Immortal India: Articles and Speeches by Amish

by Amish Tripathi

But were any of them holocausts, in which millions or even lakhs were killed? No. A holocaust is what Hitler carried out in Germany (six million deaths in the 1940s), what Churchill consciously precipitated in pre-independence eastern India (1.5 to four million deaths in the 1940s), the Indian-Partition riots (one million deaths) or Pakistan’s atrocities in East Pakistan, the nation we know as Bangladesh today (one to three million deaths in the 1970s). It is a fitting description of what is happening in Syria right now (1,60,000 to 4,00,000 deaths, and counting). Why, the Native American population was approximately ten million in North America when Columbus famously landed. It was reduced to less than a million by the time the genocide stopped. Once again, without belittling the suffering of the victims of communal violence in India, we need to be careful with the words we use. Admittedly on an unrelated issue, according to the US CDC, in 2010 alone, there were over 30,000 gun-related deaths in the United States. That single year’s gun-related death toll in the US is more than twice the total number of deaths in ALL the religious violence in India, cumulatively, in the last fifty years!