In his inaugural Independence day speech, India’s atheist prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stated that the soul of the nation had been long suppressed, for centuries. Who did Nehru mean when he spoke of a nation? I presume he meant its people.

And so who were India’s people? Well, about 80 per cent were Hindu, and the rest were of other religions. So in effect, Nehru was stating that the soul of the Hindu had been long suppressed.

Some writers claim that about a hundred million Hindus perished in India’s Islamic invasions. Hitler killed about 5 million Jews. That is referred to as the Holocaust. In Germany today, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust.

Even if one believes that figures of the Hindu genocide are inflated, one cannot argue with noted Pakistani writers who state that indeed, Islam, was spread by the sword and that millions perished at the hands of Islamic invaders. So while Jews are allowed to commemorate the Holocaust without question, whenever Hindus bring up the question of their genocide, liberals such as Arundhati Roy, Romila Thapar and Pankaj Mishra shriek them down.

Instead, the liberals keep painting Hindus as communal. I am a Hindu, and I am not communal.

I was born into an army family. My father was very English in his deportment. My mother was a believer in Hinduism, but she always taught me that Muslims were very cultured. I grew up with Muslim friends in army cantonments. My best friend in high school was Muslim.

I grew up on history books inspired by Romila Thapar that said that the Islamic invaders were better than the British because they stayed back in India and kept its wealth in India, unlike the Brits who repatriated Indian wealth home. Akbar was praised to the skies. Aurangzeb was only faintly criticized, with just a mention of him having restored the Jaziya. Jaziya to a sixth-grader like me signified nothing.

I grew up liberal. Very, very liberal. I hated the RSS. My family always voted Congress. Then, in the eighties, Bhindranwale and his goons started murdering Hindus in the thousands in Punjab. Their aim was to ethnically cleanse the Punjab of Hindus so that they could create their independent Sikh nation of Khalistan.

For four years this genocide of Hindus in Punjab went on. Very few Sikhs protested against it then; very few Sikhs protest against it now. Arun Shourie says that by 1984 a feeling had grown amongst Indian minorities that the Hindu was effete, that if you slap his one cheek, he would turn the other cheek.

In 1984, Indira Gandhi sent the army into the Golden Temple to get Bhindranwale who was safely ensconced there. Her Sikh bodyguards killed her in revenge the same year, and Congress party goons, almost all Hindu, went on a killing spree of Sikhs all over North India shortly thereafter. This killing spree is widely remembered by Sikhs and even by many Hindus until today, but no one remembers the faceless, nameless Hindus killed by Bhindranwale.

There is a Sikh widows’ colony in Delhi and another one in Kanpur, but there is no Hindu widows’ colony anywhere in Punjab. The Hindu widows there seem to have vanished along with their men.

Soon enough, a Hindutva movement seized upon a rickety mosque in India to build itself. While this Hindutva movement seemed like a naked play for power, it had grounds in reality. European travellers in the Mughal Empire like Manucci and Tavernier regularly chronicle how the Mughals would blow up Hindu temples and build mosques over them.

The Archeological Survey of India, a body which maintains Muslim monuments like the Taj Mahal in pristine condition, has found that some sort of Hindu structure, a temple or a palace, was buried below the Babri Masjid. Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested that there was technology available to move the mosque brick by brick to another less contentious space, but he found no takers in the Muslim community.

Many Muslims believed that if they gave in on one mosque, Hindus would ask for other mosques to be moved.

I am still a liberal Hindu, but that does that not mean that I will have my religion abused by those who are fascist in their own beliefs. Unlike Islam and Christianity and Buddhism, my religion doesn’t evangelize. Unlike Islam, my religion doesn’t force my spouse or children to adhere to Islam. My religion has an ethos, a Hindu ethos, that allows all religions to live and breathe freely in India.

My religion is not perfect. But so is no other religion. But my religion is less imperfect than most any other religion. Today, India is ruled by a man who is unabashedly Hindu, unapologetically Hindu, unashamedly Hindu. He is Hindu, so he cannot be communal. I am Hindu, so I cannot be communal. Other religions, and shrieking Hindu liberal fascists, please refrain from painting us as so.