THE MUGHALS

Even though Babur ruled in India for only four years (1526-1530 AD) before his death, he continued systematic religious oppression of Hindus and Sikhs, as noted by Guru Nanak in four hymns, when he witnessed it himself^[72]. According to autobiographical historical records of Babur, the Tuzak-i Babari, Babur’s campaign in northwest India targeted pagans, both Hindu and Sikh, as well as apostates (primarily non-Sunni sects of Islam). He notes that an immense number of infidels were killed, with Muslim camps building “towers of skulls of the infidels” on hillocks ^[73]. Similarly, Baburnama records massacres in, and destruction of, Hindu settlements by Babur’s army^[74].

His son Humayun could not rule for long before Sher Shah Suri defeated him in battle and took the throne of Delhi. In 1545, Suri led a campaign of religious violence across various provinces of the empire, both in the east and west, in India. Much like in the era of the Sultanate, Suri’s advisors counselled in favour of religious violence, with Shaikh Nizam once saying^[75]:

There is nothing equal to a religious war against the infidels. If you be slain you become a martyr, if you live you become a ghazi.

Sher Shah’s army also attacked the Hindu fort of Kalinjar, captured it and killed almost all Hindus inside the fort^[75]. Although Humayun’s son Akbar is taken to be a very tolerant and progressive man, he too had campaigns that very outright bloody and violent on Hindus, including those of Garha (1560 AD), Chittor (1567 AD) and Nagarkot (1582 AD).

Maulana Ahmad, a historian of that era, writes about the battle at Chittor fort in Tarikh-i Alfi^[76]:

They (Hindus) committed jauhar (…). In the night, the (Muslim) assailants forced their way into the fortress in several places, and fell to slaughtering and plundering. At early dawn the Emperor, went in mounted on an elephant, attended by his nobles and chiefs on foot. The order was given for a general massacre of the infidels as a punishment. The number exceeded 8,000 (Abu-l Fazl states there were 40,000 peasants with 8,000 Rajputs forming the garrison). Those who escaped the sword, men and women, were made prisoners and their property came into the hands of the Musulmans.

Nizamuddin Ahmad, another historian of that era, recorded the violence during the conquest of Nagarkot in the Tabakat-i Akbari as follows ^[76]:

The fortress of Bhun, which is an idol temple of Mahámáí, was taken by valor of the (Muslim) assailants. A party of Rajputs, who had resolved to die, fought till they were all cut down. A number of Brahmins, who for many years had served the temple, never gave one thought to flight, and were killed. Nearly 200 black cows belonging to the Hindus, during the struggle, had crowded together for shelter in the temple. Some savage Turks, while the arrows and bullets were falling like rain, killed these cows one by one. They then took off their boots and filled them with the blood, and cast it upon the roof and walls of the temple.

Akbar’s son Jahangir may have been a connoisseur of the arts but he was no peace-loving man either. In his reign, religious violence was targeted at Hindus, Jains and Sikhs, as seen in one of the pieces in the Intikháb-i Jahangir-Shahi^[77]:

One day at Ahmedabad, it was reported that many of the infidel and superstitious sect of the Seoras (Jains) of Gujarat has made several very great and splendid temples, and having placed in them their false gods, had managed to secure a large degree of respect for themselves. Emperor Jahangir ordered them to be banished from the country, and their temples to be demolished. Their idol was thrown down on the uppermost step of the mosque, that it might be trodden upon by those who came to say their daily prayers there. By this order of the Emperor, the infidels were exceedingly disgraced, and Islam exalted.

Jahangir also gave the order to torture and execute Guru Arjun, which stirred the Sikhs to consider militancy and strong action against the Mughals. This ultimately led to the formal inauguration of khalsa (military brotherhood) in 1699 by the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh. Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan was not one to be left behind, in religious violence, with his soldiers attacking seven temples, violently seizing and appropriating wealth and resources for their own use in Punjab.

It was Shah Jahan’s progeny though that probably takes the crown for being the most ruthless Muslim king that India has ever seen. His reign saw a scale of religious violence in India that is listed as 23rd in 100 deadliest episodes of atrocities in human history, in Matthew White’s Atrocitology: Humanity’s 100 Deadliest Achievements^[78]. Having imprisoned his father and killed his brothers for the throne, Aurangzeb unleashed one of the strongest campaigns of religious violence in the Mughal Empire’s history. Aurangzeb re-introduced the jizya tax, led a number of campaigns against non-Muslims, destroyed Hindu temples, and arrested and executed the ninth Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur^{[79, 80]}. Aurangzeb issued orders^[79] in 1669 to all his governors of provinces to:

destroy with a willing hand the schools and temples of the infidels, and that they were strictly enjoined to put an entire stop to the teaching and practice of idolatrous forms of worship

Aurangzeb not only destroyed temples (though he made some too) but also built mosques on the foundations of destroyed temples. Idols were smashed and briefly Mathura became known as Islamabad in local official documents, while the major Hindu pilgrimage sites in Varanasi and Somnath were destroyed ^[81-87]. Such was the scale of the carnage that entire town and even provinces became depopulated from religious violence. Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaign alone took 4.6 million Hindu lives, almost as much as in the Holocaust! During the Mughal-Maratha wars, about 2 million civilians died in war-torn lands due to famine, drought and plague. 

When the European Colonisers entered

Soon after the entry of the Portuguese into India, the Goa Inquisition was established. It was an institution established by the Roman Catholic Holy Office between the 16th- and 19th-century to stop and punish heresy against Christianity in Asia. The institution particularly persecuted Hindus, Muslims and Judaizing Nasranis, among others, by the colonial era Portuguese government and Jesuit clergy in Portuguese India^[88].

