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

Hinduism, this social ostracism of the converts was so very persistent with the ban on eating food from persons of another caste, the ban on inter-caste marital relations and the others, that it was at once accepted by the leaders of the Hindu Society without any thought about the consequences. Naturally, this ban on the repurification and adoption of the converts back to Hinduism, also automatically grew into a new fetter and instead of checking the foreign religious aggression, it hampered the progress of Hinduism itself. Ban of Ostracism and self-seeking Converts 403. Well, it would have been quite proper and necessary to ostracize those opportunists among the Hindus, who had taken to Islam for their selfish ends, for power, or for avenging their private grudge against their own fellow men; for they had willingly severed all connections with the Hindu people, and no good could be served by readmitting these sinful people into the Hindu Society. But what, if they should later on, sincerely repent for this sinful act of theirs! This irrevocable ban did immeasurable wrong to those unfortunate tens and hundreds of thousands who, fearing social boycott, would never have dreamt of going over to Islam but who were absolutely unable and helpless to face the atrocities of the Muslim onslaught. For these miserable and forlorn thousands and for their offsprings, at least, there should have been some hope of redemption! 404. Again, the self-seeking opportunists, who willingly went over to Islam were much too limited in number. Precisely for this very reason, it seems extremely tragic that this punitive measure of ostracism fell like a bolt from the blue on the helpless victims of the avalanche-like Muslim religious aggression, doing not the least harm to the real perpetrators of the crime. As it were, it was insult added to injury. They were already wriggling with excruciating agony at the loss of their religion and were even prepared to court death by way of atonement and yet, they were irretrievably condemned to permanent damnation, were never again to be received by their own parents, their husbands and sons and all their relatives, as their own. The very flesh of their flesh and the blood of their blood were now complete strangers to them, at least in this world! A Strange Justice 405. While thus mercilessly penalising these innocent victims, the Hindus could not only do no harm to the malevolent and atrocious Muslim invaders

with their counter-stroke of ostracism, but, on the contrary, helped them directly and enormously in their work of proselytization! 406-407. Unlike the armed vigilance that was necessary for hundreds of years to keep the converted Christians, Jews and other peoples of the west, tied down to the Muslim faith, the work of proselytization in India necessitated a day's labour for the Muslims. If once at the time of a battle, or an armed aggression on cities and villages, they took the trouble of defiling thousands of men and women either by food, drink or rape or mere association, the responsibility of keeping them in the Muslim fold for generations together was shouldered by the Hindus, as if it was a religious duty of their own! Thus worked the punitive measure of ostracism, serving the best interests of the enemy, whom it sought to counteract. 408. But the conversion of one Hindu to the Islamic faith meant the transformation of a man into a demon, the metamorphosis of a God into a Satan! This was the unpleasant reality of the cataclysmal Hindu-Muslim wars! How this demonization of the Hindus took place, is briefly shown in paragraphs 379 and 380. 409. Even then, the Hindu society turned a deaf ear and blind eye to this reality! To speak broadly, it can be safely said, that the Muslims had never to worry about the converts ever going back to their own religion, for they were convinced that the Hindus would never accept them! 410. The Hindus could never clearly distinguish the change of caste from the change of religion. 411. For instance, if a Vaishya had an illicit exchange of food or matrimonial relations with one of a lower Hindu caste, say a Shimpi (a tailor), a Bhandari (a brewer), or someone else, he was excommunicated from his caste. Similarly, if a Hindu had perforce to take food, or drink water with a sinful (in their opinion) non-Hindu or if he or his wife was defiled or raped, and so had to live with the Muslims, he was banished not only by his own caste but even by the lowliest caste of the Hindus. It means the casting out of a Hindu from one caste, for having the so-called illicit relations with another, was considered on a par with the casting out of another from the whole of the Hindu society for similar reason! The fundamental national difference between the two, which in the long run was to affect, adversely and horribly, the numerical superiority of the Hindus, altogether escaped their notice.

