difficulty does freedom lie. Only by abandoning hope can we discover what Zhuangzi called “free and easy wander­ing,” what the Buddha called “the extinc­tion of craving,” what Dante glimpsed in his vision of Paradise: a life no longer en­slaved by the future, no longer torment­ed by the not-yet, no longer dependent on outcomes we cannot control.

Hope, in the end, is not liberation but one of its obstacles; the belief that tomorrow will redeem us, that history has a direction; that our suffering serves a purpose; that the arc of the universe bends towards anything at all. The truly radical gesture is to set hope aside. To act justly because justice is right, not because we believe it will triumph. To create beauty because beauty is its own justification, not because we hope it will change the world. To resist oppres­sion because resistance expresses our humanity, not because we trust it will succeed. To love because love is what we choose to do, not because we hope to be loved in return. – Open, 25 December 2025

› Carlo Pizzati is an award-winning multilingual author and journalist who has lived in India since 2010, currently residing in the fishing village of Paramankeni with his wife, author Tishani Doshi. He currently works as a political analyst and editorialist for La Stampa and contributes to The Hindu and Open.

Buddha Quote

Jana Gana Mana: How a British lie became India’s most persistent myth – S. Bhattacharya

VOI

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

Jana Gana Mana was neither written for King George V nor sung in his honour. The misconception arose in the overlap between the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the visiting monarch and the British propaganda apparatus, always poised to exploit an opportunity. – Samik Bhattacharya

Even today, many still fall for the British-spawned myth about Jana Gana Mana, a song that was always an ode to India’s soul. How did such a distortion come into being? It arose from the convergence of two forces: the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the Emperor, and the calculated manoeuvring of the British propaganda apparatus. At the time, several Congress leaders wished that Rabindranath Tagore compose a song in honour of King George V, to be performed at the Congress session.

In the ceaseless churn of falsehood, even gods may fall from grace, so goes the old saying. But fewer know that, in a similar vortex of falsehood, Rabindranath Tagore himself was once cast as a “British loyalist.” The irony is that the old Congress ought to have known better, for it was their silent complicity that allowed the British press to malign Tagore so effectively. One hundred and fourteen years have passed, and yet that slander still drifts through our collective memory as a stubborn myth. Many continue to be ensnared by it; a Member of Parliament was its most recent victim. But the BJP, as a party, has never endorsed the notion that Tagore composed Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya Hey in praise of King George V.

The year was 1911. From 26 to 28 December, the Indian National Congress held its session in Calcutta. It was there that Jana Gana Mana was first sung publicly. On the morning of 27 December, accompanied by Dinendranath Tagore’s musical arrangement and performed by a chorus of young boys and girls, the song resonated through the Congress pavilion.

It is true that King George V was visiting India at that time. But the song was neither written for him nor sung in his honour. How, then, did this misconception arise? It germinated in the overlap between the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the monarch and the British propaganda apparatus, always poised to exploit an opportunity.

Many Congress leaders, wishing to please the Emperor, wanted Rabindranath to write a song honouring George V for the Congress session. This proposal reached Tagore through the barrister and Congress leader Ashutosh Chaudhuri. He was annoyed and indeed disappointed. He had no objection to writing a song for the Congress session, but to write one in praise of George V, he flatly refused.

And so, two songs were sung that day: in the morning, Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya Hey; in the evening, Badshah Hamara, composed by Rambhaja Dutta Chowdhuri. A glance at their language makes it immediately clear which song lauded the Emperor and which did not.

Rambhaja Dutta Chowdhuri, a Congress leader from Punjab, happened to be Tagore’s nephew-in-law, married to Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. Since Tagore would not grant the request routed through Ashutosh Chaudhuri, another Congress leader within the extended family took up the task and composed a loyal hymn for the British “Badshah.”

If this is what truly occurred, how then did the contrary myth take root? It was, quite simply, a British stratagem. The morning after Jana Gana Mana was sung at the Congress session, three English newspapers—including The Statesman and The Englishman—published identical claims that Tagore had written the song in honour of King George V. All three were faithful mouthpieces of the colonial regime. Their synchronised reports forged a falsehood that, over time, solidified into “truth.” Thus, an empty fiction grew into a vast national myth, still alive in our discourse today. Even in independent India, several eminent figures repeated this error, unaware that they were only echoing a lie crafted by the British.

Tagore himself attempted more than once to correct the distortion. On 20 November 1937, in Bichitra, and again on 29 March 1939, in Purbasha, he wrote with a mixture of pain and indignation, compelled to dismantle the persistent falsehood. He confessed that he felt insulted by such wilful misinterpretation. “I did not write this song for any George the Fifth or George the Sixth,” he stated unequivocally. The song, he clarified, was dedicated to those eternal, illumined spirits who had guided India since the dawn of civilisation. Yet, despite his own testimony, the slander survived.

In the 1990s, I myself intervened to save a political colleague from repeating the same old error. I was then active in the youth wing of the party. At a national event, I heard someone invoke the fable linking Jana Gana Mana to George V’s visit to India. I corrected him on the spot. L.K. Advani was present on that very stage. Yet even today, some continue to perpetuate the mistake.

A carefully researched essay by MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy also sets forth the true facts. The piece rests on firm documentary evidence. Another work, Jatiyo Sangeet-er Utso Sondhane, sheds further light on the matter. Anyone in doubt may consult these sources.

Let me restate the essence plainly. On the evening of 27 December 1911, Badshah Humara was sung at the Congress session in honour of King George V. But that morning, Jana Gana Mana, sung at the very same venue, had no connection whatsoever to the Emperor. Just as the “Aryan invasion theory” is an unverified myth, so too is the claim that Tagore composed his song for George V. Many remain afflicted by this myth. But as a party, we do not endorse it; it has never been our agenda.

And to those now raising a hue and cry over the personal opinion of one BJP MP, do they remember what their own party once did to Tagore after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre?

When news of the atrocity reached him, Tagore wished to travel to Punjab with Mohandas Gandhi. He sent a messenger, but Gandhi did not respond. Tagore then urged Chittaranjan Das to organise a protest meeting in Kolkata. Chittaranjan Das asked whether Tagore would preside. Tagore agreed. Later, he was asked whether he would deliver the principal address. He agreed again. Then Chittaranjan Das suggested that Tagore himself should organise the meeting. Irritated and disillusioned, Tagore ceased further communication with the Congress leaders. Instead, he renounced his knighthood, turning his protest into a thunderous moral gesture that echoed across the world. – News18, 5 December 2026

› Samik Bhattacharya is the BJP WB President and Rajya Sabha MP.

Tagore's translation of "Jana Gana Mana" on 28 February 1919, at the Besant Theosophical College.

The Issue of Conversion: Challenges before Hindu Society – Maria Wirth

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Christian priests in saffron cloth and rudraksha malas.

Is it possible that the government does not want to know what is happening on the religious front? … When there is no will to know what is happening regarding conversions, there is probably also no will to stop it. The government, rightfully, maintains that it is secular and not concerned about the religion of its subjects. – Maria Wirth

Abstract

This article examines the aggressive proselytization targeting Hindus in India, exposing the socio-political and cultural ramifications of conversions to Abrahamic religions. It highlights the lack of reliable data on conversions, despite documented cases of fraudulent tactics, including financial incentives, “miracle cures,” and exploitation of vulnerable communities. The author contrasts Hinduism—an inclusive, philosophy-based tradition emphasizing dharma (righteousness) and universal spiritual truth—with the exclusive, dogmatic nature of Christianity and Islam, which claim sole religious legitimacy and threaten non-believers with eternal damnation. The article wonders why the secular Indian government is enabling religious inequalities, such as preferential treatment for “minority” religions and the marginalization of Hindu institutions. It is argued that conversions fracture social harmony, empower divisive forces, and erode India’s spiritual heritage. She calls for educating Hindus about their profound philosophical roots (e.g., Advaita Vedanta), challenging irrational dogmas of Christianity and Islam through rational discourse, and stopping unequal religious policies by the state. Ultimately, Wirth frames the preservation of Hinduism as essential not only for India’s cultural integrity but also for humanity as a whole. The Vedic knowledge that God is within as blissful consciousness (sat-chit-ananda) is lacking in the Abrahamic religions.

Text

Conversion is a big challenge for Hindu society in India. Yet it is hardly a topic of public debate. Moreover, it is impossible to get accurate data of conversions. In fact, even the data regarding the composition of the population religion wise, may not be reliable.

In 1947, India’s population was around 36.1 crores, of whom 30.37 crores (84.1%) were Hindus, 3.54 crore (9.8%) were Muslims, 0.83 crore (2.3%) were Christians and 0.27 crores (0.7%) Buddhists (the figures are based on the census of 1951).
In the 2011 census, the Hindu population had shrunk by 4.3 percent and the Muslim population had grown by 4.4 percent. The overall population had tripled to 121.9 crores. Hindus accounted for 96.62 crore (79.8%), Muslims for 17.22 crore (14.23%), Christians for 2.78 crores (2.3%) and Buddhists for 0.84 crore (0.7%).

The census of 2021 was postponed due to the Covid pandemic and will be held only in 2026/27. It can be assumed that since 2011, the Hindu population has shrunk further, yet the population of Muslims is still cited to be 14 percent and that of Christians still 2 percent. Do we bury our heads ostrich-like in the sand?

According to the website censusofindia.net, in 2025, the overall population is estimated at 141 crores, of whom 114 crores are expected to be Hindus. This would be a slight increase of Hindus to 80 percent, which is unlikely considering the massive conversion attempts, apart from the lower Hindu birthrate. Unfortunately, I could not find official numbers for conversions. ChatGPT says: “I could not find any official government estimate that gives a precise number of Hindus who have converted to Christianity since 2011. In fact, the Government of India has explicitly said that no central record/database of religious conversion is maintained.”

The same is valid for Islam: “There is no reliable official data specifying how many Hindus have converted to Islam in India since 2011.” ChatGPT continued, “Most demographic surveys, including those by Pew Research Center, find that religious switching is very rare overall.” According to Pew research survey of 2021, 0.7 percent of the respondents said that they have changed their religion. This would come to around 6 million people. Yet since there is no central database of religious conversion, the true numbers are anybody’s guess.

Aggressive conversions are happening

Most of us know even from personal observation, that missionary activity is extremely high in India by both Christianity and Islam, especially in certain states like Punjab or Tamil Nadu, and basically everywhere, specifically in tribal areas. They don’t hide it. Christian publications exhort their members to convert Hindus. “India must be evangelised in this generation”, declared Blessings, a Christian youth magazine in its 2008 issue, which a priest from Tamil Nadu had left with me. And a German Catholic magazine, which landed in my mother’s mailbox, had an article with the ominous title, “India – a success story”.

The Joshua Project is clearly implemented. New churches shoot up, Christian schools offer discount for fees for Christians, missionaries ‘visit’ patients in hospitals, etc. Occasionally, news about conversions come out in the media due to complaints by Hindus. Some examples from only one week:

On 30. September 2025, several news outlets reported that over 1000 Hindus from poor and backward castes converted to Christianity in Lucknow’s Mohanlalganj. A village once free of Christianity had now 5 churches and100 plus prayer halls. According to India Today, police unearthed a well-oiled nexus to lure Dalits with the help of ‘miracles cures’.

A few days later, another huge conversion ring with wide connections across states was uncovered in Gujarat’s Nandiad, on which OpInda reported.

Soon after, on 6. October, more concerning news surfaced. An American, James Watson, in India on a business visa, was arrested together with two Indian associates for fraudulent conversions in villages in Maharashtra, targeting especially children. He told them that “Hinduism is based on superstition. But if they convert, they will be happy, prosperous and cured from illness.” In this connection, CNN News 18 reported that between 2018 and 2025 over 320 cases had been discovered of visa misuse for religious conversion. This may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Muslims, too, try hard to get Hindus into their fold

The Chhangur Baba case shows how much money flows into fraudulent, elaborate conversion efforts. He and his associates were arrested in July 2025. He received hundreds of crores from abroad for his conversion racket, where he funded Muslim men to entrap Hindu girls. Love Jihad, for long denied, can’t be denied any longer. Even otherwise, Muslims are taught to coax Hindus into converting by presenting Islam as far more attractive than Hinduism. Zakir Naik said in one of his speeches around 2016, it is easy for Muslims to convert Hindus. They only need to show Hindus a picture of Ganesha, with his elephant head and big belly, and ask them whether this is the God whom they worship.

This situation is concerning and the question, why the government has no database, is only natural. Even in states, which have enacted anti-conversion laws, and where it is obligatory to register a change of religion, no overall numbers are available. What is available, are FIRs filed for unlawful conversion, and individual notifications in government Gazettes about name changes. But how many conversions in toto happened, nobody seems knows.

Religion is not a concern for the government

Is it possible that the government does not want to know what is happening on the religious front? If this is true, then even the 2011 census may not give the correct picture. And from an anecdotical episode, this is indeed possible.

