Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism, by Koenraad Elst.

................................................................................................

Decolonizing The Hindu Mind:

Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism,

by Koenraad Elst.

................................................................................................

At the very least, one sees a comparatively objective stance from the author, comparatively because from time to time the outsider who is capable of understanding India nevertheless needs to step back and reassure his ilk that he hasn't "gone native" - one sees it with Mark Tully, one sees it with Ruskin Bond, and with visitors from U.S. who praise india until suddenly thry question why Pakistan didnt get an equal share of land if India - and get progressively worse from thereon. Elst isnt that silly, of course, but he goes a tiny part of the way to where author of Three Cups Of Tea takes his stance for a few words, notably in his work titled Return of the Swastika.

Here, he begins with an extensive introduction, leaving very little out for anyone new to the subject, so much so one wonders what hes leaving for the rest of the book.

................................................................................................

"It should be clear, however, that this Orientalist construction could not have come about without a certain basis in reality. Though “tolerance” is a very recent addition to the Hindu religious vocabulary, the historical reality of Hindu society is that foreign and dissident religions were effectively tolerated, as proven by the history of the Jews or the Parsis in India. Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire’s enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality. Or for a similar example pertaining to Islam: the Orientalist association of Islam with sensuality was partly the result of internal European concerns in the Victorian Age, but it was none the less correct in so far as Islam does have a more positive appreciation of sex than Christianity."

Or it was just Arabian Nights?

Meanwhile, what's that about "Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality."? Chinese, yes, but Indian, not same, not all of them - definitely some, if not all, are held as Divine revelations, such as Vedas, first and foremost; Bhagawadgeeta is in fact held as Truth shown and told by God Krishna in person as a conversation with his friend and cousin, Arjuna. Upanishads are by seers, explaining Vedas, but much of the later work and pronouncements by saints, seers et al is held as coming through vua human from Divine, depending on quality of inspiration perceptible.

The difference is NOT that Indian scriptures are not held as revelations; the difference is in their being held as treasure, compared to a university library, available to seekers of knowledge, not an instrument of power, of enforcement, imposed as exclusive belief.

................................................................................................

"This then is also the reason for Hindu hostility to Islam as enunciated in numerous Hindu revivalist texts. Islam’s difference or “Otherness” has nothing to do with it, as the Hindu record of hospitality to the Moplahs (“sons-in-law”, Arab traders who married Hindu girls in Kerala) shows. But Hindus perceive Islam as anti-pluralistic and intolerant of what is from the Islamic viewpoint the “Otherness” of Hinduism.111 For this reason, they use the same somewhat inflated references to the Holocaust when speaking of their experiences with Islam, notably the Partition massacres of 1947 and the Bengali genocide of 1971. It is undeniable that there exists a widespread hostility to Islam among Hindus, and that this hostility is articulated if not cultivated by a number of Hindu revivalist authors; but it is sloppy thinking to construe this hostility in the fashionable terminology of “Otherness”."

"Somewhat inflated"??? Estimated numbers by European scholars are to the tune of a hundred million over the millennium that Islamic onslaught was suffered by India, and this was not part of soldiers slain in battles but civilians massacred regardless of age, gender or anything else (apart from kidnappings and rapes of women that drove India to change conduct regarding free movement of women in at least North India), all atrocities perpetratrated in name of religion, an uncivilized conduct unimaginable in India until Islamic invasions.

" ... The English-speaking elite, by contrast, and its mediatic and academic segments in particular, are the cultural heirs of the colonial system and consequently the enemies of Hindu Revivalism. This includes those Marxists who have always been up in arms against real or perceived forms of neo-colonialism in the political and economic sphere: “Those members of the Third World elite who never lose an opportunity to lash out against the West have been the worst affected by the colonisation of the mind. They speak in the language of the opponents and subscribe to their values.”120"

Westernisation isn't opposed or ridiculed in India by Hindus except in its harmful or ridiculous aspects, from fraudulent propaganda against Hinduism to wearing woollen suits in searing heat; some sections took to westernisation quickly, such as Punjab taking to bobbed hair and lipsticks, while others such as South Indians went more for women's education on par with males, without aping fashions. Having suffered much less from Islamic invasions as North India did, freedom of movement for women was far less affected, as evident even in differences between North versus South in traditional Hindu weddings as practiced, so this advance in education was all the more possible.

................................................................................................

Elst labels France secular, which is only largely true. France still has most things closed on Sunday, and persecution of Hindu women apporting articles of dressing other than French (which in case of Hindu articles is not dangerous to public security as in case of Islamic veiling of women in black from head to foot), is not secular, to say the least. Nuns or bishops, or anyone else wearing a cross, for example, aren't persecuted for the same secularism! France may be more secular than say, Saudi Arabia, but persecution of Hindu women's dressing puts it below secularism in reality.

................................................................................................

"Incidentally, this concealment job by Engineer and by the entire secularist academic establishment amounts to an unwitting admission of the outcome of the Ayodhya polemic: if a schoolboy comes home on Proclamation Day and remains conspicuously evasive about his exam results, you don’t have to actually see his report to know what those results are like. This may be an understandable ploy in the case of a losing contestant, but not in that of scholars pretending to be neutral reporters on a contest. To comment on such manipulation, we might take inspiration from Engineer’s own words on the same cover: “It is not only violence which has to be condemned but also distortion of history and intellectual dishonesty.”"

"Most consequentially, the Penguin book Anatomy of a Confrontation edited by S. Gopal, for most foreign India-watchers the only Ayodhya book within reach, carefully keeps Hindu contributions to the debate out of the picture. Thus, friend and foe have repeated again and again that the Vishva Hindu Parishad had a list of 3,000 mosques standing on the sites of (and often built with materials from) demolished temples.195 One would expect such a key document in such an earth-shaking controversy to be discussed threadbare by historians, but I invite the reader to go through the scholarly literature on the Ayodhya affair and locate even a single discussion of this list. In the vast majority of articles and books on the subject, it does not even figure in the bibliography."

That's precisely because it's true and they all know this, and too, that the number us small fraction if one considers ALL such destroyed temples and mosques or other structures built on the sites, including Taj Mahal.

They all know this, and are hoping following Hitler to stun and shut up Hindus by shouting a lie loudly. It's not that different from screaming at a woman to gorge her yo submit whether to rape or to agree to not reporting the rape or to lie that there had been none when they know its a lie - and it's not that different from shaking a crying baby, at that.

In this case, those shaking the baby don't care if the baby is dead as a result, as happened in the famous case in Boston against the English caretaker of the baby. All they want from Hindus, the last witnesses of murders of old vultures and civilisations by the two najor conversionist creeds imposed by colonial rules invading, is to provide silent slave labour, which is what Hitler wanted from all conquered populations.

................................................................................................

"But strangely, while Indian secularist scholars don’t make the faintest attempt to keep up appearances of neutrality, most of their Western contacts, rather than hearing a professional alarm bell ring to put them on alert against biased information, simply follow suit. Indeed, to an extent, Western observers follow the lead of their Indian sources, and openly declare their partisan interest in the topic of “Hindu communalism”. Thus, an Australian professor starts out by calling the BJP “undoubtedly ‘a political problem’” and ends with lamenting “the evils of Hindutvism”.248"

That's because most of West so aligned against Hindus is aligned with Vatican as far as India goes, even if personally they select any of the other options including atheism. Israel might just be different, due to two reasons, and Judaism is as separated from Hinduism in its essential nature as are other Abraham's creeds, except the drive to convert everybody - that last bit again is where Israel is on the same side as India, hunted by Islam and church alike.

................................................................................................

Somewhere along the line, perhaps in one of the footnotes author notes that widows were treated as untouchable in Hinduism, which is completely incorrect.

To begin with, there's no evidence of ill treatment of widows in Ancient epics, which, if such were the attitude, would have naturally reflected therein.

Problems arose when barbaric invaders not only massacred civilians along with soldiers, but kidnapped and gangraped women, including widows of the slain. This was completely in accord with their religion, and a horror to those indigenous of India.

So as a result changes came to the regions infested with barbarian invaders, and there were new cautionary systems protecting women and family, which included women hidden at home, unable to go out without escort, and much more such as far reaching changes even in religious functions including weddings.

For one, weddings were forced to an earlier age for everyone, so a potential kidnapper and rapist barbarian had a family and clan of the rightful groom to contend with, who'd fight for the honour of the clan. This usually meant that the young girl settled slowly with the new family, going back and forth over years, and consummation took place well after the couple was ready, which meant not only that she was well past puberty but he was also ready to assume responsibility.

For another, still visible difference across North and South in India is that the Hindu weddings in North, regions ruled far more barbarically, took place at night and still do, with a posse of males coming with the groom to escort the bride back to her new home afterwards, and hardly another woman in the whole group.

In Maharashtra, and all the more so in South India, on the contrary, weddings are as they'd been in Ancient India, conducted early morning, with invited guests staying for lunch, and ceremonies through the day. Women take central spot, as is rightful, especially in South - one has to see an ordinary wedding otocession there consiating if womdn escorting tge bride to the temple for worship and prayer before the wedding, everyone decked up and bearing platters of fruits, absolutely no thought about any requirement for extra security over and above the normal civil everyday life.

So widows were a problem in India beginning with barbaric invaders prone to kidnap and force women coming to rule, and beginning with the famous historical Queen Padmini and all the other women of Chittor flinging themselves into a pure after thrir men had gone for the final battle with Alauddin Khilji who went to war demanding that the king hand over his wife, the legend of Sati turned into practice as the way women saved their selves from indignity of barbarians forcing them.

And so widowhood came to be seen as fate worse than death, while fate was seen generally as a matter if not ones fault.

But widows were seen and treated as holy, clean, not as untouchable; they were the ones who performed worship and other clean acts in families, including reading of religious tracts.

And untouchability wasn't, isn't a matter if humiliation as much as of hygiene and quarantine - for example a new born and mother were kept separate from rest; another example, whoever cooked was the clean person, and everyone else was placed outside a chalk drawn boundary, served by those cooking who stayed in. However wealthy and powerful the man who owned the house, he too was untouchable in his own kitchen and limited to outside this boundary. This is still followed in traditional homes in North India.

In South India, on certain days, males of the family cook for everybody, due to similar concerns, which affords desperately needed rest for women a few days a month.

................................................................................................

"In some cases, however, the Arya Samaj was simply right in claiming that Vedic norms were much closer to modern standards than to those of nineteenth-century Hinduism. Thus, caste oppression and untouchability are not mentioned in the Veda Samhitas. Similarly, the status of women in Vedic society was probably somewhat more equal with that of men, and their relations more relaxed, than in Hindu society of the Victorian age.11 When you consider certain cruel and wasteful Hindu rules of conduct, such as the prohibition of widow remarriage (often affecting child widows), or the loss of all proportion in the obsession with purity as expressed in the practice of untouchability, it is hard not to sympathize with the Arya Samaj project of returning to the Vedic outlook, which had at least been much closer to human common sense. The Vedic seers (some of them female) were adventurous and creative, while the Hindu of recent centuries was continually inhibited by fear of trespassing against a million scriptural rules, astrological warnings and the opprobrium of purity-conscious fellow-castemen. "

They were following, subconsciously, the line of the foreign colonial rulers, of conversionist creeds, in blaming these ills on indigenous. If a factor such as lack of freedom for women or untouchability was nonexistent in vefic times and dies nit show in great epics, it must have arisen due to a foreign element, due to foreign practices that did not exist in India before invading barbarians brought in practices that had to be dealt with. Both the obvious ills that arose in Hinduism had to deal with those barbarians, chiefly with the invaders kidnappings of women who were thereby unable to move freely outdoors.

"The Arya Samaj generally blames the decline of Hindu civilization on purely Hindu factors, most notably “Brahminical priestcraft”, a scapegoat borrowed straight from Christian missionary anti-Brahminical polemic. This anti-Brahminism was, moreover, cast in the mould of Protestant anti-Popism, i.e. it was conceived as a restoration of the original divinely revealed doctrine against the distortive accretions of “tradition” and its wily guardians, the institutionalized priesthood."

It was easier and cheaper for them to blame Brahmins rather than the actual culprits - the invaders who were in power. If the practices were inherent to Hinduism Hindus would never agree to scrap them, but in fact the first person to go against untouchability was a Brahmin, long before British rule, and it had nothing to do with any proposal or thought from invader colonial rulers.

The following passage is highly objectionable.

"Another Bengali who made a lasting impression was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902, civil name Narendranath Dutta). After going through the standard English school curriculum, he became a pupil of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836-86), an ecstatic devotee of Goddess Kali who, though a married layman, acquired the aura of a great religious visionary. With his limited grounding in traditional religious training, Swami Vivekananda’s understanding of Hindu tradition as laid down in his handful of books on yoga is sometimes criticized as distorted and superficial.41"

That last sentence is simply untrue, unless one goes for an Humphrey Appleby argument such as " ... if they haven't been questioned, question them; then they have been questioned. "

In fact, the highest opinion on the topic, from highest possible source, is that Vivekananda was an Avataara, as was Buddha, and both of the same source Divine Shiva.

................................................................................................

"Meanwhile, the destruction which a media bombardment with hostile opinion can work among the support base of a movement is enormous. So many Hindu intellectuals I have talked with were reluctant to come out in the open with their Hindutva sympathies because they felt intimidated by the secularist opinion constraints. During the Ayodhya crisis this went as far as pronouncing secularist opinions in the presence of a third person, only to retract those opinions as soon as we had the room to ourselves. Many potential Hindutva activists or sympathizers were exposed to the daily battering of the Hindutva movement in the media with hostile stories and opinions and ended up developing doubts about the Tightness of the Hindutva cause.

"What is more, sometimes the effects of a generalized anti-Hindu and anti-India bias get physical. Thus, a lot of the killing of Hindus and of Indian defence personnel in Panjab, Kashmir and the North-east was made possible by the diplomatic or indirect material support which the separatists there were receiving from foreign countries; and this support, in turn, was made possible by an anti-Hindu or anti-India tilt in Western media opinion.47 Why is American military aid to Pakistan not made conditional on the termination of Pakistani involvement in Kashmiri terrorism? Why is Western development aid to Bangladesh not made conditional on the termination of the country’s hospitality to separatist militias? Largely because no public opinion is created on these issues by a press which has otherwise amply proven that it can whip up public indignation in any direction desired (for example, to prepare NATO interventions in Iraq or ex-Yugoslavia). This means that Hindus and others have been killed as a consequence of the absence of the Hindu or even just a neutral perspective in the international media, whose reporting is based entirely on the most partisan English-language Indian media.

"Thus, if due publicity had been given to the expulsion of around 200,000 Hindus from Kashmir in early 1990 by the Muslim separatists, or to the instant expulsion of 50,000 Hindus from Kabul immediately after the Islamic conquest of the city in April 1992, this might have influenced world opinion in a pro-India and pro-Hindu sense.48 Now, most Westerners have never heard about the Hindu refugee problem, for most journalists including reputed India hands have simply kept it out of the picture.49 Where it was at all mentioned, it was given a vicious twist, for example: “The BJP … has told the Hindus to leave Kashmir, so that the Army could enter.”50 While refugees are normally the object of pity, The Economist called the Hindu refugees “cowards”.51"

If a rape victim is portrayed as inviting it, which is usually done, it's not the fault of the victim, it's that of those who are happy to absolve their conscience cheaply, so they need not fear about the perpetrators attacking them next. This is so about much of world events, from ceding Czechoslovakia in Munich to treatment of paedophile priests by general public and church, even after the scandal broke.

Fact is, it's easier to blame a victim, and it's done both ways. As Elst is doing now, blaming RSS and co for not screaming louder than the vicious Islamic jihadists and their convenient friends.

But then, who cared about Tibet, or refugees who managed to escape, or the Tibetans who were massacred, or those who are managing to survive without a voice, as slaves in their own country? Was it also responsibility only of India to shout about it? U.S. politicians and press shouted nonstop about Afghanistan when USSR was invited by Afghanistan to help against jihadists, until the publicity was used to cover up the real issue succeeded in camouflage of the real purpose, breaking up USSR. Does anyone care that Afghanistan meanwhile suffers ever since?

No, a terrorist factory is convenient, until it turns and bites the hand that feeds it, as jihadists did over two decades ago. And the stupidity of it all was Nixon befriending China until China has bought up US economy.

"Sometimes Western commentators have their own pro-Pakistani agenda (particularly British and American ones, because of the long-standing alliance of their countries with Pakistan), but mostly they get their inspiration from Indian opinion makers. Consider for example the ludicrous claim that Jagmohan, Governor of Kashmir in the winter of 1989-90, had herded the Hindus out: “The Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley in droves in 1990 because they were corraled and herded out like cattle by the cowboy-Governor of the day.”52 This is in disregard of the numerous testimonies of the refugees themselves, who were glad enough that Jagmohan had sent troops to escort them to safety, and most of whom had horror stories about relatives murdered by once-friendly Muslim neighbours; not to speak of the testimony provided by hundreds of actual dead bodies of Kashmiri Hindus. In keeping with this scenario of Hindus voluntarily leaving their homes just to please a whimsical Governor, the Indian media have systematically referred to the refugees with the euphemism “Kashmiri migrants”, and the foreign correspondents didn’t find the news of a mere “migration” spicy enough to trouble their information consumers with."

Does that blame lie entirely at the Indian media? Would U.S. media be so complicit, so complacent about blaming it on Indian media about it, if the victims were not Hindu, Buddhist, Jain? No, it's the abrahmic bias prevalent in West that is responsible for going along with the secular-leftist muslim appeasement of Indian media.

"However, these Kashmiri refugees have made their own contribution to Hindu nationalist polemic. Hindutva authors have published some interesting books on the Kashmir problem, but not through publishing-houses which reach beyond the circle of already-convinced Hindus.53 In 1991, under the impact of the Pakistani “proxy war” in Kashmir, refugees in Jammu started a newsletter, Kashmir for Kashmiriat, which developed into a full-fledged Pakistan-watching medium reporting on narcoterrorism, sectarian violence in Pakistan’s cities and Northern Areas, atrocities on women, the oppression of Pakistan’s Hindu, Christian and Ahmadiya minorities, the Afghan civil war, and of course all aspects of Pakistani involvement in Kashmir and other hot spots in India.54 Its sources of information include direct testimonies, the Pakistani press (Dawn, Herald et al.), and reports of Western agencies and parliamentary committees. But again, this meritorious attempt to disseminate information remains marginal and has little impact on the broader process of opinion-making."

This marginalization, again, is guilt of the chain that West forms with Islam and left when dealing with Asia and especially with India, due to the old blinkers about Germany vs nazis and abrahmic solidarity against Hindus, added to blinkers pro Chinese and anti-buddhist thst allow Tibetans to be exterminated on a scale worse than holocaust. Hindu press coukd scream every day for a millennium and not only not be heard but told off to shut up, as Jews were during holocaust, by UK and U.S..

OK, why assume that every organisation branded "Hindu", by those who label themselves secular but really are quite opposite, in that they ignore murders, massacres and genocides by muslims, especially when victims aren't tall and pink, would or should fullfill all expectations of their opponents, and watchers who intend not even to acknowledge the genocide perpetrated by Islamic invaders and rulers in India for well over a millennium, victims numbering well over a hundred million?

As it is, U.S. favouring Pakistan has little to do with paki propaganda, as evidenced by the policy papers come to light, stating that if (due to famines) it comes to that, "let India go", and "save Pakistan"; here "go" literally meaning starve to death, a population of then about 500 million.

This bias, on par with that of Churchill, is abrahmic denigration of others (who won't convert) to less than human status, coupled with need of free usage of military base to be used against Russia by West in "the great game", forgetting that the prize, India, was only worth as long as her culture made it so - her ancient culture that predates not only Alexander but several millennia prior.

But then, a frequently heard phrase in U.S. was "never underestimate the stupidity of Americans" and there's no reason that won't fit most of West.

................................................................................................

Elst discusses Islamic invasions and why Hindus were defeated.

What all these explanations, of Islamic onslaught against India, forget, is the most vital point - lands, like societies and families, even individuals, are part of the reason why aggression against others is born or not.

A person brought up poor but without resignation to the state, is likely to be aggressive, resorting to theft and violence in attempts to grab anything. A child brought up to be served without deprivation of any want is unlikely to strive to go out to achieve. Rich societies, similarly, are likely to produce children unlikely to aspire, to make efforts.

The two or three distinct origins of such aggressions through history against most of the world have been Mongolia, Arabia, and later in colonial era, Europe. It wasn't that the lands conquered lacked valour. It was that the aggressors stemmed from a land that offered little to nothing, and thry couldn't form a self sufficient society with civilisation. They resorted, instead, to dealing in trade across lands, and eventually, to aggression, grabbing and looting.

India was, on the contrary, a rich and self sufficient land, hence her bent towards knowledge and spiritual seeking which did not preclude earthly or artistic rich treasures, but crowned them. Hence, too, her survival despite the longest and harshest subjugation to invasions and colonial looting regimes. And subsequent resurgence.

Bringing a gun instead of a begging bowl merely camouflaged the exterior, while exposing the inner poverty, of the invaders. They lacked any trace of culture, if civilisation.

Hence too the beggarly status today of Pakistan that was born to inherit and adapt the identity of the invaders, rejecting heritage of India.

................................................................................................

"In the Hindu revivalist perception, the ideology which has dominated independent India in its first half century, Nehruvian secularism, consists in a permanent vigilance against religion, suspended only in the case of non-Hindu religions deemed useful as allies against Hinduism. This “secularism” is not neutral vis-à-vis religion in general, it is negatively predisposed towards religion as such (though more so towards Hinduism than towards its rivals). This anti-religious variety of secularism is yet another lingering manifestation of the colonial condition, for in its distrust of religion and its vigilance to keep the slightest taint of religion out of public life, it builds on the European experience of Church-State relations. This would make it a pure transplant which ignores the radically different experience of Hindu history.

"The perception of European secularists was that man had to be emancipated from the mind control exerted by authoritarian religious establishments in the name of dogmatic and irrational belief systems. In the Hindu view, such a situation never obtained in India at all: while religion in the sense of belief in supernatural interventions was certainly widespread, Hindu tradition always had a rational core as well, which may now be promoted at the mass level through the modern education system. Most importantly, Hinduism has always had a pluralistic attitude: it never tried to stifle debate and free enquiry and constituted no threat to civic freedoms, in this respect at least. Therefore, declaring India a Hindu state is an altogether less dramatic event than the declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state was. The Hindu assurance is that declaring India a Hindu state will have no effect on freedom of opinion or religious pluralism or non-discrimination on religious grounds: “Hindu India, secular India!”"

In a nutshell, no church, no imposition of a sole conduit to salvation, no persecutions of Galileo and Jean D'Arc.

What's more, everyone has equal opportunity, not just equal right, to pursue being one with Divine. When so achieved, people of India have perception to see it, and indivually the right to ignore, accept or reject, such a person and the person's achievements in spiritual realm.

"The one genuine contribution of the Muslim invaders which the Hindu gracefully accept is that they have brought the word “Hindu” to India. By their application of this term to all Indians not subscribing to the West-Asian monotheisms, they have given an outsider’s testimony in tempore non suspecto that there is such a thing as a Hindu identity, even if it had to be defined negatively.

"In two respects, however, the Hindu including even the Hindu-revivalist attitude to Islam is or has been that of colonial underlings. First, the Arya Samâj and a large part of the urban Hindu middle-class have interiorized the Islamic objection against idolatry and polytheism, which is why they assert that all Hindu gods are but different faces of the One God. ... "

No, that part is a fact, except the last bit should read Divine instead of "One God". At that level it's formless, nameless, without qualities, and far better understood by India long before any abrahmic religion existed or could at any point dream of yet.

................................................................................................

Elst credits Hindus for doing something they never did, that is, credit Islam for equality. Obviously, who knew better than Hindus how little equality exists in Islam? Well, women do, but most Muslim women arent allowed to have an opinion by their religion.

" ... Secondly, many Hindus including Hindu nationalists have interiorized the unhistorical notion that Islam brought equality. Against these tendencies, a fundamental critique of Islam has recently been developed. On the first point, it is argued that the Islamic focus on iconcoclasm, for all its large-scale destructiveness, is at bottom simply a sign of an immature religious consciousness: God is an uncountable, and quarrels over his oneness or manifoldness constitute a projection of all-too-human categories onto God,—an understandable mistake but certainly not one worth killing for. On the second point, it is concluded from the documentary record that the anti-caste egalitarianism of Islam is a figment of the apologists’ imagination, its current popularity being inversely proportional to its historical plausibility."

Now Elst attributes something to Hindus that in the course of the book so far he attributed to West and chastised Hindus for not doing it.

"The most original and compelling (and to unprepared readers, downright frightening) contribution of the Hindu revivalist school of history is its critique of the very basis of Islam. Partly drawing on international scholarship, partly on the categories of yogic psychology, they have argued that the Quranic revelation was nothing but an unhealthy psychopathological phenomenon, perhaps due to improperly practised mystical exercises. Moreover, they have marshalled evidence to show that all the undesirable traits of Islam, its notion of jihâd, its extortion and expulsion of non-Muslim communities, its elimination of apostates and critics of the Prophet, are directly due to the example set by the Prophet himself. Their conclusion is what to Muslims may sound as the ultimate blasphemy: the problem with Islam is Mohammed. Rather than trying to pull Muslims back into Hinduism through conversion campaigns, they suggest that Muslims properly inform themselves about Mohammed’s career, not in a theologically streamlined but in an objective way, and then decide for themselves if they want to remain in the Muslim fold."

" ... Indeed, at every step in communal escalations within living memory, Hindus have essentially only reacted to Islamic aggression; but there are cruder and more intelligent ways of reacting to provocation, and the difference is consequential."

Surely Elst does not mean the Gandhian way, denying facts and asking Hindus to die with love for the killer, as Gandhi demanded Hindus should do, from Kerala to Noakhali to Peshawar and Lahore, and everywhere else across border?????

"Hindu revivalists have an acute apprehension that, short of an implosion of Islam in the footsteps of Communism, the demographic evolution leads straight to a Muslim majority and the Islamization of the Indian polity. Considering the sorry fate of Hindus in the Muslim-majority states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia, they all agree that this would be a very ominous development for Hinduism. Those who look beyond their individual deaths into the next few centuries feel burdened with a responsibility to prevent this development for the sake of their great-grandchildren. ...

Perhaps Elst fails to realise that the threat is not new to India, but it is, now, universal? Was migration from West Asia into Europe only threatening post new millennium? At any rate, U.K. was already staggering, dealing with various problems from muslims in U.K. terrorising English middle-class, to "grooming" young women and converting them, to neighbourhoods turning impossible for others to get anywhere close. Then, after Germany opened migration, there was Cologne New Year, and subsequent advise to German girls to dress so as to not provoke muslims!

" ... Some of them propose fantastic, unworkable or inhumane schemes to face this challenge, such as outright demographic competition or an exchange of population with the Muslim-dominated neighbouring states. Others offer a purely verbal solution: rebaptizing the Muslims as “Mohammedi Hindus” as a shortcut to the Muslims’ complete integration into a Hindu India, thus illustrating once more that Hindus are good at theoretical solutions for practical problems."

Elst probably cheered Biden and his solution, leaving billions of dollars worth equipment from tanks and planes to more, for Taliban, and running away, abandoning not only those who worked with them, but more seriously, women?

And starvation, since Afghan were encouraged to grow opium instead of food?

Elst asks

"HAS HINDU REVIVALISM SUCCEEDED?"

One is tempted to say "it ain't yet judgement day", except there's no such thing in Hindu understanding - judgement is simply continuous.

"It is undeniable that Hindu revivalism has been the biggest mobilizing force in modern Indian history, at least in terms of the crowds it got walking or cheering. This was first demonstrated during the freedom movement: mass mobilization for the anti-colonial struggle was in direct proportion to the dose of Hindu religion which B.G. Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and Mahatma Gandhi mixed with their political agitation. ... "

What, "mixed", as in what, a cocktail shaker? Was the freedom movement an entity apart from people, or the people involved part time Hindu who were supposed to do it only after freedom movement hours? How silly can someone get just by being brought up in church!

Elst criticises BJP et al for failure to make true on temple question. After castigating them for being losers, he turns around as usual, covering all bases.

" ... In general, it is axiomatic that ideas have consequences, and that this new Hindu revivalist thinking will have its effect, but it remains to be seen to what extent it will actually influence the Hindu nationalist decision-makers and the indian polity. Naturally, this is something which only time will tell."

................................................................................................

Contents

................................................................................................

Acknowledgements

Note on language and transcription Glossary

Introduction

Historical survey

Ideology and polemic

Hindu nation, Hindu state

Specific Hindu grievances

General conclusion

Bibliography

Primary publications: Arya Samaj

Primary publications: Hindu Mahasabha

Primary publications: RSS Parivar

Primary publications: Independent Authors

Secondary publications on Hindu Revivalism

Other publications: Indian Politics

Other publications: Hinduism

Other publications: Islam

Other publications: communal violence

Other publications: Christianity and Judaism

Other publications: general/miscellaneous Interviews

................................................................................................

Review

................................................................................................

Introduction

................................................................................................

"I also intend to restore objectivity. This is an urgent necessity in view of two challenges. The more subtle challenge to the principle of objectivity is the “postmodern” form of Marxism (quite powerful in American universities) which denies the very notion of objective knowledge, which assumes that knowledge is conditioned by one’s social belonging, and which insists that “all research in the social sciences has a political agenda”.15 This means in practice that once you have identified an author as a representative of the wrong interest group, his arguments are ipso facto wrong or vitiated. In a large part of the academic publications, this position is implicit in their way of foregoing any serious evaluation of arguments formulated by Hindu revivalists, as if the identification of the propounder of the argument as a “Hindu fundamentalist” were sufficient to put it beyond the pale of rational discourse. Thus, the Hindu litany of grievances against the inequalities imposed on Hinduism by the Indian state (which makes up a very large part of this literature) is commonly only mentioned as an object of ridicule, never of proper investigation.

"The second problem is that many India-watchers who have ordinary notions of objectivity (i.e. who ignore the stratospheric questioning of this very concept by postmodernists), have none the less published books and papers on the present topic which suffer serious lapses from the normal scholarly standards. The exacting standards of objectivity are obviously a permanent challenge to scholars in any field, but this field, or at least its present-day state of the art, presents some peculiar problems. In some cases, the bias may be in the mind of the India-watcher, but the overriding problem is that even scholars and journalists who do try to be objective are handicapped in this endeavour by their reliance on Indian sources which have considerable standing but are none the less far from objective. There is, apparently, an assumption of cultural solidarity between Western India-watchers and their Indian colleagues: the former consider the latter as “our men in India”, as representatives of enlightened modernity who stand above the ongoing conflicts between the native barbarians. The assumption is not even shaken by the conspicuous fact that many Indian academics use very partisan language when addressing the issue of Hindu revivalism.

"However, we shall show in the next section that the very basics of this research are highly problematic: numerous presumably non-partisan sources are tainted by a partisan involvement which outsiders tend to ignore or misunderstand, and even the terminology which conditions the whole discourse on India’s religious conflict is often unclear and sometimes the object of deliberate manipulation. My intention in this study is to avoid these traps and clear away the cobwebs at the only entrance to a real understanding of Hindu revivalism, viz. to let the primary sources speak."

" ... The need for “reviving” Hinduism springs from the fact that the said hostile ideologies (mostly Islam) have managed to eliminate Hinduism physically in certain geographical parts and social segments of India, and also (mostly the Western ideologies) to neutralize the Hindu spirit among many nominal Hindus. Even among committed Hindus, there is not always much life in Hinduism, except in the elementary sense that the rituals are still performed. ... "

" ... One intellectual project is to rediscover the ancient and not-so-ancient treasures of material culture and ingenuity which colonialism has obscured or destroyed. This effort is shared with other Indian intellectuals, e.g. with Claude Alvares who shows how “attempts were made to destroy non-Western technologies”, and until recently if not today, “even the idea that other cultures may have had thriving technologies was calculatingly destroyed”. ... "

................................................................................................

"The only component of the current under consideration which could be called “fundamentalist”, i.e. seeking to revive Scripture as normative for today’s society and attacking those co-religionists who have allegedly deviated from Scriptural purity, is the Arya Samâj, founded in 1875 and now long past its prime but still standing out as a progressive movement. In the case of Hinduism, it so happens that many of the traditional inequalities, injustices and unwholesome customs of Hindu society are not attested in Vedic scripture, and even less so in the Arya Samaj’s own understanding of it. This made it possible to present a programme of social equality as a return to the Vedas."

" ... In the Arya Samâj, girls get the complete Vedic initiation, as apparently they used to in the Vedic age itself.27"

" ... “fundamentalism” in the true sense of the word is not in evidence in the Hindu revivalist movement. Of course, a certain allowance should be made for journalistic vagueness in the use of such terms, which need not indicate malicious intent. Still, the term “fundamentalism”, originated in anti-modernist tendencies in Christianity, does not help in a proper understanding of what India-watchers assume to be the “corresponding” Hindu phenomenon."

"Today, “communalism” is one of those labels allotted exclusively to people who reject it; it is a term of abuse. Even people who advocate communal recruitment quota (a demand recently revived by an array of Muslim organizations) are now self-described “secularists” and signatories to every new “National Manifesto (People’s Rally, All-India Front etc.) Against Communalism”. Just two examples from the most extreme corners of Islamic militantism, which support the demand for communal quota in recruitment: the All-India Milli Council passed a resolution on 1.9.1996 “strongly opposing the communal and fascist forces”;28 and S. Ausaf Vasfi of the Jamaat-i-Islami (whose Pakistani wing has campaigned for decades, and with success, for the desecularization of the state) attacks “communalism” in the name of “secularism”.29 I cannot recall a single issue of the Islamist papers Radiance and Muslim India which failed to brandish “secularism” and denounce “communalism”.

