India Behind The Lens (News Centre)

This man has caused great loss not only to the Muslim community but to the entire society. He may be occupying a very high office, but we will not spare him. He has committed grave and deliberate mistakes. I have ordered a detailed inquiry into the bank’s functioning.

This is how Mumtaz Ali Khan, Karnataka Minister for Haj, Wakf and Minority Welfare thundered in November 2009. Guess who he thundered against? The One Who Rightfully Got Elevated in True Congress Tradition of Rewarding the Corrupt. The One Who Now Adorns the Chair of Minister of Minority Affairs. The Honourable Sri K Rahman Khan.

So all it takes for one to get a super-promotion to a Central Ministry job is to execute a scam of a few hundred crores. In Rahman Khan’s case, the record is nothing less than stellar. He was the team lead in the Rs. 300 crore swindle of Amanath Cooperative Bank, which came to light in 2009, which is what prompted Mumtaz Ali Khan to thunder thus. But Rahman Khan apparently didn’t believe in resting on past or current laurels. In the true style of super-achievers, he went ahead and bettered his own record.

Rahman Khan, who took over as Minister for Minority Affairs in the latest Union Cabinet re-shuffle, is being investigated by the Karnataka Lokayukta for allegedly conniving in the misappropriation of wakf funds….The Lokayukta investigation in the Syed Khazim dargah case has renewed attention on Rahman Khan’s alleged involvement in the massive and systematic encroachment of wakf property in the state — a scam that has been estimated in a recent report by the Karnataka State Minorities Commission at Rs 2 lakh crore.
The Wakf Property scam was the mother of all scams as far as Karnataka is concerned. Even on the national scale, it convincingly leaves the 2G scam behind. The investigation report by Anwar Manippady, the chairman of the State Minorities Commission ran into a gargantuan 7000 pages resulting in Rahman Khan being booked under IPC Sections 409, 120(b), and 467 among others. Perhaps it was this capability that made the Party bosses suddenly take notice of him resulting in something far sweeter: Rahman Khan was elevated into the Central Ministry from his erstwhile position as Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

While the entire political class is busy squabbling over the usual nonsense, while the Congress is up to its usual skullduggery, while the BJP is imploding, while Arvind Kejriwal has announced his new circus, Rahman Khan has slyly declared that he’s out to create several structures to augment the Sonia-Manmohan combine’s nation-wrecking entitlement scheme-a-day method of governance.

Union Minister for Minority Affairs K. Rahman Khan on Saturday said the Moulana Azad Education Foundation, under his Ministry, was setting up five universities across the country. One of them would be established at Srirangapatna and it would be named after Tipu Sultan, the 18th century Mysore ruler.
Mr. Khan told presspersons that Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir are the other States which would have such universities. He said 50 per cent of the seats in these institutions would be reserved for minorities. His Ministry would also build infrastructure such as Kendriya Vidyalayas for minority students.
As usual, you and I will pay the money that funds these universities, which experience tells us, will go to hell while simultaneously impoverishing us to that extent. According to media reports, some Rs. 300 crores have been earmarked for the Tipu University. Let that be how it is. No additional commentary is required on the sheer vileness of this endeavour. What should interest us is choosing Tipu’s name for the proposed university.

Guess what else is named after Tipu? A Pakistani missile. Unsurprising given that Pakistan has been consistent in its missile naming convention: Ghauri, Ghaznavi, Abdali, and Babur, all names of medieval Muslim invaders who struggled to establish the might of Islam in India. The fact that an enemy nation has named its missiles in the honour of all those who vowed to convert India into Islam is pretty revealing. And the fact that Pakistan accords Tipu the same honour shows that they regard him to be a true Muslim king who went about his goal of converting India into Islam.

And here we have an Indian citizen, a Central Minister no less, who wants to establish a university named after Tipu.