A teacher in Mumbai, who was part of the 2011 census team, told me that during the training for the census, they were instructed to accept whatever information they were given. She surveyed a heavily Muslim populated area and knew that she was not getting honest answers. She went back to her supervisor and told him, that the census won’t be accurate if they are not allowed to check the information, for example how many children a family has. Her instructor was blunt, “You heard the instruction. Accept whatever info is given.” She told me, “If the government manages to conduct an accurate census next time, it will be a shock for Hindus.”

When there is no will to know what is happening regarding conversions, there is probably also no will, to stop it. The government, rightfully, maintains that it is secular and not concerned about the religion of its subjects. It has a point. This is clearly a worldwide attitude. The German government also no longer records the religion of its citizens. It did so till in the 1950s, when I was in primary school and dutifully filled out “RK” for Roman Catholic in all official forms. Yet, today, only the Churches keep a record.

Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions are completely different categories

The situation in India is, however, unique. The Hindu faith of the majority is very different from Islam and Christianity. Often it is not even considered as a religion, because it does not have a rigid belief system, but it is rather a way of life. It has a solid foundation in philosophy and demands to follow dharma—to do the right thing in the given situation according to one’s conscience. It does not exclude anyone from being ‘allowed’ into the Presence of God. In fact, it claims, God is already present in everyone, and explains what is meant by ‘God” (not a kind of biased superman on a golden throne high up in the sky, but all-pervading, pure, blissful consciousness). In short, Hinduism makes a lot of sense.

Unlike Islam and Christianity, which were brought to India by invaders, Hinduism does not proselytise. Those two foreign religions demand blind belief in dogmas. A dogma is a claim that cannot be proven to be true, and the most irrational, and very harmful dogmas of both Islam and Christianity are the claims that, 1. Only their religion is true (both didn’t sort out over the centuries, which one exactly is true, because of course they don’t have any proof for their claims) and 2. if you don’t convert to Islam or Christianity, the great God will discard you at Judgement Day and let you burn eternally hell.

Burden of history

Hindus were threatened and brutally coerced to convert first by Muslim and later by Christian invaders over several centuries. Millions of Hindus died for their faith. Many preferred humiliation and financial burden to conversion. When the outsiders left, Hinduism was still strong. However, most of those Hindus, who had converted to Islam and Christianity during foreign occupation, were successfully alienated from their original tradition especially during British rule, who were, and still are, masters in ‘divide and rule’. They made those converts believe that they were better, higher, more worthy than Hindus.

At Independence in 1947, Muslims demanded their own country to be carved out from India, called Pakistan, which in 1971 split into Pakistan and Bangladesh. So, one would expect that Islam is no longer a problem in India, and Hindus have only to deal with those who converted to Christianity but who also, like Muslims, believe that they alone have the true religion, and Hindus will be eternally damned by God if they don’t convert. Yet this is a wrong notion because many Muslims, who agitated for a separate state before Independence on the ground that they can’t live with Hindus, did not go to Pakistan. They stayed back, possibly even with the nefarious agenda to fulfil Allah’s alleged wish to make all Indians follow Islam. The truncated India was generous and allowed it, maybe on the advice of the British who wanted to sow the seeds for division in Independent India.

Many Hindus probably considered the Indian Muslims and Christians as not very different from themselves, and did not realise that their religious doctrine had meanwhile indoctrinated many of them to look down on Hindus, and they had become as unreasonable as their foreign masters used to be. Now the converts, too, believed that the Great God Allah does not like Hindus and will throw them into eternal hellfire, and that Allah/God wants only Muslims/Christians on earth. No reasonable person would believe this, and Indians are generally reasonable, but due to indoctrination from childhood, many of the converts had embraced this irrational belief.

Respectable Gods and religions

Moreover, on the international stage, those religions, which consider the creator of this vast universe as personal, vengeful and biased, are considered respectable even today. People, who are otherwise reasonable, don’t realise that a God, who loves only certain people, must be a tribal God and cannot be the Source of All.

Unfortunately, Hindus did not seem to be aware of those dogmas. Otherwise, why would they allow Christian schools to continue after Independence to teach Hindu children, when ‘good’ Christian teachers naturally look down on their Hindu students because, according to the Church, they follow a dark, demonic cult?

Why would the government allow the catechism to be taught to Christian students, but not allow Vedanta philosophy, which is a rational explanation of what is true, to be taught—not even to Hindu students?

Why would the ‘minority religions’, parts of which are irrational and based entirely on blind belief, get government concessions, and Hindu Dharma, which is based on solid philosophy, would be disadvantaged, for example in the Right to Education Act or regarding their places of worship?

Indian Secularism is upside down

So, even though a secular state is not supposed to be interested in the religion of its subjects, in India, certain reforms would only be fair, as presently the stakes are stacked against Hindus. If a Hindu converts, he gets the advantage of belonging to a politically influential ‘minority’, which is worldwide even a majority. And if he happens to be a criminal, even world media will treat him more leniently than it treats Hindus, and it seems, as if this lenient treatment extends even to the judiciary worldwide.

Agreed, the government has no role to play in religion, but it surely has to level the playing field, especially since the Abrahamic religions and Hindu Dharma are in very different categories: Islam and Christianity are exclusive and divide society between those who are right and saved, and those who are wrong and damned. Even in the interest of developing a ‘rational mindset’, which is the explicit goal of education, the followers of those religions should not be given favours by the government.
In contrast, Hindu Dharma is inclusive and makes sense. It claims that ultimately all will reach back to their divine Source and it exhorts to follow Dharma. It would make sense, in the interest of a stable society, to favour it.

A harmonious society is rather impossible if the divisiveness of the dogmatic religions is not taken out

If you have many crores of Indians who despise Hindus because according to their belief, Hindus are great sinners by worshipping false Gods, a harmonious society is tough to achieve, and enemies of Bharat have a field day to instigate chaos and violence. This is not theory. It’s happening, including with big money from the Deep State, as the investigation into USAID had revealed.

Do Hindus even know what is preached in the innumerable churches and mosques across India? I know that Hindu Gods are called devils or demons by Christian clergy. Yet incredibly, Hindus don’t challenge those harmful dogmas of Christianity and Islam, even though they easily could, as they have the better arguments. Not only this: according to the Human Rights Charter of the United Nations, it is unacceptable to demean a group of people as inferior and damned for eternity. Yet strangely, when a religious doctrine demeans a billion people, moreover people, who are known to be open-minded and dharmic, nobody flags it as wrong.

It shows that the powers-that-be prefer that humans everywhere hold irrational beliefs instead of gaining deep insights into what is true and what can be experienced. It means, Hinduism is an obstacle for those powers. This is an important point and, in all likelihood, responsible for the unfair negative portrayal of Hinduism in world media and the entertainment industry and for funnelling money into conversion attempts. Yet the eradication of Hinduism is definitely not in the interest of humanity as a whole.

Blunders that need to be corrected

It was clearly a blunder that Hindus did not explain their faith to the Indian followers of the Abrahamic religions right after Independence and it needs to be corrected urgently. And an even greater blunder also needs to be corrected: Hindu pundits hardly explained the solid philosophical foundation of their faith even to their own people and especially to the younger generations.

Hindus are strongly focussed on education. Parents make great sacrifices to educate their children well. Yet they did not realise that under the garb of modern education their offspring was not learning anything about their ancient tradition but instead, their children were weaned away from it—due to the immense influence of the Left, which is an arm of the infamous Deep State.

Young Hindus, who went through college education, no longer know the basics of their faith and have not even heard of the Brahman (Advaita Vedanta) that is their own inner essence. Many become atheists, without knowing what being an atheist actually means. In recent years, they become not only atheists, but also ‘woke’ and ‘sexually liberated’, whatever this means. This virus affects mainly the Hindu youth. Of course, not all Hindu youth, but many have no longer an anchor in their faith—a faith for which earlier generations even died. This negative influence makes them vulnerable to go against dharma, not to believe any longer in karma, and it also makes them vulnerable for conversion, if they see material benefits.

It is no virtue not to propagate Hindu Dharma

Hindus sometimes even seem proud that they don’t propagate their faith. It is a false pride and not wise. Christianity and Islam are clever. They explain their good aspects, like strong belief and trust in God or Allah, and strong community support. They also explain why they are closer to the truth. The reason, they say is, that they have one God compared to many Gods in Hinduism. They are right: one source is closer to the truth. The Source must be formless and therefore only One. Unfortunately, most Hindus can’t counter them because, not only do their Muslim and Christian friends not know, but even they themselves don’t know any longer the basic insights of the rishis—the one formless Brahman of the Vedas which is within all of us.

If the Hindu representatives had explained the basics of the Vedas right after Independence in a big way, many of those who had converted to Islam and Christianity might have come back. Anyone who has common sense will come to the conclusion that Hindu Dharma is superior to all three Abrahamic religions, as it is a genuine enquiry and not blind belief in the supremacy of a particular group.

Instead, in the name of ‘harmony’, Hindus downplayed the intellectual superiority of Hindu Dharma and allowed Islam and Christianity to aggressively propagate their religions as “only true” and lure Hindus with a simple formula: there is only one true God and our God is this true God. He is compassionate and loving and has promised that He will look after you, provided you accept him and keep the rules and commandments.

Another positive aspect is stressed: the convert is promised to be part of a strongly bonded brotherhood especially in the case of Islam, but also in the case of Christianity, he will get emotional and financial support from the Church if in distress. Apart from that, since for many Hindus this is not enough reason to forgo their tradition, they lure converts with financial benefits, cheat outright with so-called miracles or frighten simple-minded Hindus with eternal hellfire.

What are the solutions?

Very important is of course that the government does not favour the big and powerful ‘minorities’ of Muslims and Christians. How to achieve this change in a democracy, where everyone is focused mainly on vote banks, needs to be brainstormed.

Apart from the government, Hindu society has a big role to play: First and foremost, the basics of Vedic wisdom need to be made known widely. Schools and universities are a good start and thanks to the New Education Policy, the Indian Knowledge System (IKS) is now indeed taken into educational institutions. There is however a problem: even teachers often don’t know much about the profound philosophy and haven’t done sadhana in their life to discover Atma within. So, they prefer to explain festivals or customs or stories from the Ramayana or Bhagavad Gita.

All this is important, but if the greatest advantage of Hindu Dharma is not clearly explained, students may not be convinced why they should stick to their tradition, especially when they are lured with material benefits and also told that billion humans worldwide see merit in those dogmatic religions. Otherwise, why would there be so many Christians and Muslims in the world?

The most important point and the crucial difference between Hindu Dharma and the Abrahamic religions is that Hindus claim that God is within as Sat-Chit-Ananda (blissful consciousness), and that it can be experienced.

To convey this knowledge effectively, it would need Hindus who have touched their Atma, who know from experience about the oneness of all, because if the truth is conveyed only theoretically, it won’t make an impact. Therefore, sadhana needs to be encouraged and sadhana needs to be the criterion for being able to teach, not academic degrees. Small booklets with sayings of genuine saints like Anandamanyi Ma or Mata Amritanandamayi could be distributed in a big way. They are already available and explain Vedanta philosophy in a simple way. For me personally, meeting Anandamayi Ma had a decisive influence in understanding Vedic wisdom. It was easy to understand because she lived this oneness. Anandamayi Ma once said, “There is no difference between you and me and I don’t see a difference.”

Approach to Indian Christians

The theology of Christianity is a little confusing. On the one hand, it is considered heresy for a Christian to claim that he is one with God, yet on the other hand, the Holy Spirit is supposed to come over him and guide him. And all three—God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit—are seen as God. Nowadays, many Christians in the West no longer accept the dogmas of the Church, but take the sayings of Jesus and bhakti as guideline. Therefore, many even claim that God is within, as Jesus himself said “the Kingdom of heaven is within”.

Hindus should point out to Christians those aspects, where Jesus, in contrast to the Church, is in line with the Indian rishis. For example, he made the Upanishadic statement, “I and my Father are one” (Aham Brahmasmi). Unfortunately, and shrewdly, the Church declared that this claim is valid only for Jesus, but this of course doesn’t make sense.

Another point: When once asked what is the most important commandment, Jesus said, that the most important commandment is to love God above everything else. This teaching is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It means, Jesus was foremost advocating bhakti, the most important path also for Hindus, and for anyone who wants to realise the truth. Yet the Church declared as its first commandment: You shall not have other gods before me, and doesn’t mention the bhakti aspect.

Now in all likelihood, the Christians will counter Hindus and claim, “What the Church means, is that we need to worship the true God, and we, the Christians, have the true God and you, Hindus, have false Gods.”

It needs to be understood first by Hindus themselves and then also conveyed to Indian Christians: Hinduism claims that there is absolute truth, and relative truth. Absolute truth is that which is really true, it means it must be always and self-evident. It means, only God (pure, eternal, unchanging consciousness, Brahman) is really true (it can be logically concluded and experienced). And that consciousness is really the only true, invisible, formless God. All else is Maya, a temporary appearance on this truth. This is of course universally valid and independent by what name one calls that one Truth.