"This distortion of an otherwise well-defined and useful term started in the 1920s, when Congress leaders took to using it for (i.e. against) Hindu organizations, even though the latter opposed communal electorates and recruitment quota which the Congress had endorsed. Even when Congress became a party to the Partition of India on a communal basis (Pakistan for Muslims, India for non-Muslims), which these Hindu organizations kept on opposing, Congress kept on denouncing the latter as “Hindu communalist”. All the same, during his speech in court (1948), Nathuram Godse, Hindu Mahasabha member and the murderer of the Mahatma, unselfconsciously attacked Gandhi’s compromise with (Muslim) “communalism” and repeatedly pledged his allegiance to a united India which should be democratic and “non-communal”. “Anti-communal” arguments were standard HMS parlance before Nehru popularized the terms “secularism” and “Hindu communalism”."

"To justify this shift in meaning, a symmetry was assumed between minority organizations which favoured the communal principle and Hindu organizations which opposed it, in the sense that both defended the perceived interests of their own community. The definition of the term was changed. The effective meaning of communalism in post-Partition India is explicitated by the Marxist historian Bipan Chandra as “the belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common social, political and economic interests”.30 Or: “It is the belief that in India Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs form different and distinct communities which are independently and separately structured or consolidated; that all the followers of a religion share not only a community of religious interests but also common secular interests, that is, common economic, political, social and cultural interests”, etc.31 This definition is generally accepted and used, e.g. by Saral Jhingran: “By ‘communalism’ is meant the assertion that the secular interests of a group of persons are coextensive with its religious identity.”32

"This definition is, unfortunately, quite wrong. It does not satisfy the defining criterion of a definition, viz. that its semantic domain be coterminous with the phenomenon it seeks to define. When Bipan Chandra and Saral Jhingran talk about “communalism”, they certainly include issues like the agitation against cow-slaughter, the Hindu and Muslim agitations concerning the temple or mosque in Ayodhya, and the Satanic Verses affair. In each of these examples, purely religious concerns are at stake: the leaders of these agitations are not telling their followers that they have “common economic, political, social and cultural interests”, but that the birthplace of Rama or the fair name of the Prophet is being violated. These controversies are not covered by Bipan Chandra’s definition of “communalism”.

"The kernel of truth in his definition is that some “communalists” seek to promote the interests of their religion and religious community by extending the community’s identity and solidarity into secular spheres. But that was already outlined in the old British definition, viz. communalism is the principle that communities defined by religious identity are treated as units of political organization. Today, the usage has become so imprecise that any conjunction of the phenomena “religion” and “conflict” is called “communalism”.

"The fact that nowadays the label “communalist” is systematically applied to people who never describe themselves as such, and most of whom go out of their way to deny that they are “communalists”, should caution scholars to handle it with utmost care. It may be legitimate to sit down and collect evidence for the thesis that “the Hindu nationalists are communalists”, but it is not legitimate, at least not from the viewpoint of scholarly or journalistic deontology, to routinely replace their chosen self-description with the externally imposed label “communalist”.

"The normal practice is to label a movement with the name it gives itself, e.g. even though most ruling parties in Europe at the time of writing pursue free-market economic policies, we still call them “socialist” (strictly meaning that they pursue the nationalization of the means of production, which they do not) simply because that is what they call themselves. A Trotskyite or Maoist agitator may call them “lackeys of global capitalism” (and in the 1930s even as “social-fascists”), yet no newsreader or political analyst will think of identifying a Socialist prime minister in those terms.

"Imposition of an exonym, especially a pejorative one like “communalist”, must be considered a statement of involvement in an anti-Hindu-revivalist or so-called “anti-communal” crusade; or of ignorant reliance on such sources not recognized as partisan. People are welcome to their crusades, and they may even produce some real scholarship in the service of their crusades, but it is best to remain aware of the nature of their work, and not to assume that it is objective simply because it is adorned with academic references. In this study, based on primary sources, the term communalism will be used only sparingly, viz. only where I believe I can justify it in terms of its proper definition.

"Two more remarks to keep the topic of “communalism” in perspective. It deserves to be noted that one of the trend-setting attacks on “Hindu communalism” was undoubtedly the “Report of the Enquiry Commission Appointed by the Council of the All-India Muslim League to Inquire into Some Muslim Grievances in Congress Provinces”, better known as the Pirpur Report (1938), which lists Muslim grievances in Congress-ruled provinces.33 These include: being blamed by Congress ministers for starting riots, being insulted by the singing of the “idolatrous” anthem Vande Mâtaram, “Hail Mother(land)”, the non-recognition of Urdu as all-Indian link language, Gandhi’s talk against cow-slaughter, and this: “The Indian National Congress’ concept of nationalism is based on the establishment of a national state of the majority community in which other nationalities and communities have only secondary rights. The Muslims think that no tyranny can be [as] great as the tyranny of the majority.”34"

" ... Though the Muslim League was the very incarnation of communalism (foisting communal electorates, communal weightage in representation and communal job quota on India), its attacks on Congress, Mahatma Gandhi and even Jawaharlal Nehru were remarkably similar to the post-Independence “secularist” critique of “Hindu communalism”."

"A term which is accepted as a self-description by most Hindu revivalists is “Hindu nationalist”. After the Ayodhya-related excitement with its media exaggerations died down, the more responsible Western media have decided to settle for this term when discussing the RSS and BJP. Some did so even earlier: “The BJP is often described as a Hindu fundamentalist party. More correctly, it espouses Hindu nationalism, a concept which it claims encompasses Muslims and people of other religions.”36"

" ... It should be kept in mind that in India, “nationalism” doesn’t have the negative connotations which it has in Western intellectual circles. On the contrary, the term is hallowed by its association with the freedom movement. It is also of little use trying to catch this nationalism in one of the proliferating “models” of nationalism. For the people concerned, it simply means “love of one’s country”, and in all other respects its meaning can vary: it is not a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois movement (as Marxists would have it) except in some instances, it does not generally seek to establish cultural homogeneity except that sometimes it may, it is an agent of modernization except in some respects, etc.38 ... "

"Another term which Hindu nationalists themselves often use, and which is now effectively a synonym of “Hindu nationalism”, is Hindutva. This neologism, somewhat clumsy in that it combines a Persian root (Hindû, equivalent to Sanskrit Sindhû) with a Sanskrit suffix, was coined in 1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and literally means “Hindu-ness”, the criterion being: “He who considers India as both his Fatherland and Holyland”. It is distinct from “Hinduism”, in that it designates the “Hindu nation” rather than “Hindu religion”. The “Hindu nation” is conceived as including Indians belonging to semi-Hindu religions like Sikhism and Buddhism (whose sacred sites associated with the founders lie in India), but whether it also includes Indian Muslims and Christians is a point of disagreement within the movement. For Savarkar, at least, they cannot be Hindus as long as the origins and sacred sites of their religions lie in West Asia. The organized Hindu nationalist movement is often caustically referred to as “the Hindutva brigade”."

................................................................................................

"In the often heated debates on Islam which accompany the increasing presence and visibility of Islam in the West, some people make a bid for the intellectual high ground by overruling any claims pro or contra Islam with the announcement that “Islam does not exist”. Usually, the proof given is a reference to the diversity within the Muslim world: Uighurs are different from Mauretanians, Ismailites aren’t Sunnis, etc. This reasoning is obviously invalid, for it denies the existence of most classes in nature and society, none of which consists of identical members. Or does the fact that Arabian thoroughbreds, Shetland ponies and Flemish draught-horses exist side by side, prove that “the horse species does not exist”? By the same reasoning, Christianity, Hinduism etc. would also “not exist”."

" ... In Indian history, at any rate, Muslims rarely had difficulty in deciding who was a Muslim and who was not.41"

" ... Moghul school of painting is part of “Islamicate” culture but is, strictly speaking, an offence against “Islamic” doctrine, for which reason the orthodox emperor Aurangzeb closed it down. To describe Moghul painting (a Hindu contribution to Islamicate culture) as a “contribution of Islam to India’s composite culture”, as secularist discourse has it, indicates a muddled understanding of Islamic religion and Islamicate culture.

"In this study, I will settle for the more common adjective “Muslim” when referring to the whole of “Islamicate” culture, and reserve “Islamic” for references to the doctrine of Islam stricto sensu. “Islamist” will serve as a neutral and general term for all forms of assertive or militant or purist Islam, avoiding controversial terms like “fundamentalist”."

" ... Many Hindus say that Islam is a great religion, but Muslims are a problem. Others take the opposite view: the Hindu-Muslim conflict is due not to some collective character defect in the Muslims, but to the intrinsically conflicting doctrine of Islam, which pious and otherwise good-natured Muslims feel duty-bound to stand by. The second view leads to an ideological critique of Islam, while the first leads to cruder anti-Muslim attitudes and sometimes to physical confrontation."

................................................................................................

" ... Indian Marxism as such has been only a passing phase in a much larger trend known as Macaulayism, named after the British administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in 1835 initiated an education policy designed to create a class of people Indian in skin colour but British in every other respect.43 “Macaulayites” are those Indians who have interiorized the colonial ideology of the “White Man’s Burden” (as Rudyard Kipling called it in a famous poem): the Europeans had to come and liberate the natives, “half devil and half child”, from their native culture, which consisted only of ignorance, superstition and the concomitant social evils; and after this liberation from themselves, these Indians became a kind of honorary Whites.

"Macaulay’s policy was implemented and became a resounding success. The pre-Macaulayan vernacular system of education was destroyed, even though British surveys had found it more effective and more democratic than the then-existing education system in Britain.44 The rivalling educationist party, the so-called Orientalists, had proposed a Sanskrit-based system of education, in which Indian graduates would not have been as estranged from their mother civilization as they became through English education, and in which they could have selectively adopted the useful elements of Western modernity, more or less the way Japan modernized itself.45 But thanks to Macaulay, modernization became the preserve of a class which was foreign to India not because it happened to be foreign, but because it was groomed in a foreign cultural atmosphere and ultimately chose to be foreign."

................................................................................................

" ... The 42nd Amendment changed the self-definition in the Preamble, “sovereign democratic Republic”, to: “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”. In India, like in Western secular states (France, the USA), the Constitution does not give any place to religious institutions in the structure and functioning of the polity, though it guarantees freedom of religion."

" ... The anger of Hindu revivalists is directed not against “secularism” in its proper meaning but against what it calls “pseudo-secularism”, the alleged practice of favouritism toward the non-Hindus under the cover of “secularism”. It is only as an armchair pastime that secularism itself may be questioned once in a while."

" ... For, this version of secularism, which mistrusts religion and is ever-vigilant to keep the slightest taint of religion out of public life, builds on the European and not on the Indian experience of relations between state and religion. In Europe, these were such that the exclusion of religion from politics was hailed as a solution; but Rajaram sees no reason for transplanting this “solution” to India, where the corresponding problem did not exist, where for example no pope ever forced a Galilei to recant. This transplantation allegedly ignores the radically different experience of Hindu history."

"In this view, European secularists wanted man to be emancipated from the mind control exerted by authoritarian religious establishments in the name of dogmatic and irrational belief systems, a situation which did not obtain in India at all. To be sure, religion in the sense of belief in supernatural interventions was and is certainly widespread in India. Moreover, a religious conception of political authority also prevailed, with kings being enthroned with Brahminical rituals.54 However, Hindu states always supported religious pluralism, and Hindu tradition never stifled debate, never stood in the way of science and in its early stage even incorporated and encouraged it.

"In the Vedic age, India was very religious, but it was also ahead of the rest in mathematics and astronomy.55 Thus, the geometry of the Shulba Sûtras, geometrical appendices to the manuals of ritual (Shrauta Sûtras), include the oldest known formulation of the theorem named after Pythagoras, developed in the context of Vedic altar-building.56 Modern Hindus are fond of recalling this scientific element in their tradition, e.g. by quoting Carl Sagan: “Hindu cosmology gives a time-scale for the earth and the universe which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology”, as opposed to the limited Biblical-Quranic cosmology, which was protected against more far-sighted alternatives by a vigilant religious orthodoxy.57 Like in other ancient civilizations, in Hindu India priests and scientists were often the same persons; the conflict between religion and reason is not the primitive condition but a contingent historical development in post-classical Europe, parallelled to an extent by the stagnation of Muslim culture from the twelfth century onwards.58

"Hindu India has also had no history of book-burning, of executing heretics or confining dissidents to lunatic asylums.59 The Buddha could preach his heterodox doctrine till his old age without ever being persecuted. As Dutch indologist Sjoerd de Vries writes: “In Indian society, an amazing tolerance vis-à-vis people of unusual opinions has existed for ages. … Only very few instances are known where conflicts have erupted for the sake of religion. Not until the advent of Islam did India get acquainted with religious persecution.”60"

" ... N.S. Rajaram rejects the antagonism of secular vs. non-secular as “a false problem”, pleading that the real issue is “pluralism—an environment in which different views and practices can co-exist. And this means that we must confront its archenemy: exclusivism which tolerates nothing that conflicts with the dogma of a chosen elite.”62 Implied is that Hindu religion, along with a certain secular freethinking modernity, is on the right side of “pluralism”, while its enemies, Islamic and Christian religion, along with secular ideologies like Nazism and Marxism, are cases of “exclusivism”."

"Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru gave it currency, the term “secularism” has been very popular in India: most parties and politicians call themselves “secular”. Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”. Check the editorials of Syed Shahabuddin’s monthly Muslim India, or the Jamaat-i-Islami weekly Radiance: they brandish “secularism” in every issue. Only the most extreme and least adroit Islamic organizations speak out against secularism, e.g. the self-styled Milli Parliament based in Aligarh has affirmed that “secularism is anti-Islamic and harâm”.63"

" ... Just as the English word deception has a radically different meaning from its French look-alike déception (= disappointment), the British-English word secularism radically differs in meaning from its Indian-English look-alike secularism. A professional interpreter who translates déception as deception is incompetent, and an India-watcher who translates the Indian-English term secularism into standard English as secularism, has a similar problem.64

"If this judgment seems too harsh, consider the performance of Indian secularism during the Satanic Verses affair. Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was first presented to the Indian public in September 1988 by Sunday’s Shrabani Basu (interview) and India Today’s Madhu Jain (review plus excerpts). Rushdie had sneeringly told Basu, who asked if he apprehended riots: “It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.” Five months later, amid a spate of Rushdie-related riots in Britain, Pakistan and India, on that fateful Valentine Day of 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence against Rushdie. Five years after that, Sunday editor Vir Sanghvi retrospectively commented that it is a funny world indeed, and wondered: “Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban has changed India forever? … When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement.”65

"Syed Shahabuddin, opposition MP, read about The Satanic Verses in the two magazines mentioned, and without delay, he petitioned Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to ban the book. Shahabuddin had also been planning a potentially violent Muslim march on Ayodhya, and the pragmatic Rajiv Gandhi considered this novel by a distant British writer an excellent bargaining chip to keep Shahabuddin humoured. If it could dissuade Shahabuddin from endangering the lives of numerous Indians, the Prime Minister considered it opportune (not to say: his duty to the nation) to ban the book. Rushdie may not have expected the ban in India, yet: “Rushdie cannot even have the solace of claiming that he was not forewarned about his impending fate. The Indian advisor of Viking/Penguin, Khushwant Singh, had made it clear to him, after reading the manuscript of the controversial novel, that its publication would definitely outrage the Muslims and could even spark off bloodshed. Singh’s well-meaning advice was ignored.”66

"One would have expected Indian secularists to support Rushdie. This was indeed the case with some of them, e.g. those around N. Ram’s Communist fortnightly Frontline, which printed Rushdie’s open letter to Rajiv Gandhi in protest against the ban.67 Former Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee called the ban “yet another surrender to the forces of fundamentalism and intolerance”.68 An Indian Express editorial attacked this attempt at “thought control”, but its editor, Arun Shourie, was routinely rubbished as a “Hindu communalist”.69 Among political parties, the champions of secularism remained silent; the BJP was “the only party to condemn the ban”.70

"By contrast, numerous leading Indian secularists supported the ban on The Satanic Verses, e.g. newspaper editors Khushwant Singh, Girilal Jain, M.J. Akbar, Vir Sanghvi and Dileep Padgaonkar.71 The Press Council condemned the pre-publication of some excerpts as “an aberration from the path of ethical rectitude”.72 Commentator Pranav Khullar, while extolling Nehru for ignoring a colonial ban on seditious literature before 1947, described how the washerman, the vegetable vendor and others whom he asked had never heard of Rushdie, then concluded by defending the ban with the remarkable argument: “Nobody cared a hoot for Rushdie. In a free country people have the right not to read him.”73

" ... Seeing that the policies actually carried out by the secularists are not in conformity with the dictionary meaning of “secularism”, they allege that India is controlled by “pseudo-secularists”. Some of them sum it up in one simplistic sentence: “Secularism means being anti-Hindu”.83 They profess not to reject the principle of secularism, meaning “genuine secularism” or “positive secularism”, and accuse the establishment and the other parties of “pseudo-secularism”, meaning “discrimination against Hindus justified in the name of secularism”."

"Hindus typically claim that Hinduism is by nature “secular”, in this sense at least: “Indian secularism, in the sense of equal reverence for all religions, was not born on January 26, 1950. … It predates the Constitution, the freedom movement, … It is part of the spiritual conviction of this country as expressed in the Vedas and the Upanishads.”85 The soft-line BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee claims that “the Indian concept of secularism is more positive”, because unlike the Western variety, it “is not against any religion”.86 Clearly, what Vajpayee refers to as “secularism” could more properly be called “religious pluralism”."

"It can be useful to know about the political commitment of sources on which India-watchers base their own views of the Hindu revivalist movement. Thus, the editor of a leading British intellectual weekly was rightly cautioned not to present “the Economic and Political Weekly and Frontline [the two most-cited Indian sources on “communalism”] as voices of genuine radical dissent. Both are of Stalinist-Maoist pedigree and should the country’s Communist Parties achieve exclusive power at the national level, neither journal is likely to promote the right of dissent it enjoys in India today”.91"

" ... In a number of cases, however, the Marxist label is certified by Marxist sources. Thus, Romila Thapar and R.S. Sharma are quoted at some length as representatives of Indian Marxist thought in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.93 Irfan Habib has titled a recent collection of his papers Essays in Indian History. Towards a Marxist Perspective."

................................................................................................

"To Marx, Hinduism “was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society, and he shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. … he was as sceptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu ‘golden age’ of the past.”94 Marx upheld the colonial view that India was not a country properly speaking, merely a stretch of land with a meek conglomerate of peoples passively waiting for the next conqueror. For him, the question was not whether it was right to colonize India, merely whether colonization by Britain was preferable (and in his view, it was) to colonization by the Turks or the Czar.95

"Marx’s Indian followers have remained true to his view. They reject the very concept of India as a national unit and only accept India’s unity and integrity to the extent that they consider it strategically useful (e.g. in 1970-75 when they sincerely believed that they were about to come to power in Delhi). In an interview in Le Monde, Romila Thapar cheerfully predicted that India won’t be able to stay together.96 CPM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury calls India a “multinational country” with “many nationalities”.97 CPM leaders Jyoti Basu and Ashok Mitra have declared that if the BJP were to come to power, West Bengal would secede from India, and that “India was never the solution” anyway.98

"In every conflict, they have stood on the anti-Hindu and usually also on the anti-Indian side: betraying Quit India activists to the British in 1942, supporting the Pakistan scheme in 1945-47, supporting the separatist Razâkâr militia in Hyderabad state in 1948, siding with China in 1961-62, supporting the Muslim claim in the Ayodhya controversy. As a Western Marxist observer admits: “Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle.”99 While in other Third World countries, Marxists have supported cultural anti-colonialism and encouraged national pride, Indian Marxists are generally opposed to anti-colonial developments in the cultural sphere."

" ... A disappointed Bengali Leftist comments on CPM rule in West Bengal: “The Marxist rule of the last two decades has been an unmitigated disaster for West Bengal. … Marxism has ensured that West Bengal will become an industrial desert. By blocking investment, both indigenous and foreign, the red trade unions have ensured that the number of unemployed remains high, providing endless supplies of ‘revolutionary cadres’ from the ranks of the lumpen proletariat.”100"

"At the academic level, at least, this is very much the situation: Indian Marxists are welcomed in American seminars as privileged commentators on “Hindu communalism”. It is ironic as well as disturbing that a movement which still swears by Lenin (whose October 1917 coup d’état deposed the first democratic Russian Parliament) and Stalin, is hailed in Western universities as the guardian of a civil polity against the encroaching barbarism of Hindu revivalism.

"Yet, Indian Marxists sometimes become the allies of the Hindu nationalists. Thus, when non-Marxist secularists compromised with Islamist forces on the Shah Bano and Salman Rushdie issues, hard Marxists stood firm in their rejection of religious politics, so that along with the Hindu nationalists, they opposed the Government’s concessions to the Islamists. Or for a different example, though Marxist intellectuals are very much part of the “English-speaking elite”, working-class party cadres in West Bengal have promoted Bengali medium education instead of English.103 On the economic front too, Marxists and Hindutva activists have made common cause in recent years, especially in agitations against the multinationals and the GATT/WTO treaty. This trend is paralleled by Marxist-nationalist ad hoc alliances against globalization in Russia, Europe and the USA."

................................................................................................

"One of the most fashionable ways to misunderstand the Indian religious situation is in terms of “the Other”. This popular term carries two distinct meanings, one based on the writings of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, the other on Edward Said’s much-discussed book Orientalism (1978)."

" ... it is said with some justification that the Western construction of “the Orient” as “spiritual”, in contradistinction to the “materialist West”, has been interiorized by Hindu revivalists from at least Swami Vivekananda onwards.

"A typical example of this type of “deconstruction” of the “Orientalist” factor in Hindu self-perception is this observation by Peter van der Veer about the trend towards religious tolerance in the eighteenth century in Europe, when it was colonizing India: “A growing emphasis on religious tolerance as a positive value is thus related to the marginalization of religious institutions in Europe. … This discourse is then brought to bear on the Muslim and Hindu populations incorporated in the modern world-system. Muslims, the old rivals of the Christian West, are labelled ‘fanatic’ and ‘bigoted’, while Hindus are seen in a more positive light as ‘tolerant’. At the same time, this labelling explains why Muslims have ruled Hindu India and why Hindus have to be ‘protected’ by the British. In short, what I want to argue here is that the attribution of ‘tolerance’ to Hinduism is a specific orientalist history of ideas. As such, it has also come to dominate Hindu discourse on Hinduism”.105"

He could see truth until it punched him in the nose, and then did some twisted exercises to blame it elsewhere.

Or it was just Arabian Nights?

"Also, the implicit allegation that an identity based on “Otherness” vis-à-vis the dominant colonial worldview is illusory need not be taken as a condemnation pure and simple. When looked at from the viewpoint of the colonized native struggling to regain his self-respect, this critique of the purely derivative or illusory character of an orientalism-based identity can be understood as encouraging a more serious and more historical rediscovery of the native culture as it really was, without the intrusive reference to the colonizer’s model.106

"The nastier application of “Otherness” discourse is the one affirming a “rejection of the Other” (as diagnosed in Lévinas’ reflections on the Holocaust)107 as an explanatory characterization of Hindu hostility against Islam. Many scholars assume that Hindu revivalism is just another typical case of the contemporary worldwide trend of “identitarian” politics: part of a strategy to artificially construct a common Hindu national identity through polarization with a hostile outsider or Other108 But that is a case of forcing the unwilling facts into a preconceived pet theory.

"That Hindu society does not reject “Otherness” has amply been proven throughout history. First of all, there was plenty of “Otherness” inside Hindu society: whatever the evils of the caste system, it did accommodate the continued diversity of cultural identities. As Hindutva spokesmen never tire of reminding us, the Jews and the Zoroastrians have been welcome to their “Otherness” ever since they were allowed to settle in India.109 Christianity is a more complicated matter, which will perfectly illustrate the various aspects of the issue at hand. The Christianity of the Syrian refugees who settled in Kerala in the fourth century was distinguished from Hinduism by its ritual and doctrinal “Otherness”, and suffered no hostility in consequence. By contrast, missionary Christianity brought by the colonizers is strongly disliked by Hindu activists, not because of its “Otherness”, but because of its declared objective to eliminate Hinduism through conversion, i.e. because of its rejection of Hinduism’s “Otherness”.110

" ... But social realities prove stronger: “For example, in Kanpur—fast replacing Meerut, Moradabad and Mau as the centre of Muslim assertiveness—the pitched sectarian battles are fought between Muslims and Dalits. The city is sharply polarised along communal lines, with the Dalits constituting the Hindu storm-troopers and voting BJP. … The so-called solidarity of the disadvantaged is a creation of radical intellectuals.”117

"As for the international support to anti-Hindu agitations in India, there is undeniably a flow of money from the Arab peninsula to Islamic organizations, and from the West to the Christian missions (as well as from the overseas Hindus to Hindu organizations), but there are other facts too. Thus, Kashmiri separatism is not actively supported by Muslim countries except for Pakistan. The Christian separatists of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland claim to represent an independent country, yet it cannot boast of even the faintest semblance of Western recognition. The powerful Christian press will occasionally support Muslim causes like the Ayodhya mosque, but the fate of the Christians in Pakistan inevitably limits the scope for Muslim-Christian friendship.118

"And so on: the idea of a united anti-Hindu front with international backing is very real, and to that extent the Hindu perception of being “under siege” has a basis in fact, but in social and political practice, this anti-Hindu front has no more than a fragmentary and intermittent existence. Even its most important component, the alliance between Islamist forces and the secularists (as in the Rushdie affair), is under permanent strain because it is so counternatural.

" ... Educated Hindus are confident that a confrontation with rational thought will cost Hinduism only some deadwood, some superstitious accretions, but that the core of Hinduism is capable of surviving the exposure to the light of reason. As Shrikant Talageri writes: “Hindus should adopt as open an attitude to pantha-chikitsâ [“diagnosis of sects”] of Hinduism as to that of Islam and Christianity: there is nothing to fear, since Hinduism in its essence will shine out white and pure in comparison with Islam and Christianity in their essence. It will only be cleansed of impurities which stand in its own way.”125"

" ... Hindu Nationalists surmise that a majority of Indian citizens favour a ban on cow-slaughter, yet Nehru and his successors opposed it because they didn’t want to go against minority feelings. So, they often allege that Congress and Janata Governments have systematically practised “minorityism”.

"Conversely, “majoritarianism” is the position that a majority has the right to determine the face of a country, whether in symbolic respects or in actual legislation. It is in effect a pejorative term for “democracy”, especially democracy in its unalloyed “one man one vote” form, in which a majority can take decisions without bothering about the religious background of the decision’s supporters or opponents. On issues which pit a large community against a small community, this tends to allow the larger community to vote its own wishes into law. Thus, until recently England prohibited all work on Sundays, which was a Christian commandment turned into law, and atheists or Jews who did not specially care for the Sunday just had to abide by that law. It is an intrinsic feature of democracy that it is majoritarian. In South Africa, the anti-Apartheid campaigners used to describe their democratic “one man one vote” demand as “majority rule”. And effectively, it is now impossible to elect a South-African president who is hated by the Black majority, but it is perfectly possible and democratic to elect a President who is unacceptable to the White, Coloured or Indian minorities, if he is the choice of the majority; just as it is possible in any democratic country with a Leftist majority to impose a Leftist president on the Rightist minority.

"If we put it this crudely, some people may object that it is “undemocratic”128 for a majority to ride roughshod over the minorities, e.g. journalist M.J. Akbar claims that: “The true test of a democracy is the justice that the minority gets in the system.”129 Well, no. When Socrates as a one-man minority was eliminated by Athenian democracy, that was certainly narrow-minded, intolerant and other deplorable things besides; but it was not undemocratic. Athens passed the true test of a democracy by implementing the will of the majority, viz. to eliminate Socrates (the choice between exile and death was generously left to the philosopher himself). Of course, the present writer is in favour of Socrates’ right to free speech and of a system in which minorities “get justice”; but you cannot deduce those desirable things from the single concept of democracy. You cannot invest “democracy” with all possible virtues. So, “tyranny by the majority” is and remains an inherent danger of democracy. And this would bring us to an old debate: in order not to lapse into barbarism, democracy needs the basis of a strong ethical culture in the population. Generally speaking, democracy has certain cultural prerequisites which fall outside the institutional democracy concept itself.

"One curb on unalloyed “majoritarian” democracy could consist in veto powers conceded to smaller units (though this means that a minority can impose its will on the majority, which obviously detracts from the “democratic” character of the system). This is what David Ludden refers to in his criticism of BJP “majoritarianism”: “As a majoritarian movement, Hindu nationalism defines the Indian nation as a whole and seeks to displace and remove alternative, pluralistic definitions.”130 A “pluralistic” definition seems to imply a recognition of subnationalities or other units below the level of the nation."

Here's a reality check - the Hindus have allowed various minority refugees to retain religions, identity and flourish, with as much interaction with mainstream as they wished; neither of the two powerful minorities, Islam or Christianity, would have allowed them to survive without persecution, conversion or genocide, as evident by their history outside India. If India allows veto by minority, do Muslims and christget to persecute Jews, Parsees and Tibetan refugees, and the indigenous religions - Buddhist and Jain and Sikh, which aren't seen as foreign by Hindus - to extinction? Are they to be pressured to convert, with alternative offered only as death or migration, as per agenda of Islam and Christianity?

"However, it is important to understand that this critique of “majoritarianism” intrinsically presupposes a communalist perspective: the nation is not one, is not a single unit which can take political decisions, but it is a composite of communities, one of which may be the majority, but each of which has its own sovereignty. The citizen does not participate in the decision-making process as just a citizen, but as a citizen qualified by his membership of a subnationality. Moreover, in the present debate, it is minorities defined by religion which are accepted as legitimate contenders for the status of a “minority” entitled to “get justice”.

"In secular countries, there may be subnationalities defined by region or language (and that only for very limited purposes), but it is unconstitutional and in fact unthinkable that a proposal of law in France, the US or any other secular country were to be subjected to the approval or disapproval of groups defined by religious identity. Thus, no matter how sinful the Catholic community may consider the legalization of abortion, there is no question of a modern Government giving representatives of the Catholic community a veto right against a democratically enacted law permitting abortion, nor even the right to have a separate minority law applying to Catholics alone. In those countries, a citizen is simply a citizen, and his adherence to a majority or minority religion is strictly ignored. In France, it is even illegal to inquire about someone’s religion in public life, e.g. in job interviews. That is real secularism."

France still has most things closed on Sunday, and persecution of Hindu women apporting articles of dressing other than French (which in case of Hindu articles is not dangerous to public security as in case of Islamic veiling of women in black from head to foot), is not secular, to say the least. Nuns or bishops, or anyone else wearing a cross, for example, aren't persecuted for the same secularism! France may be more secular than say, Saudi Arabia, but persecution of Hindu women's dressing puts it below secularism in reality.

................................................................................................

"That very policy, accepted as a matter of course in Western secular democracies, is precisely what Ludden describes as the “majoritarian” programme of the Hindu nationalists: to treat “the Indian nation as a whole”, in particular, to have a Common Civil Code which applies to all citizens regardless of religion, replacing the present “pluralistic” Civil Code which differs according to religion. By contrast, the “alternative, pluralistic definitions” envisaged by Ludden introduce the notion of separate communities as relatively sovereign building-blocks of the nation. But that is exactly what the British in India used to call the “communal” principle.

"This example of a controversial term may serve to illustrate how easily outside observers get entangled in the intricacies of India’s “communal” problem; how they lose their neutrality by taking sides already in the stage when terms are defined; and how they may even end up on the side which they imagine they are criticising, i.e. “communalism”. I therefore consider it better to avoid neologistic exonyms like “majoritarianism”, which simply have nothing to do with the ideological self-definition of the movement under consideration."

................................................................................................

"This study was not written in a vacuum. An entire opinion climate has been palpably present, which is bound to influence the reader (not excluding the academic specialist) in a certain direction. I am in no position to dislodge an established opinion climate, but I do want to caution the reader that certain commonly-held opinions about India and Hindu revivalism are no more than just that—opinions. Views on a large phenomenon like Hindu revivalism naturally stretch across the whole opinion spectrum, but those which dominate the international media and the channels likely to have influenced my readership, are almost uniformly hostile, sometimes ferociously hostile. About Hindu revivalism, we may say what an earlier researcher has said about the Druze community, viz. that they “were judged almost entirely in the light of sources written by their adversaries; hence many misconceptions about them persist to this day.”"

"German journalist Klemens Ludwig argues that “in spite of all rhetoric about a Muslim Feindbild [enemy-image, bogey], Islam is supported by a strong lobby, not only in political and business circles but also in circles which consider themselves as enlightened and multicultural”, specifically media opinion leaders who have become Islam’s first line of defence against criticism.134

"There is a logic to this. In cultural circles, progressives use Muslim immigrants as allies against their national-conservative enemies. As for business circles and the politicians catering to their interests: important Muslim countries are wealthy but not very dynamic in building a competitive industry, which makes them an ideal market for Western industry (exactly the opposite counts for India, an ambitious high-tech competitor with as yet only limited purchasing power). To stay on good terms with the Muslim countries and to compensate for the latter’s anger at Western support to Israel, Western powers, most of all the USA, promote Muslim-friendly policies, for example the all-out American support to Turkey, to Bosnia and indeed to Pakistan in its quarrels with India. This inevitably conditions the coverage in a large section of the media, which in the case of India reporting is anything but anti-Muslim."

