From crusade to jihad: Ram Swarup on the war on Hinduism

“Like Marx who hated capitalism but regarded it as a higher form of economic and political organization and welcomed capitalists as sappers and miners of Communism, Christianity detested Islam but honored it for destroying idolatry.”

“Though Christianity has a poor opinion of Islam, yet it regards it as a partner up to a point; it welcomes Islam's role as a cleanser of the world from the gross pollution of idolatry—the name by which the two religions remember all other religions, past or present. This sympathy arises from the fact that the two religions in spite of the long history of conflicts share a common perspective and common ideological premises.”

~ Ram Swarup, Hindu View of Christianity and Islam

Ram Swarup was not exaggerating. For nearly twelve centuries, the political battle between Christianity and Islam has been fought with ferocity across continents—Crusades and jihads, colonial conquests and counter-reformations, theological denunciations and polemical rebuttals. 

Yet beneath this enmity lies a subterranean kinship: both traditions share a fierce monotheistic exclusivism and a visceral hostility to polytheism. What separates them in politics unites them in doctrine. Both look upon the plurality of gods, the diversity of rituals, and the reverence for nature as idolatrous corruption to be eradicated.

It is here that Hinduism becomes their supreme target. As the world’s oldest and most enduring polytheistic civilization, Hinduism embodies precisely what Christianity and Islam have condemned for centuries: multiplicity of deities, sanctity of images, and the refusal to collapse divinity into a single, jealous God. 

For the adherents of Abraham, this is not cultural difference but spiritual crime. Thus, while Christianity and Islam may quarrel over Jerusalem, they find common cause in condemning Varanasi.

In my own view—though Ram Swarup himself did not put it this way—Christianity and Islam represent two distinct temperaments of monotheistic power. Christianity is the religion of the philosopher and the trader: it argues, persuades, negotiates, and often seduces. Its missionaries in India came armed with scripture and schools, with the rhetoric of equality and the inducement of material incentives. Conversion was couched as enlightenment, modernity, or social mobility.

Islam, by contrast, is the religion of the warrior and the tyrant: it advances with the sword, it legislates by the sharia, it conquers cities and uproots civilizations. In India, its method of conversion has historically been coercive—political dominance backed by military violence, social humiliation, and, where persuasion failed, the pressure of survival itself.

Thus, the Hindu experience with these two proselytizing faiths reveals not contradiction but complementarity. Christianity seeks to dissolve Hindu society through intellectual subversion and economic inducement; Islam seeks to overwhelm it through military power and social coercion. Both, however, are driven by the same conviction—that the polytheistic civilization of India must not be allowed to endure.

What Ram Swarup discerned, and what we must recognize, is that the rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a family quarrel. Their deeper unity lies in their shared disdain for civilizations that revere plurality, symbolism, and divinity in manifold forms. 

Against this combined ideological front, Hindu civilization has survived not by mimicry but by fidelity to its own spirit: the conviction that truth is not jealous but abundant, that the sacred can never be monopolized by one book or one prophet, and that humanity flourishes not in uniformity but in multiplicity.