An analogy makes it clear: In a movie hall, the flickering, changing pictures of the movie cover the movie screen. Yet the invisible white screen is the only real thing in the movie, all else, including the people, houses, etc. are temporary appearances whose substance is the one screen. The story of the movie is more like virtual reality. This should make sense nowadays. Even Elon Musk believes that this apparent reality is not the real thing. It follows naturally, that discovering the ‘real thing’ (Brahman) is the goal of life.

The Abrahamic religions do not have this absolute Truth level. Even their great (good) God and its opposite, the (evil) Satan, are within Maya, more in tune with the Devas and Asuras of Hinduism.

We should use the sayings of Jesus which are in tune with Vedanta, to make Indian Christians reflect that the dogmas of the Church are unnecessary and even ridiculous, and that their accusation that Hindus worship false Gods does not apply, simply because only one ‘thing’—not a thing of course—is true and everything is contained in that.

Another point: Often, ordinary Christians are critical of their priests and bishops. I know this from Germany, and it may be the case also in India. Especially the higher clergy may be corrupt—morally and financially. If caught, such news should be spread. It helps to wean away common Christians from the Church.

Approach to Indian Muslims

The previous point that often, the clergy is not living an ideal, but rather an immoral life, is valid also for certain Muslim clergy. It should not be hushed up, but spread in news. It helps ordinary Muslims not to be too much under their sway.

It is probably more difficult to have a sensible dialogue with Muslims. Some Britisher made a valid observation: “While the Hindus sharpen their arguments, the Muslims sharpen their swords.” At present, there is the unfortunate situation, that Muslims are confident that Hindus are afraid of their street power. This needs to change and Muslims need to be afraid that they will pay for instigating violence. Law enforcement agencies need to make them pay, or even Hindus who are not afraid to push them back in street violence.

Once I heard a congress spokesperson say on TV, “what does it matter if one worships Krishna or Christ.” True, it doesn’t matter much, Bhakti is a valid path and all true devotion and prayers reach the One. This is valid for Hindus, Christians and Muslims. But it matters what else those religions demand to believe blindly—for example that Hindus are worshipping demons and will go to hell—and which not only creates discord in the society, but also harms those believers individually, as they don’t follow their conscience which tells them to do the right thing in the given circumstances, but instead blindly “believe absurdities which can make them commit atrocities”, as Voltaire had already observed.

So, first, Hindus themselves need to be solidly grounded in their ancient wisdom through knowledge and sadhana, and second, the unreasonable dogmas of Islam and Christianity need to be fearlessly challenged—possibly even by taking the issue to international bodies like the United Nations. – Maria Wirth Blog, 15 March 2026

› Maria Wirth is a German journalist and author resident in Uttarkhand. She is a Neo-Vedantin and the views expressed in this article are personal. This article first appeared in the Journal for Indian Thought and Policy Research, March 2026.

Koenraad Elst Quote

Michel Danino: The quiet giant of our time – Sandeep Balakrishna

VOI

Michel Danino

Prof. Michel Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it. … The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction. – Sandeep Balakrishna

Michel Danino, in many ways, is reminiscent of the gurus of the ancient Indian parampara. Unassuming and quiet, yet a powerhouse of scholarship, which is matched only by his dignity and unimpeachable intellectual integrity.

I have had the immense fortune of learning from him for nearly two decades. On the several occasions I have met him, the experience has always been enriching, fruitful and, above all, ennobling.

In fact, if at all I have managed to contribute in any meaningful way in the area of Bharatavarsha’s history and cultural heritage, I owe a huge debt of gratitude—which I cannot repay—to Danino’s stellar body of work.

The areas of his scholarly investigations are daunting even for professional scholars—exposing the bogus Aryan Invasion Theory, tracing the trajectory of the Saraswati River, archaeology, ancient Indian knowledge traditions, nuances of the Puranas and epics, prehistoric studies, Harappan art and town planning, marine archaeology….

From a larger perspective, Danino has created a substantial and qualitative scholarly legacy in his own lifetime and continues quietly on his chosen path away from the public glare, away from any temptations of celebrity.

I speak from personal experience.

The distinguished positions he has held—most notably as Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar and, lately, as Chairperson of the NCERT—are not only entirely deserving but reflective of his eminence.

The Supreme Court, which took suo motu cognisance of a chapter on judicial corruption in an eighth-standard NCERT textbook, has meted out rather high-handed treatment to Danino.

In many ways, it is a tacit admission of its ignorance of his distinction.

There are legions of students and scholars who literally venerate Danino.

Without exaggeration, Danino—a Frenchman by birth and an Indian citizen for over three decades—is one of the finest cultural patriots of India.

He is deeply anchored in the philosophy and ideals of Sri Aurobindo, one of twentieth-century India’s greatest mystic-saints.

To put this in context, Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it.

Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians, a classic exposé of the NCERT (apart from the Humanities department of the HRD ministry), is perhaps the most devastating critique of this morass to date.

But the late scholar N.S. Rajaram supplies an even more stunning data point that Shourie’s book does not contain.

He mentions how Nurul Hasan—Indira Gandhi’s favourite Education Minister—ran the NCERT like a czar and the consequences thereof.

“NIEPA is a particularly influential body that administers and oversees educational policy in India.

NCERT controls textbooks and other materials that are used in schools and colleges in India…

Through his control of these two powerful bodies, Nurul Hasan became the education czar in India…

A single example should help give an idea of the dangers of this centralised feudal educational policy.

For over 20 years, H.S. Khan—Nurul Hasan’s favourite—headed the history and sociology division of the NCERT.

He is known to hold the view that India became civilised only through the introduction of Islam.

This, incidentally, is also the official Pakistani line…

This is taking the Aryan invasion idea a giant step backwards…

In 1986, on Khan’s initiative, textbook writers in all the states were directed to change the version of history to accord with the anti-Hindu model.”

Yet not one court back then took umbrage at these flagrant distortions of history done at the behest of sitting ministers and high-ranking bureaucrats.

The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction.

Yet the Supreme Court has taken severe objection to one solitary chapter dealing with judicial corruption and has used its power disproportionately against a widely respected scholar and academic.

Its wording is troubling, to say the least.

“… We have no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino, along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar, either does not have reasonable knowledge about the Indian judiciary or they deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary….

There is no reason why such persons should be associated in any manner with the preparation of curriculum or finalisation of textbooks….

We direct the Government of India and all states/UTs/universities etc. to disassociate the three of them forthwith and not assign any responsibility involving public funds.”

Since my own schooldays, there have been any number of chapters in textbooks dealing with political and bureaucratic corruption.

Yet, as far as I can remember, there were no cases or punitive court actions against their authors.

To state the obvious, judicial corruption is a reality.

One is reminded of the recent case of Justice Yashwant Varma, which sent nationwide shockwaves and led to impeachment proceedings against him.

Omitting the mention of uncomfortable truths—judicial corruption in this case—will not make them disappear.

One is tempted to use the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but this issue is perhaps one of the clearest signs of the times we live in.

Or rather, an illustration of a timeless truth of history beautifully captured in the Mahabharata:

sulabhāḥ puruṣā rājan satataṃ priyavādinaḥ |
apriyasya tu pathyasya vaktā śrotā ca durlabhaḥ ||

“O King, it is easy to find people who always say pleasant things.

But it is extremely rare to find someone who speaks the unpleasant but beneficial truth, and even rarer to find someone willing to listen to it.” – News18, 13 March 2026

› Sandeep Balakrishna is an author, editor, columnist, public intellectual and an independent researcher. He is the founder and chief editor of The Dharma Dispatch.

See also 

Plato Quote

Why nations go to war – Acharya Prashant

VOI

Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump & Ali Khamenei

You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep. – Acharya Prashant

There is a question that goes unasked every time the world erupts in war, and its absence is more revealing than anything the analysts say. The question is not about which side is right, or which grievance is legitimate, or which alliance has been betrayed. Those questions get asked at great length, with great sophistication, by very worldly, credentialed people. The question that does not get asked is simpler and more dangerous: who is the one fighting? Not which nation, not which ideology, not which scripture, but who, actually, is doing this, what does this person want, and why does the wanting never stop?

That question is dangerous because it turns the lens around. All the other questions look outward, at the adversary, at the system, at the historical injustice. This one looks at the looker. And the looker, it turns out, has a very strong interest in not being looked at.

In the recent weeks, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have killed several top military and political figures, including senior leadership; Iran retaliated with strikes on Israeli positions and on American bases and allied targets in parts of the Gulf region; Pakistan launched strikes into Afghanistan; the Ukraine-Russia front continues its grinding attrition; and all this is happening while the devastating war in Gaza is still quite fresh in the collective memory. Across every editorial room and foreign ministry, the same machinery cranks into motion: geopolitical analysis, balance-of-power calculations, resource competition, historical grievance mapping. These explanations are not wrong, exactly. They describe the furniture of the room quite well. But what they do not explain is who is sitting in it, or why that person keeps setting the room on fire and then expressing surprise at the flames.

Nations Don’t Fight

There is no such thing as a nation as a conscious entity. A nation is a principle, and a principle has no agency of its own; it can only express the consciousness, or the unconsciousness, of the people who generate it. When a people is inwardly chaotic, driven by fear and the need for dominance, it produces a nation that is belligerent, exclusive, and always in search of an enemy to confirm its own identity. When a people is inwardly clear, the nation it generates can be genuinely civilising. But we do not speak this way. We say “the US attacked Iran” as though two abstract entities are in principled competition; the label launders the real actor, the human ego, into a flag, and the flag then takes the responsibility while the ego escapes into the applause.

Consider what a single historical fact does to the entire geopolitical narrative of the current US-Iran crisis. Until 1979, Iran and Israel were functional allies. Iran was an important oil supplier to Israel during the Shah’s era; Israeli and Iranian intelligence services collaborated closely; Iran extended de facto recognition to Israel in 1950 and maintained working relations with it throughout the Shah’s rule, at a time when every Arab neighbour had gone to war to prevent exactly that. Two countries that today describe each other in the language of surgical removal and satanic identity, “the cancerous tumour must be excised,” “the Little Satan must perish,” were, within living memory, strategic partners. No territory changed hands between them in 1979; no oil field was found or lost; no ancient wound was reopened. What changed decisively was the 1979 revolution that placed religious identity at the absolute centre of the Iranian state, and the same country that had been a partner became the enemy. The Islamic Republic made opposition to Israel a central ideological position of the new state, not because Israel had done anything new, but because a state founded entirely on theological identity requires its identity to be defined against something. A Jewish state served that purpose with theological precision.

This is not geopolitics wearing a religious costume. This is religion being worn by the ego as its most respectable armour, and it tells us everything we need to know about the nature of the conflict.

Religion exists to civilise the animal. Every great tradition, at its irreducible core, was attempting to do one thing: take the creature that emerges from the womb driven entirely by the biological logic of survival: consume, expand, eliminate the threat, secure the territory, and elevate it into something capable of clarity, compassion, and self-knowledge. That is the whole project. The animal, however, is remarkably resourceful. It can colonise the very force meant to tame it; it can drape itself in scripture, recite the holy verses with genuine feeling, and emerge looking not like a beast at all, but like a soldier of God. When that happens, religion does not merely fail at its purpose; it becomes the most potent accelerant the ego has ever discovered, because now the hunger for dominance carries the blessing of the divine, the violence is sanctified, and the enemy is not merely an adversary to be defeated but a heretic whose destruction is itself an act of devotion.

Look at the region, and the pattern is visible everywhere at once. The Shia-Sunni schism, a theological dispute over succession thirteen centuries old, continues to shape proxy wars across Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; the hatred between those who share the same God, the same Prophet, and nearly the same scripture exceeds in ferocity the hatred between people who share nothing. In the United States, some influential evangelical constituencies hold a literal belief in Biblical prophecy that makes their support for Israeli military policy not a political position but an eschatological one; they believe the Second Coming is contingent on certain territorial arrangements in the Middle East, and no diplomatic argument reaches a conviction rooted in the Book of Revelation. Hamas frames every missile launch in the language of holy liberation. The Israeli state, forged in the trauma of the Holocaust and the genuine existential terror of being a country the size of a few Indian districts surrounded by populations that have repeatedly declared their wish to see it gone, responds with a hardness the world has rarely seen directed so openly at a civilian population, and does so while invoking its own theological entitlement to the land. Every party has its scripture and its God. Every party’s God appears to have personally endorsed that party’s military strategy. One must pause and ask with full seriousness: what kind of God is this, who sides so reliably with whoever happens to be invoking him at the moment of the airstrike?

The answer, of course, is that this God does not exist. What exists is the ego, which has been using the name of God since it first discovered that the name confers immunity from examination.

