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Inventing a ‘Genocide’: The Political Abuses of a

Powerful Concept in Contemporary India

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

To cite this article: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2023) Inventing a ‘Genocide’: The Political Abuses
of a Powerful Concept in Contemporary India, The Journal of Holocaust Research, 37:1,
102-107, DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2153974
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THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH
2023, VOL. 37, NO. 1, 102–107
https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2153974

Inventing a ‘Genocide’: The Political Abuses of a Powerful

Concept in Contemporary India
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Department of History, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The long-term historical demography of India is a highly intractable India; Muslims; genocide;
subject, due to a lack of reliable statistical data. Nevertheless, in Hindus
recent decades, it has become increasingly common in popular
and journalistic circles (including Le Figaro and The New York
Times) to resort to the term ‘genocide’ in order to claim that a
very large number of people were systematically killed in the
process of the Islamic conquest of the area (c. 1000–1800 CE).
This short essay examines the fragile basis of this claim, as well as
the ideological programs underlying it. Effectively, such an abuse
cheapens the term and devalues historical situations when
genocide really occurred, including the Shoah.

Although its inventor and main proponent, Raphael Lemkin, may have been reflecting on
the term ‘genocide’ for a good period preceding World War II, it is clear that the neolo-
gism properly entered public debate only in 1944, and then met with a large amount of
acceptance, as well as some resistance.1 Within four years, by the end of 1948, the General
Assembly of the fledgling United Nations had adopted a ‘Genocide Convention’ (techni-
cally, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), which
was to come into effect in early 1951, as its first human rights treaty. The UN’s Office on
Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect notes that ‘according to the Gen-
ocide Convention, genocide is a crime that can take place both in time of war as well as in
time of peace,’ and adds furthermore that ‘the Convention establishes on State Parties the
obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by
enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, "whether they are constitution-
ally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals" (Article IV).’2 Yet, it also
admits that over forty member states of the UN have yet to ratify the Convention, and
a closer look at this history of reluctance reveals that among the latecomers were the
United Kingdom (which acceded to the convention in 1970), and the United States
(which resisted until 1988). In the latter case, this was on the ostensible grounds that
the Convention would pose limits on US sovereignty, though in fact the foot-dragging

CONTACT Sanjay Subrahmanyam subrahma@history.ucla.edu Department of History, UCLA, 6265 Bunche Hall,
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
1
Anson Rabinbach, “Raphael Lemkin et le concept de génocide,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 189 (2008): pp. 511–554.
Also useful, albeit dated, is the brief reflection in Mark Mazower, “After Lemkin,” Jewish Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter
1994): pp. 5–8.
2
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml.
© 2022 The Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 103

came, first, from politicians representing the southern states of the US who were con-
cerned about the scrutiny of race relations there; and second, from many other represen-
tatives who were of the view that the current and historical treatment of Native
Americans could be criticized using the Convention.3
In Asia, matters took on a different flavor. Some monarchical states such as Thailand
have shown a reticence to sign to this day. In the case of Japan, there has been a long
history of complicated parliamentary maneuvers without an outcome.4 Indonesia also
remains outside the Convention, no doubt out of concern about foreign scrutiny. But
many other major states did indeed accede to the treaty rapidly. The immediate after-
math of World War II had had major consequences for geopolitics outside Europe,
including the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, Israel in 1948, and the cre-
ation of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Indonesia in 1949. In each
of these areas, the late 1930s and 1940s had been turbulent. In the case of the Indian
sub-continent even before the extreme Partition violence of 1946-1947, there had been
the major Bengal famine of 1943, which – no doubt influenced by the circumstances
of World War II as well as acts of British policy – accounted for some two million
deaths. In China, there had been partial Japanese occupation and an extended civil
war, also leading to millions of deaths. In view of all this, there may indeed have been
some concern that the idea of ‘genocide’ would open up the possibility of relitigating dis-
putes in a variety of ways. This may explain why, while acceding to the Convention,
countries like India nevertheless placed reservations with regard to Article IX, in
which the question of international adjudication of complaints was addressed.
Legal scholars as well as civil rights organizations in India have pointed to the fact that,
despite acceding to the Genocide Convention, there has been no real effort to put into
place any internal legislation that would complement it.5 Many sections of the legal
code in the country continue to reproduce what are effectively British colonial laws,
and not only are these dated to before World War II, but they are also not designed to
protect individual or group rights, as would be the case in a functioning democracy.
The current demography of India, according to official most recent available Census
data (from 2011), is as follows: Hindus account for 79.8 percent, Muslims for 14.2
percent, Christians for 2.3 percent, and Sikhs for 1.7 percent. The Sikhs were mainly tar-
geted in the political violence of late 1984, which followed the assassination of Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards; official figures place the deaths in the
vicinity of 3,300 (other estimates are considerably higher).6 While terms like ‘riots,’ ‘vio-
lence,’ and ‘massacre’ are commonly used in relation to 1984, many Sikh organizations
have preferred the term ‘genocide’ as a description, and several western observers and
institutions have accepted this terminology. It is clear that the leadership of the ruling
Congress party was heavily implicated in organizing this violence, both by commission