412. An exile from any one caste of the Hindus never lost his Hindu society nor his Hindu religion; he could merge in any one of the many other Hindu castes or could form a new caste of similar outcastes. But this new caste of such outcastes formed an integral part of the Hindu society. There was a change of caste but never a change of religion—nor even a change of society. Why then speak of a change of nationality? The above-mentioned Vaishya, for instance, lost his Vaishya caste, but his being a Hindu remained unimpaired. Naturally, this sort of banishment from one caste to the other in the Hindu society, never caused any numerical loss to it.
413. Only one extract from the many ‘Tavarikhs’ (histories) written by various Muslim writers should serve as a sample to show how miserable the Hindu converts were! 415-417. Of the hundreds of Hindus taken as slaves and sent to Persia, Turan (Turkey) and Arabia, at the time of the invasions of Mahmud Ghazni, some could give the slip, individually or in groups, and would run away to Punjab, which because of the staunch Hindu resistance, remained the extreme limit of Muslim domination for over a century or so after Mahmud Ghazni. Thereafter, these runaway Hindu converts would escape even from Punjab and enter the neighbouring Hindu states of Rajputana for shelter, and were glad at heart that they were at last free from the Muslim clutches and that they would live happily in Hindu families, in their own temples and in their own society!
414. But when, according to the same custom, a Hindu, banished because of some sort of (so-called) illicit contact with any Muslim, would cease to be a Hindu altogether, and as thousands of such Hindu men and women were, often enough being converted under coercion by the Muslim aggressors, and as they were all without any exception, thrown out of the Hindu society, it was the Hindu society that suffered huge numerical losses year after year!
415. But alas! they were grossly disappointed because of the ban on reconversion and rehabilitation of these caste-outs! These groups of runaway Hindu converts would come to these Hindu states only to find that not only their own, but no other Hindu state was prepared to accept them in their fold. If at all they wished to live in the Hindu states, these men and women of the runaway shelter-seeking groups had to live as Muslims alone! Later on, when after a century or so, the Muslim armies began to make successful expeditions upto Delhi and central India, they were very much

surprised to see these people still living in these Hindu states as Muslims. If any such group or community of the Hindus were found to be existing in the Muslim states, it could never have been allowed to live as a Hindu community any longer! For, by force or by craft, it would have been converted to Islam. This was the experience of the Muslims! This was the Muslim religion! 419. Here, however, in Hindu states, the Hindus who were converted much against their will and who were willing to come back to the Hindu society, and to live as none else but the Muslims, because of the ban on their re-orientation! This was the Hindu Religion! 420. What wonder then, if in an unequal war, the Muslims defiled with craft or coercion, millions of Hindus, and thus inflicted immeasurable numerical loss to the Hindu nation. The greatest wonder, however, is how this loss was limited to this much alone! ❑

Perverted Conception of Virtues 421-422. Besides the silly superstitions of the Hindus about the caste- system, the various bans on exchange of food and drink, redemption of the outcastes and others, of which we have already written fully, and which had done tremendously more harm than the two-pronged religio-political Muslim offensive had done, another suicidal morbidity had completely possessed the Hindu mind for a long time. This morbidity paralysed their own offensive and counter-offensive might. Far greater than the Muslims could ever attempt, were the defeats inflicted on themselves by these morbidly virtuous Hindus! If a comparatively mild term is to be used for this infatuation—this mental imbalance of the Hindus, which caused disastrous losses for themselves—we have to call it a perverted sense of Hindu virtues. 423. In fact, virtues or vices are only relative terms. No virtue can be unqualified and absolute under every circumstance or at every place. Be it said briefly, that in practice or in ethical code, a virtue should be called a virtue only to the extent it is useful to the best interests of human society. And the moment it begins to cause harm to mankind, it should be considered a vice and as such discarded forthwith. 424. Some qualities at least are divided into three parts: Satwik (mild, gentle), Rajas (passionate) and Tamas (irascible, irritable); and even these should be viewed with reference to the peculiar conditon of time, place and person. The Hindu civilization had the noblest ambition of raising Man to the status of God and as such, it went in for an all-out attempt to inculcate and cultivate with assiduous care, these gentle qualities in him. But this worldly existence is not woven with one thread alone; its texture shows at least three different threads: the gentle, the passionate and the irritable. It is precisely for this reason that if a man, whosoever he may be, wishes to live in this world, wants to win or at least does not intend to be vanquished by others, or does not want to see injustice triumph over him, he must have a three-edged weapon, which could successfully face these three-fold qualities. But at this time of the Hindu-Muslim war, the Hindu nation forgot even the Bhagwat Geeta, which preached the relative, and not absolute, values of these virtues. Why, they even twisted the message of the Bhagwad Geeta itself. The quintessence of the Bhagwat Geeta is the consideration of