Not Resources, But Identity.

Strip away the theological dressing and the geopolitical framework, and what remains is something both simpler and more intractable: the ego’s bottomless hunger to feel complete. This is the actual engine beneath every war, and no diplomatic architecture has ever been built to address it, because the architects themselves are running the same engine.

The resource explanation for the US-Iran confrontation is the most persistent alibi and the most easily dismantled. The United States is among the world’s largest energy producers; it has no material need for Iranian oil that could justify the risks of direct military confrontation with a nation of ninety million people in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Iran, for its part, possesses no intercontinental missile capable of reaching American cities, and by several credible accounts a negotiated arrangement, with Omani mediation, was genuinely within reach: Iran would continue enriching fissile material but not stockpile it, making weaponisation impossible without abrupt and easily detectable reversal. None of this fits a resource or security conflict in the conventional sense. What it fits is the logic of an ego that requires dominance not as a strategy but as a psychological condition; an ego that cannot tolerate the existence of an entity that refuses to subordinate itself to the hierarchy. You cannot give it enough. Feed it every oil field in the Gulf and it will discover it needs recognition; give it recognition and it will discover it needs submission; give it submission and it will discover it needs the annihilation of any future possibility of challenge. The hunger has no floor because the hollowness it is trying to fill has no floor either.

This is also why every coercive attempt to prevent Iran’s nuclearisation produces the very outcome it claims to be preventing. The lesson that every capital in the world is drawing from watching a sovereign nation’s senior leadership eliminated by a foreign military strike is not “we should negotiate more sincerely.” It is: “We need a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile, because that is the only thing that makes us genuinely untouchable.” North Korea understood this early and has not been subjected to the same treatment as Iraq, Libya, or now Iran; every government in the world has registered exactly why, and is drawing its own conclusions quietly. Pakistan articulated the logic with unusual candour in the 1990s when it was reported to describe its nuclear programme as the “Islamic bomb”; the theology was decoration, the calculation underneath is now a standard operating assumption in most strategic planning ministries on earth. You can prevent a country from manufacturing a weapon; you cannot prevent it from purchasing one, trading for one, or receiving one through channels that only appear in retrospective intelligence reports five years later. The ego will always find a route around the obstacle, because self-preservation is its oldest and deepest competence, and it will spend every gram of available intelligence in that service. What you cannot route around is the inner condition that makes the weapon feel necessary. Everything else: the sanctions, the strikes, the frameworks, the summits, is rearranging weapons into configurations that feel temporarily safer and calling the rearrangement peace.

The Fire Was Lit In Here

There is a temptation, particularly for citizens of the nations doing the striking, to watch all of this from a position of apparent safety: to feel either pride at a display of power or simple relief that the devastation is happening at a geographical distance comfortable enough to be consumed as news. The objects of the conflict are far away: Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine. The subject, the one who has authorised, funded, and often enough cheered for these operations, remains at home, apparently untouched. This is the ego’s most seductive illusion: that the fire it lights in the world stays in the world, that you can sanction the destruction of other people’s cities and return to your own life carrying none of that destruction inside you.

The fire does not stay outside. It never has.

The inner condition that produces belligerent foreign policy is the same inner condition that produces the epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner purposelessness that has become the defining psychological signature of the most militarily powerful societies on earth. It feels counterintuitive to connect these; it feels like a category error to link America’s mental health catastrophe with decades of American military conduct across the world. And yet this is precisely what honest seeing reveals when it is applied without flinching. The violence directed outward, and the suffering experienced inward, are not two events happening in two different places; they are the same ego operating in two directions, and the ego that lights the fire and the ego that cannot sleep afterward are not two separate entities but a single disturbed centre. The ego believes it can cleanly separate the one who acts from the one who suffers. But the one who lights fires has already become a person who lights fires; the one who sanctions collective punishment has already become a person capable of sanctioning collective punishment; and that becoming does not halt at any border. You cannot burn your neighbour’s house and rest in peace, not because of some mystical law, but because the act of burning changes the one who burns, and that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep.

The senses are made to face outward, and therefore the ego, using only the senses, sees only what is outside, never what is within. This is the structural predicament of the geopolitically entranced ego: it looks outward at the adversary, at the threat, at the historical injustice, and it never pauses to notice that what it keeps finding out there, the hunger, the fear, the need for enemies, the certainty of its own righteousness, is a precise mirror of what has never been examined within. Nations go to war for the same reason individuals destroy their own relationships: something hurts, something feels insufficient, and the instinct is to locate the source of that pain outside oneself. The nation blames the enemy state; the individual blames the partner; and in both cases the real author of the suffering, the unexamined centre that requires enemies in order to know what it is, goes untouched, free to generate the next crisis with the same efficient reliability.

Ask yourself what genuinely disturbs you when you read the news from that region. If you find that a missile strike produces something that feels uncomfortably close to satisfaction, a sense that the right people are being punished, that your side is winning, that the world is being corrected, sit with that feeling for a moment before moving to the next headline. Ask what it is fed by. Ask what it would mean for your sense of identity if the world stopped arranging itself into enemies you could feel righteous about. These wars are not aberrations in an otherwise rational world order; they are the outward expression of an inward condition that is universal and ancient, that operates identically in the head of state and in the citizen consuming the coverage, differing only in the scale of damage each has access to.

The ego that requires enemies to sustain its own sense of coherence does not disappear when the missiles stop. It waits until it finds the next available occasion. And the wheel turns again.

The wheel will not be stopped from the outside. There is no treaty elegant enough, no balance of power stable enough, no diplomatic architecture sophisticated enough to address what keeps turning it. The wheel is turned from within, by the unexamined centre that has been given every instrument of analysis and statecraft except the one that could actually change something: the willingness to look at itself with the same ruthlessness it has always reserved for its enemies.

That is the only disarmament that lasts. Not a new agreement, not a new government, not a new ideology dressed in the vocabulary of the old one, but just a human being, finally willing to ask: what in me is producing this world, and what would remain of my sense of who I am if I could no longer find an enemy to confirm it?

That question, honestly pursued, is the beginning of the only peace that has ever been real. It will need to be asked again tomorrow. And the day after. Because the ego that found the question will, by the next headline, have found a new enemy. But each asking weakens the wheel by a fraction, and a fraction, repeated across enough human beings, is the only force that has ever slowed it. – The Pioneer, 7 March 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

Trump Cartoon

Secularism and Tipu Sultan – Sita Ram Goel & Aabhas Maldahiyar

VOI

Tipu Sultan on the Tiger Throne.

One can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India’s freedom struggle against British imperialism? – Sita Ram Goel

Nehruvian Secularism – Sita Ram Goel

Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy.

Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.

We should not, therefore, confuse India’s Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognised as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.

Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India’s freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahhabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?

One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.

This is not the occasion to go into the implications of this Secularism vis-a-vis India’s own spiritual vision, India’s own cultural wealth, India’s own national society, and India’s own native nationalism. I have dealt with this theme elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the other face of this Secularism is Hindu-baiting, which profession has been perfected by many scholars, scribes, and politicians, and has so far proved immensely profitable. I need not give the names. The stalwarts in this field are very well known.

What the hazrat and the shaheed Tipu Sultan stood for is described by Mir Hussain Ali Kirmani in his book, Nishan-i-Haidari, which he completed in AD 1802, three years after Tipu’s death. Kirmani writes:

“It happened one day that a fakir (a religious mendicant), a man of saint-like mind, passed that way, and seeing the Sultan gave him a life-bestowing benediction, saying to him, ‘Fortunate child, at a future time thou will be the king of this country, and when thy time comes, remember my words—take this temple and destroy it, and build a masjid in its place, and for ages it will remain a memorial of thee.’ The Sultan smiled, and in reply told him that ‘whenever, by his blessings, he should become a padishah, or king, he would do as he (the fakir) directed’. When, therefore, after a short time, his father became a prince, the possessor of wealth and territory, he remembered his promise, and after his return from Nagar and Gorial Bunder, he purchased the temple from the adorers of the image in it (which after all was nothing but the figure of a bull, made of brick and mortar) with their goodwill, and the Brahmins, therefore, taking away their image, placed it in the Deorhi Peenth, and the temple was pulled down, and the foundations of a new masjid raised on the site….”

Masjid-i-Ala in Srirangapatna is built over a Hanuman Temple destroyed by Tipu Sultan.

Mysore Archaeological Dept. Report (1935)

That is the Masjid-i-Ala or Jama Masjid standing in Srirangapatanam on the site of a Hanuman temple. One need not comment on Kirmani’s statement that Tipu “purchased the temple from the adorers of the image … with their goodwill”. It is not unoften that terror has produced this sort of goodwill in the minds of its helpless victims. – Excerpted from the Preface to Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero

Tipu Sultan Stamp (1974)

Tipu Sultan: When an Islamist tyrant is turned into a freedom fighter and dharma saviour – Aabhas Maldahiyar

Karnataka is witnessing an Opposition backlash against a review committee set up by the state government that recommended doing away with the glorification of the alleged “rocket man” and freedom fighter, Tipu Sultan. The opposition led by the Congress, which was in power in the state between 2013 and 2018, has been parroting following three points to glorify Tipu Sultan:

  1. Tipu was the first freedom fighter of India;
  2. Tipu was the pioneer of war rockets;
  3. Tipu supported the temples and maths while Marathas looted them.

This essay intends to show how slippery and ill-founded these claims supporting Tipu Sultan are. Let’s begin.

“Who are my people? All of them—yes those that ring the temple bells and those that pray in the mosque—they are my people, and this land is theirs and mine.”

Above is a quote appearing from the work of fiction, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, written by novelist Bhagwan S. Gidwani in 1976. Unfortunately, this very work of fiction sets the narrative around how Indians should look at the “Tyrant of Mysore”.

Do you recall the following quote often attributed to Tipu Sultan, the Aurangzeb from south India?

“Every blow that is struck in the cause of American liberty throughout the world, in France, India and elsewhere and so long as a single insolent and savage tyrant remains, the struggle shall continue.”

My maiden encounter with this quote came through a paper titled, Haidar ‘Ali and Tipu Sultan: Mysore’s Eighteenth-Century Rulers in Transition, written by Kavesh Yazdani. Being an explorer of the past, it appeared to be an important duty to investigate the source mentioned by Yazdani for making such a grandiose claim. He had referred to Secret Correspondence of Tipu Sultan edited by Kabir Kausar with a complete section called “Tipu’s Views on the American Declaration of Independence”.

Interestingly, Kabir’s source is The Sword of Tipu Sultan, a historical fiction by Gidwani. Isn’t it highly cynical that one of the most “seriously considered” academic non-fiction works relies on a historical fiction to build a narrative on how Tipu Sultan “drew inspiration out of the American War of Independence”? More interestingly, the Foreword to Secret Correspondence of Tipu Sultan was written by eminent historian B.R. Grover of Jamia Millia. Read the interesting point he observes as below:

“Compiled by an archivist in his methodical and scientific approach, this work is a welcome addition to the source material of the late 18th century history of India. It affords fresh ground for an assessment of the character and activities of Tipu Sultan and his place in history.”

The then director of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Grover goes on to laud this work for its “methodical and scientific approach”, even though it relies on a work of fiction—The Sword of Tipu Sultan—to make a hyperbolic claim about Tipu Sultan. Grover further recommends everyone to read this book!

Now let’s analyse the three points on which Tipu Sultan is glorified.

Tipu Sultan a freedom-fighter?

Wouldn’t it be best to again pick the most popular work used by most to idolise Tipu Sultan as a freedom fighter? Hence, I pick an anthology of essays, titled Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, edited by eminent historian Irfan Habib. As the title itself suggests, the author attempts to project the two as the flag-bearers of modernisation and crusaders against colonialism. Ironically, there are innumerable primary sources that speak aloud of how Tipu Sultan had colonised the southern belt through the sword of Islam. This essay is not intended to deal with colonisation and atrocity under Tipu Sultan, I will just leave the readers with the verse mentioned on his sword which reads as below:

“My victorious sabre is lightning for the destruction of the unbelievers. Haidar, the Lord of the Faith, is victorious for my advantage. And, moreover, he destroyed the wicked race who were unbelievers. Praise be to him, who is the Lord of the Worlds! Thou art our Lord, support us against the people who are unbelievers. He to whom the Lord giveth victory prevails over all (mankind). Oh Lord, make him victorious, who promoteth the faith of Muhammad. Confound him, who refuseth the faith of Muhammad; and withhold us from those who are so inclined. The Lord is predominant over his own works. Victory and conquest are from the Almighty. Bring happy tidings, Oh Muhammad, to the faithful; for God is the kind protector and is the most merciful of the merciful. If God assists thee, thou wilt prosper. May the Lord God assist thee, Oh Muhammad, with mighty victory.

Let us now inspect how well Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan stood against colonialism.

