One hears it all too often: ‘Hindus
are cowards, they only deserve what they are suffering.’Mahatma Gandhi said
it clearly enough: ‘The Muslim is a bully, the Hindu a coward.’ But
Hindus are by no means cowards. Hindus as such have their problems, but lack of
bravery is not one of them.
Look at
the Bangladesh
war of 1971. The Pakistani Army was brave enough as long as its job consisted
in raping Bengali women, but as soon as the Indian Army appeared on the
scene, all they could do was to flee and to surrender. The Majority Hindu Army
liberated the oppressed Muslims and the persecuted Hindus of Bangladesh. Or
look at the Kargil war of 1999.
Though the politicians
forbade the Indian soldiers from taking the war into enemy territory by
crossing the Pak border, the Indian Army besieged the Kargil mountain
which the Pak invaders had taken, and reconquered it.
Let us look at the historical record.
First off, the Vedas and the Hindu epics, like most ancient writings, extolled
bravery.
The Bhagavad-Gita also underpins its plea for
bravery on the battlefield with a typically Hindu (at least very un-Christian
and un-Islamic) philosophy, namely the belief in reincarnation.
Cicero and Caesar had noted the Gallic men’s
battlefield bravery and its connection to their belief in reincarnation.
This was equally true of the Hindu warriors: they were not afraid of
death.
Then, Hindus stopped Alexander the Great. To
be sure, this is old history, we have a paucity of reliable sources about what
really happened, and the map shows that.
Alexander’s soldiers were uniquely far
from home and understandably unwilling to go farther even if they could.
But fact is: the great Alexander was
satisfied with the Iranian provinces of India’s frontier and declined to enter
India proper.
That was no mean achievement of the
Hindus.Then the Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas managed to gain a foothold in
India’s Northwest. The Shakas were defeated, the Vikram calendar begins with
this victory. These conquering foreigners were not fully expelled, but at
least they were absorbed. There is no distinct Shaka, Kushana or Huna
community today, much less do they demand minority privileges.
The Muslims entered Indian history with a naval
attack north of present-day Mumbai in 636, only four years after Mohammed’s
death. It was repelled. Then for half a century they sent a number of
expeditions from Mesopotamia to Sindh. Each expedition was defeated.
While conquering North Africa was a
cakewalk, there was a Caliph who expressed his reluctance to send another army
to Sindh, because those expeditions only cost the lives of so many good
Muslims. But of course, if you keep trying, you will break through one day, so
eventually, Mohammed bin Qasim occupied Sindh in 712. But even then, his
successor was soon defeated.
Meanwhile, the Muslim armies conquered Central Asia and
their next attack was through Afghanistan and the Khyber pass. Afghanistan was
ruled by the Hindu Shahiya dynasty, which gave them a long-drawn-out fight. But
towards the year 1000 the Muslims finally they won through, and the Shahiya
king killed himself when he found himself unable to defend his subjects. From
Afghanistan, Mahmud Ghaznavi entered India proper for what his court
chroniclers described as raids.
In fact, he would have been happy enough to
occupy India permanently, but the Hindus were still too strong for that.
But what the Hindus had in bravery, they lacked in alertness. They didn’t
realize that Islam was a new type of enemy, much more difficult to digest than
the earlier invaders. In the peripheral Kashmir region, the king acted
“secular” and gave Muslims positions of power and confidence, which gave
them the opportunity to take steps towards the Islamization of the region. This
would be repeated many times, down to the present.
Thus, the kings of the Vijayanagar empire
showed off their broad-mindedness (now mistermed “secularism”) by hiring Muslim
troops, only to find in the battle of Talikota that their Muslim armies
defected to the Muslim opponent camp and inflicted defeat on their erstwhile
Hindu overlord.
Meanwhile, Mahmud’s nephew Salar
Mahmud Ghaznavi made a successful foray into the Ganga basin. The Hindu kings
in the neighbourhood got together to stop him. Led by Sukhadeva and including
the famous philosopher-king Raja Bhoja, they defeated Ghaznavi in the battle of
Bahraich near Ayodhya in 1033. (It is a different matter that sentimental
Hindu sleepwalkers of later years joined their
Muslim neighbours in worshipping at Salar Masud Ghaznavi’s grave, not
appreciating the bravery and foresight of the Hindu kings and soldiers who
defeated him; there are certain things very wrong with the Hindu mentality, but
again, lack of bravery is not among them.) For more than a century and a half,
the people of the Ganga basin considered Islamic invasion a thing of the past.
