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

in order to repulse and avenge their all-out attempt to disrupt Hinduism, their mass conversions of Hindus, their most heinous attacks upon the chastity of thousands of Hindu women. They did not severely penalize the perpetrators of these crimes. No, they did not do anything of the kind to attack the Muslim religion in return! The Result 574-575. The inevitable consequence was that the two or three hundred thousand forcibly converted Hindu men and women and children remained groaning with agony in the clutches of the Muslim community in South India. Although Tipu’s political power perished completely under the heavy counter-blows of the combined Maratha-English swords and spears, the religious domination he forced on the millions of Hindus grew ever stronger and stronger in the absence of any counter offensive. The future generations of these converted Hindus, in the absence of any immediate reconversion, went on adding rapidly to the numerical strength of the enemy of Hinduism, by at least one and a half times or twice as much. Being brought up from birth under the Islamic influence, this future progeny of the Hindu converts became the inveterate enemies of the Hindus, and instead of desiring to come back to Hinduism, they cherished like the wolf in the ‘Aesop’s fables,’ the fiendish ambition of converting the rest of the Hindus to Islam. They considered it their most sacred duty! 576. If the Marathas had so retaliated, all those two or three hundred thousand Hindu men and women recently converted during those four or five years of the war with Tipu, would have, in all probability, courted Hinduism most willingly because of the love they bore for their original families and relatives, and because of the pangs of separation they suffered. Their devotion to and fascination for their recently lost religion, their love and affection for their separated Hindu fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, relatives and friends, must have at that time been so acute and fresh as to cause them many a heartache, and to make them shed many an agonized tear at their slightest mention and recollection. 577. How very simple it would have been, at that time, to reconvert all those luckless two or three hundred thousand Hindu brethren and absorb them all in the Hindu society! 578. After Tipu’s defeat, the victorious Maratha armies of Sardar Patwardhan, Holkar, Raste and other great chieftains were returning triumphantly to Maharashtra from their respective fronts and by different