On the issue of Tipu Sultan taking on the British, we need to understand that all he was trying to do was to safeguard his Islamic influence over the land he was ruling. A serious student of history would go back to the contemporary source of that period to get to the truth. I came across The Asiatic Annual Register for the year 1799, and the details on Page No. 194-95 under title “Supplement to the Chronicle” contained the thing of interest pertaining to the subject. It tells us that in February 1797, the captain of a French ship, François Ripaud, dismasted in Mangalore.

He was a conman who exemplified himself as the second-in-command in Mauritius and reflected as authorised personality to discuss Mysore’s succour with a French force that had already amassed to expel the British from India. Tipu fell for this. There began his tourney of French correspondences. It was on the second day of April 1797, when he gave his complete proposal to the French authorities through a letter. It contained among other things the proposal to replace the British with the French, and the equal division of property and territory between the French and him. We also get to know that Tipu was set to hand over Goa and Bombay to new allies, thereby replacing English with French. Irfan Habib should let us know if the proposal to replace one coloniser by another makes Tipu anti-colonial?

One can also look at Tipu’s letter to Zaman Shah, the ruler of Afghanistan on the fifth day of February 1797. In the letter, he proposed jihad against the kafirs with intent to “free the region of Hindustan from the corruption by the enemies of Islam”. The action plan was as below:

  1. Zaman Shah was to banish the Marathas from Delhi.
  2. Next the collaborated Afghan and Tipu’s army would crush the Maratha power in Deccan.

This same strategy was being applied during the Khilafat Movement too. It has been documented clearly and unapologetically by Dr B.R. Ambedkar in his book Pakistan or the Partition of India. Dr Ambedkar writes as below:

“(…) when it is recalled that in 1919 the Indian Musalmans who were carrying on the Khilafat movement actually went to the length of inviting the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India (…)”

The communal Moplah outrage of 1921 in Malabar could be easily traced to the forcible mass conversion and related Islamic atrocities of Tipu Sultan during his cruel military regime from 1783 to 1792.

So, calling Tipu Sultan a freedom fighter is an outright insult to all the freedom fighters.

Tipu Sultan the pioneer of war rockets?

The other claim which is used to project Tipu Sultan as a man of science and technology was his “invention” of war rockets. But like the previous one, even this claim doesn’t hold much water; the primary sources say otherwise. As a first source I go back to the recorded experience of James Forbes (1749–1819). He writes in his book, Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years’ Residence in India, Vol. I:

“The war rocket used by the Mahrattas which very often annoyed us, is composed of an iron tube eight or ten inches long and nearly two inches in diameter. This destructive weapon is sometimes fixed to a rod iron, sometimes to a straight two-edged sword, but most commonly to a strong bamboo cane four or five feet long with an iron spike projecting beyond the tube to this rod or staff, the tube filled with combustible materials (…)”

The below images show the replica of Indian war rockets (1790) kept in London Museum of Science. The text clearly mentions Marathas using it against the Europeans.

Indian War Rocket (1790)

Hence the attribution to Tipu Sultan to having led the creation of war rockets is a shaky assertion. There are even more primary sources which contradict any such assertion.

Tipu Sultan supported temples and maths, Marathas looted them?

Even this claim reflects how ill-informed people are about what the primary sources say. The usual narrative goes like this: That Marathas destroyed a math that was given grants by Tipu Sultan. Let’s verify it.

The Sringeri Math was sacked by the Pindaris, the freebooter mercenaries who had nothing to do with the Maratha instructions. According to A.K. Shastry, the editor of The Records of the Sringeri Dharmasamsthana:

“However, Peshwa Madhavrao Narayan conducted an enquiry & ordered Parasuram Bhau to give compensation & return the looted articles to the Matha. Parsuram gave a positive reply (Kd. 129, R. 52 in Marathi). The Peshwa’s letter reveals his key interest in giving compensation to the Matha. The positive reply from Parasuram Bhau to the Peshwa would form an impression that the foolish plunder of Sringeri was not due to any deliberate intention on his part, but a result of the predatory habits of the Pindaris in his contingent.”

It becomes very clear from the math’s record that Marathas never intended to do what the Pindaris had done and had even accepted to compensate despite this not being their own instruction. The same record also tells us that Tipu was donating to the math, but some observations give an interesting perspective. Read this excerpt from History of Raja Kesavadas by V.R. Parameswaran Pillai:

“With respect to the much-published land-grants I had explained the reasons about 40 years back. Tipu had immense faith in astrological predictions. It was to become an emperor (padushah) after destroying the might of the British that Tipu resorted to land-grants and other donations to Hindu temples in Mysore including Sringeri Mutt, as per the advice of the local Brahmin astrologers. Most of these were done after his defeat in 1791 and the humiliating Srirangapatanam Treaty in 1792. These grants were not done out of respect or love for Hindus or Hindu religion but for becoming Padushah as predicted by the astrologers.”

Alas! He is the same Tipu who had butchered thousands of Hindus and Christians, done forcible circumcisions, destroyed multiple temples and churches, commissioned literature to incite jihad against non-Muslims, forcibly took non-Muslim women to his harems, etc. How naive it is to believe that the bigoted tyrant was sorrowful for Shankaracharya’s math being looted by some freebooters!

Some interesting nodes to be dealt with later

As I look for the source from where these fake narratives emerge, it takes me to a paper Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan by B.N. Pandey which talks of Tipu giving grants to 156 Hindu Temples. Pandey writes, “Prof. Srikantiah supplied me with the list of 156 temples to which Tipu Sultan used to pay annual gifts.”

Then we are told that Sir Brijendra Nath Seal, the then vice-chancellor of Mysore University, had forwarded Pandey’s letter to Prof. Srikantiah and the latter responded by giving this list.

Interestingly, Sir Seal was the VC of the Mysore University between 1921 and 1929. Any person with common sense would tell that Pandey must have received this list in or before 1929, but it took him 64 years to make this information public; Pandey mentioned it for the first time in his lecture on Tipu on 18 November 1993!

Another source of misinformation is B.A. Saletore’s article, “Tipu Sultan as Defender of the Hindu Dharma”, was first published in 1999 (Medieval India Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 1) It is reprinted in Confronting Colonialism (pages 115-30). This article begins itself with a Kannada sanad issued with Tipu’s seal. It talks about a dispute regarding worshipping at a mandir in Mysore, where Tipu is said to have not only given remedies to the injustice done by his own official, but he also rectifies an omission made by a previous Hindu ruler of Mysore.

In this case too, truth seems miles away. Saletore says, “The second line of the sanad contains merely the Hindu cyclic year and the month and the day (Siddhartha saum. Bhadrapada ba. 5) which corresponds to 15 September 1783.” Here is the error. The cyclic year Siddhartha occurred only once during Tipu’s life which corresponds with Saka year 1721. Bhadrapada Badi 5 of the year named Siddhartha, Saka year 1721 corresponds with 19 September 1799, and Tipu had died on 4 May 1799 (138 days before the sanad is stated).

There is a long list of errors around each document that is used to glorify Tipu. Perhaps, I will pick each one in separate essays anytime soon. – Firstpost, 1 April 2022

› Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author, architect and historian.

Karnataka Float, Republic Day Parade, New Delhi 2014.

Read Online

  1. Tipu Sultan: The Tyrant of Mysore – Sandeep Balakrishna
  2. How brave was Tipu Sultan really? – Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra
  3. Tipu Sultan, Adolf Hitler and religious tolerance – Balbir Punj
  4. Tipu Sultan: Common icon of Pakistan and Congress – Balbir Punj
  5. Tipu Sultan was no freedom fighter – R. Sampath
  6. Tipu Sultan Jayanti is needless spectacle: Karnataka HC – M.A. Deviah
  7. Tipu Sultan: The Aurangzeb of South India – Sandeep Balakrishna

Genocide in Kashmir: Forgotten and buried – Vivek Gumaste

VOI

Kashmiri Pandit exodus from Kashmir (representative image)

The ethnic cleansing of Pandits from Kashmir is the greatest moral lapse of independent India, unmatched in its magnitude, specificity, or completeness when compared to other such similar social upheavals—over a quarter million Indian citizens wronged. – Vivek Gumaste

The passage of time has the uncanny ability to blur our memory, numb our conscience, and mellow the intensity of our reactions, so much so that even the most horrendous of crimes become gradually cemented into history, fade into the background, and come to be accepted as a part of normalcy; accountability is evaded and life moves on. One such horrific event is the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits from the Valley of Kashmir that began in the late 1980s (more than 35 years ago) and continues to this day. During this genocide, over a quarter million Hindu Indian citizens were driven from their homes to become refugees in their own land, over 1000 were killed, and close to 16000 of their homes were burnt to cinder. More than 500 Hindu temples were desecrated or destroyed. This is unequivocally the greatest moral lapse of independent India, unmatched in its magnitude, specificity, or completeness when compared to other such similar social upheavals—over a quarter million Indian citizens wronged.

The purpose of recalling the horrific, blood-curdling events of those dark days is to reawaken the indifferent conscience of a country that has basically decided to callously brush aside the pain and agony of over a quarter million of its citizens and move on with its life. It is also possible that this indifference stems from ignorance. Today, over 40 per cent of Indians are below 30 years of age, and this pertains to events that happened before they were born. Therefore, it becomes vitally important to make them aware of this gruesome episode of their country’s recent past.

For a democratic, secular nation to be viable, it must demonstrate its ability to uphold the lofty principles it espouses. There is still time to rectify this wrong and salvage the credibility of a nation and prove (not to others) but to ourselves that we truly believe in the ideals of secularism. Hence this reminder.

Definition

The events that transpired in Kashmir were so comprehensive in their cruelty—killings, burning of homes, expulsion, and destruction of sacred sites—that we did not have a single term to describe this phenomenon of evil, then. Only in the mid-nineties, when journalists began to use the word “ethnic cleansing” to describe the forced migration of Bosnian Muslims from Serb territories of the former Yugoslavia, did we realise what had happened in Kashmir and were able to give it a name.

A United Nations Commission, with reference to the happenings in the former Yugoslavia, defined ethnic cleansing as “… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”

As per the United Nations, genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits fits the bill of both ethnic cleansing and genocide. This was also endorsed by the NHRC, headed by the former Chief Justice of India, M.N. Venkatachaliah, which concluded in 1995 that the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits was “akin to genocide”.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide, with reference to Kashmir, are not flippant terms concocted by Hindu fanatics but officially vetted descriptions. By appropriately labelling a crime, we not only define its scope for public and international understanding but also induct a sense of urgency to seek its redress.

Kashmir History

What makes this ethnic cleansing even more egregious is that the Kashmiri Pandits are the original inhabitants of Kashmir and the carriers of a culture and tradition that goes back 5000 years, making them and the land an inalienable part of our Vedic civilisation. The oft-repeated phrase—Kashmir is an integral part of India—is not merely a political slogan to counter Pakistan’s claims but a historical reality.

As per the Nilmata Purana, one of our ancient scriptures, the word “Kashmir” is widely believed to be derived from the Vedic sage Kashyap, who is credited with making Kashmir habitable. Kashmir also finds mention in Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, written around the 5th century BC. Other Hindu scriptures like the Puranas (Vishnu, Vayu, Matsya), which modern methodology dates to around 3 to 10th century CE (in their written form—oral versions existed much before), also refer to Kashmir.

Over the centuries, Kashmir established itself as a great centre of Hindu and Buddhist learning. Sharada Peeth, a temple university now in ruins and located 10 kms from the LOC in Pakistan, flourished between 6-12th century CE. Learned and scholarly, Kashmiri Pandits have produced a galaxy of intellectuals like Abhinavagupta, the noted philosopher and poet, and Utpaladeva (10th CE) and others who expounded the theology of Kashmir Saivism. The holy shrines of Vaishno Devi and Amarnath, located in Kashmir, which thousands of Hindus from all over India visit every year despite terrorist threats and the vagaries of the weather, is another example of the importance of Kashmir to our civilisation.

Historically and spiritually, Kashmir is inextricably intertwined with the rest of India and our civilisation; it is the northernmost outpost as exemplified in the 8th century by the extent of Shankaracharya’s religious outreach. Today, Shankaracharya Hill, a majestic mound overlooking the capital Srinagar, marks the site of Shankaracharya’s stay in Kashmir, testifying to this reality.

The purpose of reiterating these historical facts is to demonstrate that Kashmir is ancient Hindu land from which Hindu Kashmiri Pandits are being driven out, today.

Islam is a late entrant to Kashmir. Kashmir remained predominantly Hindu and Buddhist till the 14th Century, ably defended by Hindu rulers. In 1339, Shah Mir established the first Islamic dynasty of Kashmir and started the process of conversion using both fear and inducement. Sikander Shah (1389-1412), labelled “Butshikan” (iconoclast), the sixth ruler of the dynasty, was notorious for his anti-Hindu atrocities, destroying temples by the thousands and forcing people to convert. By the time he died in 1413, a mere 70 years after Shah Mir established his dynasty, nearly 60 per cent of the population had been converted to Islam, mostly by force. Over the next 600 years till present times, different Muslim kings tried to rid the Valley of its Hindu inhabitants or forcibly converted them to Islam. Times changed, people became more educated, but the intention never changed—Project Kafir, whose aim is to rid the Valley of infidels, remained on track.