" ... I propose we do our own fact-finding, with an emphasis on the international coverage of the Hindu revivalist phenomenon.

"For starters, consider the following case. When the BJP lost the elections for the Legislative Assembly of Uttar Pradesh in 1993, some papers claimed that a Scheduled Caste politician belonging to the winning Backward Caste alliance (SP-BSP) had been murdered by a vengeful “upper-caste BJP”.135 In reality, the murder victim, Kala Bachcha, was a BJP candidate.136 Such misreporting with inversion of guilt could hardly have been cooked up at editorial offices outside India; either it was done quite deliberately by interested parties in Delhi, then gullibly copied by foreign press correspondents; or, more likely, the original information was insufficiently explicit about the political identity of the victim, so that this gap was filled during the editing process on the purely deductive assumption that “BJP = Hindu = oppression of lower by upper castes”, ergo “an ex-Untouchable must have belonged to the anti-BJP camp”; or perhaps “BJP = fundamentalist = terrorist, ergo BJP commits murders”. At any rate, the net result was en exchange of aggressor and victim, arguably the most hurtful form of misinformation.

"For a more important example, affecting the entire Western press for years on end, consider the coverage of the Kashmir conflict. The cause of the conflict is routinely misrepresented in the false claim that “in 1990, militant Muslims took to arms after Jagmohan, the authoritarian Indian governor of the state, had reacted excessively to a peaceful demonstration”.137 In fact, the armed insurrection had started in autumn 1989 with the accession of the presumedly pro-Muslim government of V.P. Singh and his Kashmiri Muslim Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, months after the end of Jagmohan’s first term in office, and Jagmohan had been sent in again in January 1990 (by Home Minister Sayeed, who was to praise Jagmohan’s accomplishments in Parliament on 25 April 1990) to remedy the situation.

"With the publicity given to the phenomenon of “ethnic cleansing” in ex-Yugoslavia, one could have expected a sympathy wave in favour of the Kashmiri Hindus, who were collectively hounded out of the Kashmir Valley in 1989-90. Nothing of the sort ever materialized, if only because most foreign media simply refrained from reporting this event.138 When at all forced to admit the fact, some commentators added insult to injury by claiming that the exodus of the Hindu population was part of a strategy which triggered (instead of being caused by) the Islamic insurrection, a strategy masterminded by Jagmohan (as alleged by Congress MP and columnist Mani Shankar Aiyar)139 or by the BJP. Though the BJP was practically non-existent in the Kashmiri Pandit community (whose political sympathies were predominantly Leftist), a Flemish India-watcher claimed in 1995: “The BJP, which controls the whole of India, has also infiltrated Kashmir and convinced the Hindus there to leave, so that the Army could move in.”140

"Most of the attention was given to the plight of the insurrectionists in their confrontation with the security forces, who were sometimes even blamed for acts of the former, e.g. the exploding of the Chrar-e-Sharif mosque in 1995.141 The BBC’s dramatizing coverage of clashes between separatists and security forces has been criticized by Indians (not just Hindu revivalists) as a “misrepresentation” which “won’t wash”, “cleverly mixed” and “extreme”, but to no avail.142 At any rate, the opinion climate in key sections of the media was not favourable to publicity for the plight of the Kashmiri Hindus. Till the time of this writing, most references to the Kashmir conflict in the international media fail to mention the Hindu refugee problem.

"This deliberate and systematic distortion of information on the Kashmir crisis is more than just a deontological problem: it is a matter of life and death. If proper information had created public opinion against the Pak-backed terrorists in Kashmir, Western governments might well have withheld weapons deliveries to Pakistan and exerted serious pressure to end the proxy war which Pakistan has been waging against India in Kashmir and on other fronts. Instead, reporters have objectively supported the prolonging of the Kashmir crisis with its ever-rising death toll."

"Objectively"???

"While the first half of the 1990s saw a peak in the anti-Hindu bias in international India-watching, the second half saw a a partial return to common sense. An example of this evolution, from vaguely critical to downright hysterical and then back to a more factual coverage is provided by the Catholic missionary monthly Wereldwijd (Antwerp). The paper usually conveys fairly sympathizing viewpoints about exotic cultures; about Hinduism, this was also the case up to 1985.143 To be sure, Hinduism was described as “the religion of unredeemed man”, and Christianity was advertised as the solution, but I see nothing wrong in value judgments and evaluative comparisons, not even when one’s own religion happens to come out on top. Until 1985, Hindu revivalism in its contemporary form was not even noticed, and at first it was only mentioned in passing, as “a fundamentalist movement like the RSS”.144

"In 1986, the Hindu revivalists are called “fundamentalists”, modern Hinduism is described by interviewee Prof. Romila Thapar as “a denial of pluralism”, partly based on “myths” (meaning stories about atrocities by the Muslim invaders of yore). At the time, the BJP had two seats in the Lok Sabhâ, but the reporter consistently pretends that the Government does the bidding of the “fundamentalists”. There is also a section about “Catholic ashrams”, featuring saffron-clad missionary Bede Griffiths, without a hint that Hindus consider him a swindler.145 So far, so good.

"The main source in this report, however, is V.T. Rajshekar, editor of the Bangalore-based fortnightly Dalit Voice. No information is given about the credentials of this man, but it is good to know that after being sacked as Indian Express reporter for collusion with Khalistani terrorists, he became India’s foremost spokesman of anti-Brahminism. He frequently alleges that Brahmins pull all the strings in India, a position adopted lock, stock and barrel by the Wereldwijd reporter: “The orthodox Brahmins control the RSS while the ‘progressive’ Brahmins lead the ‘national’ parties including the Communist parties. The intention is that Brahmins always rule, no matter who wins the struggle.”146"

"Actually, the orthodox Brahmins denounce the reformist RSS as heterodox, but let that pass. More remarkable is the similarity with Hitler’s rhetoric of how world Jewry was behind both capitalism and Bolshevism, all the more so because Rajshekar does combine anti-Brahminism with anti-Semitism. Indeed, catering to a largely Muslim readership, he regularly publishes anti-Jewish items and alleges a secret collusion between Israel and the “Jews of India”, meaning the Brahmins.147 All the while attacking the Hindus as “Nazis” (and many other terms of abuse besides), he also writes: “Muslims approved the persecution of Jews by Hitler who believed that as long as Jews existed in the world there would be no peace in the world. This is coming true as the Jews are controlling the Pentagon and CIA, not to speak of Lebanon and West Asia.”148"

"Let us assume that the reporter, who has quoted from Dalit Voice, had overlooked such passages and was unaware of Rajshekar’s agenda. But what he did quote was still somewhat worrying, e.g. that “a Hindu cannot be human”, and that the only solution for Hindus is to convert out of Hinduism. About the RSS, even ordinary social work on the Christian missionary model is described in hateful terms, for example, it “besieges the aboriginal tribes and infiltrates among the untouchables”, exactly the language which the RSS uses to characterize the work of the Christian missions. The reporter is candid about his own assent to Rajshekar’s explicitly quoted views: “Thus argues V.T. Rajshekar. The facts appear to put him in the right.”149

"In 1991, at the height of the Ayodhya controversy, Wereldwijd calls the RSS a “militia” consisting of “Nazis” who “want to perpetuate the monopoly and the power of the Brahmins”.150 This time, the sources quoted include Dalit Voice, iterviewee Dr. J. Kananaikil, who leads the (Christian) Indian Social Institute in Delhi, and Rajni Kothari, who had applauded the newly enacted reservations for Other Backward Castes (which pit them against the upper castes) as having “the capacity to finish off the supremacy of Vedic Hinduism”, and who is quoted as asserting that caste struggle is inevitable and necessary.

"A picture captioned “Muslims on the steps of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya” shows a functioning mosque in some other place, thus giving the impression that the Ayodhya controversy was about a functioning mosque which Hindu militants wanted to snatch from the local Muslim community, when in fact it was mosque architecture functioning as a Hindu temple since 1949. (After the violence in Ayodhya in late October and early November 1990, many newspapers including De Standaard and the New York Times published such wrongly chosen or wrongly captioned pictures. It got even worse in the more popular press, for example, a Dutch glossy magazine showed Khalistani terrorists wielding machine guns with the caption: “Fundamentalist Hindus near the demolished Babri Masjid”).151

"In 1995, the “fundamentalist RSS” is accused of the “deification of political leaders”, with reference to the political ascendancy of film stars in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu: “Since then, Tamil Nadu politics is in the hands of fascist film stars.”152 In fact, the RSS (referent of the “fascist” smear) hardly had a presence in Tamil Nadu, but presumably Jayalalitha Jayaram, ex-filmstar and then Chief Minister, had proven “fascist” enough by encouraging Vedic education (now also for Scheduled Castes) and earmarking funds for the upkeep of temples. We also get to read the old canard that “RSS militants murdered Mahatma Gandhi”. In fact, none of the conspirators belonged to the RSS, which was officially cleared of all suspicions; the actual murderer, Nathuram Godse, had left the RSS a decade earlier precisely because he wanted a more militant political involvement, as he confirmed during his speech in court.153

"And then, after election victories, the Hindu nationalists came to power, for 13 days in May 1996, and somewhat more durably in March 1998. Nazis and fundamentalists, Hitler and Khomeini rolled into one, they were set to change India into one vast concentration camp; that at least is what you could legitimately expect on the basis of the earlier reports. Yet, in 1998, after the BJP victory, the title of the on-the-spot report becomes: “When the Gods wake up”, and one of the captions reads: “Today, Hindu consciousness is waking up in the people themselves.”154 We get anti-colonial talk from Vishvanath Lawande, a veteran of the Goa liberation movement (which achieved decolonization in 1964) and from philosopher Claude Alvares, who accuses all parties (BJP included) of following the same Western development model. But Alvares acknowledges the rise of the BJP as a logical symptom of a welcome general revival of religion and abandonment of religion-free secularist attitudes among the intellectuals, and he admits that the BJP programme of economic self-reliance (“one of the few Gandhian legacies to survive”) is proven right by the crisis of the East-Asian economies."

"The same trend is in evidence in another Flemish monthly, the secular, government-sponsored De Wereld Morgen. Its coverage of Hindu revivalism had always been rather fragmentary and mostly hostile. When its editors asked me for an article about the Ayodhya affair, I gave them the facts based on primary sources, but they prefaced my article (which they did publish) with an editorial article of the same length, based on sources like Frontline, which said all the opposite things, a unique move in the paper’s history.156"

"If this change in attitude is found in an Indian paper (as it is in many of them), it might be dismissed as just a matter of opportunism. But these Flemish monthlies have little to gain or lose by taking this side or that in an Indian dispute. So, the evolution in their treatment of Hindu Revivalism reflects a real change in opinion. It also shows something else: when these papers published attacks on the RSS and BJP which now seem wildly exaggerated, they did so in good faith, because that just happened to be the information fed to them by Indian sources which they considered reliable. Once they were given a different version, they didn’t mind publishing that one also, but until then, the hate-BJP version was practically the only one which had come through their information channels for years on end."

He's naively forgetting the church influence angle, or hoping India knows nothing of conversion Agenda?

"In the years 1989-94, a massive and implacable hatred of Hindu revivalism in the English-Indian press totally coloured the information flow, and it will take some time before the effect of this opinion wave on the non-specialist media dies down. In the general media, a diversification has taken place since, with some papers still taking a virulently anti-BJP line, after the example of Indian Communist papers like Frontline, and others following the opinion shift in the mainstream segment of the English-language Indian media. The actual position taken by the foreign media largely depends on their sources, which are now more diverse in their opinions than the uniform hostility of the early 1990s. Certain media opted for a cool-headed coverage years ago (e.g. the London Economist), while others have continued to be fiercely hostile (e.g. the New York Times).

"Whether the more neutral line is followed or the old hostility is revived on occasion often depends on random factors like the personal idiosyncrasies of the junior correspondent to whom the India reporting is entrusted, but may also result from political choices, e.g. the projection of political struggles at home (which may also include a Muslim factor or an antagonism between minority and majority) on to the political configuration in India, or, in the case of the powerful Anglo-American media, their governments’ alliance with Pakistan. At any rate, for the period under consideration, we have to reckon with distorted reporting and hostile analysis, both in the media and in specialized publications. If anything, the latter are more firm in their commitment to combat rather than study the Hindu revivalist movement, as we shall see in some of the following sections of this chapter."

"The international media coverage of Indian politics is based on an information flow which passes through a uniquely narrow bottleneck: a handful of Indian English-language papers, which are faithfully copied by press correspondents in Delhi. Editors in Paris or New York have India very low on their list of priorities, and they don’t scrutinize the sources used by the India desk in filling the limited space allotted to it. Further, because India is a democracy, no one has an attitude of suspicion vis-à-vis Indian sources, the way most people had a healthy skepticism vis-à-vis the Soviet media. Therefore, a handful of people in the leading media can get away with pushing their own reading of Indian reality. For the period under consideration, my finding is that their version, the only one which reached the international public, was not that of neutral observers, but embodied the views and prejudices of one very specific class.

"Unlike in China, where the ruling class during much of the past century has waged an unrelenting and high-powered struggle against native culture and religion, the impact of the Nehruvian secularist elite in India has always been limited. Its sway has never really extended beyond the strictly public sphere: the dominant media, academe, and politics. There, the smallest deviation from the Nehruvian line could be punished forthwith. A typical example is the case of G.G. Swell, presidential candidate for the opposition in 1992. He belonged to a minority (Christian) and to a Scheduled Tribe while his Congress opponent, Shankar Dayal Sharma, was a Brahmin; an outsider would think that this should have made him the natural candidate of the secularists and the Left. However, when the BJP promised to support his candidature, he returned the compliment by declaring that the BJP is not a “communal” party. At once, a group of vocal secularists including Syed Shahabuddin and Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma) announced that they withdrew their support to G.G. Swell. Congress and the Communists supported Sharma en bloc. Swell’s caste, religion or political programme had not changed, but his saying something nice about the BJP was enough to get him ostracized.

"By contrast, in the administration, the army and the private sector, this quasi-McCarthyist taboo on any expression of Hindu identity or sympathy for Hindu Revivalism was never that strong, and in some quarters, it simply remained non-existent. However, the secularist hard core did man those sectors which control the information flow, and therefore the picture of Hindu nationalism among international India-watchers differed sharply from the opinions which common Indians had formed about it on the basis of their real-life experiences with it.

"At the end of the period under consideration, even the core areas of secularist control started opening up somewhat to the winds of change. This became evident at the time of the 1996 elections and increased in proportion with the cracks appearing in the anti-BJP coalition led by Deve Gowda and then by Inder Kumar Gujral, when a surprisingly large number of media people and second-rank Congress politicians abandoned their tough anti-BJP talk, apparently for no better reason than that the BJP seemed set to take over after the next elections (which took place sooner than expected, in February 1998).

"In some cases, this may be due to a genuine change of heart following the generally uncontroversial governance provided by the BJP in the states it had ruled in the preceding years, which suggested that the BJP was not such a monster after all. This impression was shared by the masses: “Then, there is a growing realization among the electorate, including a section of the minorities, that BJP’s portrayal is somewhat exaggerated”.158 Others thought that the BJP had been a monster in the past (thus justifying their past anti-BJP crusades), but that the party had changed, that it “is endeavouring to recast Indian nationalism in another mould by going away from a narrow and retrograde definition of what constitutes the basis of the national community towards another, more open and flexible definition”.159 This was also the position taken by Mohiuddin Shah, a spokesman of the Kashmiri Muslim party National Conference, who said that the BJP “was a communal party. Now, it has softened its stand and may take up the national agenda”.160

"The professional India-watchers in the West have so far been slow to pick up this trend. When the BJP came to power very briefly in May 1996, a lonely James Clad reassured the Western readers that “the BJP will continue in India’s secular path”.161 Otherwise, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s accessions as Prime Minister in 1996 and 1998 were greeted with a strange silence. Here were the people who had been described in terms of Hitler and Khomeini, now they actually came to power in the world’s largest democracy, a fledgling nuclear power, a giant of the next century, and nobody came forward to explain to the public just what this BJP stood for. After the 1998 elections, the Western media paid much more attention to Sonia Gandhi and her accession to the Congress presidency than to the BJP, as if not Vajpayee but the Italian widow had come at the helm of the nation. Perhaps they were embarrassed that their earlier alarmist writing about the BJP suddenly seemed so unrelated to the real world."

That last bit had more to do with West hoping one of them would rule India again, helping Vatican Agendaof conversion, and continuing loot of India as well, of course, and more. Perhaps her backing includes secret organisations across fugitive Germans network, too?

Did this picture of the then new PM, Atal Behari Vajpayee, change with India's nuclear device, or Kargil? Or was it a Bill Clinton smiling approvingly at the PM when lattaffifmed India's right to defence asserting India never did and newfound attack another? Or was it the whole Parliament surrounding Clinton and an incredibly friendly atmosphere generated by his reciprocation, that only became better when he got off and danced with women on roads? They were certainly surprised, and happy! As were TV viewers.

................................................................................................

"So far, no one seems yet to have questioned the reliability of the privileged Indian sources of information which led to the extremely partisan reporting in the past decade. It is in a different context that Rajni Kothari, political scientist and a socialist himself, briefly described the relevant background development, viz. how under Indira Gandhi’s regime (1966-77, 1980-84), the Left “did make a major effort at influencing not just the polity but also a number of scientific and educational institutions, a variety of government and semi-government committees, inner councils of the party and Parliament, a considerable cross-section of the mass media as well as important journals which they came to control. After all, in the Stalinist view of things the intellectual-scientific domain is extremely important. … Meanwhile, the country also drifted more and more into the Soviet dragnet which had its local networks of individuals, research institutions and funding agencies which gradually forced many intellectuals and bureaucrats to fall in line.”162 Though now waning, this politicized background of the dominant Indian discourse on Hindu revivalism is extremely important to keep in mind when evaluating Indian claims about Hindu revivalism.

"Kothari mentions Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and of course Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) by name, but the Indian Council of Historical Research would also deserve mention, as well as the key positions acquired by combative Marxists in the University Grants Commission, the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Social Science Research and other institutions; and this move to capture the intellectual sector obviously also extended to the media. The job of mapping out this Marxist bid for control of the intellectual, media and educational space, which has a history stretching from Nehru to Inder Kumar Gujral (who, as Prime Minister in 1996-97, nominated prominent Marxists including Romila Thapar in the selection committee of Doordarshan programmes),163 remains to be done. For now, it will suffice to remind the readership that a lot of the information and analysis presently available about the Hindu revivalist movement is the fruit of deliberately politicized research programmes."

"Very often, misreporting or misinterpretation of data in the media is wholly unintentional. Correspondents distort the information not because they feel compelled to do so by their political convictions, but as a result of intellectual failings. One relatively innocent factor is a general tendency to mental laziness, which leads to a blind application of schemes from better-known parts of the world to the Indian situation. A typical case is the assumption of symmetry, attributing the same motives and policies to both parties in the Indo-Pak or Hindu-Muslim conflict.

"The most common mistaken presumption of symmetry is that between “Muslim Pakistan” and “Hindu India”. Thus, a French commentator writes about the Partition: “But henceforth, there were two countries of the pure ones, purely Muslim Pakistan and, in spite of Nehru’s profound secularism, Hindu India. Purely Hindu.”164 A Flemish commentator likewise sees British India partitioned into “a greater Hindu India and a smaller Muslim Pakistan who both saw their minorities as undesired intruders and opted for an archaic kind of purity”.165 In fact, India is by no means a Hindu state; it was not based on the refusal to co-exist with others, as Pakistan was; and it is not squeezing out its minorities, as Pakistan is. The best refutation is provided by the highly anti-symmetrical migration stream: the constant trickle of Hindu refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh is not matched by a similar trickle of Muslim refugees from India, but by a vast movement of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh illegally settling in India."

What's missed is that there's a great number of illegal migration from pakistan as well, via either visitors staying on after visas expired and vanishing into Indian population, or terrorists trained to attack India and pushed for the purpose by Pakistan across border.

................................................................................................

"For a less dramatic illustration of the symmetry fallacy, consider the fate of Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, a book attacking Bal Thackeray, leader of the Maharashtrian Hindu party Shiv Sena, and arguably also lampooning Hinduism as such.166 Because of the symmetry fallacy, Indian and Western media predicted that Bal Thackeray would pronounce some kind of a fatwa against Rushdie, after the Ayatullah’s example in the Satanic Verses case. Tim McGirk’s article was mis-titled: “Rushdie satire infuriates Hindu extremists”, for he could only report that “there’s no threat so far” according to the book’s distributor, and that the Shiv Sena leadership had not seen the book yet; the rest was prediction and speculation.167 And the predicted event never materialized: no bookshops were attacked, no copies of the book were burnt, no statement was made. Finally, journalists went and begged Thackeray for some comment. He replied laconically that he would have his secretary read the book and then maybe say something, maybe not.168

"As for the BJP, its leader Atal Behari Vajpayee called the idea of banning the book “wrong”, for the simple reason that “if you don’t like a book, you are at liberty not to read it”.169 The most humourless comment was made by the Hindu Students’ Forum of Britain, who called Rushdie “intellectually bankrupt” and concluded with a request to the British Government to let Rushdie arrange his own security rather than have it at taxpayers’ expense.170 And BJP economist Jay Dubashi poured out his contempt over Rushdie: “I do not know why Rushdie has to write such trash year after year. … For the likes of Rushdie, India is not a country but a background for his books which rubbish India and the Indians. … Those who cannot rise above the level of gutters are doomed to live in them.”171 But no call for a ban, even there. A mild customs ban was finally imposed by the Congress Government, reportedly because a dog in Rushdie’s book was called Jawaharlal, but possibly also because it would not take chances with the Shiv Sena, considering the press “reports” about its “impending” retaliation.172

"But the symmetry fallacy proved so strong that even after the fact, at least one journalist maintained that Thackeray had followed in Khomeini’s footsteps, and that Rushdie’s book “was also prohibited by these [Hindu] fundamentalists, and they too threatened to murder him”.173 Other journalists have not written this explicitly, but by never correcting their initial predictions, they too have propagated the impression that Hindu nationalists are Khomeini-like book-burners."

"In journalism, the symmetry fallacy leads to a systematic projection of bits of established “knowledge” about the already ill-understood phenomenon of militant Islam on to the total unknown of militant Hinduism. Thus, it is routinely alleged that the goal of Hindutva is a Hindu “theocratic state”, a concept neatly defined in Islam but unknown in Hinduism. It is my considered opinion that the major part of media “background information” on Hindu revivalism consists in the purely deductive application of the symmetry fallacy, projecting half-digested ideas about Islam on to Hinduism.

"The Sikhs, whose religion supposedly takes a midway position between Islam and Hinduism, also fall into place once the symmetry between Hindus and Muslims is assumed: during the Partition massacres, Hindus and Muslims killed each other “and the Sikhs, in between the two, were hit from both sides”.174 In reality, during the Partition massacres, the Sikhs functioned as arch-Hindus, favoured targets of Muslim fury in West Panjab and the most assiduous Muslim-slayers in East Panjab, with no Hindu-Sikh clashes in sight.

"A rather consequential effect of the symmetry fallacy is that the organized Hindu movement, like so many West-Asian Islamist groups, has been labelled “terrorist”. Activists of the largest Hindu organization, the RSS, sometimes have visa problems because the security services of some countries have booked the RSS as “terrorist”. Some scholars have also put it in writing that the RSS is “terrorist”.175 But they ought to get down to specifics: who are the secularist or Muslim leaders assassinated by the RSS? Where are the airplanes they hijacked or blew up? Whom did they kidnap for ransom or political concessions? These things have all been done by Sikh and Muslim separatists whom the Indian press refuses to label as “terrorists” (the approved term is “militants”), but it doesn’t follow that Hindus must have behaved likewise."

"Even in the most fundamental data concerning the Hindu-Muslim conflict, this symmetry fallacy plays a distortive role, for “Hindu identity” and “Muslim identity” are two very different concepts. To be a Hindu, it is not necessary to adhere to a specific belief, whereas belief is the defining condition of Muslim identity. ... "

"The Hindus worshipping at Sufi shrines have adopted such Muslim sites into their pantheon of venerable objects, and no Hindu priest is haranguing them about it because Hinduism has no doctrine excluding particular objects from veneration, and also because in many such cases, the Muslim buildings enumerated are known or believed to have replaced demolished Hindu temples, the underlying original object of veneration. By contrast, the Muslims worshipping donkey-borne goddess Shîtalâ have simply failed to outgrow this Hindu practice, which was an integral part of the religious life of that one ancestor who agreed to convert to Islam, a practice which remained in the family out of habit even though the convert abjured it upon conversion by pronouncing the Islamic creed (“There is no god but Allah”)· Sacrificing on the altar of a Hindu goddess is blatantly in conflict with the Islamic doctrine of monotheism, which is why Islamic Tablîgh workers are actively trying to weed it out.177"

Author fails to note that the so converted ancestors had not converted out of conviction, but forced at point of sword, hence their lack of transformation; that this is not universal isn't because some conversions were genuine, but due chiefly to other reasons such as Hinduism being not as easy to follow but requiring very little if one is a Hindu, so that anyone not doing much to be a Hindu getting converted at point of sword continues the life with added enforced strictures.

................................................................................................

" ... In writing about India, it is all too common to starkly ignore the Hindu voice. Among Western authors, this disdain for Hindus is very robust, so far unaffected by all the anti-Eurocentric soul-searching of recent years.178 In the Asian Studies departments in Western universities, there is a remarkable contrast between the political sympathy of the staff in the Chinese and Islamic sections for their study domains and the sharp hostility for Hinduism (and for India to the extent that it is the current political embodiment of Hindu civilization) among the India experts.179 The only Hinduism which they like is museum Hinduism; any Hinduism that displays a will to survive is treated with the same horror that would be aroused if a mummy were to show signs of life.

"Consider for example, the contempt for Hindu authors, among Westerners and some anglicized Indians, in the case of the topic “criticism of Mahatma Gandhi”. A great majority of the Indian population and of Gandhi’s fellow Congressmen were Hindus. One would therefore expect some of his critics also to have been Hindus. And effectively: Sri Aurobindo was ever sarcastic about Gandhi, Swami Shraddhananda was in mutual conflict with him in 1922-26, Veer Savarkar attacked his policies in his capacity of HMS president (1937-43), and Gandhi’s murderer Nathuram Godse, undisputably his most hard-hitting critic, formulated a detailed critique during his defence speech in court.180 Yet, not one of these Hindu revivalist critics of Gandhi is even mentioned in B.R. Nanda’s much-acclaimed book purportedly dealing with Gandhi’s critics, Gandhi and His Critics.

"The Hindu voice is ignored in all kinds of debate. It is often absent in general presentations of comparative religion, very common in our multiculturalist days, where the Jewish view of a given topic is presented by a Jew, the Islamic one by a Muslim, etc.,—and the Hindu one by an Indologist, mostly a Western Christian or agnostic.181 It is even muzzled to a large extent when the discussion specifically concerns the Hindu revivalist movement itself. Thus, an article by Antony Copley about the Hindutva inroads into the notion of secularism quotes profusely from writings by declared critics of Hindutva like Mushirul Hasan, Praful Bidwai and Sarvepalli Gopal, but of its 64 footnotes, not one is a direct reference to a Hindutva source.182 Only four references claim to reproduce the words of Hindutva spokesmen, and they have been taken from secondary, non-Hindutva sources: two from newspaper reports (and we know how journalistic accounts are often less than accurate), and two from Bruce Graham’s standard work Hindu Nationalism."

"David Ludden has edited a book, published in India as Making India Hindu and in the USA as Contesting the Nation (1996), which contains twelve expert contributions on Hindu “communalism”. The works included in the combined bibliography may have been consulted by all twelve or by just one of the contributors, but those missing have certainly been overlooked or ignored by all twelve experts. While containing ten titles by Asghar Ali Engineer, a declared campaigner against Hindutva, it contains just one by otherwise prolific and very influential Hindu writers like Balraj Madhok, H.V. Seshadri and Arun Shourie, and one BJP publication—but not a single BJP resolution or speech by its presidents, no HMS or RSS resolution or manifesto, and no book or article by seminal authors like Ram Swamp and Sita Ram Goel. Its basis in primary sources is extremely slender, and most quotations are from earlier academic Hindutva-watchers and from Indian sources openly hostile to the movement which they purport to study."

"The Ayodhya evidence debate (about whether there had really been a temple at the site of the controversial Babri Masjid before the latter was built) provides an example of wide complicity in muzzling the Hindu voice.187 To my knowledge, not one Western scholar has covered the debate on the basis of primary material, all of them merely relaying the anti-temple account of partisan Indian authors. Thus, Brian K. Smith bases his account of the evidence debate wholly on an article from the Communist fortnightly Frontline, giving the game away by relaying some of the consensual canards circulating among secularist polemicists, for example that ASI director-general B.B. Lal had “found absolutely no evidence of any pre-existing temple at the site” (in fact, Lal had found the bases of a pillared building which either may or may not have been a Hindu temple, and later came out in support of the more recent and more decisive archaeological findings which Smith’s source prematurely, and till today unprovenly, dismisses as fraudulent).188

"To get an idea of the treatment of the subject by partisan Indian sources, consider this instance. Asghar Ali Engineer writes on the cover of his Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy (1990): “Future generations will have a right to know what the controversy was about”, but then takes care to include only a few token statements for the Hindu side which are either on peripheral aspects of the debate or belong to the clumsier variety of Hindutva polemic.

"He repeats the same exercise in his sequel Politics of Confrontation (1992): a few token pro-Hindu articles are included, hand-picked for harmlessness (whether by incompetence or by focusing on a peripheral aspect of the controversy), but not those on the central question of the historical evidence, least of all the official presentation of evidence by the Vishva Hindu Parishad prepared during the government-sponsored scholars’ debate in December-January 1990-91.189 Juxtaposing the temple-and-demolition evidence with the counter-argumentation would have drawn attention to the fact that the latter consisted only in attempts to sow doubts concerning some of the pro-temple testimonies; not in any positive indications for a no-temple and no-demolition scenario (as if the anti-temple party had been asked to sit in judgement upon evidence submitted to it by pro-temple supplicants, when in fact both parties were in the arena as equal contenders, both expected to prove their own position). 190 The net outcome of the debate was that the pro-temple team of scholars had defeated the no-temple party fair and square, which the latter implicitly conceded by staying away after an embarrassingly uneven session (24 January 1991); but don’t expect to find this information in Engineer’s publications.

................................................................................................

"Blacking out Hindutva self-expression is a matter of deliberate policy: “After the Babri structure came down, Shri N. Ram thundered at a conference in Delhi that the print media owed it to the nation as much as to itself to black out fully statements and activities of the Hindutva brigade.”196 But it is one thing to do so for a Marxist editor in his own newspaper, and quite another for scholars to do so in academic publications purporting to study Hindutva ideology.

"Numerous written attempts to explain what lies behind the Hindu upsurge in 1989-92 have cast their searchlight everywhere except at the explicit self-explanation of the movement itself. Hindu activists are treated like animals in a zoo: to know more about them, you can read the signboard in front of their cages, written by real human beings, but don’t expect those dumb creatures to speak for themselves. The abnormality of this treatment of Hindu revivalist thought in academic publications may be grasped more clearly if we compare it with the treatment given to Islamist activists. Muslim communalists themselves are invited to do the quoting, and to act as competent interpreters of not only their own but also their opponents’ viewpoints. Let us mention some well-known examples."

" ... When accomplished Hindu intellectuals find reasons to support this or that Hindu revivalist cause, they are not listened to or invited to give their expert clarification. Only their name is cited, not as a competent reference, but as illustration for the assertion that “the middle-class is getting contaminated with the communal virus”.

"But Mr. Engineer, at least, is something of a reformer, a progressive within the limits imposed by Islam. By contrast, Syed Shahabuddin is one of India’s most outstanding, even proverbial, fanatics. He took a leadership role in all the recent campaigns of Islamist mobilisation, including the Shah Bano case, the Babri Masjid movement and the demand for communal job reservations.198 He personally unleashed the Satanic Verses affair. Yet, it is claimed that Shahabuddin is “widely recognized to have strong secular leanings”.199 A fine scholar like Gérard Heuzé calls him a “liberal”.200 Perhaps he was misled by the fact that Shahabuddin, unlike most Ulemâ, speaks English and even manages some voguish jargon like “post-modernism” (appropriated as a trump card against modernity with its inherent questioning of pre-modern belief systems like Islam). But if Shahabuddin is a liberal, how should we imagine Heuzé’s idea of an extremist?

"Likewise, a contribution by Syed Shahabuddin is included in a leading Leftist weekly and another one in a respected political science monthly in India.201 A leading American Islam-watcher, John Esposito, has edited a strictly academic book titled Islam in Asia. Religion, Politics and Society. The part on Indian Muslims and their struggle with the Hindu majority is written by an American together with, yes, Syed Shahabuddin.202 Let me clarify that I am not pleading for an embargo against contributions by Shahabuddin or anyone else; I am only drawing attention to the contrast between the treatment which he receives and the exclusion which has struck leading Hindu intellectuals like Arun Shourie during the period under consideration.203

"Likewise, when the BBC wanted to do a documentary serial on Islam, it commissioned Akbar S. Ahmed, known for positions which are, at the very least, polemical.204 A secularist reviewer notices “Ahmed’s fall from scholarly neutrality”, for example: “He hates Muslims with non-Muslim wives, who drink whisky and whose children have Hindu names. … And he is all praise for Imam Bukhari and Syed Shahabuddin”, India’s proverbial Muslim communalists.205 Again, Akbar Ahmed is entirely welcome to his opinions, but the point is: it is simply unthinkable that the BBC would entrust its programmes on Hinduism to Ahmed’s Hindu counterparts."

