The Aligarh school has been emulated on a large scale.

Soon its torch was taken

over by Marxist historians, who were building a reputation for unscrupled history-
rewriting in accordance with the party-line.

In this context, one should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian
communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the communists gave
intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India
and create an Islamic state. After independence, they succesfully combined (with the
tacit support of prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the
constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force
India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this collaboration has
continued to their mutual advantage, as exemplified by their common front to defend
the Babri Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's rule these
Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and
policies.

Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even
those who formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist
categories.
They accepted, for instance, that religious conflicts can be reduced to economic and
class contradictions. They also adopted Marxist terminology, so that they always
refer to conscious Hindus as "the communal forces" (Marxism dehumanizes people
to impersonal pawns, or "forces", in the hands of god History). The Marxist historians
had the field all to themselves, and they set to work to "decommunalize Indian
history-writing", i.e. to erase the importance of Islam as a factor of conflict.

In Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia
and Bipan Chandra, professors at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, the Mecca of
"secularism" and negationism) in Delhi, write that the interpretation of medieval wars
as religious conflicts is in fact a back-projection of contemporary religious conflict
artificially created for political purposes. In Bipan Chandra's famous formula,
"communalism is not a dinosaur", it is a strictly modern phenomenon. They explicitly
deny that before the modern period there existed such a thing as Hindu identity or
Muslim identity. Conflicts could not have been between Hindus and Muslims, only
between rulers or classes who incidentally also belonged to one religious community
or the other. They point to the conflicts within the communities and to alliances
across community boundaries.

It is of course a fact that some Hindus collaborated with the Muslim rulers, but that
also counted for the British colonial rulers, who are for that no less considered as
foreign oppressors. For that matter, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw the Nazis
employed Jewish guards: this does not disprove Nazi Jewish enmity. It is also a fact
that the Muslim rulers sometimes made war among each other, but that was equally
true for Portuguese, French and British colonizers, who fought some wars on Indian
territory: they were just as much part of a single colonial movement with a common
colonial ideology, and all the brands of colonialism were equally the enemies of the
Indian freedom movement. Even in the history of the Crusades, that paradigm of
religious war, we hear a lot of battles between one Christian-Muslim coalition and
another: these do not falsify the over-all characterization of the Crusades as a war
between Christians and Muslims (triggered by the destruction of Christian churches
by Muslims).

After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-
existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to
explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-
existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal
identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They
carried on a "divide and rule" policy, and therefore they incited the religious
communities against each other, thus encouraging their communal separateness. As
the example par excellence, Prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th-century 8-volume
work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians. This
work does indeed paint a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans
with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a concoction by the British historians:
as the title of their work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers, most
of them Muslims.

Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has
become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a "secularist". It