After 1819, Kashmir became a part of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sikh empire and eventually passed into the hands of the Dogra dynasty. While these periods provided some respite to the Hindus, the tolerant nature of both Sikh and Hindu rulers failed to reverse the new culture of intolerance that had been forced on the majority of Kashmiris who now accepted it as their destiny.

Since the reign of Sikander Shah, Kashmiri Pandits have been forced to flee the Valley because of religious harassment at least seven times, under different Muslim rulers. The current ethnic cleansing is the latest in this gory saga of ugly religious persecution.

Grievances

The political aura given to the “Kashmir Problem” in recent times is a sham. Machinations of New Delhi, the rigging of the 1987 elections, and the Pakistani Hand have all been invoked as explanations for the targeting of Pandits. But none of these explanations are logically sound or morally tenable. Secular grievances against a third party cannot justify the killings and expulsion of a helpless minority that is an intrinsic part of one’s community. If that were the benchmark, we would see a hundred reverse-Kashmirs in the rest of India. Even at the height of the Gujarat riots, we did not see the scale of migration that Kashmir has witnessed.

There is and remains only one explanation for this depravity: the Hindu identity of the Kashmiri Pandits. The reasons put forth are mere excuses to camouflage the ultimate hidden agenda—the Islamisation of Kashmir.

Even before matters came to a head in the late 80s and early nineties, what we see in Kashmir from the beginning of the 20th century is a sustained anti-Hindu animosity. Nearly every modern political leader of Kashmir has adopted this game plan.

Sheikh Abdullah (1905-1982), the grandfather of Omar Abdullah, was one of the tallest leaders of modern Kashmir, supposedly known for his broad secular outlook. But under the façade of secularism, he practised a rank communalism that discriminated against Hindus and Kashmiri Pandits. In 1931, he was at the forefront of a popular rising against Dogra rule. On July 13 (observed as Martyr’s Day by Muslim Kashmiris on either side of LOC), the Maharaja’s forces fired on an unruly mob, killing 22 Muslims. The Muslims in turn directed their ire on the Kashmir Pandits, killing several of them, looting their shops, desecrating temples, and raping their women. These riots, called the Maharajganj riots, were the beginning of the latest campaign to evict the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley.

Following independence, when Dogra rule ended and governance fell into the hands of the National Conference, persecution of Kashmiri Pandits became even more blatant. Land reforms were introduced that effectively stole the livelihood of Kashmiri Pandits, many of whom actually belonged to the low-income group. To justify these reforms, Kashmiri Pandits were cast as rich feudal landlords, a myth that the left-liberal lobby and their lapdogs in Western academia latched on to. The reality was quite different—lucrative sericulture, horticulture, and floriculture land meant for farming of fruits, flowers, and silk was under control of the Muslim majority. Even compensation for the land acquired was delayed, and Pandits were discriminated against in jobs, forcing many Kashmiri Pandits to move away from the Valley.

Ghulam Mohammed Shah, who was the CM from 1984 to 1986, openly followed a policy of communalism. In 1986, he authorised the construction of a mosque in Jammu Secretariat where an old Hindu temple stood. And later that year, when Rajiv Gandhi opened the doors of the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid to Hindus for prayer, he incited Muslims to riot by declaring, “Islam khatre mein hai ” (Islam is in danger). Kashmiri Pandits again bore the brunt of Muslim anger. A mini-pogrom engulfed Kashmir in which Anantnag was the epicentre—hence called the Anantnag riots. An investigation revealed that it was the so-called secular parties that engineered the violence. In Kashmir, there is a thin line between secular and non-secular parties with regard to their core ideology—persecution of Hindus.

In 1986, Ghulam Shah was dismissed and President’s rule was imposed. The 1987 elections that were allegedly rigged, reinstalled Farooq Abdullah as the chief minister. Law and order collapsed during this period, allowing Muslim separatists and Pakistan a free run. Added to this, a weak V.P. Singh government that was both clueless and directionless took power at the centre.

Time was ripe for the final phase of ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits and the Islamisation of the Valley that started 600 years ago, to be executed. – News18, 24 January 2026

› Vivek Gumaste is an academic and political commentator based in the US. This is the first part of a two part article.

Kashmiri Pandits demonstrate in support of the Citizenship Amendment Act at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2020.

Sita Ram Goel’s letter to Romila Thapar – Sandeep Balakrishna

VOI

Romila Thapar

Sita Ram Goel’s letter in 1991 to Romila Thapar rebuffs her and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus to Islam. – Sandeep Balakrishna

The first thing about Left-Liberals is the fact that they’re bullies and miraculously transform themselves as victims the moment someone stands up to them. A defining character-trait of a bully is a complete absence of manners and decency. Even a brief perusal of the “works” of the likes of Ram “perfumed” Guha, (late) Girish Karnad, (late) U.R. Anantha Murthy, T.M. Krishna, et al reveals this fact. Needless, they all took their lessons from that arch-bully Nawab Nehru. A little known fact of Nehru’s career as a wily politician is that when challenged, he would beat a temporary retreat, then go behind the scenes and write flowery, flattering letters in honeyed language to persuade his opponent to “please let me have my way just this once.” Those were vastly different times and Nehru got away with his perfidy. However, once he was confident that his authority as prime minister and party supremo was unchallengeable, he bared his fangs and hunted down and finished off the same opponent with a zealotry matched only by a medieval sultan.

This is the exact playbook that the Nehruvian history establishment followed under the leadership of Czarina Romila Thapar. And like Nawab Nehru, her gang either expelled or finished off the careers of all scholars and historians who did not toe the Communist line. Yet, there were undaunted men and women who were not only not afraid of their bullying but actually stood up to them and punched back twice as hard. In the political realm, the indomitable Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari ensured that Tamil Nadu would never have a Congress government. In the realm of history writing, doughty fighters like Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Meenakshi Jain led the fight from the front at great personal cost. It took a long time, but truth prevailed: names like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Bipan Chandra, and D.N. Jha have deservedly become obscenities and swearwords. Think about it: would you like to be called “Romila Thapar?”

Of these Sita Ram Goel was the master-boxer who did not give the dictionary meaning of say, “charlatan” as “a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill.” He simply uttered the word, “charlatan.” And provided us a great model at calling out charlatanism:

1. Suffer them not

2. Confront them head on

3. Be independent

4. Watch them squirm and then lose their ground when they start abusing and defaming you personally

5. The final stage: when they play victim

Recent history shows that all of these have rung true in real life. One cite scores of instances of this in Sita Ram Goel’s writings but a letter that he wrote to Romila Thapar in 1991 serves as a superb illustration of this model. In it, Goel rebuffs Romila Thapar and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus, to say the least. By itself, the letter is an exemplary work that combines solid historical scholarship, adherence to truth, and fearlessness in confronting an opponent armed with formidable political and institutional power.

Here are some excerpts included in the appendix of his monumental, two-volume work, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol. 1, Appendex 4.

Excerpts from Sita Ram Goel’s Letter to Romila Thapar

We return to the Marxist professors…

We have cited from eighty histories written by Muslims over a period of more than one thousand years. We have also cited several Islamic inscriptions which confirm what the historians say. The citations show how Hindu temples continued to be destroyed over a vast area and for a long time. We have added no editorial comments and given no communal twist to the events that took place. All along, we have kept to the actual language used by the Muslim historians.

We wonder if the professors will dismiss as a mere listing of dates the evidence we have presented. What we expect from the professors is that they will come forward with historical analysis and interpretations so that the destruction of Hindu temples mentioned in the Muslim narratives gets explained in terms of economic or political or any other non-religious motives.

We stick to our position, namely, that it is the theology of Islam which offers the only straight-forward and satisfactory explanation of why Muslim conquerors and rulers did what they did to Hindu places of worship. We have provided full facts about that theology, as also about the history of how it took its final shape. It would be most welcome if the professors come out with their comments on the character and meaning of this theology. In fact, we look forward to a Marxist explanation of it. What were the concrete material conditions and objective historical forces which gave rise to this theology in Arabia at that time?

Next, we refer to the second point which the professors had made in their letter to The Times of India [sometime in August 1986]. They had said that acts of intolerance have been committed by followers of all religions. … We do not share their philosophy of separating the Buddhists, the Jains and the Animists from the Hindus. But we agree to use their terms for the time being and request them to produce:

1. A list of epigraphs which record the destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

2. Citations from Hindu literary sources describing destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

3. The Hindu theology which says or even suggests that non-Hindu places of worship should be destroyed or desecrated or plundered, or which hails such acts as pious or meritorious;

4. A list of Hindu kings or commanders whom Hindus have hailed as heroes for desecrating or destroying or converting into Hindu places of worship any Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines;

5. A list of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines which have been desecrated or destroyed or converted into Hindu places of worship in the remote or the recent past;

6. The names and places of Hindu monuments which stand on the sites occupied earlier by Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines, or which have materials from the latter embedded in their masonry;

7. Names of Buddhist, Jain and Animist leaders or organizations who have claimed that such and such Hindu monuments are usurpations, and demanded their restoration to the original occupants;

8. Names of Hindu leaders and organizations who have resisted any demand made by Buddhists or Jains or Animists for restoration of the latter’s places of worship, or called for legislation which will maintain the status quo, or cried “Hinduism in danger,” or staged street riots in support of their usurpations.

We think that this sort of concrete evidence alone can decide the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites…

If the professors fail to come out with answers to questions posed by us, and to present the evidence in support of their statements, we shall be forced to conclude that far from being serious academicians, they are cynical politicians hawking ad hoc or plausible explanations in the service of a party line. In fact, we shall be justified in saying that they are … Stalinists. Stalinism … is an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in pursuit of a particular end. – The Dharma Dispatch, 16 March 2020

Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them (Vol. I).

Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel: Intellectual kshatriyas who wielded the pen like a sabre – Shankar Saran

VOI

Sita Ram Goel & Ram Swarup

Wake up, folks, wake up! As intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the stream and looking racist, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse crusade is on the march. As blinded as you are by the myopia and the stupidity of the politically correct, you don’t realise or don’t want to realise that a war of religion is being carried out. A war they call Jihad. A war which is conducted to destroy our civilisation, our way of living and dying, of praying or not praying, of eating and drinking and dressing and studying and enjoying life. As numbed as you are by the propaganda of the falsehood, you don’t put or do not want to put in your mind that if we do not defend ourselves, if we do not fight, the Jihad will win. It will win, yes, and destroy the world that somehow or other we have been able to build. – Oriana Fallaci in The Rage and the Pride

Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel lecture. 

Writing against the current in a democratic society poses problems of a different kind. Pondering at the range and depth of writings of Ram Swarup (1920-1998) and Sita Ram Goel (1926-2003), and the approach of our academia and media towards them gives an inkling of the problem.

In a totalitarian political system—Fascist, Communist or Islamist—a non-conformist writer can hardly publish anything. Even writing in private is a dangerous venture. But in a country with complete freedom of speech, with a ‘politically correct’ intellectual ambience, an inconvenient author can be silently buried in indifference. Not even the most open minded readers would know of his existence. Speaking of the Soviet case, Solzhenitsyn had observed that “the environment is dense and sticky: it is incredibly difficult to make even the smallest movements because it immediately takes the environment with them.” In contrast, the atmosphere in democratic countries is “like a rarified gas, or almost a vacuum: there it is easy to wave one’s arms, jump, run, turn somersaults—but it all has no effect on anybody else, everyone else is doing exactly the same in a chaotic manner.”

Without understanding this difference, we can never comprehend why even sixty years’ of original work of the rare duo of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel hardly left a mark on the intellectual scene of our country. Both died largely unsung. It is not a small measure of the regrettable situation that even a solitary biographical sketch of them each came from a Belgian scholar, Koenrad Elst. No Bharatiya scholar, journalist or student wrote one. Neither in their lifetime, nor after they passed away. Our media did not even bother to take note of the demise of Sita Ram Goel in 2003. The chief reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is that their work remained largely unknown to the general public of our country. Both were original and non-conformist thinkers. Our governments as well as the academic class felt quite at ease in ignoring them. Media happily followed suit.

There was a time in the Soviet Union when Solzhenitsyn was vilified. His works were considered ‘concoction’, ‘betrayal’, ‘disease’ and what have you. Even in the Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia of 1973 his name found no place at all (this, after he was already world-famous with Ivan Danisovich, and the Nobel Prize). He simply did not exist.