................................................................................................

" ... What Hindutva critics held against Gandhi’s Muslim policy was precisely that it did not treat Hindu and Muslim citizens as equals, but conceded ever more privileges to the Muslims (for example, his last-ditch proposal to Jinnah to accept Muslim/non-Muslim parity in parliament, making one Muslim equal to three non-Muslims). But since egalitarianism is deemed a good thing, the fiercely anti-Hindutva weekly judged it more opportune to twist things a bit.

"When something good has to be reported for which the BJP could take credit, the political responsibility for the reported development is generally omitted. Thus, in 1998 it was reported that air pollution in Delhi had substantially decreased, the role of the Delhi government was acknowledged, but very rare were the foreign media which also added that the government in the preceding term had been formed by the BJP. When the BJP state government of Uttar Pradesh acted against corruption, dismissing corrupt civil servants, this was reported as the kind of policy which India badly needed, but the name of the ruling party was not given.220

"For an example at the level of political science, it is alleged in a much-quoted Marxist publication on the RSS: “The frequent representations of Hindutva as a spontaneous mass movement in search of Hindu identity naturalizes and suppresses a whole history of meticulously organized efforts towards a Hindu Rashtra.”221 Actually, no one is deliberately “suppressing” the “whole history of meticulous efforts”, least of all the RSS itself, which prides itself on its “efforts”."

"By the way, Marxists who know the history of the labour struggle are in no position to deny genuineness to a movement just because it has been meticulously organized by activists. In the Marxist view, agitators have to make their target audience conscious of its objective collective interests; and that is precisely how the Hindutva activists see their own activities. Truly spontaneous mass movements seldom come to anything; demanding that Hindu (or any) mass agitation be spontaneous and nothing but spontaneous is a demand for suicidal ineffectiveness and guaranteed failure.

"For another example: “At the heart of Hindutva lies the myth of a continuous thousand-year-old struggle of Hindus against Muslims as the structuring principle of Indian history. Both communities are assumed to have been homogeneous blocs—of Hindu patriots, heroically resisting invariably tyrannical, ‘foreign’ Muslim rulers.”223 This is not backed up by any quotation from an RSS source. It could not be, for the position described is definitely not the RSS position. The perception of medieval history as a continuous Hindu-Muslim struggle is indeed widespread:224 this much is the correct starting-point from which sloppy extrapolations are made. But the RSS view of history is not one of “homogeneous blocs”, on the contrary: in the RSS view, Hindu society was defeated by Muslim invaders because it was not sufficiently homogeneous, which is why the RSS makes it its business to organize the Hindus into a more homogeneous society.

"In RSS pamphletteering, there is frequent reference to Hindu traitors, particularly Jayachandra, the king of Kanauj who allegedly made common cause with invader Mohammed Ghori against Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi. Thus, Golwalkar describes Jayachandra as “the person most responsible for the defeat of Prithviraj”, and Moghul vassal Raja Mansingh as “the person who hounded Rana Pratap from forest to forest”. After mentioning a few similar cases, he concludes: “There was a veritable race of such traitors”.225 The RSS is painfully aware of the non-bloc nature of historical Hindu resistance to Islam."

"The politicized character of Hindutva-watching leads to unabashed manipulations of the semantics of established terminology. Authors simply announce that they will apply to Hindu phenomena terms which do not properly apply, but which are preferred simply for their stigmatizing force. This is not to be taken lightly, for any meaningful communication, and a fortiori scholarly discourse, is based on agreed meanings of terms. The very first rule of logic is: a = a, “a term retains the same meaning throughout the discourse”. Violation of this rule is the most elementary violation of scholarly method, betraying either a very fundamental incompetence, or else something even more worrying.

"Thus, in her published (and widely acclaimed) Ph.D. thesis about the political and commercial forays of Hindu gurus, Lise McKean starts out by innovatively conceptualizing “spirituality” as “a complex of ideas and practices that uses referents to ultimate values to legitimate the authority and self-interested actions of specific political groups”.232 Considered closely, this redefinition of an established term is of a breathtaking brutality. You cannot just walk in and allot new meanings to words, especially when you are going to discuss statements by and interviews with people who routinely use that same word in its established meaning. Nobody, but strictly nobody who refers to his own pursuits as “spirituality”, will ever conceptualize it in the sense outlined by Lise McKean. Even that subset among professionals of spirituality which does dabble in politics, and among them even those who merely use “spirituality” as a smokescreen to “legitimate self-interested actions of political groups”, can only use that smokescreen precisely because everyone agrees on the profoundly non-political, inward-oriented meaning of the term “spirituality”.

"For another example, Christophe Jaffrelot endeavours to add the label “racist” to all the hostile labels which Hindu nationalism is already carrying.233 Likewise, Salman Rushdie describes anti-Muslim actions of the “Ravana gang”, apparently the Shiv Sena, as “racial hatred”.234 It is well-known that many Hindu authors (Bipin Chandra Pal, Veer Savarkar, Guru Golwalkar) have used the word “race” when speaking about the Hindus; Sri Aurobindo even spoke of the “Aryan race”.235 But in pre-War English, the word race often simply meant “people, ethnic group”, not “race” in the biological sense. The fact is that racism does not play any role at all in Hindu thinking about Hindu–Muslim relations or about the ideal Hindu state."

"Golwalkar’s statement was disowned by its author, who withdrew the booklet from circulation in 1948. It was never repeated later and was in fact contradicted numerous times in more recent Sangh Parivar writings, for example, all BJP election manifestoes since 1980 have affirmed the principle of legal equality regardless of religion. Can France’s star BJP expert feign to ignore this? Golwalkar’s statement is reprehensible in that it imposes on Muslims a position of second-class citizens, on the model of the Zimmî position of non-Muslims in Islamic states, but that does not constitute racism, not even a little bit of it, any more than the inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims in Islamic states constitutes racism.237

"In Golwalkar’s booklet We itself, many statements off-hand refute Golwalkar’s alleged “racism”, first of all by proving that he consistently gives the word race the meaning of “nation” or even “society”, of which outsiders can become members, quite in contrast with a biological race. Golwalkar repeats ad nauseam his assimilationist (or in French terms, Jacobin) position, viz. that the Muslims should assimilate themselves into Hindu society, for instance: “Culturally, linguistically, they must become one with the National race; they must adopt the past and entertain the aspirations for the future of the National race; in short, they must be ‘Naturalised’ in the country by being assimilated in the Nation wholly.”238 This is the diametrical opposite of Hitler’s plans with the Jewish “race”, which was largely assimilated into German society and which he first of all forced to dissimilate again.

"The point is also made, in the most straightforward terms, by the seed ideologue of Hindu nationalism, Veer Savarkar: “After all there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned but a single race — the human race, kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift and only relatively true. Nature is constantly trying to overthrow the artificial barriers you raise between race and race. To try to prevent the commingling of blood is to build on sand. Sexual attraction has proved more powerful than all the commands of all the prophets put together. Even as it is, not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa. Truly speaking all that one can claim is that one has the blood of all mankind in one’s veins. The fundamental unity of man from pole to pole is true, all else only relatively so.”239

"These explicit anti-racist positions are all the more remarkable when you consider that until c. 1940, even biological racism was fully respectable in British India, most notably in the British preference for the imaginary “martial races” (Gurkhas, Sikhs) as opposed to the “effeminate races” (Bengalis), and in their colour prejudice against the native “Aryan brown”.240 Moreover, all Hindu revivalist ideologues were entirely clear about the well-known fact that Indian Muslims were mostly descendents of Hindus converted to Islam, so that the Hindu-Muslim conflict was one between sections of a single Indian race.

"In spite of this thorough refutation of his position by explicit and authoritative statements (which he has, in fairness, acknowledged), Jaffrelot refuses to admit that the absence of biological discrimination definitively absolves the Hindu ideologues from the suspicion of “racism”. Instead, he attributes to them “more a racism of domination than a racism of extermination …: the Other is not excluded but he can only be integrated at a subordinate rank.”241 Borrowing from Gyanendra Pandey, he calls this “upper-caste racism”.242

"The distinction between a “racism of domination” and a “racism of extermination” is meaningful: while white settlers in Patagonia or Tasmania effectively endeavoured to “exterminate” the natives, the white cotton-planters in Alabama or South Carolina merely wanted to “dominate” the blacks, to “integrate them at a subordinate rank”, not to kill or exterminate their dearly-paid human investment. But the point is: both varieties can only be put on the common denominator of “racism” because both presuppose a race theory, a theory which divides mankind in biological categories and then draws political conclusions from that division. Such is not the case at all with the Hindutva ideologues, who never tire of repeating that the Indian Muslims are flesh of their flesh, estranged only by the imposition of a foreign religion."

" ... could Pandey and Jaffrelot have been so eager to stigmatize Hindu nationalism that they thought it worth their while to distort the meaning of the central term in their plea?

"That much, at any rate, is admitted openly by an Indo-Australian researcher who has likewise expanded the meaning of the incriminating term “racism” for political purposes: “I hope that this Indian debate will have some relevance for my Australian audience”243, viz. for the struggle against anti-Asian racism there; never mind that race is not by any stretch of the imagination the issue between Hindus and Muslims. He concedes that he is distorting the word’s meaning but is unapologetic about it: “There are, of course, particularly ‘Indian’ twists to this story, and it is also true that ‘racism’, properly speaking, has social-Darwinist connotations and should not be conflated with ‘ethnicity’. Yet, for me, the popular word ‘racism’ has the advantage of not making India look ‘peculiar’.”244

"So, instead of studying the Indian situation, he projects his Australian concerns on to it, never mind that this will certainly distort the picture of his purported study object. This state of affairs is pretty grim: scholars openly proclaim their partisan position and their disrespect for the most elementary deontology of scholarship. And they need not fear any adverse consequences in their careers, on the contrary."

................................................................................................

"The fundamental mistake of Western India-watchers is to assume that secularism means some kind of neutrality, of being “above” the warring parties in the inter-religious conflict, so that self-described secularists must be unbiased. That is not the case at all. Most Indian secularist journalists and academics on whom Western India-watchers rely for their information have never pretended to be neutral. They usually start out quite openly by describing “Hindu communalism” as one of India’s major problems. This may be right or wrong, but it is most definitely a partisan stand, for many others in India consider Hindu Revivalism as a solution.

"The practice of quoting partisan Indian sources as uncontroversial authorities is widespread, for example, the French Leftist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique reproduces an article by one Teesta Setalvad, introduced as the editor of the Mumbai monthly Communalism Combat, i.e. someone who has made a profession of her partisan position vis-à-vis Hindu revivalism (“communalism”).245 The record indicates that her pro-Hindu counterparts would never get a tribune in the same monthly.246 She only quotes authors who are militantly hostile to Hindu revivalism, e.g. Praful Bidwai, a Marxist scholar at the Nehru Memorial Library, whose assessment of Hindu revivalism is: “utterly despicable, base and crass”.247

................................................................................................

"It could just as well be argued that the Congress Party has been independent India’s number one problem, for example, its sycophantic culture of dynastic rule and flattery of bosses has stifled initiative and dissent, its way of trying to be all things unto all men has pre-empted clear political choices, it has no internal democracy and has once imposed the Emergency on India. Come to think of it, these flaws of Congress explain the persistent anti-Congressism of some Communist and regional parties which in 1996-98 even kept them from joining hands with Congress in a solid anti-BJP front.249

"Lise McKean’s book Divine Entreprise. Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement provides a good testimony to the prevalent opinion among academic India-watchers. In his laudatory review, Jeffrey J. Kripal correctly calls her conceptual framework “decidedly Marxist”.250 Her work (which has the one great merit of showing the continuity between spiritual and political Hinduism, a fact ignored by most Western followers of Hindu gurus) was accepted as a Ph.D. thesis, published by a prestigious publishing-house (University of Chicago Press), and acclaimed by reviewers in most professional journals. This means that at least a dozen experts have carefully read it, and approved of it. Yet, the book displays an unabashed bias. The only critical review of it known to me, by Daniel Gomez-Ibanez, points out its “serious flaws of scholarship” and its “obvious bias, verging on hostility”, as well as its gross allegations (“the sect’s coercive and punitive powers”; “greed, guile and violence that secure their status as spiritual leaders”) which are not based on even a single specific fact presented at any place in her book.251

"Neither flaws nor bias could prejudice her jury or her publishers’ reading committee against her, not even to ask her to soften her language or check a few details. This, I think, constitutes an authoritative testimony to the prevalent opinion climate in a sector where objectivity ought to be the norm. Not that I object to her explicitness in choosing sides; again, it is perfectly possible to produce real scholarship in the service of a crusade, and it is perhaps better that bias is explicitated than that a false pretence of neutrality is kept up. However, having read a great deal on Hindu revivalism in the last few years, I have never come across a study with the opposite bias which has received the same red-carpet welcome in the small world of India-watchers."

"A typical feature of the power equation in the opinion climate of the past decade is that for Hindutva observers, Hindus are (or were) damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Thus, if they demolish the Babri Masjid, it proves that they too are intolerant, and that anything they may say about the Muslims actually applies to themselves; but if they are tolerant, they are accused of trying to swallow the minorities by “assimilative communalism” (like a “boa constrictor”)252 and “repressive tolerance”.253 If they were to reject democracy, this would obviously be denounced as “fascist”, but because they abide by democracy, this itself is given a pejorative twist as “majoritarianism”. For millennia, Hindu India had been the proverbially rich country, and for long, the wily money-making “Hindu bania” (merchant) had been a favourite enemy-image projected by the Indian Muslims and Leftists, and given new flesh more recently by the economic successes of the overseas Hindus; yet, when Nehru imposed stagnation on India’s economy with his Soviet-style five-year plans, the secularists called the disappointing economic results of this non-Hindu policy “the Hindu rate of growth”.254

"Consider, for a more serious example, this allegation by a Christian missionary: “India’s constitution witnesses to the fact that Hinduism’s famed liberalism is sometimes remarkably intolerant of the beliefs of others: Parsis, Christians and Jews have their own marriage and inheritance provisions, but Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs are all treated as Hindu groups.”255 A separate law system for Sikhs, Jains or Buddhists has never existed in history. It takes a fervent anti-Hindu animus to detect “remarkable intolerance” in the recognition of this fact by India’s Constitution, a text which is not the handiwork of “Hinduism” anyway. And it takes a remarkable forgetfulness about realities in the rest of the world to describe as “remarkable intolerance” what most Constitutions of democratic countries consider evident and necessary, viz. that the same laws should apply to all citizens regardless of religion.

"Some authors even manage to turn the bright record of BJP state governments in containing communal violence against the BJP. In Uttar Pradesh, four Chief Ministers performed as follows: under V.P. Singh (non-BJP), the monthly average of casualties (dead and wounded) in communal violence was 29, the monthly average number of Muslims killed was 8; for N.D. Tiwari (non-BJP), the figures were 28 and 3; for Mulayam Singh Yadav (non-BJP), they were 98 and 17; and for Kalyan Singh (BJP), they were 5 and 1.256 Sikh secularist Tavleen Singh writes: “Let us also remember that it is the Congress Party, not the BJP, which has presided benignly over some of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in Indian history: Meerut, Maliana, Bhagalpur, Bombay.”257 The BJP itself proudly reports: “Above all, we have proved in the States where the BJP is in power that we can maintain communal peace and harmony; we can ensure security of life and property; and we can protect the honour and dignity of the minority communities.”258 Now, if a BJP source cites this fact, this is not interpreted as reassuring, but as a threat: “What they say: ‘Muslims are safe in BJP-ruled states’. What they mean: ‘Vote for the BJP or face communal riots.’”259

"Another testimony by an Indian Muslim confirms this: “My family of orientation migrated from India to erstwhile East Pakistan, although I did not experience any discrimination personally from the ‘majority’ Hindu community in India”.261 A third one argues that Muslims are better off in India than in Pakistan: “Two pictures, one in the Arab News and the other in the Gulf News, arrested my attention. One showed Indian Muslims offering prayers near the historic Taj Mahal in Agra in peace. The other showed people praying in a Karachi mosque with paramilitary forces guarding the worshippers.”262 And a fourth one confirms: “In Saudi Arabia, there is peace but no freedom. In Pakistan, there is freedom but there is no peace. In India, Muslims enjoy both peace and freedom.”263

"In the long run, this openness is certainly the right policy, but in the short run, the results of tolerance can be perverse. India is hospitable even to its critics, and the latter eagerly accept the invitation. All those NGO activists working in Indian tribal areas can openly support separatism and still stay in India or return there after vacation.264 Foreigners who like to do some “drain inspection”265 can do it at leisure in India, focusing on Hindu society: it is fun to be in India, and there is no need to fear reprisals. It takes courage, and the willingness to forgo future visas, to write as negatively about China or Pakistan as is commonly done about India. The end result is a complete lack of a sense of proportion, for example, grave concern about alleged discrimination against the minorities in India even when the situation of the minorities in Pakistan is much worse by any standard, violent indignation at the alleged Hindu plans for a “Hindu state” but acceptance as a matter of course of the actually existing “Islamic state” in Pakistan and Bangladesh."

................................................................................................

Somewhere along the line, perhaps in one of the footnotes author notes that widows were treated as untouchable in Hinduism, which is completely incorrect.

To begin with, there's no evidence of ill treatment of widows in Ancient epics, which, if such were the attitude, would have naturally reflected therein.

And so widowhood came to be seen as fate worse than death, while fate was seen generally as a matter if not ones fault.

But widows were seen and treated as holy, clean, not as untouchable; they were the ones who performed worship and other clean acts in families, including reading of religious tracts.

In South India, on certain days, males of the family cook for everybody, due to similar concerns, which affords desperately needed rest for women a few days a month.

................................................................................................

................................................

January 21, 2022 - January 23, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

Historical survey

................................................................................................

"A central concern of the Arya Samaj was Shuddhi, “purification”, i.e. giving the Vedic initiation to non-Hindu or low-caste Hindu people. With this ritual, originally devised for Brahmins who had lost their caste purity (e.g. by travelling abroad), two different problems were sought to be solved in one stroke: intra-Hindu inequality and the historical or ongoing conversion of Hindus to Christianity or Islam. The biggest problem for the Shuddhi movement was to get newly initiated (“twice-born”) Untouchables accepted by caste Hindus; sometimes the Shuddhi performers themselves were expelled by their native caste for polluting themselves by their communion with Untouchables.

"The great success story of this movement was the conversion of almost half a million Malkana Rajputs, who were accepted as Hindu Kshatriyas by the All India Kshatriya Sabha, meeting in Agra in 1922. The enthusiasm waned when the Malkana Rajputs found that many a Hindu-born fellow Rajput was still reluctant to give his daughters in marriage to them. In fact, the operation had almost backfired dramatically: the Hindus initially went back to sleep after passing the resolution accepting the Malkanas as Hindu Rajputs, which had alerted Muslim preachers to start their first great Tablîgh (“propaganda”) campaign to keep the Malkanas in the Muslim fold; only an all-out effort by Arya Samaj activists narrowly saved the Shuddhi project.13

"In order to motivate the Indian Muslims to convert (or “reconvert”) to Hinduism, the Shuddhi workers argued that their ancestors had been pressured or forced into Islam, and that after the demise of Muslim rule, there was no reason left to continue this enforced pretence of believing in the religious doctrines of the erstwhile conquerors. One of the most important contributions to this line of thought was Pandit Lekh Ram’s Risâla-i-Jihâd ya’ ni Dîn-i-Muhammadî kî bunyâd, “Treatise on Holy War, or the Basis of the Mohammedan religion” (Lahore 1892).14 It documented the violence of the Muslim conquests and listed cases of forced conversions. The bottom line was a call to the Indian Muslims to undo their past islamization: “Dear Brethren! Let us remove hatred and jealousy from our hearts, sit in an atmosphere of love and unity and worship the one God. Let us purify our hearts through the Vedic way of worship. The doors of penance of your return to the fold of your former real faith are wide open to let you in. Shed the burden put on your necks by force and under compulsion. Befriend the truth and help us in spreading the truth, because God helps those who help themselves.”15

"Pandit Lekh Ram’s Risâla-i-Jihâd was the object of a lawsuit, in which Muslims demanded that the book be banned. After several rounds in court, they lost definitively in 1896. But the matter did not end there, for Lekh Ram was murdered in March 1897. Some Muslims, including Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1838-1908, pretender to prophethood and founder of the Ahmadiya sect of Islam),16 openly applauded the murder: “Mirza Ghulam Ahmad published a tract in which he thanked God for the fulfillment of his prophecy that Lekh Ram would die a violent death. … Individuals reported receiving threatening letters, and mysterious notices appeared on the wall throughout the province. ‘All Hindus are warned to remember the Islamic prophets and believe in them; otherwise they will be murdered like Lekh Ram. The members of the Shuddhi Sabha and the Arya Samaj should consider themselves dead men. (sd.) A well-wisher of the nation.’”17 Twenty thousand people attended Lekh Ram’s funeral rites, and Lala Munshi Ram (later ordained as Swami Shraddhananda) started a newspaper called after Lekh Ram’s nickname Arya Musâfir, “Arya traveller”.18"

"Meanwhile, the organization’s defiant stand against Islam was increasingly reaping the whirlwind. The polemical candidness pioneered by the Arya Samaj had emboldened other sections of Hindu society to speak their minds about Islam as well, but this triggered a drama in Kohat (North-West Frontier Province). A pamphlet of the local Sanâtana Dharma Sabhâ, written by its secretary Jiwan Das in reply to a Muslim pamphlet disparaging Sita, contained an anti-Islamic poem. Frightened by the first Muslim protests, the Hindu minority convened and passed a resolution “regretting their error and requesting pardon”. To appease the Muslim protesters, the authorities arrested Jiwan Das and kept him in prison for a week. Nevertheless, on 9 and 10 September 1924, Muslim mobs raided the Hindu neighbourhood, killing dozens of Hindus; the rest had to be escorted to safety by the army.31

"The most outstanding Arya Samaji of the twentieth century, Swami Shraddhananda, was killed by one Abdul Rashid on 23 December 1926 as he was lying sick in bed. He was soon followed into martyrdom by another prominent Arya Samaji, Lala Nanakchand. Next, Mahashay Raj Pal, signatory of the pamphlet Rangîla Rasûl (approximately “Playboy Mohammed”), which contained some petty backbiting about Mohammed’s sex life, was killed in his shop by one Ilamdin in April 1929. The murderers were apprehended by the British authorities and duly sentenced. When Abdul Rashid was hanged for murdering Swami Shraddhananda, Muslim clerics all over India held prayer-meetings for his martyred soul. Dr. Ambedkar, the later Minister of Law, testifies: “The leading Muslims, however, never condemned these criminals. On the contrary, they were hailed as religious martyrs.”·32

"In 1933, another Arya Samaji, Nathuramal Sharma, was taken to court for publishing a similar pamphlet as Lekh Ram’s, and he lost his case under Art.295-A of the Indian Penal Code (enacted in 1898, a move partly triggered by the murder of Lekh Ram), which forbids any form of insult against religions, calculated or reasonably expected to arouse hostility. In September 1934, Sharma went to court to plead his appeal against the sentence, and in the courthouse itself he was murdered by one Abdul Qayum. According to Dr. Ambedkar, “Mr. Barkat Ali, a barrister of Lahore who argued the appeal of Abdul Qayum … went to the length of saying that Qayum was not guilty of murder of Nathuramal because his act was justifiable by the law of the Koran.”33

"This spate of killings of Arya Samajis in retaliation for their critique of Islam and for their reconversion efforts had the predictable effect of isolating the Arya Samaj from Hindu society. Intimidated by the murders, few people were willing to stand up and say that the Arya Samaj’s policy was the correct one. The Arya Samaj got slightly unnerved by the murders and subsequent street riots, against which the police had proven unwilling or unable to protect them. This led to the creation, in 1927, of the Arya Vîr Dal, “Arya heroes’ group”, which took up training in physical self-defence, in an exact parallel with the contemporaneous RSS initiative to include martial training in its daily schedule. These Arya self-defence squads played a central role in the peaceful protest movement (Satyâgraha, in the then-common Gandhian term) in 1939 which forced the Nizam, the Muslim princely ruler of Hindu-majority Hyderabad, to adopt political reforms and lift the ban on the Satyârtha Prakâsh.34 And in 1948, they were very active in the struggle with the Muslim Razâkâr militia which terrorized the Hindus in a bid to prevent the incorporation of the Nizam’s domain into India.35"

................................................................................................

" ... Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894), the Bengali writer. He had received an English education and made his mark as a promotor of Western science. His first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, was in English, but for the rest of his work he reverted to Bengali. His religious and philosophical ideas have been expressed in an explicit form in Dharmatattva (“Essentials of Dharma”, first published as a serial, 1884-85) and Krishnacharita (“Life of Krishna”, 1885); for the rest, novels carried his message. Women play a central part in his writings (“Woman is the crowning excellence of God’s creation … Woman is light, man is shadow”)37, and the Motherland is revered as a Mother Goddess in his most famous and most political novel, Ananda Math (“Abbey of Bliss”).

"The Ananda Math story is set in the eighteenth century, when a group of warrior-monks mount a guerrilla was against Muslim rule. The activists of the freedom movement understood this as a metaphor for the struggle against British rule, though in the last chapter, Chatterjee explicitly attributes a historical role to the British in the long-term Hindu revival. The idea that Muslim rule could be considered as a type of colonial rule on par with (or even worse than) British rule is nowadays considered outrageously communal, but at the time, it seemed evident."

That last part is only true if consideration is limited to Muslims and appease therefore, but even they know its a fact - just as those attempting to exculpatory perpetrators of gangrapes know very well that they are attempting to salvage their public image with a lie against the victim, a cheap way to survive, but their conscience is dead or easily shut up.

................................................................................................

"Chatterjee’s most conspicuous contribution lies in the poem Vande Mâtaram, “Hail Mother(land)”, which became the battle-song of the 1905 Swadeshi movement against the Partition of Bengal, and of the Indian National Congress.38 Set to music by Jadunath Bhattacharya, it was first sung at the 1896 session of the Congress.39 These lyrics became the object of a still unresolved communal controversy because many Muslims consider the song idolatrous, a thinly-veiled hymn to the tigerborne goddess Durga. To placate the Muslims and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Constituent Assembly rejected it as national anthem in favour of Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana.40 Justice to Vande Mâtaram remains one of the symbolic demands of the Hindu Nationalist movement."

The following passage is highly objectionable.

That last sentence is simply untrue, unless one goes for an Humphrey Appleby argument such as " ... if they haven't been questioned, question them; then they have been questioned. "

In fact, the highest opinion on the topic, from highest possible source, is that Vivekananda was an Avataara, as was Buddha, and both of the same source Divine Shiva.

................................................................................................

"Swami Vivekananda gave Hindu self-confidence a boost with his successful lecture tour in Western countries, particularly his widely applauded speech on behalf of the Hindu religion at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893. Strictly speaking, the official representative of Hinduism was a Brahmo Samaji, Protap Chunder Mazumdar. Vivekananda had been sent by wealthy South Indian sponsors who objected to the idea of being represented by a heterodox Brahmoist.42"

What Elst doesn't point at is that the regime that otherwise separated minor differences and said they were not Hindu, sent a Brahmo as representative of Hindus, although Brahmo - Elst himself points out - is a copy of church doctrine in almost every way. Thus was obvious fraud by British, but then fraud is what British do practice.

"Sri Aurobindo

"Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), internationally known as a writer on yoga and related subjects, was a revolutionary activist in Bengal during the Swadeshi movement, which aimed at undoing the Partition of Bengal (1905-11). His medium in this period was Bande Mâtaram, a paper founded in August 1906 by Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932), leader of the “Extremist” faction in the Indian National Congress, then dominated by the Moderates. Already by November 1906 he was the controlling editor of the Bande Mâtaram, a position which made him one of the leading spokesmen of the Extremist faction. He was arrested in May 1908 as a suspect in the Alipore Bomb case, but was acquitted and released in 1909; on that occasion, he delivered his famous Uttarpara Speech, one of the founding statements of Hindu nationalism (discussed below). In 1910 he retired from active politics, but through his writings he remained in touch with political developments.

"At least one researcher claims that a perusal of Aurobindo’s published writings and diaries shows a gradual development from sympathy for the armed struggle to actual involvement; then to doubts and misgivings after his stay in prison, when he remained in contact with a group of terrorists led by Motilal Roy without trying to restrain them; and finally, by 1914 at the latest, to revulsion. This ultimate rejection was partly out of sympathy for the victims and partly out of the realization that the kind of terrorism then practised in Bengal was a ridiculous conspiratorial game which led its practitioners to the gallows, but not India to Freedom.48"

This sort of conclusion is on flimsy basis of wishful thinking; reality is quite adequately stated by Sri Aurobindo himself, in that he had spiritual revelations, and devoted himself then on, completely, to spiritual life. 'Spiritual' here is not to be interpreted in sense prescribed by church.

" ... The most important example of the Western (including Theosophy’s) impact on Aurobindo’s understanding of Hinduism is probably his incorporation of the then-recent notion of evolution in his theory of yoga (somewhat parallel to Teilhard de Chardin’s attempt to integrate evolution into a Christian view of man). In the traditional view, the yogic state is very simple, unchanged since the first yogi stumbled upon this state, forever perfect and beyond progress. Moreover, it is a strictly individual experience: one has to retire from intercourse with the rest of humanity and direct consciousness inward. Aurobindo, by contrast, sees a collective march towards a higher consciousness as a gradual incarnation of the Supermind in mankind. ... "

This shows nothing as much as Elst's inability see anything or anyone further than West, despite his acquaintance with India and her great souls. He fails to realise that evolution is already incorporated in Dashaavataara, ancient India's realization incorporated in treasure of knowledge offered in Hinduism in form of legends. And of course, he thinks Sri Aurobindo incorporated his western upbringing in study and throrising, being himself incapable of seeing what Sri Aurobindo and his path, his work really were, or even whither it led.

................................................................................................

" ... Lucknow Pact of 1916 between Congress and the Muslim League, in which the Congress leadership had conceded the principle of communal electorates (i.e. separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims, with Muslim candidates being answerable only to Muslim voters) and weightage in representation (one-third of the seats in the Central Assembly for the 22% Muslims).

"This upset the Hindus because they objected to the principles of communal electorates and communal weightage (unknown in the only model of modern democracy they knew, Great Britain), but most of all because they saw it as a trendsetter for similar future developments, as proof that the Congress leadership was on the slippery ground of conceding anything the Muslims demanded. As if to confirm these fears, the Muslim leader Muhammad Ali related later about the Lucknow talks: “When at Lucknow, in 1916, some Hindus complained to my late chief, Bal Gangadhar Tilak Maharaj, that they were giving too much to the Musalmans, he answered back like a true and far-seeing statesman, ‘You can never give the Musalmans too much’.”64 And Tilak was a staunch Hindu, still a revered name in the Hindutva account of the freedom struggle. If he could make such concessions, the HMS saw reason to fear that others might go even farther in the policy which would later be called “Muslim appeasement”."

Bal Gangaadhar 'Lokamanya' Tilak, wasn't making concessions, he was stating the fact that was by then well understood in India - Islam demands everything, and won't be satisfied until whole human civilisation is wioed out, including most of humanity. Pakistan, along with China, are intent on destruction of indua, of Hinduism, and settling the land with their own, as Hitler intended with Europe, and would hasucceeded in, but for allies' spirit and that of their leaders.

................................................................................................

"However strong the HMS’s dismay with the compromise policies of the Indian National Congress, its opposition could never be very effective with leading HMS men also being Congress office-bearers. This was even more painfully clear in 1920, when the Congress leadership decided on a mass movement of Non-Co-operation in support of the pan-Islamist agitation for the restoration to the Turkish Ottoman Caliph of his empire and at least of the guardianship of the Islamic sacred sites in Palestine and the Hejaz. Khilâfat concerns had already provided the background to the Lucknow Pact of 1916: the Muslim League had only been willing to make a deal with the Congress when it developed an anti-British grievance of its own, viz. over the British war effort against the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany, in World War 1. Now that the Ottoman Empire had been reduced to its Turkish rump, Indian Muslims felt they had to start a life-and-death struggle to preserve the gravely threatened Khilâfat.

"This Muslim concern about the Caliphate was understandable, but it was much less evident that the Indian National Congress ought to support the Caliphate cause. Later HMS writings denounce the 1920 decision in its support as a Himalayan blunder, but the fact is: among the signatories we notice HMS leader M.M. Malaviya and others who now belong to the Hindu nationalist pantheon, such as Lala Lajpat Rai. One of the highlights of the Khilâfat agitation was when another HMS pioneer, Arya Samaj educationist Swami Shraddhananda, spoke at the Jama Masjid to the Muslims of Delhi in support of the Khilâfat cause.

"But this Hindu-Muslim honeymoon was to be short-lived. When Gandhiji called off the Non-Co-operation campaign after the killings of some policemen by his own followers in Chauri-Chaura, the Muslim Khilafatists felt let down and soon turned against the Hindus. It was the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1921-24 which whipped the HMS into becoming a real political force. Two of the most important HMS leaders, Bhai Parmananda and Balkrishna Shivram Moonje (1872-1948, founder of the Bhonsle Military School in Nasik), cited their horror at the massacres of Hindus in Kohat and Malabar as their personal reason to throw their full weight behind the HMS.65"

Calling them "It was the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1921-24" is a lie on par with calling 1984 organised massacres a riot; what took place in response to failure of Khilâfat movement, which was not due to Gandhi as much as failure of the cause from causes external to India, was Muslims massacres Hindus - Gandhi’s beginning of a policy to tell Hindus to shut up no matter what, which he continued till death.

