Excerpted from a longer article.
Billy Rojas
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Was there an Islamic genocide of Hindus ?
Koenraad Elst
Belgian historian / University of Leuven
Hindus suffered ...attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the
Pakistani Army killed 1 to 3 million people, with Hindus as their most wanted
target. This fact is strictly ignored in most writing about Hindu-Muslim
relations, in spite (or rather because) of its serious implication that even
the
lowest estimate of the Hindu death toll in 1971 makes Hindus by far the most
numerous victims of Hindu-Muslim violence in the post-colonial period. It is
significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death
toll has been attempted: The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes
all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims.
Nandan Vyas ("Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan", Young India, January 1995)
has argued convincingly that the number of Hindu victims in the 1971 genocide
was approximately 2.4 million, or about 80%. In comparing the population
figures for 1961 and 1971, and taking the observed natural growth rhythm into
account, Vyas finds that the Hindu population has remained stable at 9.5
million
when it should have increased to nearly 13 million (13.23 million if the
same growth rhythm were assumed for Hindus as for Muslims). Of the missing 3.5
million people (if not more), 1.1 million can be explained: it is the number
of Hindu refugees settled in India prior to the genocide. The Hindu refugees
at the time of the genocide, about 8 million, all went back after the ordeal,
partly because the Indian government forced them to it, partly because the
new state of Bangladesh was conceived as a secular state; the trickle of Hindu
refugees into India only resumed in 1974, when the first steps towards
islamization of the polity were taken. This leaves 2.4 million missing Hindus
to be
explained. Taking into account a number of Hindu children born to refugees
in India rather than in Bangladesh, and a possible settlement of 1971 refugees
in India, it is fair to estimate the disappeared Hindus at about 2 million.
During the Islamic conquests in India, it was a typical policy to single out
the Brahmins for slaughter, after the Hindu warrior class had been bled on
the battlefield. Even the Portuguese in Malabar and Goa followed this policy in
the 16th century, as can be deduced from Hindu-Portuguese treaty clauses
prohibiting the Portuguese from killing Brahmins.
In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for slaughter
and the women and children for slavery or concubinage.
Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic conquerors,
e.g. when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in 712 CE. Thus,
in
Multan, according to the Chach-Nama, "six thousand warriors were put to
death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves". This is
why
Rajput women committed mass suicide to save their honour in the face of the
imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g. 8,000 women immolated
themselves during Akbar's capture of Chittorgarh in 1568 (where this most
enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants). During the Partition
pogroms and
the East Bengali genocide, mass rape of Hindu women after the slaughter of
their fathers and husbands was a frequent event.
...The mass killing of Hindus by Muslims rarely took place in peacetime, but
typically in the fervour immediately following military victories, e.g. the
fall of the metropolis of Vijayanagar in 1565 was "celebrated" with a general
massacre and arson. Once Muslim power was established, Muslim rulers sought
to exploit and humiliate rather than kill the Hindus, and discourage rebellion
by making some sort of compromise. Not that peacetime was all that peaceful,
for as Fernand Braudel wrote in A History of Civilizations (Penguin
1988/1963, p.232-236), Islamic rule in India as a "colonial experiment" was
"extremely violent", and "the Muslims could not rule the country except by
systematic
terror. Cruelty was the norm -- burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or
impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way
for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an
uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the
countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as
slaves."
Though all these small acts of terror added up to a death toll of genocidal
proportions, no organized genocide of the Holocaust type took place. One
constraint on Muslim zeal for Holy War was the endemic inter-Muslim warfare
and
intrigue (no history of a royal house was bloodier than that of the Delhi
Sultanate 1206-1525), another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of Islamic
law in India. This is the only one among the four law schools in Sunni Islam
which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, dis-empowered third-class citizens
paying a special tax for the favour of being tolerated; the other three
schools
of jurisprudence ruled that Pagans, as opposed to Christians and Jews, had
to be given a choice between Islam and death.
Staggering numbers also died as collateral damage of the deliberate
impoverishment by Sultans like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir. As Braudel put it:
"The
levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was
enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at
a
time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors'
opulence."
There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands
of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers
suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent,
Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the
Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in
central
India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum
goal whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus; and they were only a
third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the
raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North
India
by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi
Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were
fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the
Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be
hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to
India is yet to start in right earnest.
Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian schoolbooks and
the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British
period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the
primary
sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called negationism.
The really daring negationists don't just deny the crimes against Hindus, they
invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is routinely
alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality, Buddhist
monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule, but their thousands
of
monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.
Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of en
slavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad
and
Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of hardship,
e.g.
the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian mountain", was renamed Hindu Kush,
"Hindu-killer", when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a
hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia.
Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his
journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter,
while
in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each". Hindu slaves were
converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they
swelled the
numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the
Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of Hindus
enslaved
by Islam.
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