india

Updated: Mar 30, 2015 01:25 IST

Indian Leftists have been Jihad-friendly and the state patronised their views post-Independence, said a new Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) member on Sunday in a stinging attack on Left-leaning historians who were at the forefront of history writing since the 1970s.

ICHR member and retired Hansraj college associate professor of history, Saradindu Mukherji, told HT that some historians had been terribly biased and had a political agenda which helped them career-wise.

“In India, it was just not Left … I would call it Jihad-friendly Left. Hence, they had to take a definitely anti-Hindu line, decry every positive aspect of our ancient civilization,” he said, reprising a growing chorus against Leftist historians since the NDA came to power last May.

Mukherji saw a bias in the way medieval history has been written. “Hindus suffered terribly at the hands of their Islamic conquerors and rulers,” he said. “Look at the records and not the propagandist books, doctoral dissertations, and you find every such activity of destruction of temples, discrimination, forced conversion is either being smothered or rationalised if not justified, too.”

He took on Christian missionaries and minced no words to support ghar wapsi or homecoming. “For Christian missionaries (exceptions apart), conversion of heathens is an important objective. Once you allow people belonging to certain predatory religions to tell Hindus that they have false gods and only they have true gods … and so they should abandon their ghar … there would be problems,” he said.

“By that logic, Hindus must go back to these victims of false theology and tell them that they should return to their parental homes...”

To him, Mother Teresa is “indeed a controversial figure”.

He said the proportional decline of Hindus, as indicated by reports on the latest census, needed to be reversed. “We can’t afford another religion-based partition.”