................................................................................................

"During the post-Khilafat Hindu-Muslim conflict, Swami Shraddhananda got a copy of a pamphlet which was being spread among the Muslim elites, with a view to mobilizing them all for a grand strategy of conversion of low-caste Hindus to Islam. The pamphlet, Daî-i Islâm (Urdu: “Invitation to Islam”) by Khwaja Hasan Nizami, had been written as the foreword to a larger book, Fâtamî Dawat-i Islâm, (Urdu: “Islamic Conversion Work”), which laid out detailed plans for securing a Muslim majority in India by means of large-scale conversions, all the while impressing on its readers the need to keep the operation a secret.69 Its message was that all Muslims, from princes to prostitutes, should each make their contribution to the project of penetrating Hindu communities and converting Hindus."

"One of the highlights of Shraddhananda’s book was a diagnosis of the competition between Hindus and Muslims for the numbers: “while Muhammadans multiply like anything, the numbers of the Hindus are dwindling periodically”.70 The Swami quoted from the 1911 Census Report to show the reasons why the Muslim population was growing faster than the Hindu population: “The number of Muhammadans has risen during the decade [1901-11] by 6.7 per cent as compared with only 5 p.c. in the case of Hindus. There is a small but continuous accession of converts from Hinduism and other religions, but the main reason for the relatively more rapid growth of the followers of the Prophet is that they are more prolific.”71 Follow a number of social customs which encourage the Muslim birth rate, for example, fewer marriage restrictions and common remarriage of widows, absence of a celibate monkhood, and the Muslim insistence that the children of mixed marriages be brought up as Muslims."

" ... The Muslim percentage has not only increased, but the rate of increase itself has increased. This is very clear when we take a long-term perspective: in the fifty years between 1941 and 1991, their percentage has risen 5.64 per cent, substantially more than the 4.31 per cent gain in the sixty years between 1881 and 1941. On the Hindu side too, we see a long-term acceleration of the observed trend: a decrease of 5.94 per cent in the sixty years between 1881 and 1941, and a larger decrease of 6.57 per cent in the shorter period of fifty years between 1941 and 1991.

"At the subcontinental level, Muslims were increasing and Hindus decreasing by less than 1 per cent before 1941, and by more than 1 percent after 1941. Moreover, the cumulative effect of the larger Hindu participation in birth control since the 1960s in the birth rate of the next (proportionately smaller) Hindu generation is only just beginning to show in the 1991 census, but this factor, unforeseen by Shraddhananda, is bound to have a larger effect in the next decades. So, the observed trends are accelerating, and unless the tide is turned, Muslims will need far less than 316 years to outnumber the Hindus in India."

"In the months after the Independence and Partition of India on 15 August 1947, Hindu public opinion in truncated India was angered by the sight of massive waves of refugees from the new state of Pakistan, and turned against the Congress leadership which had won the December 1945 elections by promising to prevent Partition; or, as the HMS would have it, by “stealing the HMS campaign platform”. This was, after all, not the independence of a united Motherland, which Mahatma Gandhi and millions of Hindus had been fighting for, but the independence of a truncated India and of an intrinsically hostile neighbour carved out of her, Islamic Pakistan. Now that Congress had broken its promise by negotiating the Partition of India, the HMS was in a position to make spectacular gains among the Hindu electorate. But just when the political wind seemed finally to be blowing the HMS way, the party was reduced to an insignificant fringe group overnight.

"As millions of Hindu refugees kept pouring in from newly-created Pakistan, there was a public outcry against the politicians who had not been willing or able to ward off the Partition, especially against the main champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, Mahatma Gandhi. Cries of Gândhî murdâbâd (“death to Gandhi”, usually to be interpreted as a softer “down with Gandhi”, but on that occasion often intended literally) were the order of the day during Hindu-Sikh protest demonstrations. It got worse when Gandhi forced the Government to pay Rs. 550 million to Pakistan as its share in the British-Indian treasury, in spite of the occupation of a part of Kashmir (and the wholesale elimination of the Hindu and Sikh minorities there) by Pakistani troops. ... "

Here Elst describes Godse as associated with the organisation, just as he's describing the organisation as decisively involved in the murder of Gandhi. Both are equally untrue surmises, convenient for Congress and left to bash the Hindu organisation's, and never proved. Godse and his intimate friends who'd participated in the action on a prior date were separated from the organisation's long before the act was even thought of, much less action plan finalised, and the final action was decisively by Godse acting alone.

................................................................................................

"Ideologically as much as politically, the HMS became a fringe group. A small band of HMS men gather every year to commemorate Nathuram Godse’s “sacrifice”. The party supports attempts to “rewrite Indian history”, which unfortunately are not limited to the legitimate decolonization of Indian historiography. Thus, it propagates P.N. Oak’s efforts to show that the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and even the contentious Babri Masjid in Ayodhya were not built by Muslims but by Hindus.92 Otherwise, the party maintains the classical Hindu nationalist positions defined half a century ago."

Those structures were raised on demolished functioning Hindu temples in case of two out of three, and using materials apart from foundations from the demolished temples; but in any case, the labour was Hindu, as was architect of Taj Mahal according to legend, and money to build of course was loot from Hindus - under Islamic invaders or colonial rulers, Muslims were considered human, others slaves, used for any purpose suited to whim of the Muslims including massacres or rapes.

................................................................................................

"The Constitution of the “All-India Hindu Great-Assembly” or Akhil Bhârat Hindû Mahâsabhâ (as amended at a meeting of its All-India Committee held at New Delhi on 9 September 1990), includes, apart from purely organizational arrangements, the following politically important passages.

"“2. Jurisdiction. The jurisdiction of the Hindu Mahasabha shall extend to the whole of India or Bharat as it existed before August 14, 1947.”93 Born in the struggle against Muslim separatism, the HMS has not reconciled itself to the fact of Pakistan (including the former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) and tries to maintain the notion of a united India (“Akhand Bhârat”) at least in its own functioning. For all practical purposes, this passage is without effect as there is no HMS activity in Pakistan or Bangladesh. "

Considering those two parts are Islamic nations that outlaw any other faith with possible punishment including execution, and the massacres of Hindu populations therein since before 1947 onwards, any such activity there is hardly likely. As it is left nakes it seem an abusive accusation when they say BJP has those objectives in India.

"“3. Aim. The aim of the Hindu Mahasabha is to establish a really democratic Hindu State in Bharat, based on the culture and tradition of Hindu Rashtra, and to re-establish Akhand Bharat by all constitutional means.”94 The emphasis on democracy is, apart from a matter of political principle, also a reminder of the struggle against Muslim separatism, which fought the full democratic play of numerical majorities by wresting separate electorates and finally a separate state from its Congress and British partners. "

It's hardly possible to say they wish a return of a Raamaraajya or a Shivaji rule, since that cannot be arranged via human agency.

"“3-A. Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha bears faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as established by Law and to the principles of socialism, secularism and democracy and would uphold sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.”95 The reference to socialism and secularism is an echo of the inclusion of the same two terms in the preamble of the Constitution of India in 1976; it confirms that the HMS is not as far removed from the political mainstream as is sometimes believed.

"“4. Objects. The objects of the Hindu Mahasabha are: “(a) To remove all forms of inequalities and disabilities and thus to establish an order in which all nationals will enjoy equal opportunities to serve the State.”96 Evidently modern and egalitarian, this seeming platitude which could have been copied from any mainstream party manifesto in any democratic country in the world, contains an implicit demand for a Common Civil Code, actually a very controversial issue in India.

"“(b) To assure to each national full freedom of thought, expression, association and worship not inconsistent with the national interest.

"“(c) To make Bharat militarily strong and self-reliant in defence.

"“(d) To promote the glorious ideals of Aryan womanhood and to establish Ashrams for the protection, education and vocational training of women and children.”97 True to the conventions of electoral propaganda (where it is important not to alienate any segment of the targeted constituency), the expression “glorious ideals of Aryan womanhood” is neatly ambiguous, catering to both the traditionalist and the reformist audiences: to the former, it means chaste women who know their places and serve their husbands and children, while the latter may read a reference to the supposedly more emancipated Vedic women into it, as a good non-Western model for the process of women’s emancipation in modern India.98"

That last bit is complete nonsense, even apart from the offensive bit about "chaste" part - various abrahmic societies have traditionally all been far more explicitly punitive about insistence on this factor, until modern era, and now seek to paint any other society as retrograde when the latter prefers its ways.

For the rest, ancient India was far more equal in every matter regarding treatment of women, unlike the abrahmic societies that held females as Satan's partners while their Gods were exclusively male; and the vitally needed restrictions, that were necessary for protection of women during barbaric Islamic regimes were sought immediately to be removed when colonial regime changed to British, a less dangerous one as far as women were concerned, by Hindu men seeking reforms that were really not radical changes away from nature of India but were of India in step with times.

So there are examples of very highly educated women who were supported by their husbands, including for example an Aanandiebai Joshi who became a medical doctor, with a degree from US, in an era when few women in West were so highly educated, and neither Harvard nor oxbridge admitted women.

"Only real, practising Hindus are welcome in the membership ranks of the HMS, as could be expected from the Hindu vanguard party. In that sense, it could certainly be called a “communal” party: it seeks to represent only the Hindu community, or rather the “Hindu nation”. Of course, one should not confuse private arrangements with programmes for public policy: anyone has the right to join or set up a club which recruits only in a specific segment of the population (which is why the Election Commission decision to bar the HMS from contesting the elections, could not be upheld).104 Formally, the question is only whether the party spokesmen would include such discrimination in its policies after taking public office. On that count, the HMS’s intention, at least on paper (see point 4:a above), is to abolish all religion-based discriminations if ever it comes to power."

Considering the fact that it's abrahmic, especially the later two, creeds discriminate against all others and chiefly against Hindus, that last should really be seen in this light of truth proven historically over a millennium and half; the disctination by Hindus amounts to quarantine rules comparable with those in place in UK, US and even California where food or plants from other states are unwelcome - while discrimination against Hindus by others amounts to usage as slaves or treatment as low caste in everything and promises of hell by faith, openly proclaimed.

"“11. Untouchability will be rooted out. There will be full economic and social justice to all.” Comment: contrary to the very common allegation that the Hindutva forces intend to restore the caste system, the anti-caste and especially the anti-Untouchability stand has always been a prominent plank in the platform of the HMS, as also of the BJS-BJP. At the same time, it must be admitted that several Hindu nationalist organizations including the HMS were created by reformists and then joined by the not-so-creative conservatives who infused a dead-weight policy to stem the reformist momentum."

Considering any departure from strict adherence to strictures of religion has conservatives of other religions, especially the conversionist abrahmic faiths, is to be immediately up in arms and take every measure from scrapping it legally to lynching those that propose such a measure, one would think Elst could appreciate conservative Hindus, if he had no vestiges of racism.

"“13. Strict vigil will be maintained on the borders and infiltrators will be shot down.” Reference is to the problem of illegal Bangladeshi immigration, or “infiltration” in Hindutva parlance."

Considering it's a stated, printed and published objective, of Islamic organisations in East Bengal, to populate parts of India - chiefly, Northeast - so as to separate them from India, as documented by Arun Shourie in his works, infiltration is not merely an appropriate term, it's a most politely exact description of facts.

“17. Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators who were deeply involved in Bombay and Calcutta riots in Dec. ’92 and Bombay and Calcutta bomb blasts thereafter are not only a danger to the security and law and order in the country but also a burden on the food resources and employment potential of the country, will be scared away to their native places. “

"18. Borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh will be completely sealed. Ex-army men will be rehabilitated on Kashmir borders. Article 370 will be removed.” Explanation: Art.370 of the Constitution accords a special, semi-sovereign status to Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in India; populating the Kashmir border zone with army pensioners would be a way of relatively decreasing the Muslim majority and of geographically isolating Kashmiri separatists from their Pakistani support base."

Considering the enforced exodus, ordered and achieved, through genocide of 1990 of Kashmir Hindus and other nonmuslims, perpetratrated by infiltrated terrorists from across the border by Pakistan, this should be really seen in light of intention to cleanse India of jihadists rampaging since a millennium and a half in India. As you status of Kashmir, that was supposed to be a temporary provision (much like reservations for low castes), that ought not to have been in place at all in the first place, but was due to Nehru attempting to please Mountbatten and trying to convince him of keeping up the British caste system in place, including Muslims above Hindus in preference to everything better, higher or preferred.

................................................................................................

"Since childhood, Hedgewar had been a great admirer of the Maratha freedom fighter Shivaji. As a student, he was an avid reader of B.G. Tilak’s nationalist weekly Kesarî and a follower of the Nagpur-based Congress and HMS leader B.S. Moonje. It was at Moonje’s request that in 1910, Hedgewar went to Calcutta to study medicine,—and to establish links with the Bengal revolutionaries.108 During his six years in Calcutta, he came into contact with the Anushîlan Samiti and learnt their technique of attracting young men by organizing sports activities, chiefly lâthî (stick) training. On his return to Nagpur in 1916, he disappointed his family by renouncing any prospects of marriage and a medical career, opting for full-time activism instead."

"Dr. Hedgewar was a man of action, not a thinker and writer. He has left us very few writings, but that in itself is indicative of an important choice which the RSS has made since the beginning and to which it has remained true: a disdain for intellectual work. ... "

Fraudulent and empty speeches is, though it has been labelled intellectual for a while, just that - fraudulent and empty. True intellect isn't satisfied discussing Marxism or theosophy, any more than a true man of action is satisfied limiting himself to ten hours of gym and looking fit. As for RSS, it's members do not need to seek approval of their intellectual status from elsewhere outside India, unlike followers of west or left. India provides tremendous treasures of knowledge for a foundation, while modern education of science is sky enough.

" ... RSS kept a low profile (except through its political front, the Jana Sangh) but worked very hard. It earned some recognition for its volunteer work during the Chinese invasion in 1962, so that Nehru gave the RSS a place in the 1963 Republic Day parade: “Given the spirit, even the lathi could successfully face the bomb.”114"

"Considering that the RSS Constitution was written under duress, one can always argue that its wording need not be taken seriously: since Golwalkar and his lieutenants merely wanted the RSS to be unbanned, they were willing to make all the right noises which could convince the Government of the organization’s harmlessness. This has in effect been the attitude predominant among Hindutva-watchers: to assume that an RSS man who says something unobjectionable must be lying.117"

This is the typical attitude towards all subjects from all conquistadores, all slaves and ex-slaves from all slave owners of yore, and all women from names of misogynistic, especially abrahmic cultures, including of course attitude of all Islamic institutions towards every non Muslim and especially all Hindus, no matter what.

" ... In India too, the time of Deoras’ accession to the RSS top office saw the expansion of Leftist power throughout the public sector. The Indian Communists pursued an “entryist” policy, viz. massively joining the Congress Party and influencing its policies from within. Rajni Kothari is one of the very few to have briefly described “the determined bid for power from the Left of the Congress Party in which sections of the CPI leadership also played a role. … It started after the 1969 split of the Congress after which Indira Gandhi had to depend on communist support for survival. … a number of former card-carrying members of the Communist Party made their way into the Congress with the hope of penetrating its core both in the government and in the party. … As it turned out, Indira Gandhi was nobody’s fool and she seems to have used them, rather than the other way around. But they did make a major effort at influencing not just the polity but also a number of scientific and educational institutions, a variety of government and semi-government committees, inner councils of the party and Parliament, a considerable cross-section of the mass media as well as important journals which they came to control. After all, in the Stalinist view of things the intellectual-scientific domain is extremely important. … Meanwhile, the country also drifted more and more into the Soviet dragnet which had its local networks of individuals, research institutions and funding agencies which gradually forced many intellectuals and bureaucrats to fall in line.”122"

"So, Indira Gandhi’s political secretary P.N. Haksar and education minister Nurul Hasan manoeuvred Communists in all manner of power positions and set up a number of institutions manned by committed Marxists ab initio, most importantly the Jawaharlal Nehru University, intended to be India’s Harvard.123 While Indira’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, an open sympathizer of Communism, still had to reckon with an influential conservative section within the ruling Congress, Indira herself, though much less ideologically committed to “progressive” causes than her father, presided over a party and a political establishment with a far more decidedly Leftist orientation. (In July 1975, Sanjay Gandhi took the Communists by surprise and threw them out of Congress: he had realized that the Communists, who were setting up “street committees” to enforce the Emergency in every corner, were trying to take over. But he did not touch the Communist hegemony in the cultural sector, not being sensitized to the importance of cultural power.)"

In the event, while JNU provides much free support to students of humanities for far longer than anywhere else, it's unclear if it produces any real intellectuals, unless the definition is changed, to one who is supported through chains of influence to positions and awards; and JNU is more known for "students" who have little to show, as justification for expensive support by taxpayers of India - for free living on campus in enviable accommodations with no requirement to work - except "protests" that amount to provocative slogans seeking to destroy India.

As for science, people known for sterling worth therein either stay away from politics, or, naively assuming that if left is pervading thinking it's because it's noble and true, pay lip service without thought, which takes little to test - those doing most talking against capitalism and USA are usually happiest to not only travel to USA for a job, but prompt in seeking a permanent position and settling as a citizen. Thereafter they may in privacy of their circles talk against it, but are the first to incest in mutual funds, not exactly funding schools in villages in India they profess to prefer.

................................................................................................

"Towards the end of his term, Deoras led (by remote control) the Hindu movement for the liberation of Rama’s supposed birthplace in Ayodhya, the “largest mass movement in India since Independence. At its height, more people were detained by the police than during the course of the Salt March and the Quit India movement combined.”128 ... "

"Supposed"? Elst trying to reassure went and left he hasn't gone native?

For that matter, has he or anyone else any proof as such regarding any tenets of his faith, other than the clout of the Vatican, commanded through subconscious terror due to centuries of inquisition?

As for Ayodhya, there has been never any doubt about it having been not only birthplace, but also the capital, of kingdom that was eventually ruled by Raama, who is worshipped as the seventh Avataara; nor have there been doubts about location of either Ayodhya, or any other place mentioned by name in the epic dealing with life of Raama, including Sri Lanka, or the bridge to it - built by Raama - that can be still seen.

Such doubts have, of course, been raised - by left, and by those inclined to insult Hinduism to curry favour with institutions of power in Islam and Christianity. But they are doubts either of Humphrey Appleby variety, raised without any merit just so it can be said that doubts have been raised, or they are those raised by atheists on question of existence of reality of anything non material, with the typical Indian variation such as that of a minister in Tamil Nadu, who, after he asserted that there was no such thing as Raama or God, was questioned if he thought the same about Allah and Jesus.

He blew up when pressed by the questioning journalist despite repeating himself, and said he wouldn't respond to stupid questions.

Some people point out that there are other cities elsewhere named Ayodhya. They should remember how many cities of USA, and even some in Canada, have names from Europe and UK, or even from elsewhere, from Greece to India.

................................................................................................

"The Vishva Hindû Parishad (“World Hindu Council”) is a religious organization founded at Guru Golwalkar’s advice in 1964. It seeks to create a common platform of Hindu religious personalities, and to represent Hindu religious viewpoints and interests in international forums. One of its most remarkable achievements is that it has been able to unite most of the ever-quarrelling sâdhus on a common platform of the defence and reform of Hindu society, with the effective abolition of Untouchability as top priority. As a result of the VHP’s efforts, even known arch-conservative clerics have come around to verbally supporting the programme of social reform.135 The VHP is also mildly active on the Shuddhi front, its greatest success being the reconversion of the superficially islamized Meherat Rajput community in the Udaipur and Ajmer districts of Rajasthan.136 Its women’s wing is called the Durgâ Vâhinî (“Brigade of the Tiger Goddess”), its youth wing the Bajrang Dal (“Team of Hanuman”, Rama’s valiant helper)."

What kind of sloppy translation is "Durgâ Vâhinî (“Brigade of the Tiger Goddess”)"?

Durgâ is the Goddess of Divine Victory; a lion, representing power, is what she rides, and there is no such thing as a Tiger Goddess, although some may portray Durgâ riding a tiger - which is more likely having arisen due to North India being forced to use foreign Asiatic languages during Islamic regimes and having used a common word "sher" for both of the animals. Anyone with a little information, however, is aware that it is Simha, lion, not Vyaaghra, tiger, that is her choice for a vehicle.

................................................................................................

"The Deendayal Research Institute was founded by Jana Sangh leader Nana Deshmukh in 1972. ... "

Why avoid mentioning the questionable circumstances of end of Deendayal Upadhyay who was found murdered in his train compartment shortly before Nanaji Deshmukh named an institution after him, and the fact that this was never investigated properly by the then government of Indira Gandhi?

For that matter, there have been a series of such murders, and those poorly veiled as accidents or otherwise, of leaders of the so-called Hindu political parties, from Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee who stepped across the physical line into Kashmir and was arrested promptly for just that only to return dying after a month of incarceration, to Pramod Mahajan whose brother was convicted and hanged for the murder (despite his lawyer arguing that he, the brother, did carry the weapon but didn't shoot it), and more. A brother-in-law died shortly after BJP came to power, supposedly in an accident by a truck speeding on an early morning on a quiet Delhi street as the new minister of central government came out of his residence, a story very unlikely if one has seen those streets. And more. Last one, that one can think of, was a secretary of a central government minister, a man responsible for the victory of BJP, by defeating the quarter Italian, half Indian descendent of Indira Gandhi in his family constituency, who - the secretary - was shot to death within less than a week of the election results.

Of course, in states such as Bengal and Kerala, murder of RSS and BJP workers is routine. This has especially been so post 2014.

................................................................................................

" ... When RSS men say that India has no need for a Mother Teresa, it is not purely a matter of envy or sectarian spite. Unlike their Marxist academic critics, they have personal experience of such work, and they consider their own record in social service as no less deserving of a Nobel prize."

What she did more than anything was to convert people without being caught in the illegal activity, which is why the obsession with helping those dying indigent; her resistance to helping those that could survive is recorded, as is her outspoken opposition to abortion even in poor countries.

Why not work for one's own people, her own country Yugoslavia, those who needed her even more during those decades? Because working in India highlights the fact that India isn't converted? Or because elsewhere it could be dangerous, as proven by fate of bishops and nuns working under junta in Salvador and so forth?

................................................................................................

"The first Jana Sangh president, law scholar Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (1901-53), had been elected to the Bengal Legislative Council in 1929 as a Congressman.143 Under Mahatma Gandhi’s directive to boycot the councils, he resigned in 1930 and started concentrating on his academic career; in 1934-38, he was the youngest person ever to hold the office of Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University. In 1937, he was elected as an independent from the University constituency (there was a corporatisme element in British-Indian democracy, with separate representation of certain professional groups), and in 1939 he joined the HMS. In 1941-42, he was Finance Minister in Fazl-ul-Haq’s Government of Bengal, which did not save him from being imprisoned, along with Savarkar, during a British crackdown on the Bhagalpur session of the HMS.

"In the elections of 1945-46, he was one of only three HMS candidates in India to be elected. He was also elected to the Constituent Assembly of India. On Independence Day, Nehru included him in his Cabinet as Minister of Industries and Supplies, clearly a move to prevent the HMS from actively opposing the government all the while effectively sidelining its representative in an ideologically inconsequential post. After the Gandhi murder (30 January 1948), Mookerjee stayed on as Minister and did not resign his HMS membership until December 1948. Along with another Bengali, K.C. Neogy, he resigned from the Cabinet on 8 April 1950 in protest against the Nehru Liaqat Pact, an “unequal treaty” in which Nehru promised Pakistani Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan not to interfere in the treatment of the minority Hindus across the border, even while the latter were suffering large-scale atrocities in East Bengal (Liaqat’s counter-promise not to interfere in India’s dealings with its Muslim minority was without object, a stable communal cease-fire having descended on India on the day of the Gandhi murder)."

................................................................................................

" ... HMS was more radical, more outspokenly Hindu, more defiant vis-à-vis the official dogma of secularism, while the BJS was more equivocal. ... "

"official dogma of secularism"?? Where IS that?

Certainly not in any nation with Christian majority, where holidays of other religions aren't in awareness of anybody, much less accepted by state as equally valid; and of course Islamic nations rarely allow equal status to non Muslims, much less anything further, and any indication of another faith can have you imprisoned if not worse.

That leaves a few Buddhist nations, tolerant because Buddhism was an offshoot of everything that's Indian culture from antiquity of which Buddha was born and in which he was brought up; and finally, leftists, who either repress every other thinking equally or abuse all religions or both.

Secularism is peculiar only to Hindu culture.

Proof?

Ask Israel where the Jews were not persecuted. See where Parsees survived post Islamic destruction of Persia by Arabs. Ask Tibetans. Notice that India had refugees from Asian nations, whether previously part of India or otherwise - including illegal migrants, from across both borders, who find it better in a non Islamic country, despite having demanded an Islamic piece of motherland India as a separate nation in the first place.

................................................................................................

" ... Nehru never made a secret of his deadly hostility to the Hindu Nationalists. Once he told Mookerjee: “We will crush you!” (Mookerjee, always more polite than Nehru, replied: “We will crush this crushing mentality.”)147

"In 1953, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee led an agitation against the separate status of Kashmir, where non-Kashmiri citizens could only enter with a permission from the Kashmiri state government. He was arrested for crossing the Kashmiri border, and died in prison of a heart attack.148 Though even top Congress leaders “demanded a judicial inquiry into the circumstances of his death”, the inquiry was never held, so that “the obstinate refusal of Pandit Nehru to concede the demand for inquiry deepened the mystery and created widespread doubts regarding the real nature of his death”.149 At least in Sangh Parivar circles, it is common to refer to Mookerjee’s death as his “martyrdom”.150 Many BJP offices are still adorned with his photograph."

................................................................................................

" ... “Handicapped all through the 50s by a crippling lack of financial resources, its small achievements look all the more impressive when viewed against the background of the irresistible financial power of both the Congress Party and the CPI.”159 Whatever else may be said of the BJS, it genuinely functioned on pure idealism."

"Like S.P. Mookerjee’s and Raghu Vir’s, Deendayal’s presidency was cut short by his dramatic death. And like Mookherjee’s, his death (11 February 1968) became the object of a controversy. He was standing at the door of a train coming from Delhi and approaching Moghulserai railway station, just outside Varanasi. The next thing we know is that he was found lying beside the railway track a mile west of the station, with a five-Rupee note in his hand.161 In his compartment, all his belongings were missing, and the RSS decided that this could not have been an accident but a “murder most foul”.162 Even Bruce Graham writes that he was “apparently murdered”.163"

" ... Even if it was murder, it could simply have been a case of robbery by excessive means. Since the investigation was carried out by officers who owed their job to Congress authorities, one can always claim that under orders from a corrupt Congress leadership, they have withheld the truth. Many Sangh people say that Deendayal was murdered by the security services acting on orders of the ruling party."

"The strongest BJS party leader in the 1960s was undoubtedly Balraj Madhok (1921), who taught History in Delhi University. He organized the civilian defence of Srinagar against the invading Pakistani irregulars in 1947-48 and co-founded the RSS student wing ABVP. In 1961 he was the first to raise the Ayodhya issue in Parliament: during the debate on “emotional integration”, he argued that a heartfelt national unity could not come about when one community occupied or laid claim to the sacred places of another. As a Panjabi Hindu (born in the Panjabi-speaking part of Jammu & Kashmir), he led the unsuccessful opposition to the partition of East Panjab into a Panjabi-speaking and a Hindi-speaking part (Panjab and Haryana), as demanded by many Sikhs and conceded in 1966. Widely respected as a foreign policy specialist, he was president of the Indo-Israeli Friendship Society in 1967-74, and more recently of the Indo-Tibetan Society.

"After the figurehead presidents of 1953-65, Balraj Madhok was again a president of substance (1965-67), both within the party’s own policy-making and in the national political arena. He led the BJS to its best electoral score in its history: 9.4 per cent of the votes in the 1967 Lok Sabha elections, yielding 35 seats, up from 3 seats in 1952,4 in 1957,14 in 1962, and better than the 22 seats obtained in 1971.166 Madhok was a committed anti-Communist and this brought him in conflict with the more Left-leaning party leaders, who sought to form “unprincipled” alliances with the Left parties in states where this could ensure a non-Congress majority and an “opposition government” (as non-Congress governments were then called)."

"After Deendayal Upadhyaya’s demise, the party was increasingly controlled by Atal Behari Vajpayee, Nana Deshmukh and their “Leftist” faction, to which Madhok developed an open hostility. When he failed to win a seat in the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, he alleged that Congress had rigged the elections by means of ballot-papers produced in Moscow and treated with invisible ink; this conspiracy theory made him the butt of uncharitable jokes.168 In 1973, Balraj Madhok was expelled from the party because of “anti-party activities”. After the BJS had been dissolved and then reconstituted as the BJP in 1980, Madhok re-founded the BJS, but without the RSS cadres behind him, he never got very far with it."

"Though the vast majority of jail-goers under the Emergency had been RSS/BJS men, and though the underground resistance which had prepared the way for the Janata take-over had been manned mostly by RSS workers, the RSS would quickly become the black sheep of the Janata Party. At the initiative of Madhu Limaye, the Socialists in the Janata Party, who owed their chairs in large measure to the sweat and blood of RSS activists, raised the so-called “double membership” issue.170 The RSS members in the government were given a choice between renouncing their Janata Party membership (or government post) and renouncing their RSS membership. Alternatively, the RSS was given the option of renouncing its Hindu identity and becoming the multi-religious mass organization of the Janata Party. Fortunately for the RSS, the dilemma was aborted by the fall of the Janata Government.171"

" ... The Janata government did not realize a single point that had been a distinctive concern of its BJS component. On the contrary, on several points, Foreign Affairs Minister A.B. Vajpayee (1925) out-Nehrued the Nehruvians. On a visit to China, he formally expressed India’s acceptance of China’s claim that Tibet is an integral part of China, a position diametrically opposed to the one stated in the BJS election manifestoes.173 Not surprisingly, China’s leader Li Peng was one of the first to congratulate Vajpayee when he briefly assumed office as Prime Minister in May 1996.

"Vajpayee also inducted the diplomat Syed Shahabuddin into the Rajya Sabha, presenting him as a model Muslim and a progressive alternative to obscurantist leaders like the influential Imam Bukhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid; however, Shahabuddin was to become an articulate spokesman of Muslim radicalism. Finally, Vajpayee also made it much easier for Pakistani citizens to travel to India, a facility which is hard to disconnect from the recent boom in espionage and sabotage acts which Hindu nationalists routinely impute to Pakistani agents inside India."

"The only Hindu-sounding stir created by a Jana Sangh politician was the Freedom of Religion Bill, moved by O.P. Tyagi, which proposed to outlaw conversion by force or fraud. Unobjectionable as that proposal might seem, the Christian missionaries launched a worldwide campaign against its alleged implication of outlawing proselytization altogether. The non-BJS section of the Government thwarted its adoption. Similar laws had none the less been adopted at the state level by Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Arunachal Pradesh."

" ... Vajpayee is also a Hindi poet, and Narasimha Rao, Congress Prime Minister and something of a litterateur himself, has declared that in poetry: “Atalji is my guru.”180"

................................................................................................

"The VHP shot to prominence (or notoriety) with the campaign for the liberation of the Hindu sacred sites in Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi. This issue had been on its agenda since its foundation in 1964, but became a priority in 1986. That was when a major concession to Muslim pressure on an issue of the separate Muslim Personal Law (the Shah Bano affair) forced the Rajiv Gandhi government to make a compensatory gesture to Hindu sensibilities.192 In that climate, a polite suggestion from the sadhus was enough to make the government order the removal of the locks on the Babri Masjid, a mosque-structure built on Rama’s supposed birthplace. In this building, idols of the god-king Rama and his companions had been installed in 1949, but Hindu worshippers had only had limited access to it.

"After the opening of the locks, Muslim militants founded the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the rivalling Babri Masjid Movement Co-ordination Committee to campaign for the restoration of the mosque status of what had effectively become a Hindu temple. ... "

As per strictures, Muslims cannot worship at a site where images exist. In any case it was well over decades that the structure was not in use as a place of prayer except by Hindus.

" ... Marxist academics came to the rescue of the BMAC and BMMCC by floating the ad hoc theory that there had never been a temple at the disputed site. ... "

This ever ready dpirit to lie at any cost so as to attack India and Hindus lost their credibility for general population, which can no longer believe they have had any good intentions after 1942 at the latest, likely much further back.

" ... Talks on the historical evidence for the past existence of a Hindu temple at the site yielded important new findings (confirming its existence) but no consensus. ... "

Which is a deliberate obfuscation of facts, which was, archeological finds of remains of the temple, and other evidences such as historical documents by contemporaries of Babar, of the existence of the temple and its destruction by Babar, who deliberately destroyed it to humiliate a conquered people, had the so-called Marxists simply stay away from scheduled talks, so Hindus were convinced that the left and others merely were truculent against Hindus at every cost.

" ... In 1994, the Supreme Court rejected a request from the Narasimha Rao Government to express an opinion on the historical question. At any rate, most Muslim claimants insist that even undeniable evidence that the mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a temple does not invalidate their claim. So, the litigation which started in 1950 has continued, with little promise of a satisfactory verdict.194"

The last part emphasises the validity of the general Hindu perception that Muslim stance is based on Muslim claim to a right to loot and occupy property of others, a right based in a creed that denies equality to everyone else on par with Muslim males.

