From ‘Holy Warriors. A Journey into the heart of indian fundamentalism’ by Edna Fernandes

In 1750, the Afghans swept in to capture [Kashmir]……It was said that they cut off heads with the abandon of a child plucking flowers from a stem. It was of little consequence to them that the majority of those they killed were fellow Muslims. In their desperation, the Kashmiris turned to ….Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh ….. accompanied by Raja Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu, his forces galloped in to defeat the Afghans…..

The Sikhs viewed the kingdom as strictly business …….And like different grades of cattle, the Kashmiris had different prices on their heads. ‘Murder of a native by a Sikh is punished by fine to the government of from sixteen to twenty rupees, of which four rupees are paid to the family of the deceased if a Hindu; and two rupees if he was a Mohommeden.’

Saint Francis Xavier ……….. the ultimate crusader, the man who brought the Inquisition to India….. the blunt instrument of Christian fundamentalism and an institution of terror that left scars imprinted on Goan society to this day. Its aim was to stop new converts to Christianity from slipping into the ways of their old religion ……stripping out the Hindu ways and replacing it with a pure, unadulterated Catholicism. It was a brutal process. Yet centuries on, the majority of the ancestors of these converts venerated Francis Xavier and loved him still.

Mario had that very Goan temperament of vivaciousness underscored with a melancholy brooding. It was very Latin and yet very Indian at the same time.

[Mario Miranda]….said …… ‘….What Goa needs is a Tennessee Williams to write it all down, about a centuries old way of life that is collapsing in our very lifetime. Goans are a vanishing tribe. I tell you, in forty years, the old Goan identity will not exist.’

……some of these early Jesuits relied on coercion, iconoclasm and in the final resort the violence of the Inquisition, to force Goans onto the righteous path …..

….. [the Nagas] ….. are a handsome people, and gentle in nature, despite their fearsome reputation as warriors. They have none of the typical India garrulousness, and a restrained dignity that reminded me a lot of the people I’d met during a visit to Mongolia ten years ago.

‘If we worship in the temple, he would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals, that would irritate him. If we worship cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her. He was tooth and nail opposed to our way of life in all aspects – religious, cultural, social etc. He had imbibed that hostility to the very core. His number also was not small. Next to the Hindu’s, his was the largest.’

-          M. S. Golwalkar, writing about the Muslim in India in his book Bunch of Thoughts, which is widely seen as a mission statement for Hindutva.

Former RSS leader M.S.Golwalkar, a black-bearded yogi known simply as Guruji, said in his writings that Hitler was an inspiration:

‘To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.’