islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

Islamic Imperialism in IndiaWithin a century, most of the people of the lowland tropical regions were literally wiped out, while as high as80 percent of the highland population of Andes and Middle America also died from these diseases. 522Nonetheless, the colonists also killed the Pagan natives, probably in the millions, often on religious grounds.The Europeans, too, did not have acquired immunity to falciparum malaria and yellow fever of Africanorigin; they also died in large numbers from these diseases contracted from African slaves brought to theAmericas.Based on historical documentation and circumstantial evidence, Prof. KS Lal estimates that thepopulation of India stood at about 200 million in 1000 and it dwindled to only 170 millions in 1500, in spiteof the passage of five centuries. 523 Between sixty and eighty million people died at the hands of Musliminvaders and rulers between 1000 and 1525, estimates Lal. The possibility of annihilation of such a largenumber of Indians by Muslim invaders and rulers may appear a suspect. However, in the war of independenceof Bangladesh in 1971, the Pakistani army killed 1.5 to 3.0 million people in just nine months. It occurred inour modern age of flourishing journalism, but the world hardly took a notice of it. Moreover, a large numberof the victims in this case were their co-religionists, the Muslims of East Pakistan. Hence, it is entirelypossible that Muslim invaders and rulers, who came with the mission of extirpating idolatry from India, couldeasily have slaughtered as many as eighty million Indian infidels over a period of ten centuries in such a vast land.HINDU-MUSLIM DIVIDE: A BRITISH INVENTION?One aspect of the British imperialism in India, which critics of the subcontinent have obsessively used fordemonizing the British, was their "Divide and Rule" policy. These critics claim that the British rulers createdanimosity between Hindus and Muslims as a premeditated stratagem to weaken the unity and neutralize thecollective resistance of Indians for facilitating their continued occupation and exploitation. They argue thatthis clever ploy kept the Hindus and Muslims of India divided; they fought each other over their religiousdifferences, allowing the British rule to continue unimpeded.An overwhelming majority of the people in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan also think that thisBritish-created religious divide is the root cause of the internecine communal troubles that have continued toplague India to this day. They entertain a deeply-entrenched belief that religious animosity between Hindusand Muslims was totally unknown in India before the British rulers came and devised this cunning andmalevolent scheme to keep the Hindus and Muslims at each other’s throat.This hyperbolic criticism of the British "Divide and Rule" policy has been consumed voraciously andregurgitated frequently by all and sundry: Hindus and Muslims, progressives and obscurantists, liberals andzealots. There existed, believe critics, a wonderful relationship of amity, tolerance, brotherhood and cooperationbetween the Hindus and Muslims before the devious and manipulative British spoiled it all. EvenNehru painted a picture that the British deliberately created a division between the Hindus and Muslims.India’s Congress Party viewed this conspiracy theory as a major underlying cause of the continued Hindu-Muslim conflicts in post-independence India; and all blame was conveniently heaped, in absentia, on theformer colonists.The British rulers undoubtedly exploited the religious division amongst Indians to their advantage.But the question that must be asked is: Was there a unity and brotherhood between Hindus and Muslimsduring the centuries of Muslim rule in pre-British India?522. Curtin PD (1993) The Tropical Atlantic of the Slave Trade, In M Adas ed., Islam & European Expansion, TempleUniversity Press, Philadelphia, p. 172.523. Lal (1973), p. 25–32164