Intrafaith Dialog - Hinduism, Buddhism And Jainism

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->He mercilessly attacked Christianism and Islamism with all his might, and with what Oj! But did he even so much as raise a finger at Sikhs, Jains, Bauddhas? <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think you have been misled, Swami Dayananda attacked all the other 3 as strongly as he did Christianity and Islam, infact the Arya Samaj attempts to reconvert Sikhs and their attacks on the Sikh gurus were one of the prime reasons for the schism between them and us.

Here is some info:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The attitude of cringing Hindu gratitude to the “sword-arm” is not the only nor even the most important reason for the contempt which some Khalsa Sikhs developed toward everything Hindu during the past century. The British policy of privileging the Sikhs is probably the decisive factor, but we should not ignore the role which Hindus themselves have played in the estrangement of the Sikhs with their own type of contempt.


The Arya Samaj, as a genuinely fundamentalist movement, distinguished between “authentic” (Vedic) Hinduism and “degenerate” (defined as post-Vedic) forms of Hinduism.  By campaigning for the Shuddhi (“purification”, effectively conversion) of Sikhs, it implicitly declared the Sikhs to be either degenerate Hindus or non-Hindus.57 Khushwant Singh describes the adverse effect of the Arya Samaj’s campaign: “Fortunately for the Sikhs, Dayanand Saraswati was also very offensive in the language he used.  He did not realize that he was treading on soft ground when he described guru Nanak as a dambi, an impostor.58 (…) The Sikhs rejected Dayanand and the Samaj, and set up Singh Sabhas and the chief Khalsa Diwan to counteract Dayanand’s movement.  Kahan Singh of Nabha published a book entitled ‘Ham Hindu nahin hain’59 It was a categorical statement of rejection of Hinduism.  The Arya Samaj can take the credit for driving Sikhs away from Hinduism.”60


In the Arya Samaj version, Sikh pro-British “toadyism” versus Arya nationalism was a more decisive factor in their mutual estrangement.  After independence, Sikhs started arguing that their own contribution to the Freedom struggle had been the greatest given the high proportion of Sikhs among the martyrs.  However, most of these fell during the Jallianwala Bagh shooting in Amritsar (1919), started as a peaceful gathering of people who had no intention of giving up their lives (the responsible officer was removed from his post, for the useless and unprovoked massacre totally deviated from British policy).  The proportion of Sikhs who chose to wage their lives for Freedom was quite small; the one community which was heavily “overrepresented” among the freedom fighters executed or otherwise punished by the British was the much-maligned Brahmin caste.61 It is a well-attested historical fact that the Sikh community as such was firmly loyalist (see Khushwant Singh, above, on the Sikhs in the British Army), even after the emotional estrangement from the British which followed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.  By contrast, the Arya Samaj can claim to have stood by the cause of Freedom, though it certainly has a history of compromise as well.


As for Dayananda’s allegation that Guru Nanak was a pretender, Arya Samaj authors Pandit Lekh Ram (then) and Kshitish Vedalankar (recently) have defended it, arguing that Nanak could not read Sanskrit and was therefore not qualified to speak out on the Vedas and the Puranas.62 Modernists may sympathize with this irreverent and down-to-earth critique of a venerated saint, but it has a price, viz. the hostility of the saint’s followers.

http://voiceofdharma.org/books/wiah/ch8.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->