But then, the breakthrough came. It was
not due to Hindu cowardice, but to Hindu magnanimity and overconfidence. A year
after being defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan, who spared him, Mohammed Ghori did
battle again and took his erstwhile victor captive. After blinding and
executing Prithviraj, he and his generals conquered the entire Ganga plain,
using newer battlefield strategies.
From there, they would extend their
power southwards to cover almost the whole subcontinent in due course.
But for five centuries and a half, the Hindus had prevented this, while West
Asia, North Africa and Spain had fallen within eighty years.
The age of Muslim expansion was again marked by endless
Hindu resistance. Wise Muslim rulers opted for a compromise with this
unbeatable foe (misinterpreted by secularists as “secularism”), but more
zealous rulers depleted their forces in endless wars.
The age of Muslim expansion was again marked by endless
Hindu resistance. Wise Muslim rulers opted for a compromise with this
unbeatable foe (misinterpreted by secularists as “secularism”), but more
zealous rulers depleted their forces in endless wars.
In this
endeavour, they
were helped by a stream of West-Asian adventurers and African slave-soldiers
who came to India to increase the Delhi Sultanate’s large standing armies. The
Muslim states were totally geared to warfare, something unseen in Hindu history.
For this reason, we can say with the comfort of hindsight that the Muslims
could finally have conquered all of the subcontinent had they remained united.
Even Hindu bravery could not have
prevented it, any more than the brief acts of North-African bravery could stop
the Islamization of North Africa.
But fortunately, Muslim states or Muslim ethnic
lobbies within a state also fought each other, which gave Hindus a chance to
regroup and to mount another attack.
Also, some Hindu kings did what they thought
best under the circumstances, viz. they surrendered without war, paid tribute,
and retained sufficient autonomy to house rebels from other areas or become
rebellious themselves once circumstances allowed this.
It was important for a come-back
to have these free territories (just like the reconquista of Spain was only
possible because its Asturian region had managed to remain free since the
beginning). Their collaboration was not cowardice but a ruse to gain time.All
the same, this meant that Hindus enlisted in the armed force of sagacious
Muslim rulers.
Akbar, who had consolidated his power
by defeating the Hindu ruler Himu, was smart enough to keep enough of the
Hindus on his side to overpower rival Muslim claimants and to fight Hindu
freedom fighters.
Famously, the rebellious Rana Pratap
was countered by Man Singh, who wielded the sword of the Moghul empire. Hindu
bravery was employed by Muslim rulers.
Finally, in the 17th century, a rebellious
Shivaji, born in a family of collaborators, would arise and restore Hindu
sovereignty. Where his Maratha army appeared, defeat of their enemies was a
certainty. The Moghul empire became a mere shadow of its former self, while the
military power rested with the Marathas.
In 1817, the Peshwas, who had taken
over the Maratha confederacy, were terminally defeated by the British. But
again this was not for Hindus’ lack of bravery.
They fought like lions, and on the other side,
other Hindu divisions fought like lions for the British, who could conquer and
rule India without doing too much fighting themselves.
If something can be held against the
Marathas and their Peshwa successors, it is not a lack of bravery or military
prowess, but lack of proper ideological motivation.
This is why they spilled their energies
in predatory raids against other Hindu populations, it is why their leader
prostrated before the powerless Moghul emperor in 1771, it is why some Peshwa
descendents could be enticed into a Hindu-Muslim or Moghul-Maratha cooperation
(which was really a case of mutual deception) in the Mutiny of 1857.They lapsed
from Shivaji’s sense of mission as the liberator of the Hindus.
One constant for at least 8 centuries
was that Hindus didn’t use their brains to update their
warfare. They didn’t learn from their enemies’ successes. Also, they were
sentimental and too overly attached to the person of their leader.
They could bravely fight all they
wanted, but if the leader was killed, there was no second person, much less a
collective plan, to take his place. When you look at today’s Hindu politicians
and internet warriors, you find exactly the same defects.
In a hostile sense too, Hindus are too focused
on persons. They have wasted their energies attacking Sonia Gandhi and her
family, and failed to dismantle the secularist dispensation established by her
grandfather-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru, and given a Marxist slant by her
mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi.
They haven’t emulated the techniques by
which the secularists, like the British of yore, exercise power totally out of
proportion to their numbers. They haven’t figured out how to stop the
phenomenon of “Hindus wielding the sword of Islam”, in which Akbar exulted, but
which has become so commonplace under the guise of secularism. For that, an
analysis of all the factors in the field is necessary.
This is not too difficult, it
only takes a normal degree of involvement and will. But so far, Hindus have not
mustered the will to win.
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