Hell in Hindustan
BASHARAT HUSSAIN QIZILBASH Pakistan Today
The forgotten bloody chapter
in Indian history
India is predominantly inhabited by Hindus, who are followers of
Hinduism, a four-thousand year old religion. Through skilful
manipulation of history and more recently the mass media, the
Hindus have successfully projected an embellished image of
themselves as a peace-loving people. The two distinct streaks of
this consciously created propagandist soft image of the Hindus and
their Hindustan are (a) they are a cultured and civilised people,
who shun hatred, intolerance and violence; and (b) they have never
waged aggression against other peoples and countries rather they
have always been the victims of foreign invaders be they the
Central Asian pagans, the Arabian or Afghan Muslim conquerors or
the European Christian colonists. These Hindu assertions are not
entirely true.
Since the rise of religious extremism among a fringe of militant
Muslims through the courtesy of the so-called “Afghan jihad” a few
decades back, the Hindus have found it convenient to depict the
Muslims as violent and aggressive people. There has grown a whole
industry of Hindu writers whose chief preoccupation is Muslim
bashing. They dug out incidents from the past to present the
brutality of the Muslim rulers of the Indian subcontinent against
the Hindus but fail to name them except one or two such as the
Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and the Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni,
the latter actually never made India the seat of his
government.
The Hindu writers particularly lament over the plunder and
destruction of their holy places and the forced conversion of Hindu
subjects to Islam by the Indian Muslim conquerors but fail to
realise that had the Muslim rulers adopted forcible conversion at
the point of sword as a systematic state policy, there would have
been no Hindus in Hindustan or at best only a few Hindus might have
survived but contrary to this allegation an absolute majority of
people living in India today are Hindus.
Such a propagandist distortion of history deserves to be
countered. What a few Muslim rulers did with the Hindus seem
negligible when compared with whata few Hindu rulers did with the
Buddhists, the followers of a great world religion, Buddhism, which
was founded by Buddha about 500BC in India as a revolt against the
exploitative Hindu caste system and the oppressive elite Brahman
priestcraft. Over time, it became the most popular religion
reaching zenith in the time of Emperor Ashok, the Great and the
Kushan rulers. One should remember that Buddhism was an indigenous
religion of Hindustan; this is importantin view of the fact that
Hindu criticism against the Indian Muslims is based on the argument
that religion Islam was born in Arabia and its leading places of
worship being situated in the Arabian lands, the Muslims being not
the sons of soil were aliens in Hindustan. On the contrary,
Buddhism was indigenous because it was born out of the soil of
Hindustan but as it directly challenged the unquestionable power
and authority of the ruling Hindu Brahmanical priestly caste, the
Brahmans started an unrelenting hate campaign against Buddhism in
their Smritis, Puranas and other classical religious texts
particularly by their ideologues such as Manu and Chanakya. The
person of Buddha became the prime target of their diatribes. To
belittle his status, it was propagated that if anyone died at
Harramba near Monghyr, the place where Buddha breathed his last
then that person would either go to hell or would be reborn as a
donkey.
Gradually, the Hindu propaganda against Buddhism began to have
the desired effects because in the fifth century AD, Sasank, the
Brahman king of Bengal not only burned the Bodhi, the tree under
which Buddha had meditated and destroyed his footprints at
Pataliputra but also ravaged several monasteries. Not only the
Buddhist places of worship were devastated by the militant Hindu
rulers, the lives of the followers of Buddhism were also not
spared. The Buddhists were the “sons of the Hindu soil” and not
aliens, however, when life was made hell for them in the sixth
century Hindustan by the Hindu rulers, they fled in thousands to
China, Tibet, Korea and Japan. The first Indian premier, Jawaharlal
Nehru, who was also a prolific writer, admitted the presence of
three thousand monks and ten thousand Buddhist families from India
in the Chinese province of Lao Yang in the first quarter of the
sixth century due to the persecution of the Hindu Brahmans.
The Hindu nationalists who are violently imposing the ban on
beef-eating in Modi’s Hindustan, today, should not forget that
Brahmans themselves were voracious beef eaters in not too distant
the past.Actually, it were the Buddhists, who being opposed to the
killing of animals for food had a state edict passed that
prohibited the slaughter of animals for food and in opposition the
Brahmans under the great Hindu philosopher Adi Shankaracharya
mobilised the lumpen Hindus against this beef ban. The beef eaters
of yesterday are imposing a ban on beef eating today. What an
irony?
Oppression of Buddhists intensified during the time of
Shankaracharya in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Like
Mahmud Ghaznavi, who smashed the idols in the Hindu temples of
Somnath, Mathura and Jawalamukhi; Shankaracharya, too, destroyed
many Buddhist temples in all the four corners of the subcontinent:
Nagarjunakonda in south, Badrinath in north, Puri in east and
Dwarka in western Hindustan. Moreover, he personally directed the
killing of hundreds of Buddhists in a large Buddhist settlement at
Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh and so intense was his fury that
the Buddhists of Badrinath fled in dread to the neighbouring region
of Tibet. Like Mahmud, Shankaracharya also wanted to plunder the
riches of the monasteries but unlike Mahmud who left to Afghanistan
after the plunder, Shankaracharya forcibly brought the Buddhist
centres under the Brahmanical control. Such is the tragic saga of
the elimination of Buddhism from Hindustan.
In its heyday, Buddhism had spread out of Hindustan in the
neighbouring states of Turkistan, Bamyan and Kabul. Persecution at
the hands of the Hindus forced many Buddhists in Hindustan to seek
shelter in these neighbouring states but in the latter half of the
ninth century AD, a powerful Brahman minister Kulusha overthrew the
last Buddhist King Lagaturman, founded the Hindu Shahi Kingdom and
turned his daggers at the Buddhist subjects. Not only did he kill
thousands of Buddhists but also vandalised or razed to the ground
many Buddhist monasteries and citadels in Bamyan, Gardez, Laghman,
etc; a shocking parallel to the destruction of the Buddhist relics
in Bamyan by the Taliban some years ago.
The above mentioned acts cataloguing the horrible treatment of
the Buddhists at the hands of the Hindus are not the findings of a
Pakistani or a Muslim researcher but an Indian scholar named
Arwinder Pal Singh, who made these revelations in a paper that was
presented at an international conference. Mr Arwinder Singh
concluded that Mahmud Ghaznavi’s campaign against the Hindu places
of worship was a providential retribution against the earlier Hindu
acts of terror against the Buddhists and though Buddhism was almost
made extinct by such acts in Hindustan; the Hindus, too, remained
subjugated under the Muslim rule for the next eight centuries. In
Arwinder Pal’s opinion “the Hindus have learnt one thing from
history that they cannot learn anything.”