In this country, a very similar attitude was applied towards Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel as far as our academic class is concerned. Goel found no mention in intellectual debates and writings on issues he published for decades. If rarely someone mentioned his name, it was scornfully dismiss him as ‘communal’. Hence unwanted, irrelevant. It is a mark of the pathetic condition of our social sciences that after the demise of the Soviet Union, and opening up of the Soviet and East European archives, our Marxist professors were not dragged on the coals for their propagandistic writings masquerading as scholarly ones. Nothing happened by way of re-examining their highly distorted writings on history, political science or economics. On the contrary they are still ruling the roost! By corollary, even after the demise of communism, Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup are not accorded their due place in the scholarly arena for their realistic, incisive and farsighted analyses of the communist systems. Perhaps after the advent of a Saudi Gorbachev, this might be done.

Disaster at Inception: The English Takeover

Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote on Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Islam, Christianity and Hindutva. In this country all these are politically sensitive subjects. As is well-known, to the first five issues it is considered politically correct to be respectful, even reverential. As for the last one, it is best to disregard, if not mock openly. Reasons are various for this pitiable situation in this otherwise intellectually rich country.

A misconception regarding the Islamic mentality on the part of the national leaders since the 1920s was one. Getting the very first prime minister heavily enamoured by Marxism, Soviets and Islam was another. It has to be understood that the founding moments of any institution, law or system invariably become crucial to set the tone and standards for a long time to come. For a free Bharat the period of, say, 1947-56 was such a founding one because so many of our intellectual or socio-political traditions laid down by the Communist-and-Islam-leaning first prime minister.

Jawaharlal Nehru: India’s First Prime Minister

English becoming the intellectual language of the country, even after freedom from the British rule, was the third reason. It summarily and effectively excluded more than 95% of the population from participating in influential intellectual exercises. Thus a possible corrective to ideologically marred theories, propositions etc was foreclosed at the very inception. English ensured that even if a Bharatiya citizen is wise, experienced, knowledgeable and articulate, he or she can do nothing to check or persuade an erring intellectual or a whole intellectual group—unless he can do it in English. Besides, he must also hold a high chair to be heard.

Discourse in any language other than English in this country, howsoever rich and invaluable, simply does not touch the influential, decision making classes. Thus, intellectual pursuits became an undeclared monopoly of a minuscule few, who, even if grossly errant, ignorant or misguided on a matter in hand, could still set the standards for the entire country to follow—history writing and NCERT textbooks since inception are a case in point. The rest of the population simply came to accept, in naïve belief, a la Soviet citizens of yore, that whatever is emanating from the high chairs of a council, academy, commission, university, centre or ministry is certainly better informed. “They must know better who speak and write in English” became the common, if disastrous, sentiment among the Bhartiya public.

In the subjects mentioned above, that never was the case. The philosophy, understanding and experiences of the common Bhartiya masses were vastly different from the English-wielding intellectual elite about, say, the ways of socio-economic change or the Islamic character. Yet they could do nothing, thanks to the monopoly of English in matters academic or policy, to correct the academic and political decision makers. This restrictive, anti-Bharat role of English in a free Bharat is hardly considered in analysing why such a “politically correct” intellectual atmosphere came to rule here.

Original Critiques of Islam, Christianity and Communism

In such a politically correct intellectual environment Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel jointly represented diametrically opposite views. The dominating political and intellectual classes which followed a different path, naturally detested this. It is, therefore, not surprising that the duo’s rich contribution was wholly ignored. Both started publishing their critical works with the advent of freedom in 1947. It is out of the purview of this essay to compare the parallel views of the duo and those of the ruling intellectual-political classes of our country. Suffice it to say that time has proven most of the analyses and conclusions of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel right.

Of the nature and role of Marxism-Leninism, Soviet system, Maoist practice, and Communist economies, it is now irrefutably evident that whatever our first prime minister and Left-leaning economists, social scientists believed for decades (some still do) were indeed mere superstitions. As far the Islamic problem is concerned, anyone can judge the farsighted analyses the duo presented till the end of their lives. Life has shown, decade after decade, that from Gandhi to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, every leader or preacher seriously erred, with very tragic consequences, in assessing the Islamic problem. In their case, wishes were not horses.  Every concession, every leniency, all hosannas to Islam did never bring a single positive result. As Sita Ram Goel put so succinctly, in one of his last contributions:

“A study of Hindu-Muslim relations since the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 tells us that Muslims have been making demands—ideological, political, territorial—and Hindus conceding them all along. Yet the Muslim problem remains with us in as acute a form as ever. With the advent of petrodollars and the emergence of V.P. Singh, Laloo Prasad, Mulayam Singh and Kanshi Ram on the political scene, Muslims have become as aggressive and intransigent as in the pre-partition period.”

To understand the nature of the problems we are facing today on this score, and also to value the scholarly contribution of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, it would be helpful to see what some other gifted observers have concluded the world over. Oriana Fallaci, whom Milan Kundera calls the ideal of the 20th century journalism, has been saying this for the last twenty-five years. She is a remarkable writer inured to living with all races and habits and beliefs, accustomed to opposing any fascism and any intolerance without any taboos.

She is indignant towards all those who did not smell the bad smell of a war to come and who tolerated the abuses that “the sons of Allah” were committing in Europe with their terrorism. Her straight reasoning:

“What logic is there in respecting those who do not respect us? What dignity is there in defending their culture or supposed culture when they show contempt for ours?”

She puts the likes of Osama bin Laden on par with Hitler and Stalin, firmly arguing that fascism is not an ideology, but behaviour. She warns that the fight with this fascism “will be very tough. Unless we Europeans stop shitting in our pants and playing the double-game with the enemy, giving up our dignity. An opinion I respectfully offer to the Pope too.”

Do we comprehend what Fallaci is stating? Most of the members of our intellectual class would not. Let alone fighting a war, on the intellectual plane, they tend not even to see the international phenomenon and problem. As if every disaster perpetrated by the sons of Allah in any corner of the world is a mere accident and not manifestations of a single ideology.

Bamyan Buddhas

Bamiyan Buddha Destruction

Question: Why do some people remain unfazed even by violence of such magnitudes as 9/11, Bamiyan, Godhra or Nadimarg in Kashmir? They readily try to explain away such violence blaming some “primary” cause and thus shield the barbaric perpetrators. But the very same people hysterically cry “fascism” on even an ordinary statement that the Ayodhya temple movement is a national sentiment. Why such double standards?

Political correctness is not the whole answer. Love for one’s own comfort, ignorance and laziness also play the part for many a people. As Solzhenitsyn aptly said in the context of condemning the nuclear tests conducted by France and China, that the double standards were “not only because of moral squint, but simply out of cowardice. Because from an expedition into the Chinese desert or to the Chinese coast nobody would return—and they know it”. The same is truer of keeping silent on everything Islamic, fascist or terrorist, while crying hoarse about even non-acts of “Hindu fascism”. As the great author wrote, “They only protest when there is no danger to life, when the opponent can be expected to give in and when there is no risk of being condemned by ‘Leftist circles’—it is always better, of course, to protest with them.” This is highly apt to describe the noisy secularists of Bharat.

We have different scales of values for wickedness and punishment. According to one, killing of an innocent-looking terrorist—Ishrat Jahan for instance—or a missionary indulging in illegal proselytizing activities—Graham Staines—shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, systematic cleansing of Hindus from the territory of Kashmir, Assam and Nagaland, burning an entire train coach with Hindu pilgrims in Godhra, mushrooming of Islamic terrorist dens in the border areas of West Bengal, Bihar and UP—all this gets no attention much less alarm. No condemnation, no seminar, no books, no documentation and, of course, no campaigns on the lines of “fight against saffronisation”.

Whenever an Islamic assault becomes impossible to ignore and at least our editorial classes feel compelled to write something of a criticism they never forget to mention “Hindu extremism” in the same vein. It is pure fiction, an added insult to meek Hindus who have been at the receiving end all along for centuries. No one speaks for them with force, with extra-constitutional methods. Hence no question of a Hindu “extremism”.

But in editorials, Islamic violence is never condemned on its own merit, it is wilfully clubbed with a Hindu one. This artificial balancing flies in the face of hard, horrible facts. There has never been a single act on the part of the Sangh Parivar which can even remotely match, either in words or deeds, those of the Islamic ones: Lashkar-e-Toiba, Student Islamic Movement of Bharat (SIMI), Deendar Anjuman, Hizb-ul-Muzahideen, Tablighi Jamat et al. Yet the politically correct editorial and academic classes of this country present Hindu “extremism” and Islamic terrorism on par. Worse, for some, the former is the cause of the latter. Therefore, the bigger culprit is the (Hindu) Sangh Parivar. Hence all fight is against “saffronisation” and none against “Islamisation” of every possible thing—land, people, culture, dress, food, language, thought and manners.

What kinds of scales are used in this artificial balancing of Islamic intolerance with an imaginary Hindu one? The first unit on one scale may be ten, but the first unit on another scale may be ten to the sixth power, that is, one million. It is high time our politically correct eminences understood these two non-comparable scales of valuation of the volume and moral meanings of events. It is impossible to accept the ideology of Osamas bin Ladens even remotely comparable to that of say, Pravin Togadia. One is causing a “Une grande Peur” (A great Fear) all over the Western world and the non-Islamic Eastern world. While the other causes nothing because she merely expresses the frustration of common Hindus. An angry Hindu at best draws a derisive laugh among the Islamic world steeped in unimaginable violence. Unimaginable both in methods and scale.

An Excellent Guide

If we want to understand the things in perspective, there is no better guide than Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel. Yes, not even Bernard Lewis or Daniel Pipes has done it with such perfection as the duo (Lewis et al are marred by their West-centric approach, ignoring the role Islam played in Bharat and the difficult Hindu struggle with it for centuries).

Oriana Fallaci has presented the scenario very well on an empirical plane. Addressing those who remained indifferent or harboured illusions about the Talibani destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan she asked,

“Who is next, that the ‘idols’ of Bamiyan have been blown up like twin towers? The other Unfaithful who pray to Vishnu or Shiva, Brahma, Krishna, Annapurna? … Do they hate only the Christian and Buddhists, those voracious sons of Allah, or do they aim to subjugate our whole planet?”

Unfortunately, there are still very few scholars in the West to delve into the issue on a realistic plane.

It is no exaggeration that on philosophical, historical and analytical planes, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel have presented superior analyses about the Islamic malady. To realise all this, we must first know exactly and thoroughly whatever has been happening all these decades in every corner of the world—from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Palestine to Pakistan, from Malaysia to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, from Algeria to Senegal, from Syria to Kenya, from Libya to Chad, from Lebanon to Morocco, from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia. Only then can one comprehend the hollowness of the artificial balancing of “both Hindu and Muslim” communalism/extremism, which is a routine, mindless practice in our country. In practice, it is nothing but a profound help to the Islamic jihadi politics and terrorism targeting Bharat.

Penetrating Analysis of Islamic Terrorism

The phenomenon of the modern phase of Islamic terrorism arose in the late nineteen sixties. Beginning with September 1970 “Arab terrorism” came to be known in the entire world. No academic or journalist, howsoever politically correct, could then imagine balancing that terrorism with anything else. It was original and Islamic. Balancing it with some US, Israeli or Hindu deeds are a much later invention.

After the beginning of a Euro-Arab dialogue in 1975, and dubious agreements thereafter, petrodollars came pouring into the Western media and academia. The money readily brought subtle and not so subtle messages and conditions. Only then did this kind of artificial balancing began to appear in print. First in France, then in the whole of Europe and American universities. Today from the Harvard University to the London School of Economics to the Jawaharlal Nehru University, from the New York Times to the Economist to the Times of India there are any number of scholars and hacks who compete with each other to explain that anything but Islam is responsible for the acts of Islamic terrorism. That Islam is nothing but basically a religion of peace and brotherhood. And woe betide those who dares contradict this!

That exactly was the refrain towards Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel of our left-secular hacks and professors. Keeping eyes wide shut towards the Islamic nature of so many international problems—violence, bigotry, terrorism, intolerance, etc.—has made the West more vulnerable. It is not the problems attached to gaining insight that made it difficult for the West, but lack of will to say the right thing. The same can be said more assertively about our own country, for we especially prefer the comfortable to the difficult.

Though it has also to do with the traditional Hindu character that remains concerned mostly with swaddharm (one’s own Dharma), and altogether ignored studying and understanding the various religions of the others, the creeds of those aggressors who, driven by permanent hostility and purpose to convert, repeatedly attacked Bharat. This careless attitude to deeply study Islam, Christian missionaries or Communism also played the part for the astonishing Hindu ignorance of Islamic or Communist theory and practices. This in turn, makes the game of the invaders, aggressors, revolutionaries and infiltrators an easy one.

However, as in Europe, here too, the spirit of Munich has been leading the search for insight. The spirit of concessions and compromise, and of cowardice, self-deception by prosperous leaders, scholars and responsible individuals. They all have lost the will to set limits, to be firm. This course has never in the past led to the desired results, including preservation of peace and justice. The experience of Gandhi and the Partition are the most visible examples. But it seems that human emotions are stronger than even the clearest lessons of the past.