The whole business of regarding Tipu as some kind of a heroic patriot took a new turn after Sanjay Khan’s ill-informed TV serial on Tipu Sultan was aired on Doordarshan. This was based on Bhagwan S Gidwani’s equally ill-informed and fraudulent novel named The Sword of Tipu Sultan. A walk in the Muslim-dominated localities in any major city of Karnataka will show you at least one hoarding that proclaims something on the lines of Mysore Tiger Tipu Association. Its more famous avatar is the Tipu Sultan United Front, a rogue outfit that brings us echoes of the likes of the Jihad-mongering Popular Front of India. This is the extent to which the Tipu Myth has taken roots and has grown into an enormous tree over the years: the university, and the agitation to rename the Bangalore International Airport after Tipu are just two of the very many venomous fruits of that tree.

And so we need to remind ourselves again, we need to set the record on Tipu straight before we even name something in his honour. Naming things after supposedly-great dead people is one of the ways to preserve their deeds, their ideals, and their legacy. So what is Tipu’s record on these parameters?

Tipu Sultan lived in an era when the British Crown wasn’t ruling India. India was on its way to reviving and restoring its ancient ideals and way of life after the prolonged darkness of the Islamic era ended with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. The Marathas had emerged as the most powerful and the largest political force then. It’s therefore both a misleading and a fraudulent claim that Tipu fought the British in the sense of the then British Government. Tipu waged war against the British East India Company. He waged the war purely for territorial and imperial purposes and not because he was spurred by patriotism towards India as a nation. He was primarily an immensely cruel Muslim zealot motivated by the goal of establishing Islam in India. Indeed, the notion of India as—roughly speaking—a nation state took root in the minds of the early crop of Indian freedom fighters after the British Crown took over the country and declared it as one of their colonies. This fact is intentionally blanked out by our clever-by-half historical frauds of the Marxist school in their vile endeavour to project Tipu as some kind of a valiant saviour. If Tipu is indeed this heroic freedom fighter who fought against British tyranny, why don’t our secular scum extend the same logic to the Marathas as well?

Another popular myth is in wide currency as far as Karnataka is concerned. Girish Karnad among others has played a huge part in recent times to perpetuate this myth that Tipu Sultan was an unsullied patron and promoter of the Kannada language. About 4 years ago, he frothed at the mouth in a Kannada daily when the then Education Minister D.H. Shankara Murthy correctly claimed that Tipu was an opponent of Kannada. Dr. S L Bhyrappa then tore into Girish Karnad’s perverted history concerning Tipu’s life and deeds. Here are some excerpts from that piece by Dr. S.L Bhyrappa (translation mine):

Kannada was the official language of the Mysore state when the Wodeyar dynasty ruled over the Mysore kingdom…When Tipu took over, he changed the administrative language from Kannada to Farsi. We can witness this till date. Karnataka Government’s land and revenue records use Farsi terminology. For instance, a usage like “Ramesh’s son Suresh” is written as “Suresh bin Ramesh.” Our state has retained terms like “Khata,” “Khirdi,” “Pahani,” “Khanesuvari,” “Gudasta,” and “Baranamoona,” a direct holdover from Tipu’s times. Not just that—Tipu changed the names of entire cities and towns: Brahmapuri became Sultanpet, Kallikote became Farookabad, Chitradurga became Farook yab Hissar, Coorg became Zafarabad, Devanahalli became Yusufabad, Dinigul became Khaleelabad, Gutti became Faiz Hissar, Krishnagiri became Phalk-il-azam, Mysore became Nazarabad, Penukonda became Fakrabad, Sankridurga became Muzaffarabad, Sira became Rustumabad, and Sakleshpur became Manjarabad…Muslims in Malabar speak, read and write Malayalam even today just as Tamil Muslims in Tamil Nadu read, write and speak in Tamil. Thanks to Tipu, Muslims in Karnataka speak only Urdu. This is the direct result of Tipu’s insistence that Farsi and Urdu were the only permitted mediums of instruction.
This linguistic assault apart, we need to examine the full extent of the unfettered barbarism Tipu Sultan unleashed in serving the cause of Islam. Here’s what comes out of the mouth of this Islamic zealot par excellence, someone who belongs in the same Hall of Islamic Savagery that Aurangzeb occupies. We can turn to S L Bhyrappa again:

