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print versionInventing a ‘Genocide’: The Political Abuses of a Powerful Concept in Contemporary India
by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2153974
ABSTRACT
The long-term historical demography of India is a highly intractable subject, due to a lack of reliable statistical data. Nevertheless, in recent decades, it has become increasingly common in popular and journalistic circles (including Le Figaro and The New York Times) to resort to the term ‘genocide’ in order to claim that a very large number of people were systematically killed in the process of the Islamic conquest of the area (c. 1000–1800 CE). This short essay examines the fragile basis of this claim, as well as the ideological programs underlying it. Effectively, such an abuse cheapens the term and devalues historical situations when genocide really occurred, including the Shoah.
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In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the extreme ‘Hindu nationalist’ cause also began to gain a handful of vocal adherents in the West, and especially in Europe, whether among those claiming a ‘new age’ affinity with Hinduism or those seeing the potential of defining common ground against Islam and Muslims. It was in this context that the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro published a set of articles in 1998 entitled ‘Identité hindou et nationalisme indien.’Footnote11 These articles accused liberal and left-wing Indian scholars – and some of their French counterparts – of falsifying the history of South Asia with the deliberate purpose of underplaying the historical suffering of Hindus, and termed this a ‘negationist’ attitude. In a context in which the proper characterization of the Armenian experience of 1915–1916 as a ‘genocide’ was being publicly debated in France, this was clearly an attempt to draw parallels with India. Le Figaro articles not only accused several prominent French historians of participating in a form of genocide denial, but also did so using a number of quotations from their writings that were either truncated or entirely falsified.Footnote12 The articles also made the assertive claim that ‘between the years 1000 and 1525 alone, 80 million Hindus were killed directly or indirectly?…?by the Muslims.’ Since Le Figaro apparently does not employ fact checkers, let us turn to the source of this astonishing claim, which is now regularly repeated on various political websites.
The single source for the claim that eighty million Hindus fell victim to a Muslim genocide between 1000 and 1525 is a reading of the work of Indian historian Kishori Saran Lal (1920-2002).
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motivated invention for furthering a sectarian political argument, as is the case with K. S. Lal’s population estimates for medieval India. Even more puzzling in this context is The New York Times’s decision in 2011 to produce a graph, based on a nonsensical set of references, claiming that the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb in the later seventeenth century caused a genocide involving 4.6 million persons.Footnote19 The newspaper may have imagined that it was being ‘amusing’ (its own words), but in reality, it was creating a reference that would then be quoted ad nauseam in extreme right-wing Hindutva websites and political campaigns. It is surely to be regretted that a major American newspaper chose to treat delicate issues in Indian history as a matter of frivolity, and is a measure of its ethnocentric attitudes.
To conclude, a great deal of emphasis has rightly been placed in the last decades on the phenomenon of genocide denial, often in the form of organized campaigns with political implications in countries such as France (where a prominent political figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has repeatedly been convicted of Holocaust denial). But it is also of some significance to note the symmetrical phenomenon of ‘genocide invention,’ which is equally a radical falsification of the historical record. Such inventions serve the function of ‘red herrings,’ drawing attention away in societies such as India (but also elsewhere) from the real acts of collective political violence that can be observed. But we should also note that they serve a secondary function, which is not merely to relativize but actively to trivialize the great genocides of our times, including the Shoah.
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