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

them, indicating their fiendish acts against the Hindus, have been read out to litem, they should be blown off from cannon-mouth before the joyful eyes of the thousands of Hindu spectators. A National Homage to the Hindu Martyrs 618. “In the end, this reconversion week should be concluded with a national homage to the report of three volleys of guns from every fort and city of Maharashtra, in honour of the thousands of men and women, who courted martyrdom by leaping into the rivers like the Krishna or the Tungabhadra or in some other ways, because they had no other effective means to save their religion and to escape the direct persecution at the hands of Tipu’s soldiers, when thousands of them surrounded and blockaded whole towns, carrying on wholesale conversions with fire and sword.” The Echoes of Religious Retaliation 619. If at all, the Marathas had dealt such a crushing counter-blow on the Muslim religious front, the echoes and re-echoes of the guns, thundering from every fort in Maharashtra, would not have been heard in the valleys of the Krishna and the Tungabhadra alone; they would also have reverberated throughout the Gangetic, the Indus, nay, far beyond it, the Vakshu (Oxus) river-valleys and the whole of the Muslim world. The barest news, that the Hindus too, had been reconverting the millions of converted Hindus, breaking away the fetters of the ban on reconversion, would have shocked the Muslim world far more fiercely than the report of thousands of guns fired simultaneously, and their very existence would have begun to dwindle. This is not mere historical guesswork but a guarantee of historical probability. 620. But this historical probability remained only a probability! The Hindus never broke the ban on reconversion, nor did they allow it to be broken. Naturally, the Islamic religious dominance in India could not be overthrown. 621. The virus of the caste-differences caused by birth had already permeated the whole blood-system of the Hindu society long before any Muslim aggressor could come to India. Perpetual Muslim atrocities aggravated its effects all the more, and the Hindu Society lost its original susceptibility to change, its expansionism, its ability to absorb newer elements and its strong inclination to retaliation even in the religious field. How could the Hindu leaders, then, hit back the Muslim foreigners or absorb them in their Hindu Society?