Challenging Destiny

We have elaborate literary evidence of the World's biggest holocaust from existing historical contemporary eyewitness accounts. The historians and biographers of the invading armies and subsequent rulers of India have left quite detailed records of the atrocities they committed in their day-to-day encounters with India's Hindus.

The holocaust of the Hindus in India was of even greater proportions, the only difference was that it continued for 800 years, till the brutal regimes were effectively overpowered in a life and death struggle by the Sikhs in the Punjab and the Hindu Maratha armies in other parts of India in the late 1700’s.

These contemporary records boasted about and glorified the crimes that were committed - and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, mass rapes of Hindu women and the destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu Buddhist temples and libraries have been well documented and provide solid proof of the World's biggest holocaust.

"The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by Mughals during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period."

Francois Gautier in his book 'Rewriting Indian History' (1996) wrote:

"The massacres perpetuated by Mughals in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese."

Seen through the eyes of the Hindus, the Mughal invasion of their homeland was unmitigated disaster.

"Their temples were razed, their idols smashed, their women raped, their men killed or taken slaves. When Muhammad of ghazni entered Somnath on one of his annual raids, he slaughtered all 50,000 inhabitants. Aibak killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands.

The list of horrors is long and painful. These conquerors justified their deeds by claiming it was their religious duty to smite non-believers. Cloaking themselves in the banner of Islam, they claimed they were fighting for their faith when, in reality, they were indulging in straightforward slaughter and pillage."

The sword of Islam yielded a rich crop of converts most of the Women (to save their honour) burnt themselves to death. Those captured were distributed (Noblemen)" among Mughal Mansabdars.

The Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali attacked India in 1757 AD and made his way to the holy Hindu city of Mathura, the Bethlehem of the Hindus and birthplace of Krishna.

The atrocities that followed are recorded in the contemporary chronicle called: "Tarikh I-Alamgiri' :

"Abdali's soldiers would be paid 5 Rupees (a sizeable amount at the time) for every enemy head brought in. Every horseman had loaded up all his horses with the plundered property, and atop of it rode the girl-captives and the slaves. The severed heads were tied up in rugs like bundles of grain and placed on the heads of the captives. Then the heads were stuck upon lances and taken to the gate of the chief minister for payment.

"It was an extraordinary display! Daily did this manner of slaughter and plundering proceed. And at night the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people. All those heads that had been cut off were built into pillars, and the captive men upon whose heads those bloody bundles had been brought in, were made to grind corn, and then their heads too were cut off. These things went on all the way to the city of Agra, nor was any part of the country spared.”

When we hear the word HOLOCAUST most of us think immediately of the Jewish holocaust. Today, with increased awareness and countless cinema films and television documentaries – many of us are also aware of the Holocaust of the Native American peoples, the genocide of the Armenian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, and the millions of African lives lost during the Atlantic slave trade.

The World seems to either ignore or just does not seem to care about the many millions of lives lost during the 800 year long holocaust of Hindus in India.

The Indian historian Professor K.S. Lal estimates that the Hindu population in India decreased by 80 million between 1000 AD and 1525 AD, an extermination unparalleled in World history. This slaughter of millions of people occurred over regular periods during many centuries of Arab, Afghan, Turkish and Mughal rule in India.

Many Indian heroes emerged during these dark times including the 10th Sikh Guru – Guru Gobind Singh and also the Hindu Maratha king Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj who led the resistance against this tyranny and eventually led to its defeat by the late 1700s after centuries of death and destruction.