India:Islam, Independence, and the Misguided Mahatma

Pakistan, according to [Jinnah], in a nutshell, is a demand for carving out of India a portion to be wholly treated as an independent and sovereign state … If Pakistan as defined above is an article of faith with him, indivisible India is equally an article of faith with me. Hence there is a stalemate.

—Mahatma Gandhi in Harijan, July 26, 1942

The Position of the Communist Party is clear and emphatic. We declare that in a free India, all nationalities, Muslims or otherwise, having a contiguous territory as their homeland, common language, culture, common economic life and psychological make-up have the right to form sovereign states which will come together in a joint Indian Federation or Union. Each unit must have the right to secede if it so desired.

—Communist Party of India Manifesto, 1942

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

—Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana1

For more than 5,000 years Kashmir was Hindu land. It was home to many great saints and scholars. A branch of Hindu philosophy known as Kashmir Shaivism was born in the region around the eighth century AD. When Buddhism arose and spread across India, many people of the Kashmir valley embraced the new faith. Even today, Kashmir has a substantial minority of Buddhists, particularly in Ladakh. For 2,000 years Kashmir was home to all manner of Sanskrit learning—particularly historical

texts, philosophy, and romantic fables.
All this was transformed utterly by the arrival of Islamic rule in the 14th

century. Islam became the religion of the court, and the spread of Islam was encouraged in the land. Toward the end of the century, the Muslim rulers began to make concerted efforts to eliminate what they saw as religious and political opposition from the Hindu majority.2 Persecution of Hindus became systematic, particularly under the rule of Sikandar, who destroyed many temples and drove Hindus out of the major cities by threatening them to convert or flee or else be killed. Sikandar strictly enforced Sharia law on Kashmir, banning a host of cultural activities and imposing the jizya tax on non-Muslims. He even forbade Hindus from applying tilak to their foreheads.3

Through forced conversions, influx of foreign Muslims, and simple breeding Islam used demographic conquest to wear away at the former Hindu majority in Kashmir, eventually reducing them to minority status in their own country. By this same process Islam also replaced the Hindu and Buddhist populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia—all countries whose very names (the –stan ending comes from Sanskrit, not Arabic) indicate their Indian origins. In Kashmir, the process of demographic conquest is not 100 percent complete as it is in Afghanistan, but it is close.

In other parts of India, this same process of demographic conquest is underway— although it is not as far advanced as in Kashmir. In Kerala, in the state of Assam, and in Eastern India the outbreeding of Hindu populations by Muslims is slowly producing a replacement of the people that will change the character of those regions just as it has already done with Afghanistan and Kashmir. As these regions experience this shift, the likelihood of violent confrontation increases dramatically. India and Pakistan have already fought at least three wars over Kashmir itself. A future confrontation could easily include nuclear weapons: Pakistan has over a hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal, India somewhat fewer. Should a future conflict between the nations go nuclear, the fallout in death, disease, and forced migration would be a disaster of incalculable proportions.

The analogous situation in Israel between the Israelis and the Palestinians does not bode well for lasting peace between India and Pakistan. In both conflicts, which are two of the longest-running in the world today, there is the same intractable and implacable enemy: Islam. There is no end to jihad. Islam wants all of India just as it wants all of Israel.

INDIA’S FAILURE AGAINST ISLAMIC JIHAD

From the invasion of Bin Qasim in 712 to 2014, India has been subject to Islamic jihad. By military and demographic means, Muslims have strived to replace Hindus across the subcontinent. In some countries, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—all once part of India—they have almost completely succeeded. While Hindus have fought valiantly against this 1,300-year conquest it has never been enough.

The primary difficulty for the Hindus has been to understand their enemy. Islam teaches a dualistic ethic which has no analogy within the Hindu worldview. The Islamic ethical system, as this book has shown earlier, teaches that fellow Muslims are to be treated ethically, while non-Muslims must be treated poorly—even cruelly. When Islam is in a weak position, it downplays these qualities and pretends to be just another religion like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism. Unlike those other religions, however, when Islam is in a strong position it becomes an imperialist ideology with a single goal: conquest and annihilation of non-Islamic religions. It always offers the same excuses—the other religions are idol worship, their metaphysical systems are in error. There is no sense of “live and let live.”