the fine distinction between man and man—of which the Hindus of those times seem to be divinely oblivious. 425. Of course, it must be remembered that all this argument applies generally and collectively to the Hindu polity made up of hundreds of millions of people, but it must also be remembered that there were to come to life, from time-to-time, thousands of exceptional groups of men and brave societies of dauntless people, who opposed this perversely virtuous Hindu society in order to bring about a social revolution. They will be referred to at their proper places. 426-427. To let go the vanquished and abjectly surrendering enemy, is said to be a virtue in some religious books; so enemies like the ungrateful Mohammed Ghori and the Rohila Najibkhan were set free. And what did they do in return for this noble act of the Hindus? The first brutally murdered his former benefactor, Prithviraj Chauhan, while the second conspired against the very Marathas, who let him go alive and brought about their unprecedented destruction at Panipat. Having only learnt by rote the maxim, to give food to the hungry and water to the thirsty is a virtue, the Hindus went on giving milk to the vile poisonous cobras and vipers! Even while the Muslim demons were demolishing Hindu temples and breaking to pieces their holiest of idols like Somnath, they never wrecked their vengeance upon those wicked Muslims, even when they had golden opportunities to do so, nor did they ever take out a single brick from the walls of masjids, because their religious teachers and priests preached the virtue of not inflicting pain on the offender: ‘Never pay the tormentor in his own coin but bear the torments meekly and be patient that God will punish him.’ दिघलें दुःख पराने उसने फेडू नयेचि सोसावें। शिक्षा देव तयाला करील म्हणुनि उगेच बैसावें॥ 428. The vilest of vices recorded in the catalogues of the religious texts could never have been more detrimental to the welfare of mankind, more harmful to the national interests and so, more detestable than such virtues as give rise to horrible atrocities and the greatest of sins. Naturally, whoever cultivates and lives upto such virtues thoughtlessly and foolishly and with slavish adherence to the religious texts, and also with fanatic obstinacy, is bound to perish individually and bring about disaster of the nation he lives. These qualities are not virtues; they are virtues distorted in the extreme.

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

exhibition of the perverted virtue of the Hindus, which makes any further discussion in this regard absolutely unnecessary! 432-433. After Mahmud of Ghazni demolished the temple of Somnath for the first time, it was rebuilt several times by the Hindus and destroyed by the Muslim conquerors as many times! Once, when a powerful Hindu king established his power in that region, he rebuilt it with all pomp and ceremony, and under his able guidance, the land also prospered. This Hindu ruler should have, in fact, debarred from entering into the Indian waters any Arab traders, who used the Indian ports in this region of Sindh as watering and fuelling stations on their way to the distant eastern and southern parts of India. For, the Hindus often had the bitter experience of the Arab armies and navies following these traders by sea. But in order to exhibit his religious tolerance and generosity, this Hindu ruler not only did not stop these Arabian traders from visiting the Indian coast, but treated them with such great deal of hospitality that they might feel quite at home there. Naturally, these Arabic traders, actuated whether by political trickery or by religious pride, thought of building by way of a challenge, as it were, a masjid just in front of the Somnath Temple, rebuilt by the Hindu kafirs. But under the circumstances, then prevalent there, they could not do so by force or bravado. Hence, with their usual craft, they applied in the most courteous and humble words to the King for permission to build the masjid. And O what wonder! That gullible Hindu King consented to it most willingly, and up rose the new masjid challenging the Somnath Temple. As a matter of fact, considering the highly miserable state to which the Temple of Somnath was reduced by Mahmud of Ghazni and others, that Hindu King should have wiped out of existence all the masjids, without exception, as soon as he conquered the land and then and then alone, could he have restored the Somnath Temple to its original glory. But instead of destroying the existing masjids he permitted a new one to be built up and bestowed an annuity on it for its maintenance. For this suicidal-religious tolerance (perversion of a virtue again!), he had very soon to pay dearly; because when after some time, the brutal forces of Alla-ud-Din and other Muslim aggressors attacked Gujrat and killed thousands of Hindu men and raped as many Hindu women, and pulled down hundreds of Hindu temples and marched straight towards Somnath, how did these Arabs and their descendants repay the religious tolerance of the Hindu King, who allowed the Arabian traders to build the said masjid? Did they allow the restored Somnath Temple to

