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

397-398. But when they invaded Sindh and forced conversion to the Islamic faith on the people there, these Muslim invaders came to realize soon enough that although the Hindus' pride for their religion and their loyalty to it was no less ardent than that of any other people, and that at times, it was far more fervent and irrepresible than that of all of them— why, for this very reason—it was very easy for the Muslims and others to enforce physical conversion on the Hindus, if, however, mental conversion was far too difficult. 399. This did not merely pertain to the time when the Muslims invaded India. Even before the rise of Islam, the Syrian Christians, who were very generously—in other words suicidally—given shelter by the Hindu kings in the Malabar, and who began to proselytize the Hindu community, also came to know very soon that it was quite possible to desecrate a whole village of caste Hindus by merely thrusting a morsel of grub into their mouths or by just throwing crumbs of half-eaten loaves of bread or biscuits or slices of beef or the meat of cows into wells and tanks, where people went to have drinking water; and that no one of them had any place in the Hindu community any longer. 400. Later on, when in the 15th and the 16th centuries, the European armies of the Portuguese and others rushed into India by the sea-routes, they, too, were pleased to find the above-mentioned superstitions of contamination and the absurd religiosity of the Hindus, and were fired with an evil ambition to proselytize the whole of India with no difficulty at all. Fetters for the Miserable Hindu Proselytes 401-402. The Hindu armoury has all along been full of invincible weapons to beat back the political aggressions of the foreigners, and they had successfully crushed down such attempts on various occasions. But it had, at least in those times, no weapon to fight back this religious aggression. So the Indians had to rely on this sole weapon of social boycott, while facing this uprecedented Muslim religious aggression of polluting and converting the Hindus. They went on relentlessly with their policy of completely ostracizing every proselyte Hindu, according to the custom of those days. The then Hindu Society had kept no way open to purify a convert by some form of atonement for the sin of contamination and conversion. Although, by the time of the Muslim advance up to Punjab, the number of Hindu converts to Islam had already mounted to hundreds of thousands and although many of them earnestly wished to come back to