As part of this initiative, conversions to Catholicism occurred by force, while thousands of Goan Hindus were massacred by the Portuguese between 1561 AD and 1774 AD. The last traces of the Goa Inquisition were removed away when the British occupied the city in 1812 AD. The British and the French were not much better. Both sought to proselytise, with even some East India Company openly seeking to convert sepoys in the Indian army.

Some argue that this may have been a cause of unrest, which was further increased with the rumours of the use of animal fat on bullets used in the army. This eventually led to the Sepoy Mutiny, which, after being crushed, led to the brutal execution of 100,000 individuals (some say this could be more), many of whom were Hindus^[89].

The British Raj was also very clever in employing the divide-and-rule policy that made them pit one Indian king against another, one Hindu against a Muslim, and so on. This led to minimizing harm to their personnel but significant losses to the Indians. In the riots during the Bengal partition of 1905, a number of Hindus and Muslims died in what turned out to be a prequel to the riots of 1947, when East Bengal and West Bengal became parts of different countries, based on religious lines. The Direct Action Day, called for by the Muslim League, which started on 16 August 1946, a year before India’s independence, left approximately 3000 Hindus dead and 17000 injured.

During the partition, around 14.5 million people crossed the borders. With the British government having left the Indian subcontinent, the newly formed governments were ill-equipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude. Massive violence, along communal lines, occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths range around roughly 500,000^[90].

In post-Independent India, riots in Mumbai and Gujarat, along with the anti-Sikh riots, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and insurgency in various parts of the country have led to loss of lives. There have been a number of attacks on Hindus and their temples by Christian evangelists and Muslim militants. The most prominent among them are the Chamba massacre (1998), the Fidayeen attacks on Raghunath temple (2002), the Akshardham Temple attack (2002), the Godhra train burning (2002), the Marad massacre (2003) and the Varanasi bombings (2006), resulting in a number of deaths and injuries. There have also been killings of Hindu priests and saints. 

In August 2000, Swami Shanti Kali, a popular Hindu priest, was shot dead inside his ashram in Tripura, with the police identifying ten members of the Christian terrorist organisation – National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) as being responsible for the murder. They also raided and destroyed some of the ashrams, schools and orphanages set up by the priest in the state. Christians were also responsible for the murder of Swami Laxmananda in 2008. Riots have also affected Hindus a lot in the country, from before India attained Independence [91, 92]. One case in example is the Godhra riot of 2002. I have always condemned the killings of Muslims in the Godhra riots. What is often missed though, in this regard, is that 254 Hindus were also killed in the 2002 Gujarat riots^[93-95]. A similar number of deaths were reported during the 1992 Bombay riots, with 275 Hindus having died ^[96].

DHARMIC RESILIENCE

A natural question you may have is: what makes the dharmic tradition so resilient. I would say a few things. Firstly, due to the element of tolerance ingrained in Sanatana Dharma, one has had a lot of schools of thoughts, sects and even cults be a part of Hinduism over the millennia. Often these groupings have been so much against each other that one probably could not call them part of the same religion at all. A Vaishnavite ^{[97, 98]} might not see eye-to-eye with a Shaivite^{[99, 100]}, while a Carvak^[101] may not see eye-to-eye with a Vedantist^[102], even though they all are today put under the same umbrella term: Hinduism. This flexible, albeit almost loose, and yet fairly strong association perfectly encapsulates the paradox of Brahman and is one of the key reasons for the resilience of Sanatana Dharma.

The second major reason is that politics and faith have never been as closely coupled and connected as in many of the Abrahamic religions. Therefore, we never have a pope start a war to have his king sit on the throne, in India, although we have had instances like with Chanakya when an advisor or Brahmin mentor has wielded enough influence and used his statecraft to get his favourite to the throne. It is, however, an exception and not a norm to see such a close association.

Hinduism has always had the Brahmins maintain a certain position in society, irrespective of who the kings of the times of yore were. Here, I personally do not mean or abide by the hereditary idea of who is a Brahmin but rather with the idea that anyone who has certain traits, compliant with expectations from the Brahmins, is a Brahmin. Since Hinduism is such a personal religion without any over-reliance on any figure or place of worship or even text, beyond a point, destroying any one of these or even all of these still does not break the spirit of Hinduism. That is the beauty and strength of Hinduism.

In Conclusion

I hope I have taken you down an interesting journey in this article. As we come into the modern age, I cannot help but notice the similarities between the pursuits and tendencies of Hinduism and science, both of which seek to pursue the truths of the Universe, albeit using very distinct paths. It will be interesting to see what kind of an interface may be possible between the two, with some individuals looking at topics such as the Science of Vedanta lately. Without disrespecting any religion, I would like to highlight the fact that Hinduism is the one religion that accepts all pursuits, possibilities and characteristics of the Truth, be it with Jesus or Allah or Ahura Mazda or any of the other supreme deities around the world.

Since it is henotheistic, this comes naturally to the faith. What I have lately found extremely fascinating is that Hinduism is both theocentric and anthropocentric in its establishment that the all-pervading Brahman is a part of each of us and we are made in and by the Brahman. Sanatana Dharma may have historically been documented for some thousand years but since it fundamentally relies on observations, inferences and ideas based on laws of nature and reality, it is, in effect, an ‘eternal way of life’. Given all that it has to offer, I hope this ancient order of spiritual humanism survives till the very end of days!

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