Indian scholar Jairus Banaji on the affinities between India’s extermination of Muslims & the Spanish Inquisition’s extermination of Muslims & Jews:
Faizabad becomes Ayodhya. The drive to obliterate the Muslim heritage from the fabric of India’s society and history by, for example, renaming places is tantamount to progressively stripping away the cosmopolitan element from India’s culture and transforming this into something hideously artificial, lifeless and drab, and of course irreducibly caste-ridden. The surge of hatred which drives it is like a series of amputations. The BJP loves to talk about ‘surgical strikes’, but their bonehead in UP is wielding a mechanical saw on his battered patient. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Spanish Church in the middle ages and its own drive to eliminate the last traces of Spanish Islam in the sixteenth century.
It was in Spain that fascism first appeared in its strictly medieval avatar, in sucessive expulsions of Jews and Moriscos for a whole period from the end of the fifteenth century down to the early seventeenth. The process was brutal, violent and protracted. Spain was the only European country that actually had the chance to evolve a unique civilization because it both inherited its Catholicism from late Rome and saw large parts of the country ruled by (mostly Syrian) Arabs. What it chose instead was the extermination of cultures which its bigoted leaders decided were antithetical to Christianity. Spain “became” Catholic the way India will “become” Hindu, unless the modernist strand in India’s politics, culture and society is able to put a stop to this appalling catastrophe. 2019 may be a good chance to do so.