An article in the Indian Express from 8th January, 2022 caught my attention. It was titled “Your silence emboldens hate voices: Faculty, students of IIMs to PM”.
16 Professors and 167 students of IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore had signed a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office. It urged PM Modi to steer the country away from “forces that seek to divide us”, and rued, “Your silence, Honourable Prime Minister, emboldens the hate-filled voices and threatens the unity and integrity of our country.”
Almost two years ago, I had also written a letter to the Prime Minister and had attached a draft for a petition to the United Nations with a similar request. I had focused on the contempt and resultant hatred which is inbuilt in the doctrines of Christianity and Islam for Hindus, which I know firsthand since I grew up in one of these religions. Hindus are seen as unbelievers, even though most Hindus are great believers in the Divine, because for those religions, ‘unbelievers’ means those who don’t believe in Christianity or Islam respectively.
Both these religions are divisive because they divide humanity into those who are right and saved by the Almighty, and those who are wrong and will be punished by the Almighty. And they claim that Hindus belong to the second category. For them, Hindus are despicable, sinful idol-worshippers who will suffer for all eternity in hell.
I had argued in my draft that teaching children these claims creates hatred and can lead to hate crimes if not genocide. This is not far-fetched. Genocide was committed in India by Muslim and Christian invaders over the last 1000 years and millions of Hindus were brutally killed for being Hindus.
My latter, of course, would not be talked about because it was not demonising Hindus.
‘The unrelenting, unjust vilification of Hindus and Hindutva (Hindu-ness) by the leftist media in support of these two religions puts Hindus in a dangerous position. Hate speech against a group precedes hate crimes and genocide. It needs to be stopped urgently.’
So when I saw this article in the Indian Express, I was happy that professors and students of the prestigious IIMs may finally have taken up the cause of the unacceptable discrimination of and hatred for Hindus, since there is no doubt that the two exclusive religions, each one of which claims that it alone is true, are divisive forces.
However, while reading the article, I soon realized that those professors and students seem to live in another world. A world that is upside down. Where the victims are the perpetrators and the perpetrators are the victims.
In short, the professors, who drafted the letter believe that Hindus are hate-filled and attack Muslims and Christians. They point to speeches by Sadhus, certain murders and lynching of Muslims by Hindus. Yes, these happened. For example, when Muslims steal cows and villagers go after them. The speech by Sadhus at the Dharma Sabha in Haridwar can be seen as a concerned reaction to equally or more terrible speeches which were made by Muslims and Christians in plenty and which show their intent to wipe out Hindus, but which strangely are not flagged by these professors and students as hateful.
Don’t those signatories of the letter remember for example the Muslim women at the CAA protest in Delhi saying on video that when they are in the majority, they will kill Hindus one by one? Or Waris Pathan, the spokesman for Owaisi, openly challenging Hindus that if the 15 crore Muslims take to the streets, it would be enough to bring the 100 crores of the country down to their knees? Don’t they know that it’s the duty of good Muslims to do Jihad and leave only Muslims on earth and that it’s the duty of good Christians to wipe out belief in “false gods”?
There are umpteen hate-filled speeches against Hindus on the net, not only by Muslims but also by Christians. For example, a priest of the Pentecostal Church in TN asked all members to convert Hindus, so that in 3 years the whole of TN is converted. In the Blessings Magazine of the Baptist Church, the youth is exhorted “India must be converted in this generation.”
Have the signatories forgotten the lynching of the sadhus and their driver in Palghar? Or the many pujaris murdered and their temples desecrated? The many rapes and murders of Hindu girls? Or Ramalingam, a youth from Tamil Nadu, who objected to conversion and many like him for example from RSS?
Do those signatories not know about the history of the last 1000 years? I can’t even attempt to detail the cruelties by Muslims and Christians, as it would need the length of a book. Even in the last 100 years the list is terrible – the Hindu genocide by Moplahs, the ‘Direct Action Day, the partition, the brutalities against Hindus in 1971 in Bangladesh, or in 1990 in Kashmir.
Now, dear students and professors of IIMs, please compare with what Hindus did to Muslims and Christians and have some integrity and honesty. Think of your ancestors who greatly suffered for holding on to their Dharma, and who may have had to open their mouth and humbly receive the spittle of Muslims who rode on horses (I read this and other terrible incidents in ‘Legacy of Jihad’, by Andrew Bostom). Thanks to your ancestors Hindu civilisation still survived, though it has shrunk a lot. In fact, most Muslims in the world had Hindu ancestors, not only in Pakistan and Bangladesh but also in Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan…
It’s really sad that you support those who attack Hindu Dharma and thereby risk making Indian Hindus and possibly yourself in a few decades suffer in similar depraved circumstances, as the unfortunate Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh do.
Your letter says “Our Constitution gives us the right to practice our religion with dignity – without fear, without shame. There is a sense of fear in our country now – places of worship, including churches in recent days, are being vandalised, and there have been calls to take arms against our Muslim brothers and sisters. All of this is carried out with impunity and without any fear of the due process.”
Please introspect. You surely consider yourself highly educated, but there are gaps in your education. Read about the history and about the fundamentals of Hindu Dharma and the fundamentals of those religions which claim that they alone are true and all must follow them. And also read and listen to media with the required discernment.
Then you may come to a more realistic understanding.