................................................................................................

"Meanwhile on the streets, the long-drawn-out Hindu-Muslim confrontation with various marches and agitations kept India under tension for several years. On the BJP side, the main event was L.K Advani’s car procession from the Somnath temple in Gujarat (a famous temple repeatedly destroyed by Muslim iconoclasts and rebuilt again, last just after Independence) to Ayodhya. This Rath Yatra may not even have been the BJP’s own initiative. At the time itself, I was told at the BJP office that Prime Minister V.P. Singh had suggested to Advani that he create some public opinion pressure on the Government concerning Ayodhya. That way, V.P. Singh (who rejected the claim that the disputed building was a “mosque”) could explain to his Muslim supporters that in the face of such mighty pressure, he would be unable to keep his promise to give them the disputed Ayodhya site. So, possibly that is how the BJP decided to have the Rath Yatra."

Rath, or more properly spelt, Ratha, translates as carriage, not car, used by kings, warriors and so forth in era before foreign invasions. Calling it car is akin to calling ceremonial carriage of British royalty tonga.

"It was much to the BJP’s own surprise that Advani received a stormy welcome by unprecedentedly large crowds. The BJP had not been aware of the groundswell of Hindu consciousness and of the mass enthusiasm for the Ayodhya temple until it was confronted with this response. And even then, it has refused to believe its own eyes, for its policy ever since has been to push the Ayodhya issue into the background. Indeed, it was in reaction to the BJP leadership’s pussyfooting on Ayodhya that ordinary Hindutva activists took matters into their own hands."

According to statements by L. K. Advani in his autobiography, he became aware of this struggle by Hindus who had been petitioning government for as long as the rule was non muslim, about two centuries and longer, before he decided to have BJP support the struggle. Political decision to not be militant about it was quite in the spirit of Hindus who'd patiently petitioning the government for over two centuries, instead of taking matters in hand long ago.

"The agitation culminated in the demolition of the disputed building on 6 December 1992. The demolition was a strange event. While participants deny that there had been any preparation at all, other Hindu activists claim that it had been prepared by a small group of volunteers led by a professional engineer, and that once this core group took the initiative, the crowd joined in. At any rate, appeals by RSS leader H.V. Seshadri, VHP leader Ashok Singhal and BJP leader L.K. Advani to maintain the discipline and refrain from vandalism were ignored by the defiant and exuberant rank and file.

"The provincial security forces refused to intervene (the film of the event shows a commander shouting at his men, who quietly refuse to act), and the Central Government refused to send troops until it was too late. Most Muslims have accused Prime Minister Narasimha Rao of deliberately allowing the demolition to take place, and I believe rightly."

Imagine governments through Europe required to maintain structures built by naxis to commemorate blitzkrieg victories, arresting mobs intent on destruction and shooting down hundreds. This was done by a previous chief minister of the state, who lost election subsequently.

"Consider the matter from his viewpoint: as long as the “mosque” (for the BJP, the “disputed structure”; for commentator Girilal Jain, the “non-mosque”) was standing, the BJP could use it as a rallying-point, a visible “sign of national humiliation imposed by the invader Babar” kept in place by the “pseudo-secularist” Congress Government. On the other hand, if the building was demolished in a BJP-related action, this could be used against the BJP and the whole Hindu movement, viz. as a reason to dismiss the BJP state governments and ban the Hindu mass organizations. This is at any rate what effectively happened: the Ayodhya theme was killed as a BJP vote-getter, and the BJP’s march to power was temporarily reversed."

Elst considers the matter from point of view of not only West but a secular West rooted in church, thst is, assuming tranquilly that the only considerations valid are those from point of view of a Christianity-islam oriented secularism, which amounts to assigning importance to those two faiths but no other. He forgets that others might think differently, even if they refrain from saying so, expecting ridicule and worse from the said West.

In particular he forgets that the then PM Narasimha Rao, too, was a Hindu.

Not only that, he forgets that even the ruling family, the quarter Italian half Indian descendents of the first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, while maintaining disdain for Hinduism and Hindus in public and equally carefully maintaining high regard for muslims and church - letting criminals go free due to pressures from them on the quiet, for instance - nevertheless maintains a charade of Hindu family ceremonies for public consumption, despite a farcical facade being quite apparent on the whole if anyone carefully takes a second look.

For instance they have cremated the two sons of Indira Gandhi without anybody questioning why they weren't officially Parsee, since their father Feroze Gandhi was claimed to be Parsee, and there was no conversion to Hinduism in his case, even if that had been then allowed; and the weddings in the family, except that of late PM Rajeev Gandhi, have too been as per Hindu tradition, according to all reports given out, with photographs et al - although, again, there gave been few if any other evidences of even the definitely Hindu members (Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi) observing any traditions at all, much less those who were brought up in other faiths (Feroze Gandhi and wives of his sons) being reported to have changed to Hinduism, in particular the half Italian member of the family.

As for the political analysis of motives of the then PM Narasimha Rao by Elst, it may be correct up to a point, but is a tiny fraction of the whole.

One, the media was constantly blaring promises by BJP to refrain from building at the site; nobody had been asked to refrain from opposite. Two, there was a backlash beginning with muslim mobs attacking police station in Mumbai, which was rarely mentioned. Three, subsequently Hindus were blamed for everything, media refraining from mentioning that these riots were begun and indulged in by Muslims, media preferring to indict Hindus as perpetrators and Muslims as victims, entirely. This is in keeping with the Islamic creed that Muslims killing everyone else is only right, and brings the killers rewards in heaven.

................................................................................................

"The 1998 elections brought the BJP to power, by any standards a watershed in modern Indian political history. Let us now look into the ideologically important parts of the BJP’s 1998 election manifesto:

"“This ageless nation is the embodiment of the eternal values enshrined in the concept of ‘Sanatana Dharma’ which, according to Maharishi Aurobindo, is synonymous with Indian nationalism.210 This ancient nation evolved a world-view based on the motto ‘Loka samasta sukhino bhavantu’ (Let the entire world be happy) thousands of years before any League of Nations or United Nations was thought of to avoid global strife. The Indian nation evolved this grand vision not by marching its armies and conquering the rest and offering peace;211 but by the inner-directed pursuit of universal values by the Rishis living in the forests and mountains of India.”212

"“The Bharatiya Janata Party is a proud inheritor of this tradition while all other political parties have branded everything associated with this great tradition as sectarian, unworthy of being followed. The post-Independence tendency to reject all ancient Indian wisdom in political life led to all pre-Independence values and symbols—be it the idea of spiritual nationalism expounded by Swami Vivekananda, or the concept of Ram Rajya articulated by Mahatma Gandhi, or the soul-stirring ‘Vande Mataram’ song by Bankim Chandra—being discarded as unsecular and unacceptable. The BJP rejects this attitude and idea of disconnecting from the past.”213"

"Another classic of Hindu politics is the demand that cow-slaughter be banned, or in legal terms, that the “directive principle” to ban cow-slaughter laid down in Article 48 of the Constitution be implemented:

"“The BJP regretfully observes that, despite Article 48 of the Constitution, millions of cows and cow progeny are slaughtered every year, most of them for export, thereby causing irreperable harm to agriculture and villages. Keeping in view Article 48, the BJP will:

"“1. Impose a total ban on the slaughter of cows and cow-progeny, including bulls and bullocks, and prohibit all trade, including export (state as well as private) in beef.

"“2. Create a policy that will result in improved cattle breeding.

"“3. Exempt the income of Goshalas and Pinjrapoles from tax.”218"

"On corruption, the BJP has earned a certain credit, e.g. in 1992, its UP government introduced legislation against a very popular form of corruption: copying during exams. The next Government, headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav, championed the Backward Castes cause and denounced this law as “anti-Backward” and immediately abrogated it upon coming to power in 1993.221 In 1998, the BJP reintroduced it again.222 However, a survey of the BJP state governments’ record regarding corruption is beyond the scope of this study; suffice it to say that such lofty promises are not always easy to keep once a party comes to power."

That last bit has been proven by BJP subsequent to 2014 by the PM whose promise even as CM, prior to his taking over in Delhi, was that he'd "neither eat nor allow anyone else to do so", "eat" here referring to corruption, as in eating fruit of corruption.

"A remarkable element of the 1998 BJP Manifesto is its stand on women’s issues. Under the heading “Nari Shakti: Empowerment of Women”, the BJP makes all sorts of promises to women, such as “1) Provide free education to women up to graduation, including professional studies like medicine and engineering.”227 One of the reasons for this eagerness to push women on to the job market, apart from egalitarian principles, is that it is a very effective incentive to family planning, still a top priority in India. Indeed, “the BJP will put population-related issues, including family planning, back on the national agenda” and to this end it will “promote women’s education, employment and empowerment”.228"

"Probably the most sensational item of BJP feminism is: “2) Immediately seek the passage of the Bill reserving 33 per cent seats for women in all elected bodies, including the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies.”229 A Bill to this effect had been discussed in the Lok Sabha in 1997, but nothing came of it, partly because it would be difficult to organize (should it be done through “reserved constituencies” where only women can be candidates?), partly because all the casteist parties feared it would interfere with caste-based reservations. ... "

"“3) Actively promote the legal and economic rights of women which must be equal to those of men and not subject to the debilitating clauses of personal laws.”231 Hindu Law has been reformed in an egalitarian sense in the 1950s; though this reform was effected by Nehru and against BJS opposition, the relatively progressive guidelines of Hindu Law are now an asset to the Hindu Revivalists, for traditional Christian and Islamic Personal Law, which no secular Parliament has dared to touch, are much less egalitarian. What this BJP promise means in effect, is that some clauses of Islamic and Christian Personal Law should be overruled by secular and egalitarian clauses.

"The BJP specifies these reforms:

"“4) Entrust the Law Commission to formulate a Uniform Civil Code based on the progressive practices from all traditions. This Code will:

"“a) Give women property rights;

"“b) Ensure women’s right to adopt;

"“c) Guarantee women equal guardianship rights;

"“d) Remove discriminatory clauses in divorce laws;

"“e) Put an end to polygamy;…”232

"This reform is sure to generate an Islamic agitation, for it is directly in conflict with Islamic Law, and by replacing religious law with secular law, it would also undermine the power position of Islamic clerics within the Muslim community. Nevertheless, from a secular and egalitarian viewpoint, it is hard to object to such a reform."

"Among the BJP’s other promises to women, let us note the following: “6) Enact and enforce an anti-sexual-harassment code;

"“7) Enforce the principle of equal wages for equal work.

"“18) Amend laws that deal with molestation, rape and dowry, to provide for in-camera trial, swift justice and tough deterrent punishment as well as rehabilitation for the victims of these crimes;

"“19) Amend the Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act to make clients as culpable as commercial sex-workers.

"“24) Rapidly induct more women into the police force and appoint women to senior positions.

"“27) Strictly enforce the exising laws that prohibit unethical practices like pre-natal sex-determination tests, female foeticide and infanticide.

"“31) Set up a national-level apex women’s development bank to cater to the financing needs of women entrepreneurs and the vast number of self-employed women.”233

"This last point is obviously inspired by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which has played a crucial role in women’s economic “empowerment”.

................................................................................................

"The Ram Rajya Parishad"

"In pamphleteering publications about the Hindutva movement, it is often alleged that it is an “upper-caste” ploy to retain caste privileges, and that it is a retrograde fundamentalist movement which wants to restore the Shâstras as the basis of legislation (on the model of the Shari’a in Islamic states), disregarding the fact that from an upper-caste initiative, the movement has become mainly a low-caste affair in some states.238 Paul Brass’ claim that BJS/BJP “manifestoes emphasized the maintenance of traditional Hindu institutions of family, caste structure and law” would apply to the RRP, but is simply untrue for the BJS/BJP as far as “caste structure” is concerned.239

"The Ram Rajya Parishad was the voice of traditionalist Hinduism, while the BJS/BJP became the voice of reform Hinduism. The genuine defenders of caste hierarchy were well-placed to be arbiters in the matter, and they were dismayed at the Sangh’s “betrayal” of Hindu tradition. Swami Niranjan Dev Tirth, just retired as Puri Shankaracharya, said he was in “cent per cent agreement” with his late friend Karpatri who had “exposed the conspiracy” in his book RSS and Hindu Religion, which lashes out against the RSS rejection of caste hierarchy.

"Indeed, “one of the former Shankaracharya’s main complaints is that the RSS does not believe in varnashram (caste system). The former Shankaracharya’s remarks are significant because it explains why the vast majority of leaders of different Hindu sects have not personally involved themselves in the Ram Janmabhoomi [movement] even though many of them have expressed moral support.”240 Moreover: “‘The RSS does not believe that the Ganga is holy or that Ram and Krishna are gods. Guru Golwalkar wrote that it was a mistake to raise them to the status of deity. The RSS is against our Shâstras. I oppose it in all my meetings. I will oppose any interference with our Shâstras’, he said.”241 This is obviously a continuation of the traditionalist argument against the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj.

"The RRP fitted the stereotype of a “fundamentalist” party in all its colourful medievalism, e.g. during the Chinese invasion in 1962, Swami Karpatri announced that with his spiritual power, his body would not be hurt by Chinese artillery (he is not known to have put his boast to the test).242 By contrast, the BJS/BJP is simply a modern party."

................................................................................................

"The Swatantra Party

"The Swatantra Party was founded in 1959 by business interests and defenders of free entreprise, at the initiative of the Parsi business family the Tatas. The Tatas had been Jawaharlal Nehru’s sponsors until 1954, when he embarked on a policy of turning India into a socialist economy. The party’s political leader was Minoo Masani (1905-1998), a Parsi lawyer who had been a co-founder of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934. He was to retain cordial contacts with the Socialists, particularly with Jayaprakash Narayan, but turned against socialism. In 1950, he collaborated with Home Minister Sardar Patel in setting up an anti-Communist think-tank.

"Masani briefly served as India’s ambassador to Brazil, but after an alleged scandal (taking bribes and being rude to his personnel) he fell out with Prime Minister Nehru. At that point, he started planning the creation of a political party. In the 1957 Lok Sabha elections, 30 candidates for the prospective party stood as independents under various umbrellas. One of them, Sita Ram Goel, was on the BJS ticket, others were with the HMS or local parties, and Masani himself was on a Jharkhand Party ticket (Jharkhand being a mining and industrial area where the Tata family as the largest employer was very influential). Masani had hoped that a few prospective Swatantra spokesmen could already be elected as independents, but he himself was the only one among them to win a seat. In 1959 the party was formally constituted, and it managed to attract one of the historic Congress leaders, C.R. Rajagopalachari (1879-1972), as its charismatic spokesman. In the 1962 elections, the party got 18 Lok Sabha seats, 44 seats in 1967, and 8 in 1971.243"

" ... One political scientist even claims that the SP “had come into existence to oppose co-operative farming”.244 The SP sought an alignment with the West in the Cold War, and was articulately anti-Communist. In the Vietnam War it supported South Vietnam, and it demanded an initiative to go and liberate Tibet. A telling point of difference with the BJS is that the SP welcomed the continued use of English as India’s link language, as against the BJS’s advocacy of its replacement with Hindi (as mandated by the Constitution). To sum up: “The only authentic party of the traditional Right, as that term would be understood in Europe, was the Swatantra party, a coalition of urban big business and rural aristocratic and landlord elements in which the latter were dominant. … During its heyday, Swatantra was the leading secular party of the Right offering a full-scale critique of the Congress policies of centralized planning, nationalization of industries, agrarian reform, and non-alignment.”245

"On the other hand, the SP did go with the BJS, at least part of the way, in recognizing the legitimate role of religion in public life: “It fully declared its intrinsic ideological commitment to the rule of law as an essential element in democracy but over and above the juristic theory of the rule of law, it recognised the overwhelming significance of the Rule of Dharma or ‘a God-oriented inner law. … The Swatantra stated that democracy would cease to be the tyranny of the majority or the dictatorship of a dominant party only, when it would be suffused with the chastening and transforming spirit of Dharma. … The Swatantra thinks that the restoration of religion to its legitimate place would serve to moralize democracy by emphasizing the ethical presuppositions and governing norms of correct and proper political conduct.”246

"The SP’s anti-socialist positions were unacceptable to the socialist-leaning wing of the BJS. For this reason, Balraj Madhok’s attempt to arrange a merger between the two parties for the 1962 elections was rejected by his own party; only an electoral alliance materialized in 1967. The SP remained an elite party without a mass base, which could only acquire a modest presence in Parliament by allying itself with the BJS and its well-organized cadre and mass base. On the other hand, the support of many princely families gave it disproportionate clout; the legendary princess Gayatri Devi won the Jaipur seat with an unprecedented majority on a Swatantra ticket.

"The open princely support for the leading opposition party was the most important reason for Indira Gandhi to abolish the princes’ privileges in violation of the promises made to them at the time of their accession to the Union of India. By depriving the princes of a large part of their income, she also cut into the financial support base of her political adversaries. The unwinnable confrontation of the opposition forces linked to Swatantra with Indira Gandhi in 1970, aggravated by the death of C.R. Rajagopalachari, proved to be the SP’s swan song: from being the largest opposition party in 1967, it fell back to a handful of seats in 1971. In 1974, its remains disappeared into Charan Singh’s liberal-populist conglomerate, the Lok Dal (“People’s Group”), and thence into the Janata alliance of 1977."

................................................................................................

"The Shiv Sena

"The Shiv Sena was founded in Mumbai in 1966. Its name refers to the seventeenth-century Maratha freedom fighter Shivaji as well as to the god Shiva. The popular base of the party was first the Maratha caste and more generally the middle castes (now known as “Other Backward Castes”), upwardly mobile at the expense of the Brahmins. In a symbolic sense, this process was a revenge for the take-over of Maratha power by the Brahmin Peshwas (“Prime Ministers”) from Shivaji’s heirs in the early eighteenth century. It is important to keep in mind that the Shiv Sena is at once a pro-Hindu and an anti-Brahmin party. This fact incidentally jeopardizes the neat explanation of Hindu revivalism as a Brahmin conspiracy, or the claim that “the objective of Hindu nationalists all along has been to preserve and perpetuate the hegemonic interests of the upper castes”.247 Like the Arya Samaj and like many individual Hindu revivalists, Sena spokesmen have even blamed the Brahmins for the defeats suffered by Hindu society in centuries past. Bal Thackeray told me that in his young days, he had briefly joined the RSS, but left it “because I saw all these Brahmins around me”.248"

"The Shiv Sena (SS) is a populist party deeply rooted in Maharashtrian popular culture, and representing popular creativity, popular sentiment and also popular anger. According to V.S. Naipaul, the SS has been a very constructive social force in Mumbai’s slum areas, even before ever coming to power.252 It has also developed a very effective trade-unionist wing, and Marxists claim that this was in fact the reason why industrialists (including the veteran Gandhian Ramakrishna Bajaj) had welcomed and probably financed the budding Shiv Sena: to keep the working class outside the Communist sphere of influence.253

"The Shiv Sena’s founder-leader Bal Thackeray, a former cartoonist, has occasionally caught the attention with his unabashed and sometimes ill-inspired rhetoric. In the world of facts, however, the Sena’s terms in office in the Mumbai City Corporation and in the Maharashtra State Government have not been characterized by less democracy, more communal violence or more corruption than Congress governments (which does not amount to denying that its administration has been quite corrupt). The great waves of communal violence in Greater Mumbai took place in about 1980 and in 1992-93, when both the city and the state governments were in Congress hands.

"The SS got a lot of bad press when it reacted in strength against a series of Muslim attacks on Hindus in early January 1993. After three days of Muslim rioting (6 to 8 January), Bal Thackeray’s activists took the law into their own hands. The result was a large-scale conflagration killing at least 557 people, a majority of them Muslims.254 Even six years later, no SS spokesman is apologetic about this operation: they see it as a necessary intervention in a Muslim attempt to take over the city with street terror. On the other hand, the Sena refrained from taking the violence beyond the “normal” magnitude of street riots: when some 300 Hindus were killed in Muslim bomb attacks (12 March 1993) against Hindu or predominantly Hindu targets, including a failed one against the SS headquarters, the SS did not react, and preferred to avoid further escalation."

Here's the almost first public admission of two vitally important facts - the three days of muslim rioting before Shiva Senaa acted, and the fact that Shiva Senaa refrained from lashing back when hundreds of Hindus were killed in bomb attacks by Muslims subsequently. Most media reporting in India, and films on the subject toss India, behaved as if muslims were innocent hapless victims of Hindu violence, while every one of Hindus across India, at least those from Maharashtra and especially those of Mumbai, were vicious killers. This is not merely a lie but a direct inversion of facts.

................................................................................................

"During the last several elections, the BJP and the SS formed an alliance, much in contrast with the early years, when the Sangh Parivar denounced this regionalist party as a threat to national unity.255 Over the years, however, the SS evolved from an anti-immigrant party to a structure which helps the endless stream of newcomers to integrate into the Mumbai metropolis: “People from Tamil Nadu, to a lesser degree Kerala, began early to vote for the Shiv Sena and sizeable groups of them entered the organization during the seventies. They have only to accept simple principles, especially the Maharashtrian nature of Bombay, and the importance of Shivaji.”256 Even Muslims have found a place in the SS: “There are several shakha pramukhs (sub-branch organizers) of Bombay, and at least one shakha pramukh (branch organizer) of Pune who are Muslim.”257"

"At the cultural level, the difference between BJP and SS is conspicuous: BJP men try to speak chaste Hindi and propagate Sanskritic culture, while the SS uses the idiom of regional-Maharashtrian popular culture. The BJP cannot conceal its occasional embarrassment with its SS ally, known for its less polished working-style and underworld connections. In this respect, the SS is by no means exceptional: Congress, Janata Dal, Samajwadi Party and some of the regional parties have been at least as much involved in violence and underworld activities. This is not even punished by the voters: most politicians representing sectional interests can safely count on their support base regardless of their criminal record. But the BJP prides itself on its clean hands, and this makes its relation with the SS rather uneasy.258"

This explains why Shiva Senaa embraced others for power, when they'd only won seats due to pre-election alliance with BJP in the first place and BJP was the largest elected party in state at last elections.

................................................................................................

"The relation between the SS’s Hindutva and its Mafia character is one of inverse proportionality: on a number of occasions, the SS called off Hindu nationalist agitations in exchange for money. The SS support to the Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship should be seen in the same light; it was the only “communal” organization not to be banned. By its very nature, this type of Mafia activity is hard to document, but at least Thackeray’s reputation in this respect is very solid: even the Sena’s otherwise laudable vigilance preventing anti-Sikh violence in Mumbai after the murder of Indira Gandhi in 1984 is usually explained in terms of Sikhs paying “protection money”.

"As one independent Hindu revivalist puts it: “Thackeray is a Don whose protection can be bought. One tactic of his is to announce agitations and cancel them on being suitably recompensed. The most notorious [instance] was during the Shah Bano incident. When the Rajiv Gandhi, government passed the Muslim Women’s Bill … Thackeray announced a programme of rallies … at the venue of the Congress centenary celebrations [1885-1985] scheduled to be held a month or two later. Foreign journalists would have been present, and the pseudo-secular activities of the Congress would have been fully exposed before the international media. However, at the last minute, he was called for a meeting with the Chief Minister, and then he cancelled the agitation without any explanation.”259

"The difference in radicalism between the BJP (or the Sangh Parivar) and the SS can be illustrated with the reactions of the two parties after the Ayodhya demolition on 6 December 1992. Bal Thackeray, when shown press allegations that his Shiv Sainiks had participated in the demolition, owned it up at once: “If my boys have done it, I am proud of them.” One of his MPs, Moreshwar Save, attained “notoriety for claiming to have led the demolition squad at Ayodhya”.260

"By contrast, BJP President L.K. Advani, who had led the Ayodhya movement in 1989-92, and who was there on the spot for what was meant to be an inconsequential ceremony, could not contain his tears when the youngsters pushed the elderly leaders aside and started the demolition work. Back in Delhi, he made a mild statement in which he did not own up the demolition but merely pointed out the double standards of the secularists who remained silent when Muslim terrorists destroyed Hindu temples in Kashmir a few years earlier. Most national-level BJP leaders have tried to avoid talking about the Ayodhya demolition altogether. BJP leader A.B. Vajpayee immediately condemned the demolition outright, and during the 1996 election campaign, he even called it a “Himalayan blunder” which “ruined everything”. It was only at the demolition’s third anniversary that a lone BJP MP, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, came forward to say in the Parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs that he, too, was proud of this historical event."

................................................................................................

"The reconstituted BJS

"Among alternative Hindu parties, we should also mention the existence and activity c. 1990 of a reconstituted Bharatiya Jana Sangh. This was a late result of an intra-BJS conflict between Balraj Madhok and other party leaders, particularly Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nana Deshmukh. Apart from a clash of personalities, the initial issue was the letter’s willingness to make alliances with the Communist parties at the provincial level, after the opposition gains in the 1967 elections. Madhok, a principled anti-Communist and critic of Islamic politics was fed up with the fact that, in his opinion, BJS politics vis-à-vis the enemies of Hinduism had been watered down into “appeasement”, hardly distinguishable from Nehru’s politics. After several more quarrels, he was expelled from the party in 1973 on grounds of “anti-party activities”.

"When the BJS was reconstituted as the BJP in 1980, Madhok floated a revived BJS, virtually a one-man party. Still, in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, he seemed to have a good chance of winning the Lucknow seat, and local RSS-BJP activists wanted to support him rather than the candidate of the Janata Dal, with which the BJP had an electoral alliance. Atal Behari Vajpayee personally intervened to force the activists back in line, and the neo-BJS was thwarted in its only real chance of entering parliament."

"Among Hindu radicals, Vajpayee has never been forgiven for his action against Madhok. An NRI paper reports on a lecture by Vajpayee: “In his fulminations against Jan Sangh president, Mr. Balraj Madhok, Mr. Vajpayee said that Mr. Madhok had done immense harm to his party. And when someone asked if that was why he went to the Lucknow elections where Mr. Madhok had been winning and started to lose as soon as Mr. Vajpayee came in with his hordes to sabotage the elections of another Hindu, Mr. Vajpayee denied the charge but did not convince anyone present.”262

"Next to the HMS and the SS, the reconstituted BJS is another proof that the BJP can hardly be called “extremist”. Most politically conscious Hindus find the BJP rather wishy-washy, though many concede that in the present political configuration, a really straightforward and articulate Hindu party is hardly possible. For one thing, the mentality of the Hindu masses themselves is wishy-washy as far as specifically Hindu problems are concerned. They are easily aroused by spectacular incidents of Hindu-Muslim conflict and “Muslim appeasement”, such as the Shah Bano case. But they are hardly aware of more fundamental issues, nor of events which are no longer in the news, e.g. the massacre of Bengali Hindus by the Pakistani army in 1971 is not the object of any literature or films or even Hindutva pamphlets. Moreover, most people prefer peace to riots, and they don’t mind the post-Demolition BJP combining a basically pro-Hindu line with a pragmatic approach to controversial issues. The BJP is in tune with the Hindu electorate to a large degree when it takes a soft line."

................................................................................................

"INDEPENDENT HINDU AUTHORS

"One of the grossest misconceptions about the Hindu movement, is that it is an artificial creation of political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena. In reality, there is a substratum of Hindu activist tendencies in many corners of Hindu society, often in unorganized form and mostly lacking in intellectual articulation. To this widespread Hindu unrest about the uncertain future of Hindu culture, a discursive expression has been given by a small but growing group of independent writers."

This last bit is typical of anti-Indian, anti-Hindu attitude regarding India and especially Hindus, branding or equating the latter with dumb, mindless and so on. Reality could not be further, as the fraud policy generater, Macaulay, not only knew very well but said explicitly. This attitude stems from the said policy, of holding everything good about India as bad, deliberately, to break the spirit of India, and attacking Brahmins is the chief weapon of that objective.

................................................................................................

"Ram Swarup as an anti-Communist

" ... Born in 1920 as the son of a “raîs and banker” in Sonipat, Haryana, Ram Swarup (gotra: Garg, belonging to the merchant Agrawâl caste) earned a degree in Economics from Delhi University in 1941. He joined the Gandhian movement and acted as the overground contact (“postbox”) for the underground activists including Aruna Asaf Ali during the Quit India agitation of 1942.263 He spent a week in custody when a letter bearing his name was found in the house of another activist, the future homeopath Ram Singh Rana. In 1942-44, he worked as a clerk in the American office in Delhi which had been set up in the context of the Allied war effort against Japan.

"In that period, his wit made him quite popular in progressive circles in the capital. He was a declared socialist, a great fan of Aldous Huxley and a literary imitator of George Bernard Shaw. In 1944, he started the “Changers’ Club”, alluding to Karl Marx’s dictum that philosophers have interpreted the world instead of changing it. Of course, it was never more than a discussion forum for a dozen young intellectuals, including the future diplomat L.C. Jain, the future Planning Commission member Raj Krishna, future Times of India editor Girilal Jain, and historian Sita Ram Goel. At that time, Ram Swarup was a committed atheist, and in the Changers’ Club manifesto he put it in so many words: “Butter is more important than God.” In 1947, the club disbanded because its members plunged into real life, e.g. L.C. Jain became the commander of the largest camp for Partition refugees, organizing the rehabilitation of Hindu refugees from the North-West Frontier Province in Faridabad, Haryana.

"Just around the time of Independence, Ram Swarup developed strong opinions about the ideology which was rapidly gaining ground among the intelligentsia around him: Communism. When the CPI defended the Partition scheme with contrived socio-economic arguments, he objected that the Partition would only benefit the haves among the Muslims, not the have-nots. He moved in a direction opposite to the ideological fashion of the day, and became one of India’s leading anti-Communists. His first books, Let Us Fight the Communist Menace (1949) and Russian Imperialism: How to Stop It (1950), were published by Prâchî Prakâshan, an anti-Communist a publishing house which he and Sita Ram Goel had set up in Calcutta, then as now the centre of Indian Communism. Financial help was provided by Hari Prasad Lohia.

"The books drew attention in high places. In 1949, Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel decided to found a think-tank specifically devoted to monitoring Communism, the Democratic Research Service, which was formally started in November 1950.264 It was sponsored by the industrialist Birla family, and initially led by Morarji Desai, who passed the job on to Minoo Masani. It was as secretary of the DRS that Ram Swarup prepared a History of the Communist Party of India, which Masani published in his own name. A lot of bad blood developed between them, and Ram Swarup quit the DRS to join Sita Ram Goel in Calcutta and establish the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia.265 Meanwhile, the DRS continued to be operative, but beyond publishing the meritorious periodical Freedom First, it never became very dynamic.

"The most authentic and effective Indian centre of fact-finding and consciousness-raising about the Communist menace was undoubtedly the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia. Though routinely accused of being lavishly financed by the CIA, this organization started with just Rs.30,000, half of which was brought in by Goel personally, and continued its work with the help of donations by friends, its budget seldom exceeding Rs. 10,000. It published some important studies, which were acclaimed by leading anti-Communists in the West and Taiwan, and on one occasion vehemently denounced in the Pravda and the Izvestia. Until its closing in December 1955, the centre was the main independent focus of ideological opposition to Communism in the Third World.

"Ram Swarup’s main books on Communism are:

"Let us Fight the Communist Menace (1949);

"Russian Imperialism: How to Stop It (1950);

"Communism and Peasantry: Implications of Collectivist Agriculture for Asian Countries (1950, but only published in 1954);

"Gandhism and Communism (1954); Foundations of Maoism (1956).

"His Gandhism and Communism, which emphasized the need to raise the struggle against Communism from a military to a moral and ideological level, was brought to the attention of Western anti-Communists including several US Congressmen, and some of its ideas were adopted by the Eisenhower administration in its agenda for the Geneva Conference in 1955.267

"Later, Arun Shourie wrote about Ram Swarup’s struggle against Communism: “Ram Swarup, now in his seventies, is a scholar of the first rank. In the 1950s when our intellectuals were singing paeans to Marxism, and to Mao in particular, he wrote critiques of communism and of the actual—that is, dismal—performance of communist governments. He showed that the ‘sacrifices’ which the people were being compelled to make had nothing to do with building a new society in which at some future date they would be heirs to milk and honey. … He showed that the claims to efficiency and productivity, to equitable distribution and to high morale which were being made by these governments, and even more so by their apologists in countries such as India, were wholly unsustainable, that in fact they were fabrications. Today, anyone reading those critiques would characterise them as prophetic. But thirty years ago, so noxious was the intellectual climate in India that all he got was abuse, and ostracism.”268"

................................................................................................

"Ram Swarup as a Hindu revivalist

"Initially, Ram Swarup saw Gandhism as the alternative to Communism, and he has never really rejected Gandhism. In a small pamphlet written after the Gandhi murder, Mahatma Gandhi and His Assassin (1948), he argued that martyrdom was only befitting a man of Gandhiji’s greatness. He showed no interest in murderer Nathuram Godse’s motives, but he did appreciate that the urge to exact some punishment somewhere, though misguided (and in targeting Gandhi, misdirected), was a sign that Hindu society was not entirely dead, for suffering a calamity like the Partition and swallowing it without reaction would be a sure sign of virtual death.

"In 1948-49, Ram Swarup briefly worked for Gandhi’s English disciple Mira Behn (Miss Madeleine Slade) when she retired to Rishikesh to edit her correspondence with Gandhiji, a project which was not completed. He continued to explore the relevance of Gandhism to real-life problems, e.g. in his booklet Gandhian Economics (1977). But gradually, he moved from the Gandhian version of Hinduism to a more comprehensive understanding of the ancient Hindu tradition.