The Islamic conquest of India was largely put on hold by the arrival of the British Empire. Under the Raj, Hindus were able to reach levels of economic and political success that were largely denied to them under Muslim rule (particularly under the Mughal Empire, which dominated much of India in the centuries before the British assumed control). One man looms large in the independence movement which arose in the late 19th century and eventually resulted in India’s emergence as an independent modern nation: Mohandas Gandhi.

GANDHI’S FAILURES AND DELUSIONS

More than 65 years after his death Gandhi remains an almost saintly figure globally. The reverential term applied to him, “Mahatma” (meaning “Great Soul”), is typically assumed by most to be his first name. The struggle for Indian independence he championed is regarded as the culmination and vindication of his political efforts. But in fact Gandhi was a complete failure, and the independence movement he backed only replaced a mostly benign and light-handed ruler with a corrupt state while also liberating and empowering India’s existential enemy, Islam. Gandhi’s independence movement has replaced security with genocide and destruction.

His failure first became obvious on the issue of the partition of India. Prior to India’s independence, there was a debate over the idea of dividing the country between a Hindu- majority portion and a Muslim-majority portion. Gandhi strongly opposed the idea, famously claiming, “If the Congress wishes to accept partition, it will be over my dead body.”4 In the end, he acquiesced to the inevitable. Prior to independence, 25 percent of the population of what is now Pakistan was Hindu—many of them wealthy landowners. Now, there are only about one percent there and they are among the poorest people in the

country.
The promise of partition was that it would bring peace to India. Instead, it has

produced greater conflict. There have been four wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 (in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999). There is now a threat of nuclear confrontation between the two powers. The partition that Gandhi’s errors produced was a catastrophe; hundreds of thousands were killed or injured in the mass movement of Hindus and Muslims between the newly created nations in 1947.

Gandhi was right to oppose Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s opportunistic and delusional “two nations” theory. At the same time, he naively ignored the aggressive and destructive nature of Islam. Out of complacence he argued that tension between Hindus and Muslims was caused by British rule—an astonishing misreading of reality.5 Muslims had been massacring Hindus and destroying their cultural creations for 1,300 years, yet Gandhi still insisted that nonviolence could achieve the same results with Muslims as it could with the British. “We can achieve everything by love,” he advised Hindu friends in 1945, “If you behave with Muslim brethren in this spirit, their anger will go.”6 This sentiment sounds lovely on a poster, but if nonviolent tolerance is not reciprocated it becomes no better than civilizational suicide.

It would be too generous to accuse Gandhi of naïve passiveness in the face of Islamic imperialism, because he participated in promoting it. At the end of World War I he was an outspoken and vociferous supporter of the Khilafat movement, which opposed the breakup of the Ottoman Caliphate. As Christopher Hitchens remarked of this quixotic campaign, it “was by definition taking place in the realm of illusion, since by that time even the Turks themselves had rejected the rule of the sultan.”7 Gandhi’s defense of the moribund caliphate led to his first non-cooperation campaign against the British in India. Yet the Khilafat movement he was backing was nothing more than age-old Islamic imperialism—based on the insistence that any lands once conquered by Muslim invaders are rightfully Islamic for all time.8

In the end, Gandhi’s support for this movement was the product not of wisdom but of illusions. The unity he hoped to build with Muslims on the principle of nonviolence could

not last. As Historian Stanley Wolpert explains:
Gandhi’s earlier South African experience and success, so heavily dependent as it had been on Gujarati Muslim mercantile support and cooperation, made him mistakenly assume that India’s Muslim majority would adhere to the same principles.9

As it turned out, most Muslims shared neither Gandhi’s principles nor his priorities. His doctrine of nonviolence crumbled to irrelevance in the bloodbath that preceded and followed India’s partition. His credibility may well have followed, but a realistic reassessment of his legacy was indefinitely postponed when he was martyred by a Hindu extremist.

Looked at from the present situation, it is clear that Gandhi (and Nehru, following in his footsteps) did not serve India’s interests by fixating on the issue of British sovereignty. In fact, they got things completely the wrong way around. The enemy of India was never the British but Islamic imperialism because, in Muslims’ eyes, if a territory has ever been conquered by Muslims, it is Islamic until the end of the world (as was explained by scholar Walid Phares in the previous chapter).10 Terror activity in India shows how chillingly true to life this idea truly is. In 2003, 2006, and 2008 jihadists conducted massacres against Indian civilians with the ultimate goal of “a Talibanization inside India.”11 In 2013, a captured member of the Indian Mujahideen terror group made it clear that his group’s goal was nothing less than the complete Islamization of India.12

While the British had their faults and their own brand of cruelty, they also brought great benefits to India. It is revealing that Gandhi regarded many of these advances as threats: “India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during these past fifty years,” he wrote. “The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all got to go.”13 Today, no one seriously suggests that India’s salvation lies in giving up its advances into the modern world. The railways and hospitals Gandhi seemed to find so threatening are being expanded and increased. Muslims in Pakistan are armed with tanks and nuclear weapons, bringing the specter of mass slaughter and even genocide into the picture. The British never posed such an existential threat to India’s existence.

