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

Millions of Hindus who, for generations, suffered unimaginable pangs did so with unswerving loyalty to their accepted creed. Were they ever happy to boycott an individual for having—although unwillingly and through force —taken water from a Muslim hand or for other such reasons? How can one describe the agonies and pangs of the parents and other relatives at the unavoidable separation of their sons and daughters, of husbands and wives, of brothers and sisters? How many of them might have courted death owing to this extreme grief when they closed their doors on them, simply because they were, although unwillingly and forcibly, converted to Islam? But they suffered all this with the grim determination, viz., त्यजेदेकम् कुलस्यार्थे। ग्रामस्यार्थे कुलत्यजेत् ग्रामं जनपदस्यार्थे। धर्मार्थे पृथवीम् त्यजेत्॥ For the sake of the family, an individual is to be abandoned. For the sake of the village, a family has to be forsaken. For the sake of the state, a village has to be given up as lost, and, for the sake of religion, one should give up the whole world. 465. Should we not therefore be grateful to those Hindus for the unbearable pangs and unimaginable grief they suffered? They were misled into accepting those traditions of various bans as their religious duties, but their loyalty to their religion was unmistaken, unshaken! What was considered to be an antidote turned out to be poison itself! But the object in administering it was to give an antidote, to save the life of the nation! How can we, then forbear writing a word or two of sincere gratitude for the harrowing mental and physical agonies they suffered, with the honest intention of saving their religion? Anti-National illusory Platitudes! 466. An effective way of liquidating the Muslim religious authority could easily have been availed of by the Hindus of those times, if they had but done what the Muslims had been doing in their hundreds of offensives against Hindu states. The Muslims went on slaughtering wholesale the Hindu population. Similarly whenever the Hindus gained an upper hand, they could have retaliated by massacring Muslim population and making the region Muslim-less! Devoid of Muslims! Even their ban on re-purification (शुद्धि) would not have prevented them from doing this. For in doing this, there was no question involved of eating or drinking or of having any dealings with the Muslims.