mohanty
15 February 2011, 07:46 AM
Posting this because we were recently visited by a good-natured holocaust denier on these forums. :)
Reminded me that such people exist everywhere. India has its own sort of holocaust deniers. Unfortunately, these people are mainstream academics and not borderline loonies like in the west.
Koenraad Elst has written a book (free-to-read online) called "Negationism in India: Whitewashing the record of Islam".
Read it here: http://voi.org/books/negaind/
In my study of the Ayodhya controversy, I noticed that the frequent attempts to conceal or deny inconvenient evidence were an integral part of a larger effort to rewrite India's history and to whitewash Islam. It struck me that this effort to deny the unpleasant facts of Islam's destructive role in Indian history is similar to the attempts by some European writers to deny the Nazi holocaust. Its goal and methods are similar, even though its social position is very different: in Europe, Holocaust negationists are a fringe group shunned by respectable people, but in India, jihad negationists are in control of the academic establishment and of the press.
Today, the situation is such that to try to point these things out to people is considered politically incorrect and in order to appear secular, you have to mouth things like "all religions are equal" and "Islam is a peaceful religion".
Reminded me that such people exist everywhere. India has its own sort of holocaust deniers. Unfortunately, these people are mainstream academics and not borderline loonies like in the west.
Koenraad Elst has written a book (free-to-read online) called "Negationism in India: Whitewashing the record of Islam".
Read it here: http://voi.org/books/negaind/
In my study of the Ayodhya controversy, I noticed that the frequent attempts to conceal or deny inconvenient evidence were an integral part of a larger effort to rewrite India's history and to whitewash Islam. It struck me that this effort to deny the unpleasant facts of Islam's destructive role in Indian history is similar to the attempts by some European writers to deny the Nazi holocaust. Its goal and methods are similar, even though its social position is very different: in Europe, Holocaust negationists are a fringe group shunned by respectable people, but in India, jihad negationists are in control of the academic establishment and of the press.
Today, the situation is such that to try to point these things out to people is considered politically incorrect and in order to appear secular, you have to mouth things like "all religions are equal" and "Islam is a peaceful religion".