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

some such manner! “Come, O you, Hindu mothers and sisters, come! You, who have been wickedly polluted and forced to do all sorts of menial and dirty wretched work in the Muslim household, come out, come under our protection! We, your foster-brothers, have come lo your doors in order to rescue you and take you to your respective families. Whichever Muslim comes to obstruct you, dies instantly. May that Muslim be then a man or a woman of high rank or low! Similarly, O you helplessly converted Hindu brethren come, join us when and where you can; join our conquering brigades! The moment you gather under this Saffron-coloured Hindu banner, you will have every sort of protection.” 580B. If only such a reassuring blast was heard and echoed through towns and villages, thousands upon thousands of those ill-fated Hindu converts, men and women, mothers and sisters, would all have rushed most willingly, and of their own accord to join those Maratha warriors, and they all could have been most easily purified and reconverted to Hinduism, and the Muslim religious victory under Tipu’s leadership would have been totally nullified. But alas! Nobody ever thought of this! 581. Neither those Maratha warriors, nor their commanders, nor the Sardars and Chieftains nor the Shankaracharyas, nay not even the Peshwa at Poona, nor the Chhatrapatis of Satara and Kolhapur—alas! not a single Hindu soul ever dreamt of this simple way of reconversion of those ill- starred Hindus! Nobody of them ever felt ashmed of marching straight ahead, without casting so much as a sympathetic glance at the thousands of the brutally ravaged Hindu mothers and sisters! Their martial drums and pipes proclaimed to the world their military and political victory! The Maratha companies and battalions proudly paraded through the villages, towns and cities, supremely unconcerned about the two or three hundred thousand of their miserable Hindu brethren in Muslim bondage. No, no! not a single miserable soul was at that time reconverted to Hinduism! 582. The natural consequence of it all was that, those thousands of our brutally converted Hindu mothers and sisters anxiously waiting for the victorious Hindu armies to set them free from those hellish tortures and death-like humiliation in the Muslim prison-like homes, must have most probably turned away from the doors and windows in utter despair! To see none of the soldiers ever caring to recognize and pity them—let alone to rescue and reconvert them—must have rent their hearts in two! They must