This year, the independence we gained after India’s partition in the name of religion turned 75 years old. However, the threats posed by evangelical faiths, most prominently the virulent strain of Islam known as Islamism, are far from over. Being a Hindu and asserting one’s Hindu roots results in tragically devastating consequences, often resulting in one’s death. And there have been more than 75 Hindus who have endured the grim fate.
For years, the media has worked tirelessly to depict Muslims as largely the victims and Hindus as overwhelmingly the offenders, establishing a false notion among minorities that they are being attacked by ‘fascist’ Hindus with active state cooperation. The grim fact is that Hindus have been disproportionately targeted by hate crimes in India. Hindus have been brutally killed and lynched for speaking out, in riots, especially by Islamists, and in other cases, simply for being Hindus.
They have the ability to attack at any time of day or night. They may enter shops and businesses disguised as customers and conveniently leave after stabbing or beheading the Hindu victim. They sometimes appear disguised in saffron and depart after ruthlessly attacking with sharp weapons. These perpetrators remain disturbingly undisturbed by radical Islam. They sometimes silently wait for their victim, whom they ambush and nonchalantly kill before walking away unfazed. No one is safe, neither sages, saints, nor ordinary Hindus. Neither house nor ashramas.
In the Kandhamal district of Odisha, a well-known and highly respected Hindu Sadhu named Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati was brutally murdered by armed Naxalites and some Christian fanatics in 2008. The tribal-dominated Kandhamal district has long been the hotbed of forced conversions by evangelical organisations. Christian missionaries have been constantly targeting Hindu Sadhus working on the ground to prevent their rampant conversion efforts, with explicit help from Maoists.
Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, an 82-year-old cow-lover Sanyasi who had dedicated his life to the service of the Adivasis in the area, was murdered along with 4 of his associates in the Jalespata Ashram on the day of Janmashtami in 2008, while the Ashram’s devotees were getting ready for the festivities. His body was riddled with bullets and his dead body was brutalised further with sharp weapons by the murderers. The incident had sparked communal riots in the Kandhamal district, where tribal Hindus and Christians clash regularly, with the Naxalites supporting the Christians.
Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati was a Hindu saint. For once we could assume that his love for his religion and habit of chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’, considered a ‘war cry’ by petty Bollywood nerds like Anurag Kashyap and Islamists like Muhammad Zubair, might have triggered the Islamists, but what about Sarbananda Kaul, one of the most secular individuals who used to keep ‘Quran’ with him, yet Islamists murdered him along with his son and hanged him from a tree.
Sarbananda Kaul ‘Premi’ was also a well-known Kashmiri poet, freedom fighter and a famous scholar. He was known for his secular values. Premi wrote in Kashmiri, Urdu, and Hindi. His grasp on Persian was as strong as his hold on Sanskrit. He used to keep a copy of the Quran in his house of worship.
On the evening of 29–30 April 1990, three masked Islamic terrorists entered his home and kidnapped him and his younger son, Virendra Koul. The dead bodies of the father-son duo were found hanging on a tree on 1 May 1990. The Islamists had brutally scrapped off his forehead skin since Kaul regularly applied tilak.
Sarbananda Kaul was elderly. He was past his prime, but what about the ten children who were burnt alive on the Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002?
Twenty years ago, on February 27 2002, an enraged Muslim mob burnt 59 innocent Hindus, including women and children, to avenge the demolition of Mughal-era Babri Masjid Ayodhya. A group of Hindus travelling from Ayodhya in Sabarmati Express were mercilessly burnt alive inside the train by a riotous Muslim mob. The raging mob of over 2,000 people had killed the innocent Hindus for the simple reason that they had visited Ayodhya to perform karseva for the Ram Mandir.
In the more recent incidents, Chandan Gupta was killed in a communal clash that erupted over a flag march in Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh, taken out on Republic Day in the year 2018.
Prashant Poojary (29) a flower merchant was brutally murdered in broad daylight by six men atop two motorcycles who attacked him with sharp weapons at a market in Moodbidri when he was selling flowers as usual. Poojary, believed to be involved with the Bajrang Dal, was actively involved in stopping illegal cow slaughter and transportation.