remain unmolested in return for the obligation of the Hindus—even if it were to tantalize the Hindu gullibility and simplicity? No! The Muslim armies battered the Temple to pieces once again, and outdid Mahumud of Ghazni in taking away the sacred idol and the slab inside this temple to Delhi and made them fit nicely into the pedestal for a masjid there. 434. Once again, when Hindu power was established in the region, Hindu temples rose up and once more, the Muslims like Sultan Ahmed Shah, ravaged the land with their usual religious ferocity and harassed the Hindus there with wholesale massacres, rapes, arson and other incendiary activities. Thousands of Hindus were taken prisoners and were sold as slaves in foreign countries. Somnath remained a heap of rubble, but the notorious masjid grew in importance. Besides the old masjids, which were preserved and raised to greater glory by the Hindu rulers, the Muslim rulers built taller and more spacious mosques. 435. It was this confused religious thought, the distorted sense of virtues and the blind religious tolerance, that culminated in the religious suicide of the Hindus. How many more incidents may one cite, which came off century-after-century at every place right from Kashimir to Rameshwaram, in the face of Muslim aggression? Still, one more instance may be narrated here to show the perversion of another virtue by the Hindus; generosity— misplaced genorosity! 435A. Siddharaj Jaysinh (1096-1143 A.D.) was a valiant king of Anhilwad in Gujarat. He had also a very keen sense of justice. But he was a Hindu king! He was deluded by the absolute values, without any regard to time, place or person of all the virtuous ideologies about justice and injustice, according to his own and the alien religion and especially generosity and large-heartedness! Once during his reign, there was some dispute between the Hindus and the Muslims near Cambay (Khambayat). Writes Muhammad Ufi—himself a Muslim writer—in his book Jami‘-ul- Hikayat. 436. “In the reign of King Jai Singh, there was a mosque and a minaret from which the summons to prayers was cried out. The fire-worshipers instigated an attack on the Musalmans, and the minaret was destroyed, the mosque burnt down and eighty Musalmans were killed...” A certain Muhammadan, a Khatib or a reader of the Khutba, by name Khatib ‘Ali’, escaped and fled to Nahrwala. None of the courtiers of the Rai paid any attention to him or rendered him any assistance. Having learnt that the Rai

was going out to hunt, Khatib ‘Ali’ sat down behind a tree in the forest and awaited the Rai’s arrival. When the Rai reached the spot, Khatib Ali stood up and implored the former to stop the elephant and listen to the latters’s complaint. He then placed in his hand a “Kasida”, which he had composed in Hindi verse stating the whole case. The Rai having heard this complaint, placed Khatib Ali under the charge of a servant, ordering him to take care of him... Later disguising himself in tradesman’s dress, the Rai entered the city (of Khambayat) and stayed a short time in different places in the market-place, making enquiries as to the truth of Khatib Ali’s complaint. He then learnt that the Musalmans were oppressed and were slain without any grounds The next day, he held a court. He said it was his duty to see that all his subjects were afforded such protection as would enable them to live in peace. He then gave orders that two leading men from each class of infidels —Brahmins, fire worshippers (sometimes applied to Buddhists) and others —should be punished. He gave one lac Balotras to enable the Musalmans to rebuild the mosque and the minarets. He also gave some clothes to Khatib.” Muhammad ‘Ufi: Jami’-ul-Hikayat, Elliot HIED Vol. II Pp. 162-163). 437. This Raja Jayasingh had gone on a foot pilgrimage to the rejuvenated temple of Somnath and was a devotee of Shiva and had implicit faith in the Hindu religion. Probably, because for this very reason, place of driving the inveterate and crafty Muslim enemies out of his own kingdom or instead of reconverting them to Hinduism, even if by means of force, he had the masjids—the masjids of those Muslims who had reduced to mere rubble, not only the temple of Somnath but hundreds of other temples in Gujarat and thousands in other parts of India—rebuilt at the cost of the Hindus, and offered them a special protection according to his Hindu creed of religious tolerance and generosity! 438. Was it ever possible for the Hindus under Mahmud of Ghazni or Muhammad Ghori or for those in the domain of the Sultan, who had gone on killing the Hindus and ravaging their lands—was it ever possible for them to complain to any Muslim governor of the land against the destruction of their own temples? (Let alone the appeal for the restoration of such a demolished temple!) To complain in such a way would itself have amounted to a very grave offence of the kafirs, according to the Muslim religious code, and for this very offence, every one of the Hindu men and women would have been sold in Kabul or Kandhar as wretched slaves. But such treacherous and dangerous Muslims were allowed by the Hindu kings

