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Missionaries Broke Our Legs and Called It Salvation

Missionaries break the legs of my civilization, then hand us a wheelchair, and call it salvation from heathen Hinduism.

That is the essence of my history. That is the story of my people.

For more than 1,300 years, two forces—Islamic invaders and Christian colonizers—have waged war against Hindu civilization. They destroyed temples, burned libraries, slaughtered monks, raped women, enslaved children, and mocked our gods. They stole not only our lands but our dignity. And when the blood dried, they returned in priestly robes to tell us they were saving us from ourselves.

This is the brutality of revelation-based religions.

Islam came with the sword. Christianity came with the cross. Both came with a theology of monopoly: one God, one prophet, one book, one truth. And both demanded that Hindus—millions of us—abandon our traditions, abandon our gods, abandon our philosophy, and kneel.

Judaism may not have conquered continents, but it planted the seed of exclusivism: a chosen tribe, a revealed truth, a God who divides humanity into insiders and outsiders. Christianity universalized that exclusivism. Islam militarized it. Together, these faiths redrew the world map in blood.

What did they do to us? They broke our legs and called it mercy. They plundered our wealth and called it progress. They annihilated our gods and called it enlightenment. They looted our lands and called it civilization.

And the West dares to call Hindus “tolerant.”

We are tolerant—too tolerant. We never sent armies into Arabia or Europe. We never enslaved Africans or built empires across oceans. We never exterminated indigenous peoples. We spread our ideas with monks, merchants, and manuscripts. Buddhism spread across Asia not on horseback, but on foot. Hindu epics traveled to Bali and Cambodia with storytellers, not soldiers. Jainism elevated nonviolence to cosmic law.

Our dharma taught renunciation, not accumulation. Self-mastery, not empire. Philosophy, not monopoly.

Contrast that with the Semitic record. Christianity conquered the Americas, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, exterminating native peoples and stealing entire continents. Islam swallowed Persia, Central Asia, Anatolia, North Africa, and half of India. And even today, missionaries descend on our villages with Bibles and dollars, telling us our gods are demons, our temples are false, and our ancestors are damned.

They break our legs. They supply us with the wheelchair. And they call it love.

The insult goes deeper. Even our most sacred symbol—the swastika—was stolen and defiled by the Nazis. Today, when I display it, I am branded a fascist. Imagine losing not only your land, your temples, and your history, but even your own symbols. That is what it means to be Hindu in the modern world.

Nearly 1,400 years of Islamic and Christian assault have deformed one of the world’s most honest and nonviolent societies into a fractured, weakened, defenseless people. Hindus, taught for centuries to renounce power, now find themselves at the mercy of those who glorify conquest. And yet we are told to be ashamed of ourselves.

No more.

If we want to live honorably in this world, we Hindus have no choice but to examine the Semitic faiths. We must strip away their masks and see them for what they truly are: imperial projects masquerading as theology, doctrines of domination disguised as revelation. They enslaved Native Americans, Africans, and Australians. They enslaved East Indians and West Indians alike. Wherever you hear the word Indian, you hear the story of dispossession.

Indian traditions do not claim a monopoly over truth. We claim only that truth must be discovered—through inquiry, meditation, debate. That liberation comes from within, not from a prophet’s command. That renunciation is higher than conquest. That pluralism is richer than a monopoly.

The Semitic faiths broke us. But they did not destroy us. And if humanity has any hope of peace, it will not come from the religions of conquest. It will come from the philosophies of liberation.

Who guards peace—the renouncer or the conqueror? The monk with a begging bowl or the missionary with a musket?

Hindu civilization was broken, but it is not dead.
Our temples may be ruins, but our philosophy endures.
Our symbols may be stolen, but our spirit remains.

Missionaries broke our legs. They gave us a wheelchair. They called it salvation.
But the truth is simple: it was theft. It was a conquest. It was a lie.

And it is time the world heard our side of the story.