Gandhi’s misguided idealism must be abandoned. This does not mean meeting Islam on its own terms or reverting to medieval barbarity. But it does mean recognizing that Gandhi’s love and tolerance for Islam was not reciprocated. Hindus must base their policies on the basic reality that Islam is their enemy, not a potential ally. Coexistence is a two-way street, but Islam demands submission from all other faiths—a position diametrically opposed to coexistence on any but the most brutal terms.

THE FAILURES OF GANDHI’S FOLLOWERS

In the years after Gandhi’s death, the illusion was perpetuated that independence had strengthened India. Under Nehru’s leadership, that illusion was first exposed for what it was. During the 1962 war between India and China it became obvious. Nehru’s foreign policy had been a contradictory mixture of idealistic moralizing about remaining non- aligned and pure during the Cold War and hard-headed realism about power relationships between nation states. After the humiliating defeat of India’s armed forces at the hands of the Chinese, it became obvious that something was wrong. Many Indian elites rightly concluded that the debacle was a direct consequence of “Nehru’s altruistic policy of Non- Alignment, forged in response to the superpower dynamics of the Cold War and his failure to take a realistic stance vis-à-vis China.”14

Also exposed in the years after India’s independence was the disastrous legacy of Nehru’s centralizing socialism: inefficiency and political corruption. India’s greatest successes after independence have come when entrepreneurs and businesses have been allowed to respond and adapt to the free market. There is no lasting prosperity or economic growth in an economy of strangulation by a combination of state regulation and state-run monopolies. In the same way, India’s outdated political system, in which entrenched and unaccountable parties exercise disproportionate control is ripe for change.

The recent election of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party to power in the Indian government represents a welcome shift away from Nehru and the corruption of the Indian National Congress. Decades of almost uninterrupted power and a flawed political system have allowed the INC to grow extremely corrupt. Gandhi’s party today uses their inspirational one-time leader not as an idea but an excuse. Finally, in 2014 the excuse wore thin with the Indian people.

INDIAN COMMUNISTS—USEFUL IDIOTS OF ISLAM

Today, Gandhi’s level of misguided idealism has been matched and surpassed by Indian Communists. There was a term for such people in the Soviet Union. Well-meaning middle class liberals who spoke out on behalf of Soviet Communism without even being aware that Soviet Communism was completely opposed to their existence and dedicated to eradicating them as a class would be called “useful fools.” Today we call “useful idiots” anyone who propagandizes for a cause without really understanding its goals—all while being cynically used by the leaders of that cause. In India, Communist groups such as the Communist Party of India—Marxist (CPI-M) are the useful idiots of Islam.

This has been the case since before India’s independence. In 1940, the All India Muslim League produced a document known as the Lahore Resolution, in which they declared , “the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India [today, these are Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively], should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States.’”15 This was a blatant statement that India was not one nation. In 1942, Indian Communists agreed: “nationalities having Muslim faith [have] the right of autonomous state existence and of secession.”16

Author C.I. Isaac has noted the connections between Indian Communism and Islam from an early date. “The first Indian Communists,” he notes, “were the Khilafat Jihadis, who were on their way to Turkey to fight for the cause of the Caliphate.”17 The Soviets caught them, retrained them, and sent them back home to spread the glories of Marxism. In the 1940s, Communists E.M.S. Namboodiripad and A.K. Gopalan were leading processions of Muslims in Kerala shouting slogans aimed at independence. In 1969, when Namboodiripad was Chief Minister of Kerala, he carved out a Muslim- majority district in the province, which is today, according to Isaac, “the epicenter of all jihadi enterprises” in the region.18

M.N. Roy, the founder of the Communist party in India, was nearly sycophantic in his praise of Islam:

Learning from the Muslims, Europe became the leader of modern civilization. Even to-day, her best sons are not ashamed of her past indebtedness. Unfortunately, India could not be fully benefited by the heritage of Islamic culture, because she did not deserve the distinction. Now, in the throes of a belated Renaissance, Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, could profitably draw inspiration from that memorable chapter of human history.19

This book has already debunked Roy’s specious claim that the European Renaissance owed much to Islamic culture, and anyone familiar with the history of the Islamic conquest of India could hardly look to it for “inspiration.” Roy’s suggestion that India did not “deserve” to receive the full benefits of Islam reveals some bitterness in his assessment of India.