3
Samantha Power, “The United States and Genocide Prevention: No Justice without Risk,” The Brown Journal of World
Affairs 6, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1999): pp. 19–31.
4
Brian Greenhill and Michael Strausz, “Explaining Nonratification of the Genocide Convention: A Nested Analysis,” Foreign
Policy Analysis 10, no. 4 (October 2014): pp. 371–391.
5
Abhijeet Shrivastava, “How India’s Legislation Risks Impunity for Genocidal Speech,” Völkerrechtsblog 2022. doi:
10.17176/20220722-113318-0.
6
AA.VV., “Who are the Guilty? Causes and Impact of the Delhi Riots,” Economic and Political Weekly 19, no. 47 (1984,
November 24): pp. 1979–1985; Veena Das, (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
104 S. SUBRAHMANYAM

and omission. In February–March 2002, in the Indian province of Gujarat, a large

number of people were killed, too, in incidents of mass violence: over a thousand by
official reckoning, twice that number in the view of independent sources. Though
there has been no legal reckoning, it is widely believed that the state was complicit in
these killings.7 Once more, the term ‘genocide’ has been evoked, though it has been
rejected officially in India. In both these instances, as well as some others of lesser impor-
tance, the direction of violence has always been identified as being perpetrated by the
majority (Hindu), on a religious minority (Sikh, Muslim, or Christian), even though
some of the victims also belonged to the Hindu community.
The negative image of contemporary India created through the coverage of such vio-
lence has naturally rankled certain Hindu nationalist circles. This is all the more the case
because a quite different narrative, going back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, has long held sway amongst such groups, one in which they were the victims
rather than the perpetrators of organized violence. A conspiratorial view would place the
responsibility for this narrative on the British colonial administration that, in the second
half of the nineteenth century, published selective excerpts from medieval Arabic and
Persian sources that stressed the gratuitous violence and iconoclasm of the Muslim
rulers of that time.8 However, it could be argued that the political competition that
undergirded the anti-colonial nationalism of the twentieth century also had a role to
play. Various political organizations, first regional and then national, of upper-caste
Hindus emerged in this process, of which the most significant was the Hindu Mahasabha
(founded in 1915). This organization had a dual role, in that it both opposed the Indian
National Congress (at times violently), and more subtly influenced it through partici-
pation and entanglement. By the time of Indian independence in 1947, a sizeable
popular literature existed both in English and in Indian vernacular languages that
accused South Asian Muslims of systematic historic violence against Hindus. After
1950, this literature continued to grow, encouraged by figures like K. M. Munshi
(1887-1971), a slippery personality with variable political affiliations, who eventually
emerged as a prominent spokesman for the ‘historical grievances’ of Hindus.9 A signifi-
cant part of these came to center on an obsession with the alleged massive destruction of
Hindu temples by Muslims, and the need to reconstruct these edifices. In the 1980s, the
newly emergent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a lineal descendant of the Hindu Maha-
sabha, made this a cornerstone of its program, leading to the eventual destruction of
the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, and a cycle of subsequent violence.
The obsession also led to the production of works such as Hindu Temples: What Hap-
pened to Them, organized in the leadup to the Babri mosque incident by the curious
figure of Sita Ram Goel, who began his career as a Congress nationalist, then flirted
with Marxism, before moving to an anchorage in radical Hindu nationalism.10

7
Ornit Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
8
For a typical example of this form of reasoning, see Harbans Mukhia, “Communalism and the Writing of Medieval Indian
History: A Reappraisal,” Social Scientist 11, no. 8 (August 1983): pp. 58–65. The main colonial work evoked is H. M. Elliot
and J. Dowson, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, 8 vols. (London: Trübner and
Co., 1867–1877).
9
Manu Bhagavan, “Princely States and the Hindu Imaginary: Exploring the Cartography of Hindu Nationalism in Colonial
India,” The Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3 (August 2008): pp. 881–915.
10
Sita Ram Goel, et al., Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1990–1991).
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 105