to live in large colonies, and were treated with special honour in order to bolster up their creed of religious tolerance. And in thousands of cases during the long period of Hindu-Muslim war, these very minority Muslims who had been living as refugees in the Hindu states, never failed to rebel or sabotage the Hindu war-efforts, as soon as there was any foreign Muslim invasion. Even while they were seeing all these treacherous activities of the Muslims, the Hindu kings went on practising and committing to their memory the precepts of religious tolerance and large-heartedness, in utter disregard of the proper place, time or person and, of course, they fell as miserable victims. This is verily the distortion of virtue itself! The Grave Danger of the Muslim Abduction and Pollution of Millions of Hindu Women 439. One side-issue of the Muslim religious aggression, which caused a continuous drain on the numerical superiority of the Hindus, was the diabolic Muslim faith that it was a religious duty of every Muslim to kidnap and force their own religion into non-Muslim women. This incited their sensuality and lust for carnage and while it enormously increased their number, it affected the Hindu population in an inverse proprotion. To hesitate to acknowledge this hard fact under the guise of politeness, is simply a puerile self-deception. This abduction of thousands and millions of Hindu women by the Muslims is not such a trifling thing as to be dispensed with, by calling it religious fanaticism or simply by conniving at it. Even if it were a madness, there was a method in it! And the method in this Muslim madness was so horrible, that with the mistaken Hindu neglect of this so- called religious fanaticism, the Hindu nation came to have a perpetual bleeding sore. For, as a matter of fact, the religious fanaticism of the Muslims was not madness at all; it was an effective method of increasing the Muslim population with special regard to the unavoidable laws of nature. 440. The same law of nature is instinctively obeyed by the animal world. If in the cattle-herds, the number of oxen grows in excess of the cows, the herds do not grow numerically in a rapid manner. But, on the other hand, the number of animals in the herds, with the excess of cows over the oxen, grows in mathematical progression. The same is true of man, for at the core, man is essentially an animal. Even in the pre-historic times, the so-called wild tribes of the forest-dwellers knew this law quite well. The African wild tribes of today kill only the males from amongst their enemies, whenever

there are tribal wars, but not the females who are eventually distributed by the victor tribes among themselves. To obtain from them future progeny to increase their numbers, is considered by these tribes to be their sacred duty! It is said of at least one of the Naga tribes that when they attack an enemy, they shoot simple unpoisoned arrows at the males, but if any women are seen fighting on the enemy side, highly envenomed arrows are used to kill them instantly. For they argue, to kill one woman who cannot be captured alive is as good as to kill five men. 441. This very natural law was adopted and obeyed openly by the aggressive but numerically poor African Muslim armies and their chiefs while attacking the major populations of North Africa. On conquering those kafirs, the ransom that was collected was calculated in terms of money and women in equal share, and these women, collected as ransom, were distributed by fives or tens amongst the most faithful followers of Islam. The future progeny of these conquered women was born Muslim and so amongst the Muslim environments became literally fanatical. The Muslim chiefs who thus multiplied their numbers rapidly were honoured as ‘Ghazis’ by the religious authorities. The law of the Muslim religious warfare granted the victorious Muslim army every right to own the kafir women as completely as their other movable or immovable property. 442-443. After Ravan abducted Seeta and Shree Ramchandra marched on him, some of his well-wishers advised the demon king, just before the war, that because of his unjust act, the demon kingdom was threatened with a terrible war and that he should send Seeta back to her husband, because it was highly irreligious to kidnap her. “What?” cried the wrathful Ravan. “To abduct and rape the women folk of the enemy, do you call it irreligious? Pooh; Pooh!” — राक्षसानाम् परोधर्मः परदाराविघर्षणम् (To carry away the women of others and to ravish them is itself the supreme religious duty of the Rakshasas.) ‘Parodharmah’, the greatest duty! 444. With this same shameless religious fanaticism, the aggressive Muslims of those times considered it their highly religious duty to carry away forcibly the women of the enemy side, as if they were commonplace property, to ravish them, to pollute them and to distribute them to all and sundry, from the Sultan to the common soldier and to absorb them completely in their fold. This was considered a noble act, which increased their number.