"By the late 1970s, his focus had turned to religious issues. Apart from a large number of articles published in Hinduism Today (Honolulu), Organiser, and some mainstream dailies (in the 1980s the Telegraph, the Times of India and the Indian Express, in recent years mostly the Observer of Business and Politics and the Birla family’s paper Hindustan Times), Ram Swarup’s contribution to the religious debate consists of the following books:

"Buddhism vis-à-vis Hinduism (1958, revised 1984);

"The Hindu View of Education (1971, text of a speech given before the convention of the RSS student organization ABVP);

"The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods (1980, on the rationale of polytheism);

"Hinduism vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam (1982, revised 1992, also in Hindi: Hindu Dharma, Isâiat aur Islam, 1985);

"Christianity, an Imperialist Ideology (1983, with Major T.R. Vedantham and Sita Ram Goel);

"Understanding Islam through Hadis (1983);269

"Foreword to a republication of D.S. Margoliouth’s Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (1985, original in 1905);

"Hindu-Sikh Relationship (1985);

"Ramakrishna Mission in Search of a New Identity (1986);

"Cultural Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces (1987);

"Foreword to Anirvan: Inner Yoga (1988, reprint 1995);

"Foreword to the republication of Sardar Gurbachan Singh Talib, ed.: Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab, 1947 (1991), also separately published as Whither Sikhism? (1991);270

"Foreword to a republication of William Muir’s The Life of Mohammed (1992, original in 1894);

"Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1993, a republication of the above-mentioned forewords to books on Mohammed by Muir and Margoliouth plus an enlarged version of Hinduism vis-à-vis Christianity and Islam);

"Woman in Islam (1994);

"Pope John-Paul II on Eastern Religions and Yoga: A Hindu-Buddhist Rejoinder (1995);

"On Hinduism: Reviews and Reflections (posthumously published, 1999).

Meditations: Yogas, Gods, Religions (posthumously published, 2000)."

"In October 1990, the Hindi translation of Understanding Islam through Hadis was banned, followed by the English version in March 1991; and in 1993, Syed Shahabuddin, who had managed to get Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses banned (September 1988), made an attempt to get Ram Swamp’s Hindu View of Christianity and Islam banned as well. A prompt reaction by Arun Shourie in his weekly column and a petition of intellectuals led by K.S. Lal contributed to the defeat of this attempt.271 People had not forgotten the result of Shahabuddin’s earlier book-banning endeavour, and even the secularists who had supported Shahabuddin on that occasion were in no mood for a repeat performance: they simply looked the other way."

................................................................................................

"Sita Ram Goel as an anti-Communist

"Sita Ram Goel was born in 1921 in a poor family (though belonging to the merchant Agrawâl caste) in a village in Haryana. As a schoolboy, he got acquainted with the traditional Vaishnavism practised by his family, with the Mahâbhârata and the lore of the Bhakti saints (especially Garibdas), and with the major trends in contemporary Hinduism, especially the Arya Samaj and Gandhism. He took an M.A. in History at Delhi University, winning prizes and scholarships along the way. In his school and early university days he was a Gandhian activist, helping a Harijan Ashram in his village and organizing a study circle in Delhi.

"In the 1930s and 40s, the Gandhians themselves came in the shadow of the new ideological vogue: socialism. When they started drifting to the Left and adopting socialist rhetoric, S.R. Goel decided to opt for the original rather than the imitation. In 1941 he accepted Marxism as his framework for political analysis. At first, he did not join the Communist Party of India, and had differences with it over such issues as the creation of the religion-based state of Pakistan, which was actively supported by the CPI but could hardly earn the enthusiasm of a progressive and atheist intellectual. He and his wife and first son narrowly escaped with their lives in the Great Calcutta Killing of 16 August 1946, organized by the Muslim League to give more force to the Pakistan demand.

"In 1948, just when he had made up his mind to formally join the Communist Party of India, in fact on the very day when he had an appointment at the party office in Calcutta to be registered as a candidate-member, the Government of West Bengal banned the CPI because of its hand in an ongoing armed rebellion. A few months later, Ram Swamp came to stay with him in Calcutta and converted him as well as his employer, Hari Prasad Lohia, out of Communism. Goel’s career as a combative and prolific writer on controversial matters of historical fact can only be understood in conjunction with Ram Swamp’s sparser, more reflective writings on fundamental doctrinal issues.

"Much later, in a speech before the Yogakshema society, Calcutta, 1983, he explained his relation with Ram Swamp as follows: “In fact, it would have been in the fitness of things if the speaker today had been Ram Swamp, because whatever I have written and whatever I have to say today really comes from him. He gives me the seed-ideas which sprout into my articles. … He gives me the framework of my thought. Only the language is mine. The language also would have been much better if it was his own. My language becomes sharp at times; it annoys people. He has a way of saying things in a firm but polite manner, which discipline I have never been able to acquire.”273"

"S.R. Goel’s first important publications were written as part of the work of the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia.

"World Conquest in Instalments (1952, an annotated reprint of chapters 3 and 7 of Josef Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, 1924);

"The China Debate: Whom Shall We Believe? (1953);

"Mind Murder in Mao-land (1953);

"China is Red with Peasants’ Blood (1953);

"Red Brother or Yellow Slave? (1953);

"Communist Party of China: a Study in Treason (1953);

"Conquest of China by Mao Tse-tung (1954, an annotated reprint of some of Mao’s writings on strategy);

"CPI Conspire for Civil War (1954).

"Netaji and the CPI (1955);

"Nehru’s Fatal Friendship (1955);

"Goel also published books on Communism by other authors, including Blowing up India: Reminiscences of a Comintern Agent by Philip Spratt (1955), who, as an English Comintern agent, had founded the Communist Party of India in 1926. After spending some time in prison as a convict in the Meerut Conspiracy case (1929), he had come under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi, and ended as one of the best-informed critics of Communism.

"Then, and all through his career as a polemical writer, the most remarkable feature of Sita Ram Goel’s position in the Indian intellectual arena was that nobody even tried to make a serious rebuttal to his theses: the only counter-strategy has always been, and still is, “strangling by silence”, simply refusing to ever mention his name, publications and arguments.

"An aspect of history yet to be studied is how such anti-Communist movements in the Third World were not at all helped (in fact, often opposed) by Western interest groups whose understanding of Communist ideology and strategy was just too superficial. Most US representatives starkly ignored the SDFA’s (Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia's) work, and preferred to enjoy the company of more prestigious (implying: fashionably anti-anti-Communist) opinion makers. Goel himself noted in 1961 about his Western anti-Communist contacts like Freda Utley, Suzanne Labin and Raymond Aron, who were routinely dismissed as bores or CIA agents: Communism was “opposed only by individuals and groups who have done so mostly at the cost of their reputation. … A history of these heroes and their endless endeavour has still to be written.”274"

................................................................................................

"Sita Ram Goel and the RSS

"In the 1950s, Goel was not active on the “communal” battlefield: not Islam or Christianity but Communism was his priority target. Yet, under Ram Swarup’s influence, his struggle against Communism became increasingly rooted in Hindu spirituality, the way Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Communism became rooted in Orthodox Christianity. He also co-operated with (but was never a member of) the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, and he occasionally contributed articles on Communism to the RSS weekly Organiser. In 1957 he contested the Lok Sabha election for the Khajuraho constituency as an independent candidate on a BJS ticket, but lost. He was one of the thirty independents fielded as candidates by Minoo Masani in preparation for the creation of his own Swatantra Party. Masani had selected him for being one of the rare men deemed able to stand up to Nehru in parliamentary debate."

"In that period (1952-60), apart from the topical books in English, Goel wrote and published 18 titles in Hindi: 8 titles of fiction and 1 of poetry written by himself; 3 compilations from the Mahâbhârata and the Tripitaka; and Hindi translations of these 6 books, mostly of obvious ideological relevance:

"The God that Failed, a testimony on Communism by Arthur Koestler, André Gide and other prominent ex-Communists;

"Ram Swarup’s Communism and Peasantry;

"Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, another testimony by an ex-Communist;

"George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four;

"Satyakâm Sokratez (“Truth-lover Socrates”), the three Dialogues of Plato centred round Socrates’ last days (Apology, Crito and Phaedo);

"Shaktiputra Shivâjî, a history of the seventeenth-century Hindu freedom fighter, originally The Grand Rebel by Denis Kincaid;

"There is an RSS aspect to this publishing activity. RSS secretary-general Eknath Ranade had asked Goel to educate RSS workers about literature, and to produce some literature in Hindi to this end. The understanding was that the RSS would propagate this literature and organize discussions about it. ... "

"During the Chinese invasion in 1962, some leftist politicians including P.N. Haksar, Nurul Hasan and the later Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, demanded Goel’s arrest. But at the same time, the Home Ministry invited him to take a leadership role in the plans for a guerrilla war against the then widely-expected Chinese occupation of eastern India. He made his co-operation conditional on Nehru’s abdication as Prime Minister, and nothing ever came of it.

"In 1963, Goel had a book published under his own name which he had written in 1961-62 as a series in Organiser under the pen name Ekâkî (“solitary”): a critique of Nehru’s consistent pro-Communist policies, titled In Defence of Comrade Krishna Menon.275 In it, he questioned the current fashion of attributing India’s Communist-leaning foreign policy to Defence Minister Krishna Menon, and demonstrated that Nehru himself had been a consistent Communist sympathizer ever since his visit to the Soviet Union in 1927. Nehru had stuck to his Communist sympathies even when the Communists insulted him as Prime Minister with their unbridled scatology. Nehru was too British and too bourgeois to opt for a fully authoritarian socialism, but like many European Leftists he supported just such regimes when it came to foreign policy. Thus, Nehru’s absolute refusal to support the Tibetans even at the diplomatic level when they were overrun by the Chinese army (“a Far-Eastern Munich”),276 cannot just be attributed to circumstances or the influence of his collaborators: his handover of Tibet to Communist China was quite consistent with his own political convictions.

"While refuting the common explanation that the pro-Communist bias in Nehru’s foreign policy was merely the handiwork of Minister Krishna Menon, Goel also drew attention to the harmfulness of this policy to India’s national interests. For all its pertinence and depth, the article serial in Organiser was discontinued after sixteen instalments because Ranade and Vajpayee feared that if any harm came to Nehru, the RSS would be accused of having “created the climate”, as in the Gandhi murder case."

"Goel’s critique of Nehru’s pro-China policies was eloquently vindicated by the Chinese invasion in October 1962, but it cost Goel his job. He withdrew from the political debate, went into business himself and set up Impex India, a company of book import and export with a modest publishing capacity.

"In 1964, RSS general secretary Eknath Ranade invited Goel to lead the prospective Vishva Hindu Parishad, which was founded later that year, but Goel set as his condition that he would be free to speak his own mind rather than act as a mouthpiece of the RSS leadership; the RSS could not accept this, and the matter ended there. Goel’s only subsequent involvement in politics was when he was asked by the BJS leadership to mediate with the dissenting party leader Balraj Madhok in a last attempt at conciliation, which failed; and when he worked as a member of the think-tank of the Janata alliance before it defeated Indira’s Emergency regime in the 1977 elections (though he was under watch and his correspondence was censored, he managed to stay out of the Emergency jails).

"As a commercial publisher, he did not seek out the typical “communal” topics, but none the less kept an eye on Hindu interests. That is why he published books like Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree (on indigenous education as admiring British surveyors found it in the nineteenth century), Ram Swamp’s apology of polytheism The Word as Revelation (1980), K.R. Malkani’s The RSS Story (1980) and K.D. Sethna’s Karpâsa in Prehistoric India (1981; on the chronology of Vedic civilization, implying decisive objections against the Aryan Invasion Theory). It may also be said that he thrived as a businessman and earned considerable wealth, an asset which was to make possible the next step.

"Sita Ram Goel as a Hindu revivalist In 1981

"Sita Ram Goel retired from his business, which he handed over to his son and nephew. He started the non-profit publishing house Voice of India with donations from sympathetic businessmen, and accepted Organiser editor K.R. Malkani’s offer to contribute some articles again, articles which were later collected into the first Voice of India booklets. Goel’s declared aim was to defend Hinduism by placing before the public correct information about the situation of Hindu culture and society, and about the nature, motives and strategies of its enemies. For, as the title of his book Hindu Society under Siege indicates, Goel claims that Hindu society has been suffering a sustained attack from Islam since the seventh century, from Christianity since the fifteenth, and from Marxism in the twentieth, and all three have carved out a place for themselves in Indian society from which they besiege Hinduism. The avowed objective of each of these three world-conquering movements, with their massive resources, is diagnosed as the replacement of Hinduism by their own ideology, or in effect: the destruction of Hinduism.

"Apart from numerous articles, letters, contributions to other books (for example, Devendra Swarup, ed.: Politics of Conversion) and translations (for example, the Hindi version of Taslima Nasrin’s Bengali book Lajja),277 Goel has contributed the following books to the inter-religious debate:

"Hindu Society under Siege (1981, revised 1992);

"Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1982);

"How I Became a Hindu (1982, enlarged 1993);

"Defence of Hindu Society (1983, revised 1987);

"The Emerging National Vision (1983);

"History of Heroic Hindu Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders (1984);

"Perversion of India’s Political Parlance (1984);

"Saikyularizm, Râshtradroha kâ Dûsrâ Nâm (Hindi: “Secularism, another name for treason”, 1985);

"Papacy, Its Doctrine and History (1986);

"Preface to The Calcutta Quran Petition by Chandmal Chopra (a collection of texts alleging a causal connection between communal violence and the contents of the Quran; 1986, enlarged 1987 and again 1997);

"Muslim Separatism, Causes and Consequences (1987);

"Foreword to Catholic Ashrams, Adapting and Adopting Hindu Dharma (a collection of polemical writings on Christian inculturation; 1988, enlarged 1994 with new subtitle: Sannyasins or Swindlers?);

"History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989, enlarged 1996);

"Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them (1990 vol.1, enlarged 1999; 1991 vol.2, enlarged 1993);

"Genesis and Growth of Nehruism (1993);

"Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (1994);

"Time for Stock-Taking (1997), a collection of articles critical of the RSS and BJP;

"Vindicated by Time. The Niyogi Committee Report on Christian Missionary Activities (1998, reprint of the full report from 1956);

"Pseudo-Secularism, Christian Missions and Hindu Resistance (1998), the separately available editorial foreword to Vindicated by Time."

"Goel’s writings are practically boycotted in the media, both by reviewers and by journalists and scholars collecting background information on the communal problem. Though most Hindutva stalwarts have some Voice of India publications on their not-so-full bookshelves, the RSS Parivar refuses to offer its organizational omnipresence as a channel of publicity and distribution. Since most India-watchers have been brought up on the belief that Hindu activism can be identified with the RSS Parivar, they are bound to label Sita Ram Goel (the day they condescend to mentioning him at all, that is) as “an RSS man”. It may, therefore, surprise them that the established Hindu organizations have so far shown very little interest in his work."

"It is not that they would spurn his services: in its Ayodhya campaign, the Vishva Hindu Parishad has routinely referred to a “list of 3000 temples converted into or replaced by mosques”, meaning the list of nearly 2000 such cases in Goel, ed.: Hindu Temples, vol.I. Goel also published the VHP argumentation in the government-sponsored scholars’ debate of 1990-91 (titled History vs. Casuistry), and he straightened and corrected the clumsily drafted BJP White Paper on Ayodhya. But organizationally, the Parivar is not using its networks to spread Ram Swamp’s and Sita Ram Goel’s books and ideas. Twice, in 1962 and 1982, the RSS intervened with the editor of Organiser to have ongoing serials of articles by Goel, on Nehru on Islam, halted (the second time, the editor himself, the long-serving arch-moderate K.R. Malkani, was sacked as well). And ideologically, it has always turned a deaf ear to their analysis of the problems facing Hindu society."

................................................................................................

Arun Shourie

"After Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel started an intellectual Hindu awakening separate from the propaganda channels of the Sangh Parivar, others have joined them or followed their example. One of them is a towering personality in India’s print media: Arun Shourie, who gained fame in India as the crusading editor of Indian Express. Arun Shourie was born in Jalandhar in 1941 in a Panjabi Saras wat Brahmin family as the son of a famed civil servant and later founder of Common Cause (a public-interest juridical pressure-group), H.D. Shourie. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse University (New York), then worked for the World Bank.

"Back in India in 1976, Shourie was to work for several leading dailies. He met newspaper owner Ramnath Goenka when staying at the Indian Express guest house in Bangalore: “Ramnath Goenka started the transformation to today’s Arun Shourie, the roots of which date back to 1976. ‘What are you doing?’, Goenka asked. ‘I am writing a book’, said Shourie. ‘Nobody will read your book’, said Goenka, ‘you come and work for me’.”278 Goenka made him executive editor of Indian Express but sacked him a few years later. In 1982 he joined the Times of India, with the understanding that he would succeed Girilal Jain as editor, but Jain went back on his word and had Shourie sacked in 1983. Then Goenka took him back, and Shourie made history as editor of Indian Express.

"Shourie made a name for himself by his fearless criticism of Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial methods (see his books Symptoms of Fascism and Mrs. Gandhi’s Second Reign), his lucid observation of the Janata interregnum (Institutions in the Janata Phase) and more generally by his crusades against falling moral standards in public life. He played a decisive role in Rajiv Gandhi’s electoral defeat in 1989 with the revelations about the Bofors arms deal (see his book These Lethal, Inexorable Laws: Rajiv, His Men & His Regime).

"As a high-profile dissident, Shourie was blacklisted by a number of criminal and extremist groups, and became a regular recipient of death threats (and of journalistic and other prizes, for example, the Magsaysay Award and the International editor of the Year Award), entitling him to the dubious privilege of round-the-clock police protection. In late 1990, he was again sacked as Indian Express editor and since then, he has established himself as a syndicated columnist and independent self-publishing writer. His books on religion-related issues and on questions concerning national unity, mostly reworked compilations of his columns, are the following:

"Hinduism, Essence and Consequence (1979, a rationalist critique of Hindu scripture);

"Religion in Politics (1987, enlarged 1989);

"Individuals, Institutions, Processes: How One May Strengthen the Other in India Today (1990, application of Gandhian principles to India’s current political life);

"‘The Only Fatherland’: Communists, ‘Quit India’ and the Soviet Union (1991, a historical study of Communist treason against the freedom movement);

"The State as Charade: V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar and the Rest (1992; not in itself about religion, but the issues which troubled the Government periods studied happened to be casteism and Ayodhya);

"Indian Controversies (1993); A Secular Agenda (1993);

"Missionaries in India (1994, an elaborated version of a speech given on 5 January 1994 before the Golden Jubilee meeting of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India);

"A run Shourie and His Christian Critic (1995; the record of a debate in Hyderabad subsequent to the Missionaries book);279

"The World of Fatwas, or the Shariah in Action (1995); Worshipping False Gods. Ambedkar, and the Facts Which Have Been Erased (1997);

"Eminent Historians. Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998);

"Harvesting Our Souls. Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claims (1999).

"The first book, Hinduism, Essence and Consequence, is sometimes quoted by anti-Hindu polemicists, because it actually debunks much of the pious self-flattery commonly found in anglicized-Hindu books on religion. It points out the contradictions and circular reasoning in basic texts of Hinduism including the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Because of its strongly secular-humanist outlook, this first book has paradoxically enhanced Shourie’s later credibility as a spokesman for Hinduism."

"Arun Shourie is an embarrassment to the critics of Hindu revivalism. With his high intellectual qualifications, his well-known record of struggle for democracy and for morality in politics, and with his fortitude in his private life (he is a caring father of a handicapped son), he can hardly be dismissed as one of those monsters which the “Hindu fundamentalists” are supposed to be."

................................................................................................

"Writers and journalists

"In English-language Indian journalism, there has been a considerable migration of reputable secularists into the Hindu revivalist fold. Two well-known examples are Girilal Jain and Swapan Dasgupta.

"Girilal Jain, a long-time confidant of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, was Times of India editor in the 1980s. After being dismissed there in 1989 for his increasing sympathy towards the BJP, he continued writing as a syndicated columnist until his death in 1993. ... "

"A selection of his columns was posthumously published under the title The Hindu Phenomenon by his daughter, political scientist Meenakshi Jain.281 By the time he died, his other daughter Sandhya Jain was making her name as a combative pro-Hindu columnist."

"Meanwhile, younger Hindu voices were given a forum in the newspapers (sometimes under pressure from their commercial departments),283 the most articulate example being Varsha Bhosle, a sharp critic of not only the anti-Hindu forces but also of the Hindu slackness in the BJP. We should also not forget the journalists who openly affiliate themselves with the Sangh Parivar without necessarily ceasing to be perceptive columnists or fearless investigators, such as veteran editor M.V. Kamath, Dina Nath Mishra and others.

"In 1993, when the Hindu side was under fire for its alleged responsibility in the Demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, famous NRI authors Nirad C. Chaudhuri and V.S. Naipaul, who had little to gain or fear in India, have also contributed to Hindu revivalist polemic, most of all in their interviews in mid-1993.284 On that occasion, Naipaul made waves with his assessment that “what is happening in India is a new historical awakening”. The concise and occasional nature of their interventions is easily compensated for by their international standing and, for credibility, by their earlier anti-Hindu positions.285 For this reason, they are very eagerly quoted as arguments of authority in numerous Hindutva pamphlets."

................................................................................................

"As a lot of the polemic between Hindu revivalism and its opponents concerns history, it is no surprise that we find several professional historians among the main contributors to the Hindu Revivalist debating position. Kishori Saran Lal (1920) taught history at the universities of Delhi, Jodhpur and Hyderabad. Before entering the “communal” arena, Lal had already gained some fame as a historian, with his shiny illustrated book The Mughal Harem (1988) adorning many a parlour table. He was first accused of “Hindu communalism” after the publication of Growth of Muslim Population in India (1973). As he told me, he noticed he was no longer being invited to certain conferences, and upon inquiring was told that he had painted an intolerably negative image of Islamic rule in India.286 He says he hadn’t suspected that his findings (for example, a sharp decline in the Indian population during the Sultanate period 1206-1526) could be considered as showing any “communal” animus. In the subsequent years, he was inconspicuously reaccepted into the mainstream and could have forgotten about the ideological struggle had he chosen to."

"After his retirement, however, he associated openly with Hindu revivalism. Thus, he chaired the Historians’ Forum, a group of scholars who supported the temple thesis in the Ayodhya debate. A week after the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, it was he who, along with VHP-affiliated archaeologist Dr. S.P. Gupta and with Dr. Sudha Malaiya, presented the decisive evidence which came to light during the demolition: a stone inscription declaring in so many words that the building of which it was part was a temple dedicated to Rama.287 The following are his scholarly contributions to the Hindu revivalist argument on Islam:

"Indian Muslims, Who Are They? (1990);

"Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992);

"Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994);

"Growth of Scheduled Tribes and Castes in Medieval India (1995), a large part of which is devoted to the role of the Islamic regime in the marginalization of certain classes of Hindu society;

"Theory and Practice of the Islamic State (1998)."

................................................................................................

"Another historian of impeccable repute who joined the Hindu revivalist circle of scholars was the late Harsh Narain (1922-95), a scholar of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, who taught at five Indian universities including BHU and AMU. He was a member of the team of scholars mandated by the VHP during the Government-sponsored historians’ debate in 1990-91. The following books of his are pertinent to our topic:

"Jizyah and the Spread of Islam (1990);

"The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute. Focus on Muslim Sources (1991);

"Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1991)."

................................................................................................

"Three amateur historians should also be mentioned. Suhas Majumdar (1937-96) was a mathematician who started taking an interest in Islamic doctrine after reflecting on how he had narrowly escaped the Noakhali slaughter of 1946. In this context, one title of his which must be considered is: Jihâd, the Islamic Doctrine of Permanent War (1994)."

"Another mathematician to join the polemic is N.S. Rajaram, engineering researcher at the University of Houston and NASA adviser. After retirement, though a US citizen, he chose to live part of the year in his native Bangalore. He has contributed several books to the ongoing debate, notably: The Politics of History (1994);

"Secularism, the New Mask of Fundamentalism (1995);

"Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization (1996);

"Profiles in Deception: Ayodhya and the Dead Sea Scrolls (2000).

"Bank employee Shrikant Talageri (b. 1958) from Mumbai has authored two books of considerable genius, which deal with ancient history but bring in some ideas on the contemporary Hindu-Muslim and Hindu-secularist confrontations too: Indian Nationalism and Aryan Invasion Theory (1983); The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis (2000)."

................................................................................................

"One such independent historian who deserves mention here is Ram Gopal Misra, who taught at Meerut University. Important in the present context is his book Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders upto 1206 AD (1983), which counters the belief shared by Indian Muslims and Hindus that there was no effective Hindu defence against the Islamic invasions."

"For the earlier part of the twentieth century, we should mention a few influential scholars whose views were less controversial then than they were to become in the decades of secularist-Marxist hegemony, and who are now regurlarly quoted in Hindu revivalist polemic. One of the most lucid exponents of Hindu tradition in this century was definitely Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947). He was a Tamil Brahmin born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, who studied Geology in England and worked in the USA, where he was to remain for most of his life. His understanding of Hindu philosophy and religion was quite precise, and his comparative perspective is still nearly unequalled; his “works provide virtually a complete education in themselves”.288 In the more high-brow debates, notably on the exact relation between Hinduism and Buddhism, his input is decisive, even though it is now referred to only by some BHU professors, rarely by print media like Organiser.

"Another art historian thoroughly at home in the Vedic worldview, and meriting mention in this survey, is the late Professor V.S. Agrawal of BHU, if only for his countering, in his collection of articles India, a Nation (from the period 1943-1970), the colonial-cum-Marxist position that India is an artificial state without ethnic or historical legitimacy. Finally, established historians like Sir Jadunath Sarkar and R.C. Majumdar, and anthropologists like G.S. Ghurye, while by no means involved in polemics or politics, have also published the kind of findings which earned them the label “Hindu communalist”."

"Two civil servants should be mentioned as committed participants in the Hindu revivalist side of the debate. One is a retired police officer, Baljit Rai (1928), a privileged witness to the state’s neglect of urgent security issues, and author of:

"Islamic Fundamentalism in the Indian Subcontinent (1991);

"Demographic Aggression against India: Muslim Avalanche from Bangladesh (1993);

"Is India Going Islamic? (1994)."

"The other civil servant in our list is Abhas Kumar Chatterjee (1942). Like his old class fellow at Saint Stephen’s College, Arun Shourie, he built himself a reputation as a crusader against corruption in the administration, again to the embarrassment of the detractors of Hindu revivalism. He actually practises the anti-caste and anti-dowry social reforms which others only preach: as a born Brahmin he married an Oraon (tribal) woman, and he has always refused to attend weddings if he is aware that a dowry (dahej) has been paid.

"In 1992, he tendered his resignation in protest against the all-devouring corruption in the state of Bihar. He was involved with the Ramakrishna Mission for a while, but was never connected to (and actually an outspoken critic of) the Sangh Parivar. None the less, he participated in the gathering of evidence for the VHP during the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on Ayodhya. Here, we shall pay attention to his book: The Concept of Hindu Nation (1993)."

"Hindu revivalism is not a movement with membership rolls. Some people openly profess that this is where they situate themselves politically, but quite a few arguments supporting the Hindu revivalist viewpoint have been made by people normally not classified as such. On some points, nationalist Congress leaders Lokamanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, as well as anti-nationalist social leader Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, have been spokesmen and agents of the same ideals which declared Hindu revivalists profess. Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel started as Gandhians, and it is even said that: “In modern India it was primarily Mahatma Gandhi who sought such a Hindu revival. It is his ideas (however attenuated), particularly on the economy, which continue to resonate in the minds of the Hindu revivalists and are (at least rhetorically) embodied in their current policy programs.”289

"Here and there, we shall come across such instances where a Congressman or other formal outsider to the movement took the stand which Hindu revivalists also took (or would have taken if present). It will not do to separate the Hindu revivalist movement from Hindu society as a whole: there is a definite continuity between them, as there is between a tree and its roots."

................................................................................................

"11. The decline of women’s status in the post-Vedic age is documented in A.S. Altekar: The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization. Altekar’s own drive to prove this point was typical of the widespread effort, pioneered precisely by the Arya Samaj, to demonstrate the consonance of Vedic and modern values. See also L.K. Tripathi: Position and Status of Hindu Women in Ancient India."

"14. Literature on Lekh Ram’s arguments in Risâla-i-Jihâd is extremely scarce. Kenneth W. Jones devotes five whole pages to the Arya-Muslim conflict provoked by the book, but hardly one page (Arya Dharma, p. 150) concerns the actual contents of its polemic. Jones does not evaluate the historical accuracy of Lekh Ram’s position, but merely expresses his own contempt for this “infamous pamphlet” which “fitted well into Hindu prejudice”. The book itself is very hard to find now, and most living Arya Samajis have never seen it; I myself was told at the Sarvadeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabhâ (All-India Arya Representative Council) office that unfortunately they could not find a copy. Is it the present secularist climate which makes the Arya Samaj shy about its past stand against Islam?"

"16. Whether Ahmadiyas are Muslims at all is disputed, because Ahmad’s claim to prophethood is incompatible with Mohammed’s status as “seal of the prophets”. After Partition, the Pakistani (not the Indian) Ahmadiyas revised Ahmad’s status to that of Mujaddid, “Renewer”, but the Ulema were not convinced. The Khâksar militia, founded by Alluma Mashreqi in the mould of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (Mashreqi had returned from Germany in the 1930s), terrorized the Ahmadiyas with open encouragement from Maulana Abul-Ala Maududi (who was tried and sentenced to death for this in 1953, but soon released). In 1974, the Pakistani Government ruled that Ahmadiyas would no longer be considered Muslims, so that their entry in mosques is forbidden, while their own places of worship can no longer be called mosques."

"40. Jana Gana Mana itself is controversial because Tagore had allegedly written it in honour of the King of England, George V, the jana gana mana adhinâyak, “master of the people’s minds”, and the Bhârata bhâgya vidliâtâ, “shaper of India’s destiny”, mentioned in the opening line. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for this, and there is no convincing alternative explanation for the said opening line. In his 1911 Delhi darhâr (royal court session), George V had annulled the Partition of Bengal, conceding a nationalist demand, and that could give this glorification of the king a nationalist twist; but in general, Tagore was quite pro-British, which is what made him eligible for a Knighthood and the Nobel Prize (1913)."

"46. J.M. Jagtiani: Swami Vivekananda on Islam. I am not aware of a separate publication of his statements on Christianity, but his polemical exchanges with the missionaries have been presented from a Hindu revivalist angle in S.R. Goel: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, Ch. 13."

It's a pity Elst shirks harder path of reading, and attempting to comprehend, the two great souls - Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo - and instead chooses to quote for lesser sources commenting on them and their views; this is perhaps due ho hus Western upbringing as a catholic, whereby he must trust a far lesser institution and bunch of sources on object of his faith, than the object itself. But he could have attempted the seemingly difficult Himaalayan passes and realised that benefits include unimaginable beauty reality instead of guesses ventured from a few miles downhill, a few miles away.

................................................................................................

"51. Aurobindo’s telegram to C. Rajagopalachari, his letter to Sir Stafford Cripps and another letter explaining the same position are partly reproduced in Sri Aurobindo: India’s Rebirth, pp.228-30. Gandhi’s only comment (quoted ibid., though other sources attribute the comment to Nehru) was: “He has retired from political life, why does he interfere!”

"52. After Aurobindo’s death on 5 December 1950, the paper soon became irrelevant to politics, though it continued to exist as a monthly controlled by followers who prefer to ignore the political aspect of Aurobindo’s thought. K.D. Sethna later wrote some interesting books on ancient Indian history, especially Karpâsa (“cotton”, about the far-reaching chronological implications of the archaeological and literary evidence concerning cotton, 1981) and The Problem of Aryan Origins (1980, 2nd ed. 1992)."

With a typical western bent, Elst shows little respect for sects or spiritual institutions with less than clout in terns of number of followers, willingness of followers to violence, and general clout of the institution in terms of wealth, property, political power, or readiness to do an inquisition - requirement for upper castes as defined outside India.

"53. For Aurobindo on Communist expansionism, including his prediction in June 1950 that China would invade Tibet (as it did five months later, to Nehru’s apparent surprise), see Aurobindo: India’s Rebirth, pp.244-45; and Sri Aurobindo on Himself, pp.416-17."

JFK, reportedly, was astounded about "a yogi sitting in silent meditation could predict" China’s intentions to attack, several years before it took place.

................................................................................................

"138. An illustration of media bias is the total silence about this service aspect of RSS work. Thus, after the plane crash near Delhi in November 1996, the Marxist weekly Frontline published pictures of the relief work, on which the Hindi-speaking reader can recognize RSS banners, but the captions are strictly silent about the RSS participation. The Western media have duly noted that the Islamists in Turkey and Egypt have built themselves a respected position with their social work, but the corresponding information about the RSS is systematically withheld."

"174. During the discussion on the 1996 Lok Sabha elections in the subsequent South Asia conference in Madison, Paul Brass cut short musings by some panelists about Vajpayee’s “moderate views” with the curt reminder that “Vajpayee is a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man”. This is quite right, but the question is: should this make us suspect Vajpayee’s “progressive” statements, or should it make us rethink our frozen views about RSS “Rightism”?"