Enfeebled Hindu professors, editors and leaders—George Fernandes, the former Defence Minister provided the latest example of Hindu meekness by swallowing and concealing the insults inflicted at the US airports—of Bharat paint sentimental pictures of how violence will generously allow itself to be softened up.

That is not to be.

Primary Sources of Islamic Terror

It is not without reason that of 52 Islamic countries in the world today there is not a single one professing democracy. All are dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of one or another kind, declaredly following Islam. Yes, coercion, intolerance, violence, conquest and propaganda are intrinsic to Islam. From the very beginning, at the place of its birth itself, it could not gain ground except by violence and treachery. So much so that the Arabs, “who had been hitherto upright and chivalrous, became a great scourge and cruel invaders and rulers. Their ethical code suffered a great decline. They began to live on the labour and sweat of others.”

Reading Koran and other authentic primary sources of Islamic literature, one can easily discern that lying and treachery in the cause of Islam has received divine approval. Any hesitation to perjure oneself in that cause is represented as weakness. Consider this. During a synod that the Vatican held in October 1999 to discuss the rapport between Christians and Muslims, an eminent Islamic scholar addressed the stunned audience declaring with placid effrontery, “By means of your democracy we shall invade you, by means of our religion we shall dominate you.” The meaning is clear as daylight.

This typical treachery is on display everywhere in Europe. Islamic migrants force themselves on European people misusing the democratic and humanitarian laws of the respective countries, viciously threatening with “I know my rights” to the local inhabitants. The same “rights” they don’t have, and don’t care to have in their Islamic countries of origin. Some of the perpetrators of 9/11 were on the watchlist of the FBI and CIA. Yet, residing in the USA itself, they could carry out their inhuman mission because the humanitarian laws of the country allowed them the luxury to learn piloting, move around, meet and conspire, and finally to bring down the twin towers of New York.

This is what the Islamic scholar meant.

But as in Bharat so in the West, scholars, leaders and editorial classes have tried to downplay this essential fact. They fail to recognise or don’t want to recognise that a reverse crusade is going on. It is forced on Europe and the USA. Yet their policymakers are trying their best to appease the aggressors. The aggression is an ever-growing reality that the Western leaders senselessly feed and back up. Witness their treatment to Pakistan. Whatever the Bush administration has been looking for in Iraq, to punish Saddam Hussain, were abundantly available in Pakistani territory. Undisguised, under the very US eyes. But instead of taking serious note of it, and appropriate action, they offered Pakistan to be an ally of the NATO! Which attitude is the reason why those crusaders increase in numbers, boss around more and more. They will demand more and more and bully with greater intensity. Till the point of subduing us. Therefore, dealing with them is impossible. Attempting a dialogue, unthinkable. Showing indulgence, suicidal. And he or she who believes the contrary is a fool.

Therefore, the fact must not to be lost sight of, even for a moment, that Islam is more an imperialist, dictatorial, political ideology. It brooks no reform. It severely punishes even members of its own fold, howsoever superior or honourable in knowledge and position for the mere crime of attempting reform.

At this point, it is very important to note that Muslim population and Islam are not the synonymous terms. Just as Marxism-Leninism and Soviet people were not. As criticising Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism was not an insult or vilification of the Soviet people or Chinese people, so criticising Islam is not “spreading hate” against Muslims. It is a clever ploy of Islamist scholars, leaders, jihadis as well as Left-secular propagandists in Bharat that they arouse the Muslim masses against any such criticism as though it is directed against them.

Muslims are in most cases as victims of the Imams, Ayatollas, Amirs as the common Russians and Chinese were at the hands of their Marxist masters, the chairman or general secretaries. This ploy has to be fought tooth and nail.

Inasmuch as Islam is a political ideology with a complete social, political, juridical system of its own, it is as liable to criticism and scrutiny as any other political creed. More so as its political ambitions and juridical regulations are never confined to Muslims alone. It has clear rules, regulations and directions applied to non-Muslim masses whether for the moment it is ruling a country or not. Thus the political ideology of Islam, even otherwise, directly affects non-Muslims of the world.

Therefore, not only the Muslim but non-Muslims also have every right to criticise Islam. But the Islamic scholars and ulema using all kinds of pretexts and deceptions, shifting and contradictory—bearing the situation in a given country in mind—deny this right to non-Moslems and Moslems alike. However, as Ram Swarup said so meaningfully, once intellectual freedom is gained for the Moslem masses, rest is only a matter of time. Most Islamic rulers and scholars perceive this very well. Which is why they are hell-bent not to give intellectual freedom to their own brothers in faith, their Moslem subjects. They use every kind of violence, threats, regulations, logics and ploys to deny this.

Why?

The words of Solzhenitsyn quoted in the beginning of this article explain it. It also explains why violence is intrinsic to Islam. Make no mistake. Islamic violence is not a reaction to this or that deed of the West or the Jews or the Hindus. It is because Islam has no intellectual or verbal argument to offer on any point. The erstwhile Soviet scholars used to quote Marxism-Leninism like a spell on all questions. Even if it answered none. Likewise, Islamic scholars quote Koran in every matter, without the slightest regard for or reference to common human reason. That can hardly satisfy inquiring minds, whether non-Moslem or Moslem. That is why Islam regularly employs intimidation and violence to subdue anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere, anytime and everytime.

If these essential points are glossed over as have been done in Bharat throughout the 20th century by many respectable leaders and scholars, the Islamic problem can never be understood, let alone solved. Therefore, neither theoretical illusions nor practical difficulties—read fear—should come in way for recognising and fighting this war. As the great living fighter writes,

“In Life and in History there are moments when fear is not permitted. Moments when fear is immoral and uncivilised. And those who out of weakness or stupidity—or the habit of keeping one’s foot in two shoes—avoid the obligations imposed by this war, are not only cowards: they are masochists.”

These are the same values—freedom from ignorance and freedom from fear—that Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel tried to instil in us in their gentle, yet firm way. They were intellectual warriors—heroes of our time. – Dharma Dispatch, 24 April 2019

› This essay was first published in the volume, “India’s Only Communalist: In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel,” edited by Dr. Koenraad Elst 

› Shankar Sharan is an Indian author and professor of Political Science at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in New Delhi. 

India's Only Communalist: In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel

How the holy Ganga became the Hooghly – Reshmi Dasgupta

VOI

Ganga Arati at Kolkata.

With the worship of the holy Ganga finally restarting with arati on the riverbank in Kolkata and ceremonial dips at Tribeni, is it not time to discard the latter-day secularised name of the Ganga—Hugli/Hooghly—coined and imposed by foreigners? – Reshmi Dasgupta

In 2023, rather belatedly, Ganga Arati on the riverbank unmistakeably similar to the hugely popular one at Varanasi began to be conducted every evening in Kolkata. Today, it’s a must-attend for tourists. Around the same time a Kumbh Mela also restarted up-river, held at the same time as the more famous one at Prayagraj. The natural question that comes to mind is, “Why on earth is the Ganga called Hooghly or Hugli then as it flows past the capital of West Bengal?”

More so as this undoubtedly ugly name was not given by locals. The Ganga bifurcates as it enters West Bengal from Bihar, with one distributary veering off into Bangladesh as the Padma. The one that remains in India is called the Bhagirathi. But once Bhagirathi/Ganga reaches the 16th century Portuguese trading post of Fort Ugolim (Bandel), its name changes to Hooghly, a corruption of that Portuguese word. And this name was readily adopted by the British.

Hundreds of years of Islamic rule, European traders flocking to establish trading posts on the river and, finally, Calcutta becoming the headquarters of British Raj all contributed to the inexorable de-consecration—secularisation—of India’s holiest river in the final stages of its journey to the sea. Retaining the name Bhagirathi would hark back the river’s sacred status, clearly did not suit either the Muslim conquerors or their white successors whose focus was commerce.

Obviously the ‘firinghees’ preferred Hooghly: most foreigners cannot pronounce Bhagirathi even today and back then they would not have even tried. But why has it not been changed back? It has been 78 years since foreigners finally ceased ruling India, and yet we persist with many exonyms—non-native names for places, peoples, geographical features or languages. Just indigenising Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, all essentially British-established cities, does not cut it.

The reason for the Ganga becoming and remaining the Hooghly for so long (too long?) is complicated. It can probably be traced back to the place in West Bengal called Tribeni, which echoes that similar sounding but far better-known place in Uttar Pradesh, Triveni. Both places mark the unified Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. Only, in UP it is known as Yuktaveni, where those three rivers converge, while in Bengal it is Muktaveni, where the waterways diverge.

Yuktaveni and Muktaveni were equally revered and till the Islamic conquest of Bengal in the 13th century. Back then the Kumbh Mela was said to have been held annually at Tribeni too. That ended when Zafar Khan Ghazi not only conquered that part of Bengal in the late 13th century but also built the earliest mosque-madarsa complex of eastern India—where he and his family were buried—at the exact spot of the holy Muktaveni. That surely cannot be a mere coincidence.

There is clear evidence visible there even today that parts of demolished Hindu temples were used to build those Islamic edifices, why which Zafar Khan justified his honorific Ghazi. Once the temples were destroyed, there was an inevitable loss of inheritance and memory. This, though remnants of Hindu iconography and Sanskrit inscriptions remain on the walls of the complex—as seen in Somnath and Gyanvapi—pointing to the conversion of yet another sacred Hindu site.

Ironically this Islamic complex at Tribeni is now touted as syncretic, a saintly dargah—of a Ghazi!—that supposedly even attracts Hindu devotees. It is more likely that the Hindus actually began by going to secretly pay their respects to the desecrated idols interred on the walls and mihrab of that tomb and mosque—as happens at Gyanvapi even today—though after 800 years that initial reason may not have percolated down to the current “secular” generation in Bengal.

Turning the final 160 km of India’s holiest river into merely a waterway for trade and commerce by the East India Company by the 18th century sealed the secularisation—desacralisation—of the Ganga-Bhagirathi. Though temples dot the entire length of this section, from the Ananta Basudev temple at Bansberia to the Brindaban Chandra quartet at Guptipara and more, attesting to the quiet faith that the river is indeed the Ganga, the focus on the secular trading centres.

Ever since major European colonial powers—the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, French and British—established their trading posts along the Bhagirathi via permissions from the Mughal rulers and then local Muslim overlords and sultans, the original name of the northern-most firinghee settlement, Ugolim, became the convenient name for all of them to use and disseminate. And the sentiments of the Hindu population about the holy river were naturally drowned out.

The sad state and fate of the ‘Adi’ or Original Ganga’ also called Tolly’s Nullah—said to be the pre-17th century main channel of the Ganga-Bhagirathi-Hooghly near Kolkata—is further proof of the successful campaign to desacralize India’s most revered river. In 1777 the eponymous British engineer aimed to revive the old channel to facilitate an easier journey upstream for British ships, which found it difficult to negotiate the twists and turns of the mainstream ‘Hugli’ flow.

His plan failed to help the merchant ships so the British had no compunction in eventually turning the canalised ancient riverbed into a ‘nullah’ (drain) for the city’s effluents and sewage instead. This even though Kolkata’s most important temple, Kalighat, lies on its banks, testifying to its sacred antecedents. Amazingly parts of the putrid waterway are still revered as sacred by locals although the final blow came in the form of 300 pillars of the Metro rail being installed in it.

Not that dumping waste into the holy Ganga was confined to the part that flowed through Calcutta; that was perpetrated at many points along its course during the Raj. The most horrific example of that was the Sisamau Nullah in Kanpur (Asia’s largest) which pumped 140 million litres of untreated sewage into the Ganga daily from 1892 until it was finally fully diverted into a treatment plant in 2019.

That the Bhagirathi remained the Ganga in the collective Hindu consciousness, however, is clear from the name of the spot where it joins the sea: Gangasagar, an amalgam of the name of the river, Ganga, and an island, Sagar, named after the sea now called the Bay of Bengal. Millions of Hindus take a dip at on Makar Sankranti just as they do at other points along the holy Ganga such as Prayagraj and Haridwar. Note, it is not called Hooghlysagar—and never has been.

Interestingly, where the Padma-Jamuna-Meghna confluence—for now the bigger amalgam of Ganga distributaries—meets the sea in Bangladesh is not called Gangasagar although the name of the island that it flows past into the Bay of Bengal is evocative too: Bhola. But the Bhagirathi-Hooghly in West Bengal is obviously the true receptacle of the holy Ganga in the minds of the faithful.

With the worship of the holy Ganga finally restarting in West Bengal with arati on the riverbank in Kolkata and ceremonial dips at Tribeni, is it not time to discard the latter-day secularised name of the Ganga—Hugli/Hooghly—coined and imposed by foreigners? – News18, 14 February 2026

›  Reshmi Dasgupta is a freelance writer.

The Hooghly at Bandel.