445. In every province where the Muslim rule established itself, the Sultan, the Nawabs and the Nizams—why even the meanest of Muslim officers in every town and village therein, levied on the Hindu population not only the Jazia tax for collecting wealth; but also the heinous tax of demanding openly the daughters and even married ladies from the Hindu royal families and others of high rank, and even carried them away forcibly and openly.
446. After Sindh, the Arabs did not attempt another invasion of India, yet the Arab bands did come here along with other Muslim armies, and like these Arabs, all those newly converted people like the Persians (Iranians), the Turanians, the Afghans, the Turks, the Moghuls and others fell on India with all the ferocity at their command. Obviously, they had not brought their millions of womenfolk along with them. But all those from the Sultans to the common soldiers, as a rule, began to settle down here with the kidnapped Hindu women, whom they either married or simply kept as their concubines. Let alone the vast numbers of Hindu women of high as well as low ranks, who led the most ignoble of lives in the harems of the Emperors, Sultans or Nawabs, but almost every Muslim kept at least three or four such forcibly pulluted women. Thus, women in this aggressive Muslim community came to be more numerous than men, and polygamy being an accepted practice sanctioned by their religion, these foreign Muslim communities began to grow rapidly year-after-year, from a few thousands to millions and more.
447. An interesting point to note is that Sultan Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlak, Sultan Shikandar, Sultan Phiroz-Shah Tughlak and many other devilish Hindu-haters were born of Hindu mothers! Muslim Women too played their Devilish part in the Molestation and Harassment of the Hindu Women
448. Hindu women were considered kafirs and born slaves. So these Muslim women were taught to think it their duty to help in all possible ways, their molestation and forcible conversion to Islam. No Muslim woman, whether a begum or a beggar, ever protested against the atrocities committed by their male compatriots. On the contrary, they encouraged them to do so and honoured them for it. A Muslim woman did everything in her power to harass such captured or kidnapped Hindu women. Not only in the troubled times of war, but even in the intervening periods of peace and even when they themselves lived in the Hindu kingdoms, they enticed and

carried away young Hindu girls, locked them up in their own houses or conveyed them to the Muslim centres in masjids and mosques. The Muslim women all over India considered it their holy duty to do so. The Hindu Chivalry towards Enemy Women 449. The Muslim women never feared retribution or punishment at the hands of any Hindu for their heinous crime. They had a perverted idea of woman chivalry. If in a battle the Muslims won, they were rewarded for such crafty and deceitful conversions of Hindu women; lull even if the Hindus carried the field and a Hindu power was established in that particular place (and such incidents in those times were not very rare) the Muslim men alone, if at all, suffered the consequential indignities but the Muslim women—never! Only Muslim men, and not women, were taken prisoners. Muslim women were sure that even in the thick of battles, and in the confusion wrought just after then, neither the victor Hindu chiefs, nor any of their common soldiers, nor even any civilian would ever touch their hair. For, albeit enemies and atrocious, they were women! Hence, even when they were taken prisoner in battles, the Muslim women—royal ladies as also the commonest slaves—were invariably sent back safe and sound to their respective families! Such incidents were common enough in those times. And this act was glorified by the Hindus as their chivalry towards the enemy women and the generosity of their religion! For a sample, read the following incidents. 450. Even now we proudly refer to the noble acts of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Chimaji Appa, when they honourably sent back the daughter-in-law of the Muslim Governor of Kalyan and the wife of the Portuguese governor of Bassein respectively. But is it not strange that, when they did so, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chimaji Appa should ever remember, the atrocities and the rapes and the molestation, perpetrated by Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Alla-ud-din Khilji and others, on thousands of Hindu ladies and girls like the princesses of Dahir, Kamaldevi, the wife of Karnaraj of Karanwati and her extremely beautiful daughter, Devaldevi. Did not the plaintive screams and pitiful lamentations of the millions of molested Hindu women, which reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country, reach the ears of Shivaji Maharaj and Chimaji Appa? 451. The souls of those millions of aggrieved women might have perhaps said, “Do not forget, O, your Majesty, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and O!

Your Excellency, Chimaji Appa, the unutterable atrocities and oppression and outrage committed on us by the Sultans and Muslim noblemen and thousands of others, big and small. Let those Sultans and their peers take a fright that in the event of a Hindu victory, our molestation and detestable lot shall be avenged on the Muslim women. Once they are haunted with this dreadful apprehension, that the Muslim women, too, stand in the same predicament in case the Hindus win, the future, Muslim conquerors will never dare to think of such molestation of Hindu women.” 451A. But because of the then prevalent perverted religious ideas about chivalry to women, which ultimately proved highly detrimental to the Hindu community, neither Shivaji Maharaj nor Chimaji Appa could do such wrong to the Muslim women. 452. It was the suicidal Hindu idea of chivalry to women, which saved the Muslim women (simply because they were women) from the heavy punishments of committing indescribable sins and crimes against the Hindu women. Their womanhood became their shield, quite sufficient to protect them. 453. Still worse was the ridiculous idea, which the Hindus of those times entertained, that it was a sin to convert a Muslim woman to Hinduism. They foolishly thought that to have any sort of relations with a Muslim woman meant their own conversion to Islam. Naturally, even in the midst of a Hindu community and the Hindu state, they were secure against any attempt by the Hindus at abducting them or their forcible conversion to Hinduism. Exceptions, however, were very rare. 454. Under these circumstances, the Muslim feminine class [fair (?) sex] was left seraphically free from any chastisement or penalty for their share of the crimes perpetrated against the Hindu woman-world, and their work of enticing and ensnaring the Hindu women and forcing them to accept Islam, went on for hundreds of years, unhampered and unimpeded. But if 455. Suppose, if from the earliest Muslim invasion of India, the Hindus also, whenever they were victors on the battlefields, had decided to pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin or punished them in some other ways, i.e. by conversion even with force and then absorbed them in their fold, then? Then with this horrible apprehension at their heart, they would have desisted from their evil designs against any Hindu lady. If they had taken such a fright in the first two or three centuries, millions and millions of

