Yesterday, I watched a gut-wrenching drama performed by Gurukul children, portraying the tragic collapse of the Vijayanagara Empire. What caused its downfall then is no different from what happened in Pahalgam, Kashmir—where innocent Hindu pilgrims were ruthlessly segregated and slaughtered.

The bitter truth is this: naive, delusional, and dangerously secular Hindus continue to glorify radical Islam as a peaceful and desirable ideology. These same Hindus, blinded by their obsession with tolerance, are the first to parrot the insipid phrase, “Terrorism has no religion,” every time radical Islamic terrorists commit mass murder. Could there be anything more idiotic, more insensitive, more inhuman than this denial of reality? It’s not just salt in our wounds—it’s acid.

When terror strikes—be it 9/11, 26/11, Godhra, or the countless bombings and lynchings—the first line of defense for Islamist violence always comes from secular Hindus. They bend over backwards to mask jihad as just another “criminal act,” stripping it of its ideological core. They won’t call it what it is: radical Islamic religious fanaticism.

Meanwhile, the terrorists are brutally honest. They wear their ideology on their sleeves, screaming “jihad” with verses from their holy texts, while the cowardly secularist hides behind empty slogans. What’s even more destructive is the cold-blooded appeasement politics of our leaders. They sacrifice Hindu lives on the altar of vote banks. Hindus will be murdered, and Muslims—kept deliberately poor, uneducated, and radicalized—will be weaponized. Both communities will be destroyed. Look no further than Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or the hellhole that is Pakistan.

What’s even worse is that Indian Muslims refuse to follow progressive Islamic models like the UAE, where religion is personal and private. Instead, they make it loud, aggressive, and toxically public—causing social damage beyond repair.

And Hindus? We are architects of our own annihilation. We spend crores on weddings that don’t last few years, while our fellow countrymen remain uneducated and underprivileged. We fight our own siblings over a few square feet of land. We take hollow pride in our languages—yet most language warriors can’t even read a single verse of their own classical literature. Their children are illiterate in their mother tongue, yet they thrash fellow Hindus who speak a different language, as if that somehow makes them heroes.

Ironically, a Kannada-speaking man from Shivamogga was gunned down in Pahalgam, and Marathi-speaking tourists were killed just the same. The jihadis didn’t care about language, food habits, or caste. They didn’t distinguish between vegetarians and meat-eaters. They saw only one thing: Hindu.

And yet, Hindus will continue their self-sabotage—dividing themselves along lines of Advaita, Dvaita, Bheda-Abheda, Lingayat, Sikh, and now even new-age spiritual nonsense. Our obsession with exclusivity in philosophy is digging our graves.

When faced with slaughter, we don’t rise—we shrug. We whisper, “It’s our karma,” or “Kaliyuga, what can we do?” This is not humility—it’s suicidal delusion. We are failing to recognize the threat of exclusivist ideologies that openly vow to annihilate us.

And while jihadis arm themselves with guns and conviction, Hindus arm themselves with apathy and cowardice. I recall a Hindu father proudly telling his son not to resist, but to convert—so his grandchildren can live in comfort. “What’s in a religion?” he asked. Everything, sir. That mindset is treasonous. That mindset will get your descendants slaughtered.

Yes, many Hindus will be decimated. But Hinduism will not die. Because Sanatana Dharma is not a cult. It’s not a religion. It’s not limited to a nation. It is nature itself—sometimes lush and vibrant, sometimes polluted—but always enduring.

If humanity is to survive, every religion must be practiced privately, and universal principles of Dharma—truth, justice, compassion, and duty—must govern public life. If not, Hindus will collapse from within, and Islam will implode from its own rigidity—because what has a beginning must have an end.

I have no more tears left to shed for my butchered brothers and sisters. I now only pray—to Rudra, the fierce form of Shiva—to unleash divine fury. May our security forces be empowered to crush jihadists, and may every sympathizer of terror face the same fate as the murderers they defend.

– Govinda Das (ISKCON Member)