Interview by People of Shambhala.
In
the wake of renewed violence against Hindus in Pakistan, and with more
than 100 Hindu families seeking asylum in India, Director of the Canadian Hindu Advocacy group spoke to People of Shambhala. Mr.
Banerjee talks about the background to the conflict, and why Pakistan
was created in 1947. Why the West should include Hinduism, not just the
“Judeo-Christian” tradition. And he also discusses Islam and violence
against Hindus and the West, and how we can defend our values and
freedoms.
PoS:
At the moment about 100 Hindu families are seeking asylum in India,
from Pakistan, and are claiming discrimination and violence. There were
four doctors murdered on the first day of Eid, and, I think, a Sikh was
stabbed as well. Can you tell us a little about that situation?
RB:
Sure. The situation is very natural. Most people don’t understand what
Pakistan is. Pakistan is a country that was formed for the Muslims.
India is a multi-ethnic country for everybody. So Pakistan was formed
with the very idea that the only people that should be in Pakistan are
Muslims. There is nothing strange about what’s going on in Pakistan
today. It’s being going on for a long time.
At
independence Pakistan’s population was about ten percent Hindu and
Sikh. Now it’s less than one percent. So the question is where did that
nine percent go? Well, they were either ethnically cleansed, driven
away, or slaughtered in large numbers in the 1971 war between India and
Pakistan. In East Pakistan an estimated 2.4 million Hindus were
slaughtered in just one year, and hundreds of thousands of Hindu women
were raped.
There is nothing surprising about any of this because Islam was introduced into the Asian subcontinent with the objective of occupying and exterminating the Hindus. According to the historian William Durant,
and other historians, an estimated 80 million Hindus were killed, were
slaughtered, and thousands and thousands of Hindu temples were smashed,
and mosques were built on top of them. The Muslims of India tried very
hard over the period of their 700 years [of occupation] to wipe out the
Hindus. But there was resistance from some of the Hindu kingdoms. They
never had full control over India so they were unable to achieve that
goal. But that’s the eternal goal. According to Islam, Hinduism is the
lowest form of life on the planet. Because Hindus, according to them,
they’re polytheistic, they believe in multiple gods. They believe we
worship idols, and idol worship is a sin in Islam.
PoS:
One thing that has struck me is just the extent of the attacks on
Hindus, Buddhists, Yezidis, Zoroastrians, Kalash. Yet we don’t hear
anything about this. You mentioned the war of 71; 2.4 million dead,
200,000 Hindu women raped, but we don’t hear anything about that in the
West.
RB:
No you don’t, because there’s a systematic effort by Muslims and
petrodollars to cover it up. The reason you don’t hear about it is
because they make tremendous effort to silence it.
PoS:
In all fairness, some Middle Eastern newspapers that probably cater
mostly to Muslims have covered some of it, but you don’t seem to find it
in the West, which is even more incredible. Why do you think Western
journalists won’t cover something like that? The West always portrays
itself as caring about minorities and being the people that always stand
up to stop genocide, and that are always campaigning against violence
against minorities. But nothing.
RB: This may offend you a little bit.
PoS: It won’t [laughs].
RB: It probably will [laughs]. But, it’s because the West have been hypocrites.
PoS: Yeah.
RB:
If you look at Britain, for example, when they went to India they did
not stop genocide or massacres, they expedited them. They actually
supported the Muslims against the Hindus, helped them to perpetrate
massacres. In terms of the establishment of the state of Pakistan, if
you read people like William Dalrymple,
a British historian, it becomes quite clear that the British encouraged
the creation of Pakistan in order to divide the [anti-colonial]
independence movement.
PoS:
Do you think there is still a kind of colonial residue in the
atmosphere. Do you think there is some kind of patronizing attitude in
the media? Is that why we don’t see atrocities reported?
I’ve
heard this question before. That it’s a form of racism that they don’t
condemn Muslims for their human rights violations is because they are
non-Western and [therefore] they are expected to be barbaric. There
might be some of that, but these days it’s rather more a culture of
fear. I mean, if you publish a cartoon of Mohammed, even if you’re in
the West, you get threatened, and you possibly get killed, and you have
riots going on. So now it’s more of a culture of fear.
PoS:
On that note, Subramanian Swamy, the Hindu professor at Harvard, was
fired because he wrote an article on how to wipe out Islamic terror [in
India]. I read it. I didn’t find it shocking… I suppose [at the most
controversial point] he’s saying that non-Hindus would have to
appreciate their Hindu roots or they wouldn’t be allowed to vote. What
was your take on his article and on his being fired?
RB: The article was a hundred percent correct. He did not say
– as has been claimed – that all non-Hindus should be forced to convert
to Hinduism or anything like that. He didn’t even say that non-Hindus
should be oppressed or treated badly within India. He just said they
should have a respect for Hinduism, and that they should acknowledge the
proper history, especially the history of the Muslims in India. There
was no such thing as Islam in India before about 1,000 AD. Muslims
invaded and forcibly converted millions of Hindus to Islam. That’s just a
historical fact. And that they should acknowledge that historical fact.
PoS:
Why is it when it comes to Islam, we don’t stick for minorities? We
don’t stick up for women’s rights? We don’t stick up for gay rights? All
the things that we would stand up for at any other time.
RB:
It’s a combination of different things. Political correctness is part
of it, but it’s not the whole explanation. It’s more a simple
combination of fear and bribery. In many cases it’s just the money and
influence pouring in from the Middle East demanding that no negative
aspects of Islam be spoken about. It’s the carrot and the stick, the
carrot being the money being the money flowing in from petrodollars, and
the stick being [the fear of] rioting and beheading over a cartoon or
any slight to Islam.
PoS: In 2008, there was the Mumbai attacks.
A couple of things about that were striking. One thing was the way the
Western media covered it. If memory serves me correctly – and I think it
does – it was implied that the attacks in Mumbai were against
essentially Western targets, such as the Taj Mahal Hotel. Do you think
they were going after Western targets or do you think there was another
incentive?
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