In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the extreme ‘Hindu nationalist’ cause also began to
gain a handful of vocal adherents in the West, and especially in Europe, whether among
those claiming a ‘new age’ affinity with Hinduism or those seeing the potential of
defining common ground against Islam and Muslims. It was in this context that the con-
servative French newspaper Le Figaro published a set of articles in 1998 entitled ‘Identité
hindou et nationalisme indien.’11 These articles accused liberal and left-wing Indian scho-
lars – and some of their French counterparts – of falsifying the history of South Asia with the
deliberate purpose of underplaying the historical suffering of Hindus, and termed this a
‘negationist’ attitude. In a context in which the proper characterization of the Armenian
experience of 1915–1916 as a ‘genocide’ was being publicly debated in France, this was
clearly an attempt to draw parallels with India. Le Figaro articles not only accused several
prominent French historians of participating in a form of genocide denial, but also did
so using a number of quotations from their writings that were either truncated or entirely
falsified.12 The articles also made the assertive claim that ‘between the years 1000 and 1525
alone, 80 million Hindus were killed directly or indirectly … by the Muslims.’ Since Le
Figaro apparently does not employ fact checkers, let us turn to the source of this astonishing
claim, which is now regularly repeated on various political websites.
The single source for the claim that eighty million Hindus fell victim to a Muslim gen-
ocide between 1000 and 1525 is a reading of the work of Indian historian Kishori Saran Lal
(1920-2002). Lal’s career was a complex one. Initially, he was trained at the liberally
oriented and nationalist University of Allahabad, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation
on the political history of the Sultanate of Delhi in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries. In this work, published in a revised form in 1950, Lal argued – based on narrative
sources of the period – that ‘a thorough study of the Sultan’s character clearly shows that
religious considerations did not prompt him to oppress the Hindus in any way,’ and added
most emphatically that ‘there is no instance to prove that [Sultan] ‘Alauddin oppressed
some people simply because they were Hindus and favoured some because they were
Musalmans. [sic.]’13 He also defended the same Sultan from the charge of having attacked
a particularly revered temple in southern India. However, within a decade and a half, the
historian’s views had changed radically. As he himself presents matters in an autobiogra-
phical essay, this was because in the early 1960s he joined the prestigious University of
Delhi, and there found himself in a milieu that he considered dominated by Marxisant
and Marxist scholars who made light of his views and scholarship. His personal project
thus increasingly became one of opposing their positions, and arguing that most of
modern India’s miseries stemmed from the period of Muslim rule.
To this end, Lal began accumulating material from narrative sources on the violence
perpetrated by Muslims on Hindus. However, he was unable to construct any rigorous
arguments for his quantitative estimates of population, and simply proceeded to attribute
arbitrary numbers based on his instincts, juxtaposing his numbers with an equally

11
François Gautier, “Identité hindou et nationalisme indien : L’enjeu du ‘négationnisme’ marxiste,” Le Figaro, 30 May 1998;
Gautier, “La tentation de l’indianisme français,” Le Figaro, 1 June 1998. Gautier is a notorious figure in India for his
extreme pro-Hindutva positions; see Yulia Egorova, Jews and Muslims in South Asia: Reflections on Difference, Religion,
and Race (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 59–60.
12
For a brief account of the controversy, see Jacques Weber, “Les enjeux de l’histoire indienne entre sécularisme et natio-
nalisme hindou,” in Singaravelou, (ed.), Laïcité: Enjeux et pratiques (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007),
pp. 212–213.
13
K. S. Lal, Growth of Muslim population in Medieval India, AD 1000–1800 (Delhi: Research Publications, 1973), pp. 309–310.
106 S. SUBRAHMANYAM

arbitrary selection of quotations and excerpts from narrative sources. We thus begin with
the astonishing assertion that ‘a population of 200 million is certainly not a high figure for
AD 1000’ in India, when this was far from being a matter of consensus.14 By 1400, this
number has fallen – again by the simple act of his assertion – to 170 million, and then
plunged by 1500 to 125 million, because in Lal’s view, the fifteenth century was one of
‘political disintegration’ that must have led to ‘progressive depopulation.’15 This is
how a radical shrinkage in India’s population occurred: by simple fiat. Thereafter, the
centuries of Mughal rule are portrayed as better, with the population rising to 140
million in 1600 and 175 million in 1700. Now, it must be noted that just as Lal’s
numbers are pure speculation, his arguments throughout are marked by confusion.
Does population rise and fall because of misrule, political circumstances (such as the
rise and fall of empires), or massacres? In a later response to his critics, notably the
Marxist historian Irfan Habib, Lal denies ‘that I have stated that the sultans deliberately
killed people to reduce the population of India.’ But a mere two sentences later, he asserts
the contrary:
What happened to this huge population? It was decimated by Muslim invaders and invaders
like Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghaznavi, Muhammad Ghauri and Qutbuddin
Aibak, some of whom took pride in claiming that they had killed people by lakhs (hundreds
of thousands).16

