1946 Great Calcutta Killings – Direct Action Day​ Perpetrator - Muslim League Council. Year : 16 August, 1946 Number: 4000 Hindus killed, more than 100,000 forced to flee

Historical atrocities coupled with the passage of time allow moral inequities to creep into the fabric of society where they become irrevocably embedded; so much so that these perverted norms prevail and come to represent the new normal of a degenerate society. Right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. Ironically, even victims of these inequities placidly accept these inequalities as an act of fate or destiny. Such was the moral tragedy of modern India.

Indian history from the 7th century onwards till the 20th century had been one long, horrific story of repeated Islamic invasions, inhumane butchery of millions of innocent Hindus, senseless destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples, and economic devastation that reduced one of the richest and intellectually advanced countries in the world to unimaginable penury, timidity and ignorance. Islamic invaders who reached India’s borders in the 7th century AD gave a new meaning and a new dimension to the words destruction, loot, repression and human carnage.

American historian Will Durant in The Story of Civilization categorically states that the Islamic conquest of India is “probably the bloodiest story in history”. He adds: “It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without….”

British colonialism that followed Islamic invasions added another layer of moral turpitude to the already debased society. The partition of India in 1947 relegated a large cohort of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Christians to the status of second class citizens. Independence from the British in 1947 held forth a lot of promise for the Hindu: at last, almost one thousand years of subjugation was coming to an end. Little did he realize that he would continue to be at the receiving end as a result of a warped philosophy of Nehruvian secularism.

This secularism that was promoted in independent India did not subscribe to the dictionary meaning of the term. It was a corruption that was built on a mountain of lies and deceit; an ideology that centered on the denial of the Hindu identity and Hindu victimhood. We were told that the Islamic invasion was a golden period and that destruction of temples, massacre or conversion of Hindus was a figment of our own imagination.

Muslim majority areas of India (like Kashmir) were allowed to continue their suppression of Hindus under the pretext of safeguarding minority rights; this culminated in the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir. And modern India, which was the rightful successor of the ancient Bharatiya civilization, conveniently forgot its duty to those Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Christians left behind in Pakistan.

So, despite the legacy of Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi modern India was a morally crippled polity. We remained captors of the past, prisoners of status quo, with no courage or gumption to confront these moral delinquencies. That paradigm had to change.