The insidious thing about how people gaslight Hindus about the erasure of our ancestors' oppression is that they often do it in soft and civil(izing) tones. And it always comes from people who seem to otherwise care about oppression, people who are "well read" and "progressive".

Theirs is a quiet violence, clear and flowing as if it were beautiful and natural and peaceful, even as it corrodes and expands the edges of the hollowness created by lies. Silencing is a kind of acid.

Move on, I had been told for years. The past is in the past.

Except how do people move on from something they are either never told to study or told to never study? How do they move on from a past that is far worse than what they’ve been told (or not told)? How do they move on from a past that keeps reinventing itself today?

Sometimes when I speak of the erasure of Hindu persecution, I am gently, smugly corrected (it is always done civilly), "Indu, the information is there. No one is trying to hide it."

(That's how gaslighting works, right? It is arrogant and maddening and untethered to reality.)

Because the FACT is that’s not true at all. There are innumerable, insidious, systemic ways that people are hiding the truth. Ways that are supported and sustained by institutions, by scholars, by media conglomerates, by Hindu (American) politicians, proud internet trolls...

This is incredibly damning evidence.

An Indian citizen files an RTI (Right to Information) Application, which is protecting by law. The applicant is seeking source information about claims made in NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) textbooks (which are the ones used in schools).

They are looking specifically for the sources that prove the claim “even when [Hindu] temples were destroyed during war, grants were later issued for their repair - as we know from the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.”

They also ask for the number of temples that were repaired by Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.

The response from NCERT for both requests is:

“The information is not available in the files of the Department.”

In other words, Indian school textbooks are making claims that these marauders were actually benevolent, generous rulers and empathic to Hindus...but the organization that publishes these books is unable to provide any substantiating evidence.