In 2014, the situation is the same between Communists and Islam. Communists see evil in Hindu nationalist parties such as the BJP and the RSS and see absolutely no evil in Islam. Communists, Leftists, and secularists in general will never criticize Muslim groups and scarcely seem to notice Muslim terrorism in India. A simple survey of their news releases shows this: “Against RSS-BJP Communal Agenda,” “Bringing Narendra Modi would encourage communalism, capitalism,” “Unite against Modi Menace,” “BJP,RSS fanning anti-Muslim violence,” “Modi presiding over hate campaign.” Always the

Hindus are wrong, responsible for violence and hate, while the Muslims are hapless victims. CPI-M politician Prakash Karat expresses this narrow view quite obviously: “The country should not be allowed to experience another bout of communal discord and violence nor should the unity of the people and communal peace be disrupted.”20 No word from Karat about jihadist violence in India. Instead, the Congress of the CPI-M held “’hate propaganda’ of the RSS and its many fronts responsible for the rise of Hindutva terror groups.”21 One might expect from such an article that Hindutva terror groups outnumber jihadists in numbers and killings, but it is not so.

Indian Communists shield Islam and jihadist terror from blame or responsibility but actively and readily criticize any Hindu groups that organize for their own safety. They do so for several main reasons: above all, fear. Muslims will retaliate violently against criticism, while Hindu right-wing groups—despite the fevered imaginations of the Communists—will not burn down the houses or kill the families or their critics. Furthermore, it is fashionable to criticize right-wing nationalist groups. To do so looks tolerant, liberal, and intellectual on the world stage. Intellectuals in Europe and the United States do the same with their own home-grown nationalist groups. Finally, it keeps the money coming in. No one is getting praise or kickbacks from wealthy Muslims and Arabs by criticizing jihadists, but criticizing Narendra Modi can earn a valuable paycheck.

INDIAN MUSLIMS—USEFUL IDIOTS OF ARAB IMPERIALISM

Indian Muslims themselves are useful idiots on behalf of Islam. Where they believe themselves to be advocating on behalf of a religion, what they actually support is Arab imperialism. Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has beautifully described the reasons for this state of affairs:

Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.22One can see the proof of Naipaul’s words today in the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Even fellow Muslims from Bangladesh and Pakistan are not accepted by the Arabs there; rather, they are abused and exploited and treated like any kafir. Yet there is still no greater pride for a Pakistani or an Indian Muslim than to discover Arab ancestry

somewhere in his or her past.

THE REALITY OF ISLAM IN INDIA

In the end, Mahatma Gandhi’s worldview was flawed. He believed in Hindu-Muslim unity against the oppression of British Colonialism. But in fact there was no true unity between Hindus and Muslims, there was enmity which had from before Gandhi was born been suppressed and submerged by British rule. The British posed no demographic threat to India or to Hindu civilization. Islam presents an ever-present demographic and terroristic threat. The first enemy of the Indian people was Islam. The second was caste prejudice among the Hindus. Colonialism was third on the list.

The flaw in Gandhi’s view had deadly consequences. He believed in nonviolence and Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, but more than a million people died during the partition of India in 1947. Since then, Muslims in India have been waging a jihad against the majority Hindu community. Meanwhile, the Indians who left India for Pakistan have waged war repeatedly on their former homeland and today threaten India with nuclear weapons and near-constant terrorism.

Gandhi is praised for his nonviolence, but Abraham Lincoln presents a better example for national leaders. Rather than allow a division of the country that has only festered and produced more violence over a longer period, he should have insisted on unity. If men like Nehru had been willing to compromise their desire for a centralized socialist state, then this could have been possible. There may have been civil war and violence, but it would not have been perpetual. The consequences for the world have been enormous. With no Pakistan, there would have been no 9/11, and there would be no nuclear threat to India today.