luckless Hindu ladies would have been saved all their indignities, loss of their own religion, rapes, ravages and other unimaginable persecutions. Our woman-world would not have suffered such a tremendous numerical loss, which means their future progeny would not have been lost permanently to Hinduism, and the Muslim population could not have thrived so audaciously. Without any increase in their womenfolk, the Muslim population would have dwindled into a negligible minority. 456. The sociological explanation for this contention has already been offered in paragraphs 439 to 446. 457. But haunted with the fantastic idea of chivalry to enemy-women and a blind eye to time, place or person, the Hindus of that period never tried to chastise the Muslim womenfolk for their wrongs to Hindu women, even when the former were many a time completely at their mercy. Misplaced Chivalry to Enemy Womenfolk and the Consequent Miserable plight 458. Well, did this misplaced chivalrous idea of the Hindus have any salutary effect on their Muslim foes? Were the latter ever ashamed of their sin of molesting a Hindu woman in view of this Hindu religious generosity and high mindedness? Did the Muslims ever sincerely feel thankful to the Hindus for the safe return of thousands of Muslim women to their own kith and kin? Never! On the contrary, they again and again reciprocated Hindu chivalrous behaviour with the same old treachery and atrocity, and thus held it to ridicule and scorn. 459. On the contrary, the Muslims were puffed up, perhaps with the thought, that if at all the Hindus were to show chivalry to anybody, it should have been to their own Hindu women! It was they who had the first right to such a chivalrous treatment! But if the Hindus could not rescue thousands of their own women who were being abducted, polluted and forced into Islamic religion in their very presence, through centuries, why should the Muslims not ridicule the Hindu chivalrous idea of civility to women, even enemy women? On the contrary, they perhaps thought that the Hindus dared not think of violating or even insulting the Muslim women for fear of horrible reprisals. Thus, they were more likely to misconstrue the Hindu idea of chivalry, than interpret it in the right sense as to have been born of cowardice than of strength and bravery. The Hindus of the Pre-Islamic era never Interpreted Chivalry to Women in this Anti-National silly way

460. A serpent, whether male or female, if it comes to bite must be killed. The enemy women, who enforced conversion and heaped all sort of humiliation on our mothers and sisters, had by that very devilish act, lost their womanhood and their right to chivalrous treatment, and deserved nothing but only the most stringent punishment for their atrocious crimes. Hence, when Tratika, the she-demon marched on Ramchandra with other demons, he killed her immediately, without a moment’s thought. When Shoorpanakha, another she-demon, rushed to eat away Seeta like cucumber, Laxman deprived her of nose and ears and sent her back—not honourably with generous gifts of ornaments, to show off his chivalay to women! When Narakasur carried away thousands of Aryan women to his Asur kingdom (Assyria of today), Shree Krishna marched upon the demon and killed him in the war. But he did not stop with military and political defeat he inflicted on Narakasur! He rescued all the thousands of imprisoned Aryan females, undergoing all sorts of humiliation there and brought them back to his own kingdom; and thus took a social revenge! Shree Krishna’s army did not forsake their kinswomen, simply because they were forcibly polluted and violated—a dastardly thought that he never entertained for a minute. On the contrary, Shree Krishna as the Bhoopati—the Lord of the whole Earth— brought all those sixteen thousand or more women to his kingdom, rehabilitated them honourably and took upon himself, the responsibility of feeding and protecting them. This very act of Krishna, as the Bhoopati has been fantastically construed by the writers of the Puranas as to describe him the husband of those thousands of women. He was later thought to have married all of them.
461. In the post-Puranik period, whenever our valiant and victorious princes vanquished the enemies like the Yavan, Shaka or Hun commandants, kings or emperors on the battlefield, they invariably married the enemy princesses. This seems to have been the tradition prevalent right from Chandragupta Maurya to the Gupta Emperors! Shalivahan kings too married Saka princesses. Not only our victorious kings but all Hindus, right from the Samants (feudatory princes) to common citizens, married unhesitatingly the Yavan, Saka or Hun women. The nation was valiant enough to absorb not only the progeny of those enemy-women, but the whole enemy communities in their own, and leave no trace of their origin behind. Harmful effects of the ban on Purification and Rehabilitation

