Hindu ko gussa kyon aata hai? (Why is the Hindu so angry?)

Hindu ko gussa kyon aata hai? (Why is the Hindu so angry?)
Vinod Kumar

No one in his right mind can ever condone the carnage, both the initial one at Godhra railway station in February 2002 and its response in the rest of Gujarat in the months following. By all means it was reprehensible. Though it was neither the first nor the worst, even one life lost in communal violence is one too many.

The question we need to address is “Why was Hindu so angry?” - the same Hindu whose tolerance is so legendary. Why was the response to Godhra incidence so brutal? However we might deny, burning of sixty Hindus trapped inside a railway bogey, horrendous as it is, is not the sole cause that led Gujarat to this carnage. And Hindu anger is not limited to Gujarat alone. It has echo of support from Amritsar to Chennai and from Mumbai to Kolkata. The Godhra incident, at best, lit the fuse to the time bomb that had been ticking for a long time.

Unless we are willing to delve deeply into the real cause, such acts of violence will keep on repeating, probably even more frequently. If one goes for treatment to a doctor, he looks not only at current affliction and inquires not only the history of the patient but also his family. Why?

The powers that be would like us to believe that India was born on 15th August 1947 and prior to that it was just some empty landscape. Out from somewhere a Mahatma appeared and a nation was born. Unfortunately, that is not so. India existed long before that. If we want to know what ails India, what causes such outbursts of Hindu anger, we have to dig deeper into its past like a doctor goes into family history.

The fact is that since 712 CE, when Muhammad bin Kasim invaded Sindh and let the reign of terror loose, India has been repeatedly terrorized, raped and plundered. Hindus were captured, taken out of the country, sold like vegetables in foreign markets, massacred by the millions, forced to convert, made to live as slaves, and denied even their basic right to practice their own religion in their own country. The contemptible jaziya was imposed time and again. Hindu women were raped, ravished, abducted and massacred; again by the millions. Hindu temples, by the tens of thousands, were demolished, desecrated, and plundered. Idols were ripped of their silver, gold and jewels; were broken into pieces, and shipped to far off places to be kept in front of mosques so that the faithful can tread upon them. Mosques were built upon demolished temples or from materials obtained from them. This was not done to create a composite culture. These atrocities on Hindus went on for centuries and the vandals, with great glee, recorded all these as something to be proud of.

Scholars like Alberuni went on to write:

"Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed such wonderful exploits, by the which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, like a tale of old in the mouth of the people."

This is a very mild description of what went on for centuries. Other descriptions are blood curdling. They are so well known that this is not the place to repeat them here.

It is also no secret that Hindu civilization had caused no harm to have been subjected to such horrendous acts of vandalism. This was completely unprovoked.

The current wisdom is that if we turn a blind eye to all that happened in the past, every thing will be hunky dory. Is that so? If it were the nature of civilizations to forget the past, neither would the Hindus be celebrating Vijaya Dashmi every year nor the Shias be beating their breasts every Muaharram. The truth is that a civilization as long as it is alive does not forget either the good or the bad. Civilizations have long memories.

The present situation, to a large extent, has been brought upon us by our own people, especially those who go under the banner of "secularists". They have whitewashed the vandalism of their own nation. Not only have they removed all traces of Hindu suffering from the nation's history books, they have gone on to justify them. They have made the victims of the most horrendous crimes against humanity look as the perpetrators. They have denied Hindus their "Muharram". They have denied the Hindus their heritage. Secularists' pronouncements on the Godhra tragedy "the Hindus had it coming" or "they invited it upon themselves" is typical of their cynicism, and complete lack of any objectivity and sensitivity. When Babri Masjid was demolished, did they proclaim that since the Muslims had demolished so many Hindu temples, they had it coming?

I don't know what their agenda is but they cannot be ignorant of the facts of history because they have access to all the books written by the real perpetrators of these crimes.

What can be done to assuage the agony of the Hindus?

Firstly, the history books should reflect the facts of history as they took place. History should not be converted into fiction to please some whims or new found political correctness.

Secondly, we should accept that the Muslims of today are not responsible for acts of vandalism of the past. Having said that, the Muslims need to disassociate themselves from the plunderers and vandals of India. And as they are not responsible for or should not have any association with the past acts of vandalism, they also cannot be owners of the property built from such vandalism. If they claim such property, that would mean that they justify and condone the carnage done to the Hindus. In that case, there can be no solution to the problem. Some rights have no time limits especially where civilizational ethos is involved.

Thirdly, we should do what will go a long way to heal the agony of the Hindus. We should go through the records maintained by those vandals, and return all the buildings -- not just three -- that were built on or from material obtained by demolishing Hindu temples or other monuments. As stated previously, the Muslims of today have no right on them. The mosques under this category also should fall in the same class as other monuments like Red Fort or Qutub Minar or Fatehpur Sikri -- to cite just a few. The Muslims don't own these monuments. The same should be true of other buildings. The Muslims should hand over all such buildings to the government of India. They all need not be demolished and should not be demolished (except for two more, for which the Hindus have deep religious sentiments) -- they are part of our history. They are living embodiment of the story of Hindu agony. All these should be converted into a countrywide museum of Hindu holocaust.

What we need is serious introspection of Hindu agony. Our "secularists" have asked us to take proverbial Ostrich like approach and bury our heads in sand. This is not going to work. Hindu agony needs to be addressed. The dark period of India's history needs to addressed with grave concern and in its proper perspective.