The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c6.s6.5

c6.s6.5

But the exercise has proved counter-productive. In place of encouraging national integration, distorted history has only helped increase communalism. For one thing, it has provided a welcome opportunity to the vested interests to assert that no temples were broken, no mosques raised on their sites and no forcible conversions to Islam were made. If people are truthfully educated about the circumstances of their conversion,⁴² they would not behave as they are prone to at present. On the one hand, the government through the Department of Archaeology preserves monuments the originals of which were destroyed by Islamic vandalism, and on the other, history text-books are directed to say that no shrines were destroyed. Students are taught one thing in the class rooms through their text-books, while they see something else when they go on excursions to historical monuments. At places like Qutb Minar and Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque they see that the construction is all Hindu and destruction all Muslim. History books are not written only in India; these are written in neighbouring countries also, and what is tried to be concealed here for the sake of national integration, is mentioned with pride in the neighbouring Muslim countries. Scholars in Europe are also working on Indian history and untruths uttered by Indias secular and progressive historians are easily countered.