Dr Jay Dubashi
Today, April 9th, is Phalgun Amavasya, the last day of the Hindu year 1934 (Shalivahan), a historic day in the Hindu calendar, for it was on this day 325 years ago that Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, the son of the great Shivaji, was murdered by Aurangzeb. The second king of the Shivaji dynasty was tortured by Aurangzeb, who called himself emperor of India but had all the attributes of a butcher, before he was put to death. I visited his Samadhi for the first time about twenty years ago, and would have liked to visit it again this year, but for advanced age – I am nearly thrice as old as Sambhaji was when he died. Maybe, God willing, I shall attempt to do so next year, and bow before the great warrior, but for whom, we would all be Muslims today, and there would be no Hindustan we know it.
Sambhaji, for all his greatness, was a complex character, a son who at one time revolted against his father (Shivaji) but returned to the fold before the father died. He was crowned before he was 24 years old, and died, or rather killed, when he was a young man of thirty two. During these eight years, he gave a fight to the might of Aurangzeb, who had come down specially to the Deccan to root out the Marathas, or rather to root out the Hindus, and spread his evil Islamic empire to the south and east. Had he succeeded, he would have laid the foundation of an Islamic empire from Pune in the west to Cuttack in the east, and every Hindu would have been massacred and there would have been no Hindustan.
If I am now sitting in Pune as a proud Hindu, not for from Shanwar Wada, the royal palace of the Peshwas, I owe it all to the two great giants of the imperial Hindu dynasty, who took on the might of the Islamic invaders, who called themselves emperors, at the height of their military prowess, and turned them back to Delhi, where their imperial dreams wilted and perished, under the blows of, first Shivaji and Sambhaji, and later, Bajirao the First, who captured Delhi and flew the saffron standard from the ramparts of the Red Fort for the first time along with the Muslim crescent. Sambhaji Raje and Bajirao sounded the death knell of Islamic hegemony in India, and the Hindus could breathe again and turn the tide in their favour.
Sambhaji was captured by Aurangzeb’s thugs and was asked to convert to Islam, or else. He refused and paid for his refusal with his life. He was tortured and literally skinned alive, something only a madman like Aurangzeb could do, but he refused to yield, and was ultimately hacked to pieces. Had he yielded, everything that Shivaji had achieved would have gone up in smoke and not a single Hindu would have survived south of the Vindhyas, and the Moghuls, which means Islam, would have triumphed and the whole of Hindustan would have come under the Crescent.
Aurangzeb died in the Deccan and never saw Delhi again. But he left behind a number of little Aurangzebs, including the Nizam and a man called Tipu Sultan in the south, who fancied himself a little Moghul and tied up with the French army in India to take over the south.
I have never understood why we make so much of this little tyrant and his infamous sword, for which, two hundred years later, a crooked businessman, a Hindu himself, is said to have paid a small fortune at a London auction. Tipu was a butcher, just like Aurangzeb and just like Islamists everywhere. This is what a Frenchman, who served in his court, has written in his diary, as quoted by a French writer called Francois (Francis) Gautier, who specializes in India, and who has written a great deal on the French in India. I give here a quotation from a recent article of his in a weekly normally hostile to Hindus and particularly to RSS. This is what a Tipu courtier called Ripand de Montauderert writes in his diary on January 14, 1799:
“I am disturbad by Tipu Sultan’s treatment of these most gentle souls, the Hindus. During the siege of Mangalore, Tipu’s soldiers daily exposed the heads of many innocent Brahmins within sight from the fort for the Zamorin and his Hindu followers to see…. Most of the Hindu men and women were hanged – first, mothers were hanged with their children tied to their necks. That barbarian Tipu Sultan tied the naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces. Temples and churches were ordered to be burnt down, desecrated and destroyed. Christian and Hindu women were forced to marry Mohammedans, and similarly, their men (after conversion to Islam) were forced to marry Mohammedan women. Christians who refused to honour Islam were ordered to be killed by hanging immediately.”
These events, says Ripaud as quoted by Gautier, were corroborated by Father Bartholomew, a famous Portuguese traveler, in his memoir, Voyage to East Indies.
Brutality and Islam go together. Tipu Sultan is not an exception. Cruelty runs in the Muslim blood. In fact, all this brutality makes sense only it you consider Islam not as a religious doctrine, but as a political philosophy, whose main aim, like the aim of all totalitarian philosophies like Nazism, Fascism and Communism, is material conquest in the name of religion.
All totalitarian philosophies are brutal in their treatment of those who resist the philosophy. Tipu and Aurangzeb were not the only creatures who used brutality to subdue those they could not conquer. The Nazis and the Communists did the same. The Nazis massacred at least six million Jews because they did not fit in with his programme of a pure Aryan Germany. He did it systematically, just like Aurangzeb, by setting up concentration camps and gas chambers so that the Jews could be exterminated en masse as if they were vermin, which indeed they were in Hitler’s eyes.
The communists, under Stalin & Co., also exterminated over 20 million Russians and others of Slav origin, because they resisted Stalin’s plans. If Tipu & Co. killed Hindus after tying them to elephant’s legs, Stalin had a cheaper way of doing away with undesirable men and women, for he was operating in the 20th century, and not the 18th. But they had the same thing in mind – liquidation of undesirable people en masse, just because you do not like the colour of their skin, or their eyes, or the shape of their noses. This was fascism at its most brutal, which the Moghuls and later, the Muslims, called religion. Religion has to have a spiritual and moral base, a foundation of humanity. What base does Islam have?
