Dinesh Kamath's Editorial (Why this love and hatred?) that was published in Newsband

Why this love and hatred?

Playwright Girish Karnad condemned V.S. Naipaul, who had been chosen for a lifetime achievement award, for his appalling thoughts about Indian Muslims whom he had called the ‘invaders’, accusing them of having savaged India for five centuries. Naipaul had won a Nobel Prize and according to Karnad, Nobel had given him an unwarranted authority to hold forth, when in fact his sociological analysis amounted to glorifying the Ayodhya destruction as an act of “creative passion”.

This is not the first time that Naipaul has been condemned for attacking Muslims. He has been criticized during several occasions in the past.

In his book dealing with the influence of Islam on non-Arab Muslims, Beyond Belief: Islamic excursions among the converted peoples, Naipaul states the following about Islam: The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows to only one people—the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet—a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.

This opinion about Muslims that Naipaul harboured was not appreciated by most of the Muslims. Again in March 2002, Salman Rushdie denounced Naipaul for supporting the RSS, VHP and BJP led Indian government on the anti-Muslim 2002 Gujarat riots: Rushdie said Naipaul was "a fellow traveller of fascism and [he] disgraces the Nobel award".

Naipaul has mentioned some negative aspects of Islam in his works, such as nihilism among fundamentalists. He has been quoted describing the bringing down of the Babri Mosque as a "creative passion," and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a "mortal wound." He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the 'last bastion of native Hindu civilisation'. He bitingly condemned Pakistan in Among the Believers

As far as Girish Karnad is concerned this is not the first time that he has supported Muslims. In the past, he had lamblasted Prof. S. L. Bhyrappa for his Kannada novel "Avarana" for its fundamentalist agenda. Here, Bhyrappa had accused Tippu Sultan as a religious fanatic who would not stand Hindus in his court. Bhyrappa had substantiated the argument based on the facts pointing to several historic references written in India during Tippu’s rule. There are numerous instances in his book, which stated various methods used by Tippu Sultan to convert Hindus to Islam, each of these instances clearly given with a sound historic reference in the book. This was criticized by Girish Karnad, who had glorified Tippu in his plays.

The question is why does Girish Karnad love Muslims so much and why V S Naipaul hates this particular community?