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It is noteworthy that the first prohibition of this ancient Indian tra-
dition was enacted by Muslims. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that

the first people who attempted to eradicate the suttee tradition were the
Muslim Mongol empire’s rulers, Humayun and his son Ekber, who gov-
57
erned India between 1526 and 1707. The British rulers who succeeded
the Mongols in India formally declared the suttee tradition unlawful
when the British viceroy William Bentinck proclaimed this new law in
1828. Though the suttee tradition all but vanished in most of the coun-

try, in rural towns and villages the suttee tradition still lives on among
the Hindu fundamentalists.
What is even more worrisome than the acceptance of this barbarism
by the uneducated and ignorant Hindu masses is the fact that suttee still
has fervent supporters among the educated elite in the highly developed
cities of India. The extreme nationalist camp is gaining power by the
day, and they are campaigning for the revival of the suttee tradition. For
example, one of the leaders of the fundamentalist VHP party, Giriraj

Kishore, (he also expresses his pleasure about the arson attack on the
Baburshah mosque at every opportunity) states that if a woman cannot
bear to live without her deceased husband, there is nothing wrong about
wanting to be burned with him. 58
In an article titled “VHP reviving Sati”, printed in the Deccan Herald
newspaper, the author stated that Hindu nationalists are campaigning

fervently to reintroduce the barbaric Sati tradition and that the members
of Sangh Parivar, among them the ruling (at that time) BJP party are ide-
ologically supporting the revival of the Sati tradition. Sita Agarwal ex-
plains the connections between the extreme Hindu nationalist move-
ment and the cruelty inflicted on women in his book “Genocide of Women
in Hinduism” as follows:

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)