A 50-year-old newspaper hawker Mannulal Vaishnav was hacked to death by his customer Rafique Khan with an axe in the Kho Nagoriyan area in Jaipur in 2019, after the former urged the latter to clear his long pending dues.
Similarly, a 27-year-old Hindu youth Kishan Bharwad was killed by Islamists on 25th January 2022, merely for being a Hindu. Kishan Bharwad hailed from Dhandhuka in Ahmedabad. He was killed in the morning when he was passing by the Modhwada locality on a two-wheeler. Like other killings by Islamists, the reason behind his murder was that the Muslims claimed he had hurt their religious sentiments and committed “blasphemy”.
Many more Hindus, like Harsha, Umesh Kolhe, Kanhaiyalal, and Praveen Nettaru, have lately become victims of Islamic intolerance. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. In actuality, there is a long list of people in independent India who were murdered solely for being Hindus. All of these Hindus were attempting to bring the Hindu society together. They were assisting anyone who desired ‘gharwapsi’ (revert to Hinduism from Islam or Christianity of their own volition) or for simply wearing their identity on their sleeves. Many of them were selflessly working towards cow protection. None of them deserved to die, yet they were hacked to death just because they were Hindus.
Kala Devi, 70, was murdered while lighting a lamp at home to symbolise support for India’s fight against the global corona pandemic.
M Lavanya, a 12th-grade student, was told that if she wanted to study, she should convert to Christianity or clean the toilet. She couldn’t bear the pressure and committed suicide. Some were killed as a result of love jihad, while others were killed as they were considered a threat to Islam.
As India celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence, we present 75 names from independent India who were murdered only because they were Hindus:
- Praveen Nettaru
- Kanhaiya Lal
- Umesh Kohle
- Harsha
- Kishan Bharwad
- Rupesh Pandya
- Neeraj Ram Prajapati
- Mukesh Soni
- Kamlesh Tiwari
- Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati
- V Ramalingam
- Dhruv Tyagi
- Palghar lynching- Kapilgiri Maharaj, Sushilgiri Maharaj and Nilesh Telgade
- Gaurav-Sachin
- Prashant Pujari
- Sanjay Kumar
- Ankit Saxena
- Ratan Lal
- Ankit Sharma
- Gangaram Singh Chauhan
- Bharat Yadav
- Vishnu Goswami
- Subodh Singh
- Avinash Saxena
- Amit Gautam
- Chandan Gupta
- Ravinder Kumar
- Riya Gautam
- Yogesh Kumar
- Pankaj Narang
- Kala Devi
- Mithun Thakur
- Ravi Nimbargi
- Revati Singh
- Rajesh Kumar
- Nikita Tomar
- Dr. Sanjay Singh
- Rinku Sharma
- Sunny Sinha
- Rahul Rajput
- Rahul Solanki
- Shambhulal
- Bharat Vaishnav
- Ranjit Bachchan
- Priya-Kashish
- Nagaraju
- Dilbar Negi
- Hrithik Adarsh
- BK Ganju
- Sarvanand Kaul
- Vinod Kumar
- Tikalal Taplu
- Sadhu Saravanan
- Ajay Pandita
- Satish Bhandari
- Makhan Lal Bindru
- Girija Tikku
- Satinder Kaur
- Deepak Chand
- Hiralal Gujarati
- Rameshwar Ankush
- Alok Tiwari
- Prem singh
- Dinesh
- Veerbhan
- Bina Jha
- Karsevaks returning from Ayodhya in Sabarmati Express
- Krishna Razdan
- PN Kaul
- Neelkanth Ganju
- Rajni Bala
- Satish Kumar Tiku
- Ekta Deshwal
- Kanti Prasad
- Santola Devi
Such names and incidents cannot be summed up in 75 columns. This is a never-ending list with no end in sight. A new name is added to the list whenever the date changes. OpIndia has gone out to the relatives of several of the people on the list this year of Amrit Mahotsav. We’ll bring them to you one at a time.
We had not forgotten and will not forget these Hindus. You will be reminded of these as long as this threat exists. So long as you’re a kafir. So that you are aware of the perils of Islamism and evangelical Christianity.
