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

north-western frontier province. Of these people, Vincent Smith says, “The savage invader who worshipped his patron deity Shiva, the God of Destruction, exhibited ferocious hostility against the peaceful Buddhistic cult and remorselessly overthrew the Stupas and Monasteries which he plundered of their treasures.” The Patriotic Vedic Hindus and Treacherous Buddhists 285. In this context, the readers are referred to paragraphs 182 to 209 and 245 to 246 of this book, wherein we have commented on the patriotic spirit of the Vedic Hindus and the treacherous attitude of the Buddhists. In order to vouchsafe this comment of ours, this incident of Mihirgula should be most significant. 286. Even when this Hunnish aggressor Mihirgula had accepted the Vedic cult of God Rudra and brutally oppresed the Buddhists, who had become inveterate enemies of the Vedic Hindus, the latter did not accept his political dominance, nor did they ever join him in his atrocities against their own rivals. In spite of his avowed acceptance of the Vedic cult, Mihirgula was looked upon as a foreign aggressor and as such, a national enemy by the Vedic Hindus. They avowed enmity towards him for the sake of making politically free those regions that had so far gone under his sway. It cannot be denied that even amongst the Vedic Hindus, kings like Kamoj and Jaichand did commit treason earlier or later, but on the whole, the Vedic community had all along been hating the non-Vedic people and had been giving terrible battles for protecting the independence and imperial power of their nation unimpaired. Even the English historians like Smith could not help mentioning, maybe in malicious terms, this strong national feeling of the Vedic people. While stating in general terms that these Vedic Hindus were the born enemies of any foreign political power, trying to subdue the country, he says, “Those foreign tribes, Sakas, Pahlavas and Ionians (Yavanas), at the time, settled in Western India as the lords of a conquered population, were the objects of hostility of the Vedic King Vilivayankur II.... He recovered the losses his kingdom had suffered at the hands of the intruding foreigners and utterly destroyed the power of (the Saka King) Nahapan. The hostility of the Andhra (Vedic) monarch was stimulated by the disgust felt by all the Hindus, and especially by the followers of the Orthodox Brahmanical system of the outlandish foreign barbarians.” 287. It should not surprise the reader if he finds in this observation of Smith, a faint echo of an Englishman’s heartache at his painful experience