Why A 'National Truth And Reconciliation Commission' Must Replace The National Integration Council

The National Integration Council (NIC) was established in 1961 with the lofty aim of promoting India’s nationhood and nationalism in the people transcending religious faiths and beliefs and regions.

It was hoped that the Muslim citizens of India who were made to believe that they were a different nation by dint of their religion and therefore they should have their own national state by dividing India and creating the Islamic state of Pakistan could, through the exertions of the NIC, forget the two-nation theory and be part of one Indian nation.

Pakistaniat as DNA

Christians had misgivings that they would not have freedom not only to profess and practise but more importantly, to propagate Christianity and convert Hindus in the Hindu majority Indian state.

In order to allay the fears of these minorities and to get them to identify with the majority in a common nationhood though having different faiths, the deliberations and recommendations of the NIC would help; so was the hope. Unfortunately, despite 60 years of its existence, integration has not taken place. On the other hand the disintegrative tendencies and movements are on the increase.

Once it was propagated that the ruling British were responsible for the Hindu-Muslim divide and communal riots. The British had gone away from India 75 years ago but the number of communal riots and their virulence and their extensiveness throughout the land since 1947 too disprove the propaganda that it was the British who promoted disunity. The fact is, it is inherent in the Islamic theology and history.

The main reason is the negationism of Muslims aided by different parties in India and the deracinated so called seculars and left liberal intellectuals. In the face of history and fact, Muslims deny that Hindu temples had not been desecrated and destroyed and in place of some of them, mosques were constructed. This is what is negationism in Indian history. Opinions of two great historians/philosophers Will Durant and Arnold Toynbee are relevant to recall.

Bloodiest Conquests

It was not only in India the temples were looted and destroyed but even in the Christian lands of North Africa, Spain, Levant (Syria and Lebanon), Byzantium (Turkey…). Churches were demolished by invading and conquering Muslim armies. Iconoclasm is an essential creed of Islam.

As long as mosques exist on the sites where the Hindu temples had been destroyed and mosques erected there will be unquenchable feeling of humiliation and insult suffered by Hindus due to Islamist vandalism. Such mosques should be considered 'Hindu Masjids'. Praful Goradia, a one-time Rajya Sabha member, had written and published a book with the above title in the 1990s.

These mosques are described and historical and archeological evidence is described in that book. The most important such ones are those at Ayodhya, Mathura, Kashi and so on. In respect of all of these, the Muslim parties and their Marxist allies, ‘eminent’ historians in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the communist parties are denying desecration and destruction. This negationism and irrational denials induce and promote Hindus' resolve to get the sites back and reconstruct the temples that were once destroyed, some of them several times.

Until the 'mosques' on the very site of destroyed temples are restored to Hindus, their resolve to get them will not disappear.

These were published by Voice of India in the early 1990s and reprinted more than four times since then.

Dr Koenraad Elst, a Belgium scholar, corroborated the widespread temple destruction by Islamic invaders and rulers in India in his book, Negationism in Indian History, a Voice of India publication. He exposes the falsehoods in the narratives by Islamist and Marxist historians of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and JNU, Delhi.

It is therefore prudent and necessary that instead of the failed National Integration Council we have a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the precedents are in South Africa and Peru (South America) where the indigenous people who were, though converted to Christianity, reduced to serfdom and penury by European Christian conqueror-settler-rulers after they got freedom from the foreign rule in South Africa and after the indigenous people had become the majority in Peru.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions had been established and the strife between the foreign settlers and ex-rulers and native people had been contained. We should undertake such an exercise to truthfully once for all remove the cause for strife namely, the continued existence of Hindu masjids.