History Archive

Perpetrator: Islamic militants in (West) Pakistan, Pakistan Military
Year/ Period: 1941-1951
Number: 4.75 Million Hindus (7 Million including Sikhs) killed, forcibly converted to Islam or forced to flee

People of India were disheartened and disillusioned with the way ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’ aka ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ had accepted partition and allowed it to take place in 1947, combined with riots, destruction and unspeakable amount of bloodbath. But, soon after he was shot at by Nathuram Godse at 5:17 PM in the compound of Birla House in New Delhi on 30 January 1948, he was projected as demigod.

In less than one and a half months, the appalling genocide of the Malabar Hindus will complete a full tragic century. It was on 20 August 1921 that a plague-like pogrom descended upon the unprepared and blissfully-unaware Hindus of Malabar at the hands of people they had trusted: the Moplah Muslims. Yet, nearly a century later, this mini-holocaust of Hindus in Kerala has all but been successfully buried, its memory almost wholly erased from the Hindu civilizational consciousness.

The likely extradition of Nirav Modi has brought back memories of another fugitive, Jayanti Dharma Teja, the lawbreaker charged with evading taxes worth crores, forcing the Indira Gandhi regime to pursue him across three continents.

The Tamil country stands tallest among all Indian regions that swallowed the missionary and colonial propaganda of the Aryan Invasion Theory in the closing decades of the 19th Century onwards. More specifically, sections of the Tamil country uncritically swallowed the “Dravidian” propaganda, internalized it, gave it an ideological shape premised basically on the linguistic separateness of Tamil.

The life, career, and legacy of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar continues to remain an unnecessarily controversial topic just like most malaises afflicting politics and public life in India since Nawab Nehru was illegitimately thrust upon us as Prime Minister who inaugurated a dark new era of totalitarianism much worse than the colonial British. For more than five decades, it was taboo to even dispassionately, honestly discuss Dr. Ambedkar’s contributions thanks to this morbid climate in public life.

The Emergency of 1975 was an all-encompassing assault on the Constitution and democracy only superficially. In reality, it was a fatal invasion of the human spirit from which we will probably never recover. As horrid as it was, what happened after the Emergency is more significant: none of the central villains were punished for two main reasons.

Guess what has thankfully become conspicuous by its very public absence in the last twenty years? The ubiquitous Khadi Dhoti and Gandhi Topi on the oh-so-impressive physiques and oh-so-clean bodies of our politicians. Indeed, the decadal reduction in and eventual disappearance of this political attire is directly proportionate to the decline and destruction of the Congress Party, the mothership of this epic hypocrisy.

Remember the dreaded MISA, the so-called Maintenance of Internal Security Act imposed by Catherine the Great Indira Gandhi during the Emergency? Its one-line definition: dictatorial powers to arrest and imprison her political prisoners. As draconian as it was, it was also highly unoriginal, in fact, a cheap imitation of a far more malignant legislation in force for several years.

Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who was best known for his close association with Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi’s name was Mohandas – Mahatma is an honorific title). Kallenbach was a German-Jewish bodybuilder who moved to South Africa in 1896. He met Gandhi (who was then working as a lawyer in South Africa) in 1904 in a vegetarian restaurant and soon thereafter became the love of his life. In fact, Gandhi left his wife for Kallenbach in 1908.