Hell in Hindustan

The forgotten bloody chapter in Indian history

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

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.

 

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

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.”