Even Gandhi’s independence movement was a mistake. If India had not become free in 1947 it would certainly have come of its own accord in 1977 or 2017—exactly when does not matter. What India needed at that time, and now, was free minds and free markets. Political independence is a product of those things, as the example of America shows. Yet in the name of freedom and political independence India has been saddled with one of the most corrupt political systems in the world for decades. Indian elites amass ill-gotten wealth in Swiss banks, buy property in the West, and send their children to elite Western universities all while singing the praises of the nonviolent Mahatma.

We should ask what independence has meant to the mass of humanity in India. In 2014, 600 million Indians live without toilet facilities and must defecate outside in the fields.23 India has a serious pollution issue on its hands, with 13 of the 20 worst cities in the world for air pollution being located in India (New Delhi tops the list).24 Nearly a fourth of India’s 1.1 billion people suffer from hunger, and it has the highest number of undernourished people in the world at 230 million.25 Children are particularly vulnerable, with an estimated two million children each year dying due to hunger or malnutrition.26 Lack of health care and crushing poverty are blamed for this exceedingly high rate. Nearly 60 years after independence, India has trouble providing basic needs to its citizens. Nearly half of its children are malnourished, and 100 million families live without running water in their homes.27 More than 100 million are facing an impending crisis over water access, as groundwater supplies are being depleted faster than nature can replace them.28 Even providing electricity to the country has proven elusive to India’s

ruling class:
Electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums of money were spent on the project from independence until now. Yet despite all this, nearly 400 million Indians have no access toelectricity. Although India has less than a fifth of the world’s population, it has close to 40 percent of the world’s population without access to electricity.29

It is easy to wonder why independence has not produced much in the way of material benefit for the vast majority of the Indian population.

Significant blame for India’s horrific situation lies squarely at the feet of Gandhi’s modern followers—the corrupt political class which has mismanaged India for decades. India is among the most corrupt nations in the world, scoring 94th out of 177 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2013. With a score of 36 out of 100, India is estimated to be very corrupt politically.30 Because of this corruption, India has more people in poverty—an estimated 400 million— than the total population of most other nations. This is despite having had a growing economy for many years.

Corruption was so bad at one point, “30 percent of lawmakers across federal and state legislatures faced criminal charges, many for serious crimes such as rape, murder and kidnapping.”31 In 2011, an anti-corruption watchdog was forced to resign when he himself was hit with corruption charges.32 The situation was so out of hand, in 2014 the opposition BJP scored a major electoral success by completely overtaking the ruling Indian National Congress for control of Parliament. BJP ran on a platform of reducing corruption. It is easy to ask whether independence was worth it. For the vast majority of Indians, it matters little if fellow Indians are running the country if their rulers are taking vast sums of money for themselves.

Here it is crucial to emphasize that India was historically a nation of enormous wealth. The tens of thousands of Hindu temples across the subcontinent were typically well stocked with gold and gems brought by the pious and grateful travelers. It was the great wealth of India that attracted Muslim conquerors (along with the religious benefits of laying waste to infidels). During the European Middle Ages, the southern Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Contemporary reports from European and central Asian visitors paint the picture of cities full of arcades and bazaars and gardens. A Portuguese visitor named Paes in 1522 claimed of the main city of Vijayanagar that it was as “large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight … the best-provided city in the world.”33

Vijayanagar was under constant attack by Muslim rulers. Although Indian rulers exercised Hindu principles of tolerance, generosity, and chivalry toward Muslims until the last days of Islamic domination of India, Muslim invaders were responsible for great cruelty and destruction. Forty years after Paes saw the great city of Vijayanagar, four neighboring Muslim sultanates combined forces to destroy it. After a five-month siege it was utterly destroyed in 1565. A Muslim historian remarked that Hindus fleeing the city were massacred:

The river was dyed red with their blood. It is computed by the best of authorities that above one hundred thousand infidels were slain during the action and in the pursuit. The plunder was so huge that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, tents, arms, horses, and slaves.34

Author M.A. Khan’s historical examinations are full of similar stories about jihad in India. Consider just one example from the 18th century:

The Persian ruler Nadir Shah, in his invasion of India in 1738, killed some 200,000 people and returned with a huge quantity of booty and a large number of slaves, including a few thousand beautiful girls … “he went back to Iran taking with him precious furniture, works of art, horses, the Kohinoor diamond, the famous peacock throne, and 150 million rupees in gold.” The plunder was so huge “that Nadir Shah stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years, following his triumphant return.”35

Muslim invaders like Nadir Shah were notorious for their zeal for looting and destroying Hindu temples. Author Francis Watson has described this zeal:

Their minds filled with venom against the idol-worshippers of Hindustan, the Muslims destroyed a large number of ancient Hindu temples. This is a historical fact, mentioned by Muslim chroniclers and others of the time. A number of temples were merely damaged and remained standing. But a large number—not hundreds but many thousand—of the ancient temples were broken into shreds of cracked stones.36

This has been the reality of the Islamic impact on India—a reality Gandhi and the Communists forget or prefer to ignore.

