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Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered the temples and idols in which they were enshrined the texts they held sacred the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen.
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And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices –. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite –. But they are the ones who have been distorting it in the first place – by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods.“ And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they rise in chorus: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream. Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. „Once they had occupied academic bodies, once they had captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these historians came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan,3 but insist on reproducing his denunciations of ‘Brahmanism’, and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, ‘Communal rewriting of history’.“ Objective whitewash for objective history.
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Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam! Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion – an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one – to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the court, and that it is these things he banished. Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule – to spread the sway of Islam – are directed to be excised from the book. „The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on ‘Aurangzeb’s policy on religion’.