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

Whichever virtue is adopted thoughtlessly and without regard to the time, place and person is corrupted and rotten, and, like putrefied food, becomes poisonous. 429-430. Every Hindu seems to have been made to suck, along with his mother’s milk, this nectar-like advice that religious tolerance is a virtue. But nobody never explains to him the essence of that precept. If that alien religion is also tolerant of our own religion, our tolerance towards it can be a virtue. But the Muslim and the Christian religions, which boldly proclaim it to be their religious duty to destroy most cruelly the Hindu religion and to eradicate from the face of this earth the kafirs and the heathens, can never be described as tolerant of other religions. In respect of these intolerant foreign religions, the very extremely enraged intolerance, which seeks to retaliate their atrocities with super-atrocious reprisals, itself becomes a virtue! 431. Even if we were to restrict our discussion to the period under discussion, it will be seen that every Muslim aggressor went on demolishing Hindu temples at Mathura and Kashi (Benares). The most sacred idols in the various magnificent shrines from all over India right upto Rameshwaram were not only purposely taken to the Muslim capitals like Delhi and plastered into the portal steps of their royal palaces, but, for the sole purpose of hurting the feelings of the Hindus and insulting them, they were also used as the slabs and tiles for lavatories, water-closets, and urinals. To be tolerant towards those Muslims who called these and many other atrocities their religious duty, is the very negation of virtue, its sacrilegious perversion! Nay, for the Hindus to show such tolerance was the greatest sin to be punished in Hell! But the Hindus committed this very sin under the name of virtue! Even after overthrowing the various Muslim powers, i.e. even when the Hindus had acquired political ascendancy, they did not destroy the various masjids at Kashi (Benares), Mathura or Rameshwaram, nor did they use their ruins as tiles for the various building constructions along roads. At the most, the Hindus reconstructed and renovated their old temples which were raised to the ground by the Muslims. They did nothing more! On the contrary, there are astonishing instances of grant of new lands for their maintenance and assurance of protection of the masjids, which had been built by the Muslim aggressors, by the Hindu powers. In this connection, one stray instance can be cited to show the confusion of the then Hindu thought. It affords a shameless