The fact of the matter is that Islam wants to destroy India and Hinduism. Hindus are pagans and idol-worshippers—the worst kind of kafirs, according to Islam. Muslims may speak soothing words about getting along and peacefully coexisting when they are outnumbered. Many Muslims may even believe those words. But history and present facts show that when Islam has enough of a presence in a place, there is no question of peaceful coexistence—the non-Islamic civilization must submit or be destroyed. This is the situation in Kashmir today. Many, and perhaps most, Muslims there would be happy simply to coexist with Hindus and Buddhists. But the most serious and literal Muslims can never accept this. Thus, in all places where Islam has a strong presence yet is not officially preeminent, there is an ongoing struggle. Unless Hindus understand the truth about Islam, how it actually is rather than how they would wish it to be, they will be annihilated.

Gandhi may be a great saint, but no nation should emulate his example if it wishes to continue to exist. Perhaps it is true that no nation but India and no religion but Hinduism could have produced a Gandhi; but it is also true that no nation but the Arabs and no culture but one of the Semitic peoples could have produced a Muhammad. The values of his followers are diametrically opposed to those of the Gandhians. Before Gandhi, some Indians fully understood that Islam had to be resisted, that it posed an existential threat to their way of life. Over 1,300 years of jihad there were many valiant efforts to resist. Maharana Pratap and Shivaji from Maharastra were gifted adversaries of Islam. The great Gurus of the Sikhs—men such as Guru Tej Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh—were noble warriors. The last Sikh king, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was another.

The assessment of Gandhi in this chapter may seem unduly harsh to some of his modern followers and admirers. Such people are accustomed to more respectful—even hagiographic—descriptions. Nothing said here has been motivated by envy or malice. For the most part, I share their warm regard for Gandhi’s numerous and impressive personal virtues. As a man and as a political leader, he was remarkable and worthy of his high global regard.

But no man is above critical examination. In Gandhi’s case we have nearly 70 years of hindsight to consider the fulfillment of his political dreams. Given the current situation in India, those dreams must be reconsidered. The Hindu-Muslim unity he imagined has not

materialized; rather, the opposite has been shown to be the case, as the continual conflict between Pakistan and India and the ongoing jihadist strikes within India amply attest. The nonviolence Gandhi insisted upon and followed to great success with the British has not achieved similar success with Muslim adversaries.

In the end, even Gandhi’s dream of independence itself is open to reconsideration. For a minority of wealthy Indians, this has been indeed a great material advantage. Many of these newly wealthy people have brought part of this wealth to the West, where they purchase luxury properties in London’s Mayfair district, seek expensive and prestigious schooling for themselves and their children, and keep their money in Swiss banks. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the country’s population lives on less than half a dollar a day.

We must ask what independence and freedom means to that 80 percent of Indians. They live without adequate access to food, to electricity, to toilets, and even to running water. After 1,300 years of slavery to Islam, were Hindus capable of self-government? That 80 percent must watch as wealthy elites steal money from the state and stop at nothing to escape the country to live happily and comfortably in the West. Many of the leaders of this 80 percent are self-proclaimed Gandhians. What is it that Gandhi provided for this vast majority of the Indian people? A third of the nation of India was lost in the name of independence and almost all Hindus were removed from those places. Not a single issue between Hindus and Muslims has been resolved by partition. Today, Hindus face the prospect of nuclear conflict with former Indians who now inhabit the nation of Pakistan. What has independence brought?

For the West, India represents a warning. India’s past and present will be the future for Europe and America. The Hindus did not know how to fight Islam, but the West is already making the same mistakes: assuming that Islam is a religion, that it can be peacefully assimilated, and that its demographic warfare is of no consequence for the future. As for the Hindu civilization: after 1,300 years of attacks by Islam it is time to ask ourselves if independence in 1947 was the right thing to do. Are Hindus capable of self-government?