Facts without Comment

Many a good-natured Hindu simpleton is heard to ejaculate with a prudish air: ‘How can this be? I don’t think the Mahomedan proselytising campaign is so bad as your comments suggest. Facts would certainly belie them!’ If they would, none would be gladder than we. But friends, don’t you see that between us, the comment which is decidedly based on a mere ‘I think’, a mere silly hope that hopes against hope, is the only comment that you just passed on my comments? For, my comments are avowedly not based on a mere ‘I think’. But your remark that want only asserts ‘facts would certainly belie them’ is certainly belied by facts, for it is confessedly guilty of being based on no more solid a foundation than a hollow ‘would’. Is it not your business also, Oh good friend, to leave your cosy corner and gather facts for yourselves, if only to prove my comments false? What right have you to demand facts from me alone? Why don’t you bring out your facts which you say would certainly belie my comments? But, although, you have no right to dub my comments as certain to be belied by facts without citing a single fact to support your own, nevertheless, I have determined to treat you with an unalloyed dose of facts and facts alone for which you so dreadfully thirst but to get at which, you would not stretch out your lazy hand so much as an inch further. I hope your green opium dreams would not be disturbed even by this strong dose. We cite only those reports that come of the papers published during this current month alone. If all reports that the press had reported of Mahomedan campaign of conversion during the last four years are to be cited, a volume would not suffice. So, we call only a few of them and only out of those which happened within the last month alone. Mr. Vilas Rai Dal reports from Sambhar: ‘Ever since the Hasan Nizami scheme has begun its nefarious activity, several Hindus have been converted to Mohamedanism. Almost every Mohamedan down to the street urchins are ever on the lookout for a helpless or unprotected Hindu that they might hammer upon and entangle him in their net. Only very recently, they caught hold of two Brahmin women and made them Mohamedans. One Hindu preacher opposed them. But as the chief officer as well as lower ones are Moslems, they soon intimidated him into silence. The Moslem shopkeepers, those who visit Hindu ladies for selling glass bangles, Moslem servants in Hindu houses—all try to seduce or kidnap boys and girls and