A collection of papers entitled Tipu Sultan’s Dreams was recovered by the British Colonel William Kirkpatrick from the Srirangapatanam palace after Tipu was killed in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799. These are written in Tipu’s own hand in Farsi. Kirkpatrick himself translated several of these from Farsi to English. The India Office in London still retains the original and some translations. Tipu himself speaks in these papers, the strongest and firsthand evidence of his fanaticism. He always refers to Hindus as Kaffirs and the British as Christians. In some of these papers, he recounts a recurring dream in which a a long-bearded Maulvi frequently appears. Tipu goes to Mecca on a pilgrimage; Prophet Mohammad tells a long-bearded Arab, “Tell Tipu that I shall not enter Heaven without Tipu.” Tipu then embarks on a mission to convert all non-Muslims to Islam and then Islamizes all non-Islamic nations…. He talks nothing about modernizing India and fumes that the Christians (British) are the biggest obstacle that he must urgently remove.
The most glaring instance where Tipu’s Islam-inspired savagery played out in all its cruel glory is his brutal Malabar campaign. He managed to do in a very brief span what centuries of Islamic incursions had failed to do to large parts of Kerala. The account of his savage raid of the Malabar region makes your stomach churn. Here is how he gloats about it in a letter to the Governor of Bekal written in January 1790:

Don’t you know I have achieved a great victory recently in Malabar and over four lakh Hindus were converted to Islam? I am determined to march against that cursed Raman Nair (Rajah of Travancore) very soon. Since I am overjoyed at the prospect of converting him and his subjects to Islam, I have happily abandoned the idea of going back to Srirangapatanam now.
Equally, the Malabar Manual written by William Logan, the Collector of Malabar makes for painful reading. A horrified Logan describes in detail the kind of barbarism Tipu’s hordes inflicted on the Hindus of Kerala. To read a sample, head here. In fact, the extent and scope of Tipu’s cruelty appalled even the British who had by then developed imperial ambitions in India. Here is how the Preface of  G.A. Henty’sThe Tiger of Mysore describes Tipu:

…our struggle with Tippoo Saib was…marked by a long endurance of wrong, and a toleration of abominable cruelties perpetrated upon Englishmen and our native allies….Tippoo…revelled in acts of the most abominable cruelty. It would seem that he massacred for the very pleasure of massacring, and hundreds…were killed by famine, poison, or torture, simply to gratify his lust for murder. Patience was shown towards this monster until patience became a fault, and our inaction was naturally ascribed by him to fear.
Indeed, the people of Malabar still retain the memory of Tipu’s brutality. When the proposal to air Sanjay Khan’s spurious serial on Tipu was mooted, the Bombay Kerala Samajam published a book entitled Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero, a collection of historical essays that gives us the accurate picture of Tipu Sultan. Almost all of these essays are written by Malayalees who were rightfully enraged at the attempts to paint the bigoted Tipu as a freedom fighter, as a tolerant ruler and someone who was a pioneer of modernity. The Bombay Kerala Samajam lodged a case in the Bombay High Court to prevent the telecast of the TV serial on the grounds that it was based on distorted history.

This then is in brief, the true legacy of Tipu Sultan.

And now K Rahman Khan wants to name an entitlement university after this monster’s name. To what end? Perhaps to celebrate this bigot’s barbarism. Perhaps so that people can recall that it is worthwhile to emulate Tipu’s value system that included butchering and forcibly converting hundreds of thousands of Hindus and destroying and desecrating their places of worship. This is akin to Israel naming an University in Hitler’s honour. If the harebrained idea of using taxpayer money to start yet another university with an eye on the vote bank wasn’t already despicable enough, the plan to name it after a fanatical mass-murderer of Hindus sets a new record in perversion.

Shame on you, K Rahman Khan!

Author : Sandeep Web, Follow the writer on twitter.com/SandeepWeb
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Disclaimer: The author is a commentator on issues of national interest. These are his personal views and do not necessarily reflect IBTL's opinion.