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The question that Indian Muslims should ask themselves now is simple: Who are we? Among the 120 millions of Muslims in India, only a tiny percentage descends from the Turks, Afghans, or Iranians who invaded India. The majority of them are converted Muslims. And converted how? By terror, coercion, force, bloodshed.

The ancestors of today’s Indian Muslims are probably those who suffered the most from the Arab and Muslim invasions. Those Hindus and Sikhs who chose not to convert, took refuge in their faith, fought together and kept their pride and honor. The first two generations of those who converted must have endured hell for they certainly did not convert out of conviction, but because they had no choice: their daughters and wives were raped, sons taken into slavery, parents killed.

It is true that many Indian Muslims were Hindu `untouchables’. Marxists would like us to believe that they converted because they thought that they would access the more egalitarian society of Islam. What rubbish! Does one think in that way in times of war, terror and tears? Do today’s Hindu lower castes convert to Islam when there is no violent coercion? More likely, the `untouchables’ were the most vulnerable, the least apt to defend themselves; they had neither the faith of the brahmins, nor the riches of the vaishyas, nor the military skill of the kshatriyas.

Do Indian Muslims understand that they were part of the richest, most advanced, most tolerant and generous civilization of ancient times? That their culture was so advanced that it had spread all over the world? Do they realise that more and more archaeological and historical discoveries are pointing out that the genocide of Hindus by Muslim invaders is without parallel. The conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the entire Hindu population there; indeed, the region is still called Hindu Kush _ `Hindu slaughter’.

The Bahmani sultans in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 Hindus a year. In 1399, Taimur killed 100,000 Hindus in a single day. Professor K.S. Lal has estimated that the Hindu population decreased by 8O million between the year 1000 and 1525, probably the biggest holocaust in history. Surely, many of present-day Indian Muslims’ ancestors must have been among those slaughterers. Islam cannot be wished away. As Sri Aurobindo said, “Mohammed’s mission was necessary, else we might have ended by thinking, in the exaggeration of our efforts at self-purification, that earth was meant only for the monk and the city created as a vestibule for the desert”.

Thus Indian Muslims have to keep their faith and any attempt by Hindus to convert them back is not only futile but counterproductive. But the question to be asked to them is: What kind of Islam do you want to practice? An Islam which looks westwards, towards a foreign city, the Mecca, swears by a scripture, which is not only not relevant to India but which was meant for people living 1,500 years ago, in a language which is not Indian? Or do they want to practice an Islam which is `Indianised’, which accepts the reality of other gods, as Hinduism and Buddhism accept that there have been other avatars than Ram or Buddha?

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Do Indian Muslims want to worship Babar, a man who destroyed everything which was good, beautiful and holy and lived by the power of violence, or do they want to imbibe the qualities of Ram, who believed in the equality of all, who gave up all riches and honors of the world because he thought his brother deserved the throne more than him? Whatever the West says, which is obsessed with China, India, a vibrant, English-speaking, pro-Western democracy, is going to become the superpower of the 21st century. Do Indian Muslims want to participate in that great adventure? Do they want to feel that they are part of India, that they are Indians?

Nowadays it is politically not correct to say anything against Islam. You are immediately labeled anti-Muslim and dismissed as a `rightist’. No matter if you are only reporting the fact that there is a real problem with Islam in South Asia; that India is surrounded by fundamentalist states _ Afghanistan and Pakistan _ while more moderates like Bangladesh tend to close an eye to anti-Indian activities; that Indian Muslims sometimes tend to put their religion before their country. Thus the question has to be asked again: Do Indian Muslims want to be like Babar or like Ram? Their choice will shape their future for generations to come.

in other way...
A report by a government official of the Andhra Pradesh has put together the socio-economic history of Indian Muslims for last several centuries, and has concluded that 85% Muslims in India were formerly lower-caste Hindus upset about Hinduism’s rigid and inflexible structure. The writer of the report, P S Krishnan, a Human Resources adviser for Andhra Pradesh, has contended that religious conversions, for many such Indians, were opportunities to escape India’s class system.

A major problem with my assertion is that it ignores a very, very large number of conversions that were commonplace when Muslim invaders and rulers won new territories and through mandates, tax structures and use of force, converted poor Hindu families to Islam. There are innumerable known cases of conversions of lower and upper caste-Hindus to Islam, cases that have nothing to do with the class system but everything to do with the circumstances.

Let us take 2 very good examples from the Maratha history, significant by virtue of the Marathas having a powerful Hindu king (Shivaji) who had a successful 40-year Hindu stint right in the middle of the Mughal empire. The chief of Shivaji’s army, Netaji Palkar, briefly converted to Islam because he thought he was being passed over for promotion by his King, and because he wasn’t getting the due rewards of his bravery by his own king. Muslim rulers successfully bribed, cajoled, forced and blackmailed many Hindus into converting, a fact that had nothing to do with the prevailing class system, but more to do with circumstances, financial needs, poverty, etc. The second example is King Shivaji’s own son Sambhaji, who was threatened by his Muslim captors into accepting Islam. Sambhaji refused and ended up blind with his eyes gouged out, eventually leading to his death in captivity.

If we feel that the class system is really the reason for this religious exodus, why does he insist on perpetuating the class system by labeling Indians as belonging to this or that caste, by advocating on caste-census, and by trying to revise reservation strategies to add more reservations and quotas to select Indians?

Sure, some Hindus left Hinduism because they were sick of it. Some of those Hindus became Muslims, others became Christians. So what? Shouldn’t we letting the bygones be bygones and chart a new course?

By labeling the conversions as a caste-issue, the government report is sending a signal to Muslims, letting them know that soon, there will be more reservations based on these ‘newfound’ historical facts. So, sooner or later, this report will form the basis for adding more groups to the scheduled caste categories, helping assign additional quotas for those groups, and creating additional vote banks (the real purpose behind reservations and quotas) for political parties. Today it is Indian Muslims, tomorrow it will be Indian Christians. Soon, even the so-called higher-caste Hindus will be proved to be once belonging to lower-castes, and then everyone will have guaranteed reservations in the universities, industries and government.