- Many foreign groups of people persecuted for their religion came to seek reguge in India. The Parsis have thrived. The heterodox Syrian Christians have lived in peace until the Portuguese came to enlist them in their effort to christianize India. The Jews have expressed their gratitude when they left for Israel because India was the only country where their memories were not of persecution but of friendly co-existence. Even the Moplah Muslims were accepted without any questions asked. All these groups were not merely tolerated, but received land and material support for building places of worship. What should really clinch the issue, is the tolerant treatment which the Muslims received after their reign of terror had been overthrown and replaced with Hindu rashtras like those of the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats. The Hindus could have emulated the policy of the Spanish Christians after the Reconquista, and given the Muslims the choice between conversion and emigration. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that they would have saved many lives and India's unity by doing so, but forcing people to convert was not in conformity with their traditions.... When negationists are confronted with the evidence of persecutions by Islam, they are sure to mention a few cases where Muslim rulers patronized the building of Hindu temples. In some cases this is deceitful: in the JNU historians' pamphlet "The Political Abuse of History", they mention three such cases, but on closer inspection two of them do not concern Muslim rulers, but their Hindu ministers (in his rebuttal, Prof. A.R. Khan called this "not only concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence"). But all right, a few Muslim rulers have made gifts to Hindu institutions. The negationists insist that these few gifts make up for the systematic Islamic persecutions. By contrast, their blatantly unequal standards do not allow them to accept the systematic patronage of the institutions of Buddhists and Jains by Hindu kings through the ages as compensation for the few isolated and aberrant cases of religious conflict.... It is obvious that an inscription of this quality, if it had been cited in support of the Hindu claim to the Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi site, would have been dismissed by the Marxist historians as ridiculous and totally groundless. They would not view it as a serious obstacle to their foregone conclusion that there is absolutely definitely no indication whatsover at all that a Hindu temple was forcibly replaced with a mosque. But in this case, we are asked to see it as evidence that Shaivas attacked Jain temples, and that Hindu tolerance is a myth. Unlike the party-line historians of JNU, I do not think that historians working with conflicting testimonies are in a position to make apodictic statements and definitive conclusions,, so I will not completely dismiss this inscription as fantasy.... Still, in size, duration, intensity and degree of ideological motivation, this conflict does not at all compare with the terror wrought by Islam. Incidentally, the ruling power at Vijayanagar, whose protection the Jains sought, was of course a Hindu power... So, applying the old maxim that "attack is the best defence", the spokesmen of intolerant creeds falsely accuse the tolerant Hindus of the same intolerance. While nobody claims that Hinduism is without faults, or that Hindu society has never brought forth fanatical individuals,it is a plain lie that Hinduism has record of fanaticism similar (however remotely) to that of the three world-conquerors: Christianity, Islam and Marxism.
- Prof. A.R. Khan quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam quoting Prof. A.R. Khan
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