भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

convert every Hindu to Islam. If the Hindus did not willingly take to Islam, they were to be forced to do so, or else the men were to be slaughtered and the women were to be distributed as slaves among the Muslims. 558-560. This campaign by Tipu of pollution and proselytization of the Hindus was so thorough and ruthless, and it was carried to such vast dimensions, that there was universal wailing and a sense of unimaginable horror throughout the Hindu community in the State. Not only the soldiers in his army but even the Mullah-Maulvis in the meanest of villages too, with the Muslim hooligans and ruffians to help them, began a systematic persecution of the Hindus! At a later date, Tipu invaded Malabar and at the first stroke, converted a hundred thousand Hindus in that one single coastal district. Then overtaking the Karnataka, he even marched on the Maratha territory. Millions of Hindus from Dharwar to Travancore were horror- stricken, and hundreds of men and women from all castes and sects of the Hindu society feeling thoroughly incapable of facing its armed attack of the Muslims, preferred death by drowning themselves in the Krishna and the Tungabhadra to all the indignities and atrocities of Muslim vandalism. Hundreds of others leapt into the fire but did not become Muslims! Tipu’s Arrogant Proclamation! 561. Puffed up by the speedy success of his atrocious aggressions upon the Hindus and diabolically elated at their miserable plight, Tipu once proudly declared in his court that his campaign of mass conversion of the Hindus was accomplished beyond all expectations. On one occasion, he said fifty thousand Hindus in his kingdom were converted hardly within twenty-four hours! No other Muslim Sultan before him, he proudly stated, could have achieved that stupendous success, but that by the grace of Allah, he had been able to perform that amazing task of the spread of Islamic faith and the total annihilation of the kafirs! 562. In order to carry on this prodigious task, Tipu formed a special division of his army, which surpassed all other Muslim soldiers in enormity and vandalism. He manned it by the pick of the bitterest enemies of the Hindus and most lovingly called them his own sons. Whoever of those loving sons of his did some exceptionally brutal act of ravaging Hindu women, of forcibly converting Hindu families, of plunder and arson, or of wholesale massacre was rewarded with the youngest and most beautiful of the thousands of Hindu girls captured from different parts of the State.