India, Still a Victim of Muslim Violence

“In July of this year, violent jihad – holy war in the service of Islam – reached two groups of Hindus in South Asia,” writes the Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut. More on these attacks can be found here: “The Massive Transformation of India and the Middle East,” by Uzay Bulut, Gatestone Institute, August 11, 2023:

In the first attack, on July 16, a 150-year-old Hindu temple in Karachi was “razed to the ground.” According to the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn:

“[T]he operation took place while the area was without electricity late on Friday night. That’s when the diggers and a bulldozer arrived to do their work.

“The residents have also reported that they saw a police mobile there to provide ‘cover’ to the men operating the machines.”

The second attack, on July 31, Islamists unleashed “a pre-planned attack… against thousands of Hindus” in India. The attack, on a Hindu pilgrimage made to “revive holy Hindu sites and Hindu religious tourism,” left six dead and around 60 injured.

A report in the Indian media outlet, OpIndia, noted “unbridled violence against [the] Hindu devotees.”

“So far, over 100 FIRs [first information reports] have been filed, 202 people have been arrested and the death count stands at 6. The Islamists, in a pre-planned attack, hurled stones at the devotees, fired shots, and burnt cars, creating hostage-like situations where several thousand devotees were trapped in a Temple, only to be rescued hours after the Islamists were raining down bullets on the temple and more.”

Such jihadist incidents in India are often either ignored by Western mainstream media or blamed on India or Hindu people without taking into account either the motives of the perpetrators, or the importance of India’s religious diversity and its secular democracy – both of which exist nowhere else in the region.

Islamists, according to the Indian media, injured, robbed and held hostage Hindu people:

“[R]ioters started pelting stones at them from buildings. Then they [Hindus] saw a mob of Islamists charging towards them while raising slogans of Allah-Hu-Akbar. The rioters attacked them with swords and with the aim to kill.”

Other Indian reports noted that 22-year-old Abhishek Chauhan, along with four others, were killed in the violence that erupted. “His cousin, Mahesh (25), who accompanied him, said he saw Abhishek get shot.”

“Just as we came out of the Shiv Mandir in Nalhar, we saw a mob, armed with swords, guns and stones, running towards the temple. They started beating people, firing and setting cars on fire. A bullet hit my brother and he fell. I cried for help, but there was no one around there… I was trying to get Abhishek somewhere safe, but a man with a sword slashed his neck and fled.”…

Hindus, a widely diverse populace, comprise a little less than 80% of India’s 1.3 billion people, whereas religious minorities encompass more than 20% of the population. In addition, India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population (approximately 176 million or 14.4%)….

India first faced Islamist violence, dating as far back as the 8th century to the time of the Muslim Mughal invasions and rule through the mid-19th century. Countless Hindus and other non-Muslims were murdered or forcibly converted to Islam. Hindu women were raped and turned into sex-slaves. Many Muslims in India today are descendants of those Islamized Hindus….

Prior to the Islamic invasions, most of the entire Middle East and North Africa – countries such as Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Iraq [as they are known today] — used to be majority-Christian. Today, indigenous Christians and other minorities — such as Assyrians, Yazidis and Alawites — in almost every majority-Muslim country where they remain, are severely persecuted.

Zoroastrianism, founded in ancient Persia during the sixth century BCE, under the Sassanian Empire, was, until the Arab Muslim invasion in the seventh century, the state’s official religion. The rise of Islam in Persia led to severe persecution and the Zoroastrians’ demographic collapse. Today, in Iran, they are a tiny, oppressed minority. More than a thousand years of Islamist persecution have resulted in the gradual disappearance of Zoroastrianism from its homeland.

There are only 25,000 Zoroastrians left in Iran, which has a population of 80 million.

Uzay Bulut compares the tolerance of Indian Hindus toward others, from Jews and Bahai’s to Tibetan Buddhists and Persian Zoroastrians, with Muslim intolerance for all infidels, whom they regard as the “most vile of created beings.” She wonders what the nearly 200 million Muslims in India today, so keen to crow about the fact that “Islam is India’s fastest-growing religion,” thanks mainly to the polyphiloprogenitive impulse of Muslims, but no longer being appeased as they were when the Congress Party held political power, will do to undermine the BJP and hard-headed Narendra Modi, a leader well aware of what Islam has meant for Indian civilization and for its long-suffering Hindus.