Marxist Ideology's Betrayal of India's History and Present

In the year 2004, Shankar Sharan’s book "Marxism and Writing of Indian History" was published. The book points out that Marxists deliberately suppressed facts to fabricate the argument that Muslims felt insecure because they were a minority. The reality is that they cannot cite even a single sentence expressing this sense of 'insecurity' spoken or written by Muslim leaders, thinkers, or authors. From the Musaddas (1789) to Shikwa (1909) and the Muslim League's Pakistan Resolution (1940), from Shah Waliullah to Muhammad Ali Jinnah—Marxist historians have not quoted a single Muslim word expressing insecurity anywhere. The argument of insecurity was an additional weapon handed to them by our Marxist scholars, and like seasoned, clever warriors, Islamic spokesmen wield this weapon too whenever the need arises.

On the contrary, Maulana Hali and Iqbal are troubled by the fact that kufr (unbelief) could not be eradicated roots and all. In Islam, idol worship is kufr and iconoclasm (the destruction of idols) is a holy religious duty. In his famous work Musaddas, Hali repeatedly describes Muslims as a distinct nation. If the author’s name were not revealed, Hali's entire work could easily pass as the writing of an author from an Arab land, for India is nowhere to be found in it, except in a couple of places as an ominous, cursed land that inflicted the gravest injury upon Islam. For instance...

That fearless fleet of the faith of Hijaz,
Whose standard reached the farthest corners of the world,
Whose path no danger could ever impede,
Which halted not in Oman, nor faltered in the Red Sea,
Which traversed all seven seas under its shield,
Came and sank upon reaching the mouth of the Ganga.

Iqbal articulated this with absolute clarity and force on this very theme in his formidable works Shikwa (1909) and Jawab-e-Shikwa (1912), which take the form of a dialogue with Allah. Lamenting first before Allah over the declining glory of Islam, he complains that across the entire world, we (Muslims) destroyed idolaters and believers in false gods in Your name, shattered their idols, laid waste to their entire civilizations, and forced them at sword-point to submit to Your sovereignty...

Speak Thyself, who tore down the gate of Khaybar?
Who conquered what was once Caesar's city?
Who broke the sculpted forms of the Lord's creatures?
Who slaughtered and routed the armies of the infidels?
Who extinguished the fire-temple of Iran?
Who revived once again the remembrance of Yazdan?
By whose takbeer was Thy world awakened?
From whose dread did idols cower in terror,
Falling flat on their faces, crying 'Huwallahu Ahad'?

There are no veiled metaphors here that our Marxists could twist into a different meaning to make palatable for students. Replying to this grievance in Jawab-e-Shikwa, Allah answers with equal clarity: where are those who once performed all those deeds for Me? Those who raised the sword in My name, who brought the world into Islam by its might, are no longer to be found. The poet Iqbal's Allah says of today's Muslims...

The hands are powerless, the hearts accustomed to heresy,
The followers of the Ummah bring disgrace upon the Prophet.
The idol-breakers have departed, those who remain are idol-makers;
Abraham was the father, yet the sons have turned into Azar!
New are the wine-drinkers, new is the wine, new are the flagons;
New is the sanctuary of the Kaaba, new are the idols, and new are you!

These were the reflections of the most celebrated figure of modern Islamic scholarship. From beginning to end, throughout both these compositions, there is no concern other than establishing an Islamic empire across the entire world, nor any alternative to it. To achieve this, eradicating other religions and shattering their objects of worship is still regarded as indispensable. Nor should it be assumed that modern Islamic scholars seek to distance themselves from these propositions. Writing a foreword to these works of Iqbal in 1980, the renowned Indian scholar Rafiq Zakaria—reputed to be liberal and secular—lauded Iqbal as a champion of a broader humanism.

The question then arises: why have Marxist historians moved heaven and earth to conceal historical facts that Islamic ulema and leaders themselves have never hesitated to acknowledge, seeking charming reinterpretations for them, and pinning the blame on anyone other than Islam whenever possible?

Marxist Historians: Historians or Political Propagandists?

Indian Marxist historians are less historians and more political propagandists or political activists. In The Future Results of British Rule in India, Marx not only places Muslims, Mughals, and the British in the category of foreign rulers, but also identifies Hindutva (Hinduism) as the sole religion of Hindustan. Marx was well aware of the sizable Muslim population in India; nevertheless, he described India's character as fundamentally Hindu. At the time Marx was writing, the last Mughal emperor of India was still alive, and Marx made mention of him as well. Thus, Marx harboured not the slightest doubt that Mughal rule in India was not that of the natives of India, but the rule of foreign invaders. Yet for stating this very fact, and that too with complete documentary authenticity, our Marxist historians have sought to disparage and dismiss numerous scholarly historians such as Jadunath Sarkar, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, and Sita Ram Goel, branding them as 'communal' and 'Sangh Parivar writers'.

A second example demonstrating that Indian Marxist historians are political propagandists and activists is that as early as 1907—on the fiftieth anniversary of the events of 1857—Veer Savarkar authored a monumental history of nearly a thousand pages titled The Indian War of Independence. At that time, our Marxists were regarding 1857 merely as a 'Sepoy Mutiny'. Not only that, they characterized calling it the first war of independence as exaggerated glorification and 'uncritical nationalism', deriding authors who asserted this as self-serving opportunists.

In any case, right up to 1957, India's Marxist historians continued to dismiss 1857 as a mere mutiny, while maligning figures like Savarkar who hailed it as a war of independence as self-interested actors. Yet just two years later, when in 1959 Russian Marxists from Moscow appraised that event as 'India's First War of Independence', the stance of Indian Marxists shifted overnight. Not only did they execute a complete volte-face on their earlier position, but they bent over backwards to claim credit for being the first to describe 1857 as the Indian war of independence. With effortless cynicism, they sought to consign Savarkar to total oblivion—the very man who had made this assessment at least half a century earlier, and that too in an exhaustive, magnum opus. Such rapid somersaults with history might seem bizarre, but once one is acquainted with the nature of Marxist scholarship and propaganda, nothing about it will appear surprising. Even so, borrowing the phrase from Muktibodh, it is only natural to ask: 'Partner, tumhari politics kya hai?' (Partner, what is your politics?)

– Shivpujan Tripathi, the author is a scholar and discerning student of Indian history and culture

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