One of the issues that needs to be addressed as we seek to sort out the problems posed by the Marxist interpretation of history is what Koenraad Elst, the Belgian orientalist and Indologist, describes as negationism in India.

Known for his writings on Indian history and Hindu-Muslim relations, Elst says that while negationism in Europe means the denial of Nazi genocide of the Jews and gypsies during World War II, the Indian brand of negationism deals with the section of intelligentsia “trying to erase from Hindu memory the history of their persecution by the swordsmen of Islam”.

In his book Negationism in India—Concealing the record of Islam, Elst says: “The number of victims of the persecutions of Hindus by Muslims is of the same order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy, though no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism”.

Apart from Elst, there are several other western scholars who have addressed this issue. Among them are David Frawley, an American Hindu teacher and author, who has written extensively on the Vedas and Hinduism and Francois Gautier, the French journalist who has made India his home and has been vigorously campaigning for correction of our understanding of history, especially medieval history.

Elst quotes American historian Will Durant to back his claim that this dreadful enterprise of negating the facts of history has been a major pastime of Indian intelligentsia. Durant summed it up like this: “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within”.

Convinced that India has its own “full-fledged brand of negationism,” Elst says, “This movement is led by Islamic apologists and Marxist academics, and followed by all the politicians, journalists and intellectuals who call themselves secularists”. Also, it is promoted by the Indian state. Those who lead this movement to negate historical truths use the techniques used elsewhere to achieve a similar purpose, namely, to “slander scholars whose testimony is inconvenient; impute political or other motives to them in order to pull the attention away from the hard evidence they present”.

Further, they keep the vast corpus of inconvenient testimony out of the readers’ view. It is an intellectual crime because it subordinates the truth to political compulsions. Elst published his book a quarter century ago, but it had to wait for over two decades for his thesis to gain traction. One of the reasons for this was that the Nehruvians and Marxists constituted ‘The Establishment’ in New Delhi until 2014 and they succeeded in shutting out other voices in the academia and media.

Thus, spurious narratives flourished in utter disregard of evidence. Apart from Frawley and Gautier, many Indian authors have flagged the issue and argued that the time has come to bridge the gap between history and truth. Prominent among them is Dr S L Bhyrappa, undoubtedly one of the most prominent Indian novelists of our time, whose historical novel Aavarana makes a frontal assault on the negationists and argues that Indians must unshackle themselves “from the bonds of false knowledge”.

Muslim historian Firishta [full name Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah, born in 1560 and died in 1620], the author of the Tarikh-i Firishta and the Gulshan-i Ibrahim, was the first to give an idea to the medieval bloodbath that was India during Muslim rule, when he declared that over 400 million Hindus got slaughtered during Muslim invasion and occupation of India.

Survivors got enslaved and castrated. India’s population is said to have been around 600 million at the time of Muslim invasion. By the mid 1500’s the Hindu population was 200 million.