6_Glorious_Epochs_of_Indian_History

154 SIX GLORIOUS EPOCHS OF INDIAN HISTORY
three or four years of reaching Ghazni he died in A.D. 1030**.
378. This fanatic but brave Sultan of Ghazni undertook
at least fifteen major expeditions to India. Hindus too
fought furiously on the battle-field every time. But no
Hindu king could defeat him. But these invasions of Mahmud
and his political conquests did not so much harm the Hindus,
as did the forcible conversion of millions of Hindus in North-
West Frontier Province and the Punjab. That the kingdoms
which were lost to the Muslims were reconquered by the
Hindus sooner or later, is plain history. But the Hindus could
never bring back the millions of Hinuswho were converted to
Islam willy-nilly. We could free from the foreign yoke our
geographical regions but the enormous numerical loss of
population could never be made up by the Hindu nation.
CHANGE OF RELIGION MEANS CHANGE OF
NATIONALITt
379. We are now going to discuss at some length some
of the religious concepts of the Hindus of those times ; of the
course of conduct and practices that were considered decent
and in conformity with the religious laws of the Hindus of
those times and those that were declared to be against them;
and particularly those which deeply concerned the large-scale
forcible defilement and conversion of the Hindus that took
place during the Hindu-Muslim war. It can be very briefly
said here that if the millions of forcibly converted Hindus,
have remained Muslims even to this day it is because of the
perverse religious concepts of the Hindus of those times,
which ultimately proved highly detrimental to the best
interests of the Hindu community, viz., caste-system, the
fantastic ideas of pollution, the extravagant ideas of
religious tolerance and many other silly notions ! Why, these
Hindu converts went on increasing enormously generation
after generation and, as the later generations were born and
brought up under the Muslim influence, they began to be
more and more fanatical—so bitterly fanatical that they-
formed an appreciable part of the armies of the Iranian,