Recent revelations of Malayali-speaking Talibs celebrating with joy on the streets of Kabul as the Taliban took over Afghanistan had sent shockwaves across India, barring Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, who took pride in the fact. Most recently, a Mathrubhumi report has claimed that eight Keralites, who had left for Afghanistan to join ISIS, were also there among the prisoners released by the Taliban after taking over the war-torn country.
The incessant urge to join the terror outfits and wage a battle to create an Islamic world order has always fascinated the Islamists/fanatics of the state. On the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Malabar massacre of Hindus, also known as the Moplah Massacre, not a lot has changed in the way Islamists operate in the state.
The genesis
Most history books tend to give this portion a skip but the seeds of the Moplah riots were sown months earlier with the start of the Khilafat movement. What supposedly started as a freedom revolt against the British, ended up being an excuse to wipe out the Hindu population of northern Kerala.
At the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire started crumbling and was finally laid to rest in 1922. The Khilafat movement started by the Muslims of the subcontinent for the reinstating of the Ottoman Caliphate was given full backing by Congress led by Gandhi. The Muslims of the country received a diktat from its overlords that overthrowing the British government can best be achieved by creating a kingdom of Islam.
However, an Islamic world order didn’t have any place for kafirs and thus anti-Hindu riots broke out in all parts of the country with Moplah being the epicentre.
To this day, the unholy nexus of communists and Islamists have kept the massacre under the wraps with little to no mention in the cultural readings of the state. Make no mistake, it was a pogrom against the Hindus but Marxist historians would make you believe that it was a peasant rebellion or a crusade against the British raj.
The number of Hindu deaths as a result of the genocide in Moplah amounted to around 10,000, and it is also estimated that over 100,000 Hindus were forced to leave Kerala in the wake of the massacre.
Annie Besant described the events in her book ‘The Future of Indian Politics’ as: “They murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatize. Somewhere about a lakh of people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything. Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India”.
Read more: In Communist Kerala, rabid Islamists re-enact the Moplah massacre to scare Hindus into submission
Not only the Hindus were killed and forced to flee, but close to 100 Hindu temples were also destroyed by Islamists during the massacre. Notably, the then pro-Khilafat leaders had passed resolutions of “congratulations to the Moplahs on the brave fight they were conducting for the sake of religion.”
Mahatma Gandhi – a supporter of the Khilafat movement and bloodshed activities of Muslims
Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Modern India, rather than condemning the Muslims, fair and a square called the Moplahs brave and patriotic for doing their duty. The upholding of Hindu Muslim unity meant that Hindu lives didn’t matter. Moplahs were brave and patriotic but there was no word about their victims.
Gandhi said, “The Moplah revolt is a test for Hindus and Mussulmans. Can Hindus friendship survive the strain put upon it? Can Mussulmans in the deepest recesses of their hearts approve of the conduct of the Moplahs?… The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion despite such fanatical eruptions,”
Read More: Read These Gandhi Quotes, And Decide If You Still Wish to Call Him A “Mahatma”
He continued, “The Mussulmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Moplah conduct about forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such things might become impossible even on the part of the most fanatical among them. My belief is that the Hindus as a body have received the Moplah madness with equanimity and that the cultured Mussulmans are sincerely sorry for the Moplah’s perversion of the teachings of the Prophet.”
The whitewashing of the crimes by the fundamentalists is the reason Kerala has continued to churn terrorists and fundamentalists. As reported by TFI, recently, the widowed wives of Islamic State operatives that were radicalized by the infamous Kerala module wanted to return to India. Their husbands were killed in different attacks in Afghanistan. They have been lodged in Afghanistan’s prisons since November-December 2019 and pleading to return to India. However, the Modi government has made it clear that it wouldn’t take any of them back.
Kerala is a highly radicalized state. Over the years, it has become a hub for the Wahhabi movement, and radical Islam has spread its tentacles far and wide in the state. Despite achieving 100 per cent literacy and tooting its own horn nearly everywhere, the state is yet to curb the menace of fundamentalism.
With a communist regime ruling the state, and appeasement politics being meat and drink to Pinarayi Vijayan, one who reckons that the Islamists will continue to flourish. And this is why understanding history is important, for those who forget it, are doomed to repeat it.