462. Under the illusion of preserving the purity of their own caste and religion, the Hindu Society of the Islamic era began to enforce as their religious duty, the bans on exchange of food, on inter-caste marriage and other bans, even when they were harmful to the society. In a similar way and for the same reason of protecting the purity of their caste and religion, the ban on re-purification of the converted Hindus and that on sea-faring, began to be enforced most scrupulously and rigidly as religious injunctions. Neither any single Hindu who was converted under coercion, nor even his progeny could ever come back to Hinduism: their sin (?) had no redemption, no salvation. For generations together, the Hindus believed this to be their inviolable religious injunction; with very rare exceptions, every Hindu, from sweeper to Brahmin, from Chhatrapati (the sovereign) to Patrapati (the holder of a parchment), from Shankaracharya (the Religious Head) to Shankhacharya (the prince of blockheads), whether learned or illiterate, held this opinion about the ban on repurification of the converts unanimously and unswervingly from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
463. On account of these very bans, thousands of our Hindu ladies kindled the fires of johar, century-after-century, in order to avoid violation at the hands of the Muslims. To save themselves from this humiliation of violation by enemies, millions others leapt into rivers, lakes and wells, all over the country and destroyed themselves along with their small children at their breasts. Most bravely, did many others die defiantly refusing to be converted to Islam, like Chahatrapati Samabhaji, Guru Teg Bahadur and many of our Sikh gurus like the martyr Bairagi Baba Banda, who kept on defying the Muslims till the last, even when his body was being cut off limb by limb. How can we ever forget this unprecedented martyrdom unless we are ungrateful to them? Few other communities in the history of the world could have sacrificed their lives on such a vast scale or with such severity as did the Hindus! This martyrdom of the Hindus was not altogether futile in respect of saving their religion from the Muslim onslaught. The heroic tales of their martyrdom have been inspiring generations of the nation to offer their life for protecting the religion, and this is not altogether insignificant.
464. Although highly detrimental to the interests of the nation as a whole, and as such deserving the severest of criticism, these various bans like those on exchange of food and sea-voyage and the custom of social ostracism, were all imposed by the Hindus of that period—let it not be forgotten—with the sole noble object of protecting the purity of their caste and creed.

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.

But -! But if not the ban on re-purification, the suicidal Hindu creed of religious tolerance was certainly a major obstacle! From the very ancient times, the Hindus had been boasting of their high ideals of religious tolerance, of the equal status they conceded to all the religions of the world, of preaching the sameness of Ram and Rahim, of allowing every one to follow his own faith! This they considered to be the height of their religion! 467. Instead of massacring en masse the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who from time to time fell in their hands completely vanquished and utterly helpless, in order to avenge the untold wrongs and humiliation heaped by them on the Hindus, the Hindus, in their turn, refrained themselves from doing the Muslims even the slightest harm, because they were in minority and belonged to another religion. On the contrary, the Muslims were allowed to enhance the glory and scope of their own religion without the least possible hindrance. Not only like the Hindu citizens, but even more leniently and with more facilities were the Muslims allowed, by Hindu states of those days, to enjoy the legal rights—a fact that is borne out by pages after pages of Indian history. 468. Is it necessary to add that these 'cow-faced' followers of Hinduism, proud of their utmost tolerance of other religions, were not (in the least) likely to hit back the tiger-faced Muslims on religious grounds? 469. Religious tolerance! A virtue! Yes. It can be a virtue only where the other religion is tolerant of our own! But to tolerate the Muslim religion, the followers of which right from the Sultans like Mahmud of Ghazni and Ghori and others to the various Shahs and Badshahs, thought it their religious obligation to massacre the kafir Hindus to celebrate their accession to the throne, and had been carrying on horrible religious persecution of the Hindus for nearly a thousand years, was tantamount to cut the throat of one's own religion! It was not tolerance towards other religions, it was tolerance of irreligion! It was not even tolerance, it was impotence! But this truth never dawned upon the Hindu society of those days even after the horrible experience of a thousand years or so. They, on their own part, went on tolerating even such a hideous religion as the Islam and considered it a glorious virtue of their own—a special ornament in the crown of the Hindu community! 470. O thou Hindu society! Of all the sins and weaknesses, which have brought about thy fall, the greatest and most potent are thy virtues themselves.