[KALKI]

Sir Vidiadhar S. Naipaul (1932 - ) Nobel laureate, He is the author of several books including Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, and India: A Wounded Civilization. He has said: "India was wrecked and looted, not once but repeatedly by invaders with strong religious ideas, with a hatred of the religion of the people they were conquering. People read these accounts but they do not imaginatively understand the effects of conquest by an iconoclastic religion."

"India became the great land for Muslim adventurers and the peasantry bore this on their back, they were enslaved quite literally. It just went on like this from the 11th century onwards."

He summed up the situation well. He said, "In art and history books, people write of the Muslims "arriving" in India as though they came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the casting away of locals as slaves." Naipaul laments:

"I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions ... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed."

“India has been a wounded civilization because of Islamic violence: Pakistanis know this; indeed they revel in it. It is only Indian Nehruvians like Romila Thapar (received the American kluge prize for study of humanity - She is credited with creating a new pluralistic view of the Indian civilization ? aka politically correct history ) who pretend that Islamic rule was benevolent. We should face facts: Islamic rule in India was at least as catastrophic as the later Christian rule. The Christians created massive poverty in what was a most prosperous country; the Muslims created a terrorized civilization out of what was the most creative culture that ever existed.”

(source: OutlookIndia.com, 15 November 1999 and http://www.indpride.com/vsnaipaul.html). Economic Times. No comparison between Buddhas and Babri - Chao Mumbai.com, S. Naipaul, Anwar Shaikh and Rafiq Zakaria - By V.P. Bhatia - indiafirstfoundation.org).