Again, this does not take into account that on Lal’s own reading, the most sizeable decline
in population occurred not at the time of these rulers listed above, but rather in the
fifteenth century.
Historical demographers have long been aware of the difficulties presented by esti-
mates for medieval and early modern populations. Even in the case of China, where
pre-1800 data is of a far better quality than India, estimates remain within a fairly
large margin of error, and have fluctuated between generations of demographers.17 An
important case is that of Spanish America, where the size of the so-called ‘pre-contact’
population (in 1491) has been the subject of radically revised estimates over the course
of the last several decades. As the demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci argues, the estimates
that were generated between 1939 and 1992 show a ratio of 12:1 between the highest and
lowest estimates, and 7:1 excluding the one outlier, the estimate of Henry Dobyns. These
differences have significant implications, and ‘the assumed size of the population at the
time of first contact is not a neutral factor when trying to discern the causes of the
ensuing demographic disaster.’18 Nevertheless, these estimates are all part of a serious

14
Lal’s estimate of 200 million appears derived loosely from some speculations in an unreliable essay by Jatindra Mohan
Datta, “Proportion of Muhammadans in India through Centuries [sic],” Modern Review 83, no. 1 (January 1948): pp. 31–
34. In contrast in a standard work, Angus Maddison proposes an estimate of 75 million for the same year: Angus Mad-
dison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), p. 238. For other recent discussions, both quan-
titative and qualitative, which lend no credence to Lal’s views, see Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia:
From Earliest Times to the Present (London: C. Hurst, 2001), pp. 24–34; and Tim Dyson, A Population History of India:
From the First Modern People to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 48–75.
15
For a detailed critique of Lal’s statistics, also see Irfan Habib, “Economic History of the Delhi Sultanate – An Essay in
Interpretation,” Indian Historical Review 4, no. 1 (June 1977): pp. 287–303 (in particular, pp. 298–303).
16
K. S. Lal, Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1999), pp. 343–344.
17
Shuji Cao, “Population Changes,” in Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn, (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of China,
vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 300–339.
18
Massimo Livi-Bacci, “The Depopulation of Hispanic America after the Conquest,” Population and Development Review 32,
no. 2 (June 2006): pp. 199–232.
 THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH 107

ongoing discussion regarding methods and techniques. None of them can been treated as
an outright, motivated invention for furthering a sectarian political argument, as is the
case with K. S. Lal’s population estimates for medieval India. Even more puzzling in
this context is The New York Times’s decision in 2011 to produce a graph, based on a
nonsensical set of references, claiming that the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb in the later
seventeenth century caused a genocide involving 4.6 million persons.19 The newspaper
may have imagined that it was being ‘amusing’ (its own words), but in reality, it was
creating a reference that would then be quoted ad nauseam in extreme right-wing Hin-
dutva websites and political campaigns. It is surely to be regretted that a major American
newspaper chose to treat delicate issues in Indian history as a matter of frivolity, and is a
measure of its ethnocentric attitudes.
To conclude, a great deal of emphasis has rightly been placed in the last decades on the
phenomenon of genocide denial, often in the form of organized campaigns with political
implications in countries such as France (where a prominent political figure, Jean-Marie
Le Pen, has repeatedly been convicted of Holocaust denial). But it is also of some signifi-
cance to note the symmetrical phenomenon of ‘genocide invention,’ which is equally a
radical falsification of the historical record. Such inventions serve the function of ‘red
herrings,’ drawing attention away in societies such as India (but also elsewhere) from
the real acts of collective political violence that can be observed. But we should also
note that they serve a secondary function, which is not merely to relativize but actively
to trivialize the great genocides of our times, including the Shoah. A Pew Research
survey from 2019 noted that although a great deal of time and effort goes into informing
the public about the Shoah, ‘most US adults know what the Holocaust was and approxi-
mately when it happened … fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice ques-
tions about the number of Jews who were murdered, or the way Adolf Hitler came to
power.’20 As Carlo Ginzburg has written, Mnemosyne is an unreliable goddess – and
we may add, one who requires constant attention.

Notes on contributor
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in
Social Sciences at UCLA. He previously taught in Delhi, Oxford, and the Collège de France
(Paris). His publications are mainly focused on the early modern period. He has been awarded
the Dan David Prize (2019) and the Prix International d’Histoire (2020).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Sanjay Subrahmanyam http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7781-086X

19
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html?
pagewanted=all.
20
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/. Compare with the
analysis in Yulia Egorova, “Memory of the Holocaust in India: A Case Study for Holocaust Education,” in Jacob
S. Eder, Philipp Gassert, and Alan E. Steinweis, (eds.), Holocaust Memory in a Globalizing World (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2017), pp. 215–227.