Why are there conferences in Madison or anywhere in USA, about Hindus in India, where so-called whites, or otherwise people non-related to India, are those that are seemingly influential speakers? Is this colonialism without trouble if administration, a la British deciding to fire China and Tibet to buy opium, and conceding Tibet to China?

How would it look if a conference in Zambia assumes it has rights to decide matters, or pronounce judgements on, about laws in US, and about words from Vatican ?

................................................................................................

"Foreword to the republication of Sardar Gurbachan Singh Talib, ed.: Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab, 1947 (1991), also separately published as Whither Sikhism? (1991);270"

"270. The original had been published in 1950 by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, Amritsar. Remark how the Sikhs did take the trouble of more or less cataloguing the atrocities which the Pakistanis had committed on them as well as on the Hindus; the Hindu nationalist organizations failed to make any serious effort in this direction."

................................................................................................

................................................

January 24, 2022 - January 30, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

Ideology and polemic

................................................................................................

"THE SANGH’S ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

"Too busy to think

"A first perusal of the literature of the organized Hindutva movement, particularly of the Sangh Parivar, the “RSS family” including the BJP, will leave the reader with the impression of an unusual intellectual poverty. ... "

Unlike, say, Calvin Coolidge? Ronald Reagan? Big and little bush? George V and subsequent royals? Paul Buchanan, who wrote at least one book to prove Hitler was a peace-loving, honest, sincere man, forced by an aggressive Churchill to war because the latter had always wanted one? Cousin Willy who spirited Lenin deep into Russia so his first cousin's family was butchered with not even bones left for a burial, all because she had refused him and chosen Nicholas, another cousin? Or Marxists who spin words without meaning, seemingly lofty intellectual but in reality building prosperity if any on massacres of millions, as Mao did?

As for "Hindu" politics, intellectual background is quite plenty and firm if their education has been normal, in modern and traditional spheres; their inclination for action in buildination rather than going fir publications and awards speaks for an honest endeavour to serve India.

" ... First of all, relative to the age and membership of this family of organizations, its literary output is quite small. Secondly, what little is available is often very elementary and repetitive. A movement with literally millions of activists, in existence for more than seventy years, and operating in a country where opinions are free and publishing is cheap and easy, ... "

Elst forgets how much British looted, after Islamic invaders, so that from the famed wealthy and prosperous land that invaders came from far to loot, India was reduced to one that suffered famines and was scoffed at, including by the same looters who stole harvests and said millions dying in India didn't matter - last two including Churchill, and the USA policy paper disclosing instructions to "let India go, save Pakistan", because it was useful as military base to war against Russia, not because anyone in US cared about people of Pakistan starving in droves. Well, if Nixon sent navy to stop India from helping East Bengal out of the genocide by West Pakistan, why would any Pakistan starvbe a concern, except for the military bases against Russia bit?

Publishing cheap and easy? Has Elst ever looked at poor even of rural Mississippi, let alone of, say, slums in Mumbai? Or rural regions? Belgium did loot Congo, so by standards he's used to, India isn't expensive. Did he bother asking any auto driver if he could afford blankets in Delhi winter, never mind how he managed the killing heat of summer, unlike most of those who think publishing in India is cheap and easy, who can afford to refrain from stepping out?

But then, he probably opines, as do German males, that brothels across German border in Czech Republic are filled with eager eastern women, not cheated and blackmailed ones, tortured and forcedto serve.

" ... A movement with literally millions of activists, in existence for more than seventy years, and operating in a country where opinions are free and publishing is cheap and easy, has little excuse for its very limited achievements in the intellectual processing of the situation and challenges before it. ... "

Opinions are free because India, unlike West, really does have freedom of speech; but asserting rights of Hindu people and faith to exist requires no defence unless you belong to a society brought up on inquisition and jihad, massacring everyone with a difference of opinion. A so-called "Hindu political party" requires no gymnastics to convince its public of the righteousness of its cause, that of stopping encroachment by invading creeds attempting to wipe out India's ancient culture and treasure of knowledge.

And people aren't stupid just because they're poor, as India knows all too well.

" ... As we shall see, it does not even want an excuse, for it has deliberately chosen the non-intellectual mode of functioning. ... "

Does Elst see the difference in his church and a Hindu religious activity? Silence of yoga in latter, compared with antisemitic preaching on regular basis of former for two millennia?

Or he's really of the opinion that women can't think, because moms breastfeed babies without preaching intellectually first for hours?

"As the most direct manifestation of the Sangh Parivar’s anti-intellectualism, the situation on the ground is that RSS men are always on the move. As a US-based Hindu leader reported: “When I make a phone call to an RSS office-bearer in India, he will most often not be in the Delhi office, not in Nagpur or another town, but somewhere on the way.”1 And the wife of a BJP leader observed: “Being on the way from one place to another is a status symbol among RSS men.”2 With all this physical movement, little time and occasion is left for concentrated mental work. One visible effect is the poor state of health of RSS office-bearers, whose bodies are exhausted by all this locomotion.

"One reason for this is the RSS’s original preference for “secret society” methods as a consequence of Keshav Baliram Hedgewar’s association with the armed fringe of the Freedom Movement. Thus, after returning to Nagpur from his medical studies in Calcutta in 1916, Hedgewar formed a “Revolution Group” (Kranti Dal), and “over 150 volunteers enrolled themselves with the Kranti Dal. Greatest attention was bestowed on maintaining absolute secrecy. No new recruits were admitted without a thorough scrutiny. … All communications were sent through messengers, and invariably in coded language.”3 Till today, the RSS leadership prefers to communicate with the local branches through personal visits.

"The contemporary justification for all this locomotion is that Hindu society has been lacking in communal solidarity, and that face-to-face contact in regular meetings at the shâkhâ (branch) level and in regular visitations by regional and national office-bearers is a substantial factor in kindling the community spirit."

Elst isn't mentioning that personal talks isn't the chief reason, let alone the only one, why they are not sitting in a cushy position and living in luxury. They literally are building nation, including helping those in need. Any calamity has RSS men rush to help, and silently having done so, return, without publicity or writing and speaking about it for fame, without funding except from private sources. This includes Godse and his colleagues rushing to help victims in regions as far as Noakhali or Hyderabad, various RSS people rushing to help in every storm affected region whether coastal Andhra or Orissa, humongous events such as the tsunami and the Himaalayan floods a few years ago.

................................................................................................

"The RSS think-tank

"There is not much of a think-tank culture in India, much less in the organized Hindu movement. ... "

Elst must think that Hinduism survived, unlike other creeds wiped out by Christianity and Islam, only because the latter two were fir some vague reason not intent on destroying Hinduism, unlike cultures of Egypt, Persia et al.

His shallowness is evident when he quotes Heehs on Sri Aurobindo, instead of reading the original, and similar treatment he accords Vivekananda, with facile and wrong conclusions that everyone is following West.

"The pinnacle of the DRI’s career was when it collected some scholars from outside the Sangh Parivar and prepared the intellectual defence of the Hindu (VHP) claim to the disputed Ayodhya site. This resulted in an ostensible victory during the Government-sponsored historians’ debate (winter 1990-91) with the group of Marxist and Muslim historians mandated by the Babari Masjid Action Committee.5 After that, however, it was back to the normal unexciting pace."

Well, the Left simply refrained from attending subsequent meetings, having realised that their opposition had irrefutable evidence of existence of temple and they had only false theories made up to attack Hindus, but really India needed no arguments to prove Ayodhya belonged to Raama, while others base their negation thereof on their creeds denying all others at pain of hellfire promised to non-believers.

As for non-intellectual characterisation of Hindus, look at the rolls of graduates, or various scientific and technological institutions.

" ... In the polemical arena, it is no match for its Marxist counterparts."

Just because Marxists use words and noise as weapon to attack others, doesn't mean they are either intelligent, much less intellectual, or more so than those they attack. And who's the intellectual opposition to communists in USA or UK or Europe? Ayn Rand comes to mind, but who else?

" ... Sri Aurobindo already said it: “I believe that the main cause of India’s weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think—incapacity of thought or ‘thought phobia’.”10 The great ailment of India today is the decline in thinking power. India was once the cradle of great pioneers in abstract and social sciences (e.g. Panini in linguistics, Baudhayana in mathematics, Aryabhatta in astronomy), and it is already recovering some of its ancient greatness in economics and the exact sciences. But this hopeful trend has not yet reached the centres of Hindutva ideology."

Beat a child into within an inch of its life, hitting its head on wall, it will try to recover, not spend effort to give a speech to the attacker or write a thesis. This is what India has been through from Islamic onslaught onwards until independence.

................................................................................................

" ... Hindutva activists often use the categories developed by their enemies and they become the prisoners of these categories. For example, first they let their enemies lay down the norm of secularism, and then they try to live up to this norm and prove that they are better secularists than others, hence BJP “positive secularism” vs. Nehruvian “pseudo-secularism”. This way, they constantly have to betray their own political identity and try to fashion themselves a new (“genuinely secular”) identity which their enemies have defined but are not willing to concede to them."

Elst is wrong on both counts. For one, RSS didn't begin or go on with a decided designation of enemy for anyone, never mind borrowing glasses. When, say, a concept is in question, whether secularism or casteism, it's up to oneself to see what one thinks and where one fits. An empty and false diatribe as used by left is ultimately good for no one. When Hindus say that nothing can be as secular as Hindus, it's literally true - where did Jews and Parsees survive without persecution? For that matter, a king in India was murdered by the killer bin Kasim, sent by the Arab sultan to murder the grandsons of the prophet, because the king refused to surrender them.

Trouble isn't that RSS or Hindus aren't secular, it's that Islam and Christianity are not - those are the creeds that preach promise of hell for everyone in any sect other than ones own, week in and week out. It's not that RSS is trying to prove Hindus are secular, it's thst those attacking Hindus lie, just to attack. It's not that Hindus have caste, it's that others lie to say they dont; they do, but pretend it's not castes.

"For another example, in a Doordarshan (Indian national TV) debate between VHP leader Giriraj Kishore and Janata Dal Scheduled Caste leader Ram Vilas Paswan, the latter objected to the Mahâbhârata episode in which the archery teacher Drona rejects the tribal boy Ekalavya as a pupil, as an illustration of how deeply ingrained caste prejudice is in Hindu tradition. Kishore could have explained that within the story, this attitude of Drona was not a matter of caste prejudice at all, nor did Ekalavya see it that way: Drona’s job was to make the Pândava brothers into the best archers in the land, and so he didn’t want to train anyone, of any caste, who might become their rival at a later stage. Instead, the VHP leader, hopelessly on the defensive, hastened to disclaim Drona (“We do not recognize him as an âchârya”) with a typical readiness to lop off from Hindu tradition any and every part to which the opinion establishment objects."

Quite so. One can indeed understand why and how the teacher had arrived st such a point, but it's easier and cheaper to say instead thst Dronaachaarya is not regarded as the ideal, which he isn't dye precisely to his actions and choices through life, of which this was only one.

"This tendency to try and live up to standards set by one’s declared enemies has been common Hindu practice in the modern age. Thus, the Christian and Muslim emphasis on monotheism and condemnation of idol-worship has been interiorized by Hindu reform movements even as the latter were trying to reconvert Indian Muslims and counter Christian power in India. Instead of defending Hindu polytheism against the missionary vilification of “idolatry”, the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj movements claimed that monotheism was indeed right and polytheism was indeed wrong, but that Hinduism, properly understood, is more monotheistic than Christianity and Islam. As Shrikant Talageri has remarked: “This was rather like accepting or adopting the European prejudice which treats white-skinned people as superior to dark-skinned people, and then trying to show that Indian skins are whiter than European skins!”24"

True, on both counts, even though it's also true thst Hinduism has better comprehension of unity behind diversity even of Divine, unlike Greek or Roman polytheism on one side and abrahmic portrayal of God as male, denigrating female to Satan. The latter have done far more damage to world, via burning libraries, destruction of priceless cultural and historic objects, boots, and massacres, so one has to wonder why foes anyone ever think monotheism is superior in any way, except by analogue taken higher from monogamy to deity replacing male consort. There can be no other logic there.

In fact, demanding that monotheism is superior is no different from atheists demanding proof of deity via, say, a punch in the nose delivered by the said deity. Demanding monotheism and faith therein is simply denying reality and making up ones mind to serve a particular God, on par logically with choice of a slaveowner by a feudal serf. In reality, whether there are 330 million or none, isn't proven by the said punch in the nose.

................................................................................................

Here comes more racism.

"To the general atmosphere of intellectual sloppiness, the RSS has contributed its own wilful anti-intellectual prejudice. The perception from which Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar started his RSS project was that Hindu society essentially had everything, even the best of everything, certainly also in intellectual culture, and that the only thing it lacked was organization. It is debatable whether lack of organization was a factor in the historical defeat of Hindu princes by Muslim invaders and British colonizers, but for the interbellum period with its communal escalation, this analysis possibly had its merits."

Just because West thinks little of Hindu knowledge and intellectual endeavours of antiquity, West assumes that it can only be laziness or anti-intellectualism, the reason that Hindus won't fall in line and write thesis after thesis debating Marx vs Augustin, which is not different from West in general - and Europe in particular - expeting India to see beauty defined by criteria suitable to racism of Europe.

Elst is even explicit in his attitude looking down on the Hindu thinking that India already has intellectually profound treasures of thought.

As for defeat of India by invaders, obviously Elst, like all non-Hindus, attributes it to superior valour of invaders vs laziness of India. Nothing could be further from facts, unless they also decide that Hitler had all the valour that was lacking in Europe as Europe looked in late 1940 - early 1941.

Fact is India had a deep, ancient, well rooted civilisation, while the invaders were barbarians who didn't abide by any rule except butchering everyone else. For example

civilians, who were generally, mostly unarmed, being attacked was a no-no in India, as was attacking women or rape.

Invaders on the contrary were barbarian, proud of achievements in this regard.

"While the Muslim vanguard had its party, the Muslim League, and its thought centre, Aligarh Muslim University, most politically active Hindus were members of the pluralist Indian National Congress, and the newly founded (1916) Benares Hindu University never played a role comparable to that of AMU for the Muslim community. Quite apart from formal organizations, the Muslims showed a much stronger commmunal solidarity, whereas the Hindus were more fragmented on caste, sect, class and ideological lines. ... "

So when Hindus are bring beaten up about secularism, avoid mentioning AMU, but flog Hindus next pointing out BHU wasn't communal enough to compete with AMU?

" ... Consider the fortunes of Gandhism and Communism. Gandhi was immensely popular, and he appealed deliberately to people’s emotions, while the Communists were a fringe group, but they worked on people’s minds. Now, who won? ...Gandhian do-good emotions proved to be no match at all for Marxist intellectual work."

Cheaters, especially those dedicated to lies and cheating, do win, as Hitler did every time, in the short run - until the opposition wakes up and turns around.

As for Gandhi, he was for ever trying to keep up the image created, and this is the only reason partition was forced on India, and also why he demanded India cede territory claimed fraudulently by Pakistan, apart from paying 550 million in middle of a war forced on India by Pakistan. He didn't want victory, he wanted the impossible achievement of surrendering human sacrifices from Hindus to wild beasts until they had a change of heart and get tired of feeding on live humans.

There's nothing intellectual about lying, including by Marxists or by church.

" ... To take an example from India’s immediate post-Independence history, the conservative wing of Congress was deeply rooted in Indian society and controlled the party apparatus, yet it lost out to Nehru. ... "

Again, that had nothing intellectual about it. Remember famous arguments about who won the JFK-Nixon debate, which television viewers decided JFK had won, while radio listeners thought opposite?

Jump ahead a few years, and you have diehard right wingers say it was noble of Nixon to accept responsibility instead of delegating it.

To those not blinded it had always been obvious the man was a liar and a thorough ignoble one. But Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter lost for very little reason while those like Reagan and bushes were seen as winners, despite having been cause of deaths of far greater numbers.

" ... “Patel might win on personalities and postings; [Nehru] would win on issues.”15 While the Congress bosses were sitting in their offices, Nehru was on the airwaves or being filmed during international meetings, busy creating public opinion in his own favour and instilling his own worldview. ... "

Again, Nehru didn't "win" with all this; he not only lost face himself, he brought India down, due to not listening to counsel from his betters - and the man responsible was Gandhi, for demanding Patel step aside for Nehru. The latter should have been free to do the foreign tours and speeches, while Patel kept a hand on the wheel, taking care of nation's defence and general policies.

Elst has a habit of arguing for truth and then obfuscation by doing opposite in a later chapter. Is this for fun of playing with minds, or defensive tactic to make left come down not so hard? Gemini, someone?

" ... Nehru objected to Tandon’s championing Hindi as link language and to his involvement in the rehabilitation of Hindu refugees from East Bengal, though Patel had argued that Tandon had a restraining influence on this “communalized” constituency. ... "

Gandhi had insisted that partition refugees be thrown out,out of not only the only shelters they could find, but thrown forcibly back into Pakistan, as a point amongst his conditions for ending his last hunger strike. It's not been publicised if Nehru had agreed to throw tens of millions back to be butchered, which Gandhi explicitly said they should do, because after the refugees were beaten out of the shelters onto streets in cold Delhi winter, babies, women, old and all, Gandhi wasn't popular - he was pelted with stones when he went to meet harijans, and had to be spirited out by back door by police. So Nehru branding helping refugees as communal is true to Gandhian spirit of blaming Hindus for escaping being massacred by Muslims.

" ... In modern politics, public opinion is important, not the “silent majority” which the RSS claims to represent, but vocal public opinion which influences the views of the silent majority. ... "

If that were true, US and most other literate societies must be Marxist, but obviously they are not.

Silent majority isn't dumb just due to not perusing Marxist debates, but knows enough about realities to decide for themselves.

Hence democracy.

................................................................................................

"Hindu critics of the BJP allege that in its eagerness to be progressive and acceptable, the party simply abrogates its own natural Hindu identity. To start with a controversial example, when the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987 made the existing Satî-sthal temples (commemorating the self-immolations of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) illegal, HMS member Jeevan Kulkarni made an unsuccessful attempt to have the Supreme Court declare the Act unconstitutional.25 The only politician of a major party to protest against the law was the late Kalyan Singh Kalvi, a Rajasthani member of the Rajput caste, the one most affected by the Act; far from being a Hindutva activist, he belonged to the militantly secularist Janata Dal. The BJP, by contrast, fully supported the new legislation."

Here again Elst fails to understand. Hindus did not "support" something so traumatic as sati, as a tradition; it became transformed from a legend of Gods into a tradition, due only to the horror of facing Islamic barbarian tradition of women being kidnapped and forced by the Islamic invaders, often not only gangraped but ordered to be gangraped, by hundreds of soldiers, orders issued not just by military leaders of Islamic invaders but by the so-called Muslim saints accompanying them.

Islam instructs Muslims, to make widows of enemies into their own slaves, used for sex by Muslims, and this isn't limited to widows but extends to all women, in particular to wives of Hindu men.

The famous Queen Padmini and all other women of Chittorgarh entering funeral pyre, as their men went for a final battle, ending the war waged by Allauddin Khilji, because he wanted Queen Padmini to be handed over to him by her husband, was the turning point where the legend turned into a tradition, needed while insecurities about safety of a woman were paramount, until Islamic rules were history.

Most Hindus subsequently welcomed the prevention of sati act, which was needed more in North India - south did not see the instances thereof as widespread, although a woman could make this choice.

So BJP wasn't forced by others to make this choice, as Elst mistakenly thinks.

Rajasthan saw the trauma of sati history far more, far longer, and commemorating the unfortunate women was a solace. The only unfortunate part was one time a protest march, by people in Rajasthan agitating for right to sati. This is more akin to ex-convicts in UK unable to sleep until they shackled their feet with heavy fetters. Hence the leftist from Rajasthan going the way Elst expects BJP to go, but this isn't what Hindus want or think ideal.

................................................................................................

"Kulkarni commented: “Congress and the BJP have succeeded where even Aurangzeb failed: to prevent the Hindus from honouring their heroines who braved death itself and provided inspiration for the Hindu warriors riding to their probable deaths in desperate struggles against the Muslim armies.”26 The BJP’s motive in supporting this legislation may be analysed as follows. Part of it is a genuine belief that the prohibition of honouring satî women is a necessary component of the prohibition of satî itself (there is a native Hindu tradition of opposing satî, for example, its prohibition in parts of the Maratha confederacy decades before it was prohibited in British Bengal in 1829).

"The greater part, however, is the fear that the party would be branded pro-satî if it didn’t support the crackdown on the satî-sthal category of Hindu temples. Nothing determines the BJP position as predictably as the fear of being associated with anything of which the secularist establishment disapproves."

Elst is wrong about the last part. Human lives matter more and if Elst were right, BJP could far more easily argue for monotheism, muslim appeasement and other stuff that gets both BJP and Hindus targeted by West, left and abrahmic creed institutions alike. None of that is done to avoid those attacks cheaply.

"Originally (at least in Indian politics), “communal” was the term by which the British labelled political arrangements, such as separate electorates and quota-based recruitment, which took the religious community as the operative unit rather than the individual or the family or the region or the nation. The term was never hurled at people who rejected these arrangements, but was quite sincerely accepted by the people who proposed the “communalization” of the polity: the British and the Muslim League openly advocated “communal” electorates and “communal” quota in the services. The Congress became a party to the “communal” principle through the Lucknow Pact (1916), which conceded “communal” electorates to the Muslim League. When in the early 1950s the British proposed the Communal Award, its beneficiaries never thought of treating “communal” as a dirty word and throwing it at the Communal Award’s opponents.

"The main opposition to the unapologetic communalism of the British and the Muslim League came not from Congress (except initially), but from the Hindu Mahasabha. The Hindutva movement was born in the struggle against communalism; that struggle was its very raison d’être. The HMS’s stated programme was to abolish communalism and make India an unalloyed democracy without separate electorates or recruitment by communal quota.

"Congress, embarrassed by its own compromise with communalism, tried to cloud the debate by misapplying the term “communal” to the HMS on the analogy of the Muslim League. It falsely posited a symmetry between the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, obscuring the antisymmetry between the League’s adherence and the HMS’s opposition to the communal principle.33 Very quickly, accurate usage of the term “communal” was eclipsed by muddled usage. Today, the mores of public discourse have sunk to the level where politicans and journalists and scholars systematically and exclusively apply the term to a movement which never used it as a description of its own positions, and which has always opposed those very policies which were described by their own proponents as “communal”. And where the term does apply, as in the co-existence of separate religion-based Personal Law systems (which the BJP opposes), it is studiously avoided."

This behaviour from Congress was typical of how Gandhi targeted other political parties and Hindus, to stay on top, while appeasing Muslims at any cost, neither principles nor question of truth, not even question of lives of millions of Hindus, deterring him in this.

"Consider this reading of the BJP’s friendly face by Islamic scholar Ausaf Vasfi: “Mr. L.K. Advani has gone to the extent of saying that the BJP is not anti-minority. … For the sake of power he has not hesitated to dilute his party’s very raison d’être… it would have been far more upright morally had Mr. Advani plainly admitted his party’s Hindu character and constituency. But he wants to have the best of both worlds. It is sheer hypocrisy.”36"

He's wrong, and Advani was not merely correct but truthful. In this false atmosphere everyone including Elst forgets that the Hindu stance is for allowing everyone, including Hindus, to survive and prosper, while Islamic creed is to finish off nonmuslims, and Vatican agenda is to finish off all other faiths and cultures.

................................................................................................

"One of the Sangh Parivar’s persistent failures has been its ineffectiveness in getting its message across to outsiders, whether Indian non-Hindus or foreign observers. To an extent, these were not failures because there was no attempt at success in the first place. For a long time, the RSS cultivated a stark non-interest in the opinions of outsiders. That is no longer the case, but the demonization which has widely caught on in past decades, is still making its effects felt."

RSS simply continued the Indian, ancient, tradition in this, which isn't comparable with politics of Marxists so much as, say, The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, which cares about physics and studies thereof, but not Marxist propaganda. India had always been sufficient for most part unto herself, until barbaric invaders began, to seek to invade, destroy and loot, about a millennium and half ago, as Islam went about doing to the world.

"An example of the RSS weakness on public relations is the staggering failure of the campaign reclaiming Ayodhya to communicate its case to the world. At a time when Native Americans, New Zealand Maoris and Aboriginal Australians were frequently (and often successfully) going to court to reclaim sacred sites and other heritage items, it should not have been too difficult to explain to the international public the reasonableness of Hindus claiming a Hindu sacred site, all the more so because the contentious building with mosque architecture was already in use as a Hindu temple since 1949 (with restrictions until, and without restrictions after 1986). Yet, the net result was the exact opposite: the whole of world opinion, to the extent that it took interest in a presumed backwater like India, was solidly behind the Muslim claim and decried the Hindus as “fundamentalists”, “fascists” and what not."

This wasn't due to failure of RSS as much as the West having always been in solidarity with Islamic invaders as far as India goes, for obvious reasons.

"In other conflicts (say, the Gulf War), world opinion will always contain vocal supporters for both sides, not in equal measure, but at least even the less popular party will not be entirely bereft of support. In the case of the Ayodhya controversy, nobody who cared to pronounce an opinion and had the media at his disposal to do so, has come out in support of the Hindu side. The single exception I know of was François Gautier, India correspondent of the French conservative daily Le Figaro, who described the reactions of his colleagues as “such pompous, overblown, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, atrocious, ridiculous, sly and totally undeserved outrage”.40 It is not really exaggeration to say that the BJP’s Ayodhya campaign was the public relations disaster of the century."

François Gautier is quite correct. But he could have added that it was the fellowship of colonial invaders and looters coupled with conversionist abrahmic exclusion of everyone else from humanity, added to everything he said, that made his colleagues what he said - with added zing.

Perhaps, added to it all, is the perception, encouraged by Jawaharlal Nehru, that India was at mercy of world opinion.

Those same colleagues of François Gautier, how many of them would expect their opposition to China throwing tanks at civilians be taken seriously by China?

And this is about the government dealing with unarmed young, not, like the Babri mosque, indigenous people taking matters in hand after petitioning governments for two centuries, about the structure built by an invader, on deliberate destruction perpetrated, by him, of the indigenous people's sacred site.

"In the same period, BJP office-bearer K.L. Sharma floated a so-called “Mahatma Gandhi formula” to solve the Ayodhya dispute, viz. that Muslims should voluntarily hand over the sites of demolished temples. Secularists could easily show that the cited reference to a specific issue of Gandhi’s weekly Young India wasn’t right, and that for all we know, Gandhi never said or wrote such a thing (though he did say: “Muslims must realize and admit the wrongs perpetrated under the Islamic rule.”).42 So, here was a top leader going public with a historical claim which he knew was going to be challenged, yet he didn’t even take the trouble to verify it. Consequently, he became an easy target for accusations of “Goebbelsian lies”43 (a comparison that is unfair to both men: Sharma wasn’t evil and Goebbels wasn’t stupid). However, after this painful experience of what the RSS culture of going by rumours can lead to, no gaffes that silly have been heard of."

There's a mistaken assumption here, that Sharma was claiming Gandhi said exactly what Sharma was asking Muslims to do.

Sharma was referring to Gandhi asking various others - never Muslims, of course - to do this, giving up, as a matter of goodwill.

He'd famously told British that they will one day simply walk away, when they asked him if this is what he thought.

He'd also, always, asked Hindus to give up, when Muslims asked, demanded or took anything - including lives of millions of Hindus. He asked Hindus to give up, including lives, without complaints and with love.

Sharma was asking Muslims to follow Gandhi in an attitude that Gandhi had never himself asked Muslims in particular to do.

"Possibly the RSS leadership was satisfied with the support it received in a section of the vernacular press and refused on principle (viz. nationalist pride) to be concerned with the comments in the foreign and the “foreign-oriented, anti-national” secularist media. At the same time, however, one cannot miss the sloppiness or inertia or unconcern which kept the Sangh from verifying whether its message came across, and from devising ways to deal with the hostile climate in the national media and among India-watchers. ... "

When a patient in hospital is dealing with trauma of being subjected to a murderous attack by a gang, neither the well-wishers of the patient nor the medical fraternity care about press releases or paparazzi, especially when part of the latter is likely to be in cahoots with the murderous gang, even if the patient is a famous beauty at centre of attention of every gang in town. The well-wishers and medical fraternity are intent on smallest sign of life in the patient, busy ignoring flashbulbs. If thereby the medical fraternity gets bad press, that's not stupidity of the former but goon-friendly character of the latter.

................................................................................................

Fact is, it's easier to blame a victim, and it's done both ways. As Elst is doing now, blaming RSS and co for not screaming louder than the vicious Islamic jihadists and their convenient friends.

................................................................................................

"The Sangh’s responsibility

"The reason for the Kashmir for Kashmiriat initiative was the alleged blinkered vision of professional human rights bodies which only noticed army atrocities on poor hapless Kashmiri Muslims including terrorists, but not the atrocities which these victims themselves committed on the Hindus.55 At least one human rights organization subsequently adjusted its position and released a report on human rights violations by the terrorists.56 A similar initiative in Panjab during the (equally Pak-supported) separatist violence, Human Rights for All, was started for the same reason, witness its headline: “The roll-call of horror. Let us shed at least a few tears for them, since the Amnesty International won’t”. The ensuing list of killings of civilians is concluded with this comment: “And it goes on. Without Respite. Like an unending nightmare. Like a Greek tragedy. Without a tear being shed. Neither by the Amnesty International; nor by any of the other organisations which pride themselves as champions of human rights, the human rights of the perpetrators of terror and slaughter. The so-called violations of their human rights have been documented by these organisations—diligently, thoroughly, with all the resources and expertise at their command. But, who is going to document the violations of the human rights of these unknown martyrs who were, in cold blood, deprived of the most fundamental of their fundamental human rights—the right to live?”57"

Elst continues blaming victims of maligning war.

"Note that these initiatives do not emanate from the established Hindutva organizations. They are ad hoc initiatives by people who became conscious of the problem facing the Hindu minority in Kashmir, Panjab and the North-East after having suffered in person. Thus, K.N. Pandita, the secretary of the Friends of Kashmir who showed me around some refugee camps, and some of the refugee spokesmen to whom he introduced me, have a Marxist past.58 The Kashmir for Kashmiriat newsletter occasionally betrays that secular-Marxist view of religion, viz. by associating religion itself with backwardness."

But then, a frequently heard phrase in U.S. was "never underestimate the stupidity of Americans" - and there's no reason that won't fit most of West.

................................................................................................

"The Sangh likes to attack Indian and international human rights activists for their alleged anti-India and anti-Hindu bias (for example: V.M. Tarkunde, Kuldip Nayar, B.G. Verghese),60 but to the extent that the allegation is justified, the Sangh itself cannot disown part of the responsibility. Even the most critical and independent-minded India-watchers or Amnesty International volunteers cannot avoid being influenced by the general opinion climate and the actual flow of information. In this case, the flow of information is highly selective, with only one version coming through. If the press correspondents in Delhi would get a reasonable proportion of intelligently written formulations of the Hindu viewpoint, not just in party organs like BJP Today but in the quality newspapers, this would not fail to have a corrective impact."

Elst can't have it both ways. As far as RSS, generally Hindus - who carry heritage of India, her culture and mindset - goes, West flatters itself imagining this accusation about RSS or Hindus liking to attack others has a shred of truth. What RSS would like best is to ignore the outsiders, as would India at her heart, and most Hindus have always done unless forced otherwise at gunpoint. It's, again, not that different from those busy at The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, to make it easier for West to understand.

"Until a decade ago, most observers and even enemies of Hinduism were prepared to concede to it a certain harmlessness and benevolent tolerance as quintessentially Hindu qualities; today, even that little credit has been taken away. Hindus used to take great pride in Swami Vivekananda’s triumphal speech at the Parliament of Religions (Chicago 1893), but the celebration of its 100th anniversary in Washington DC was embarrassing because the Ayodhya demolition was generally considered to have disproven Vivekananda’s description of Hinduism as tolerant.61 Hinduism is now never discussed without mentioning the existence of “Hindu fundamentalism”, at best to disclaim this phenomenon as part of genuine Hinduism, but more often to prove that Hinduism is just as conducive to fanaticism as Islam and Christianity are. The credit for this additional blot on the fair name of Hinduism must go to the Sangh Parivar, not because it has taken up Hindu causes, but because it has handled them in such a mindless way."

Most of that is not merely complete nonsense but very obviously biased. Elst does not speak of nearly a thousand temples destroyed in Pakistan and East Bengal as reaction to the Babar mosque, not to mention rioting muslims having killed Hindus. If none of that weighs anything against a mosque, it can only be because of the huge heavy bias pro-islam and anti-Hindus prevalent in West. Amnesty International is very anti-Indian, anti-Hindu due to its hidden agenda of conversion.

"Information has an impact on people’s behaviour, and opinions have consequences, sometimes even lethal ones. Therefore, it was irresponsible for the leaders of a political movement to spurn some of the available ways of spreading pertinent information and influencing public opinion."

Elst should read The Brass Check, and other writings along similar lines, by Upton Sinclair.

His experience wasn't unique.

Has anyone in West done any historical research related to the infamous massacre, of thousands of unarmed civilians, trapped in a walled garden where they spent evenings for fresh air, by Dyer who brought tanks to bar the single exit and had soldiers firing at the people until he was satisfied everyone was dead? Thus was in 1919, and Philip the Kate husband of the present queen of England, when on his last visit to India after funeral of the late Princess of Wales, Diana, was nonchalant repeating Dyer's lie, that it was only two hundred dead. Crowd fired upon was about 20,000, babies and mothers, children and old people, all unarmed, no one was allowed to escape or to remain standing or even sitting, or able to scream for help.

West is silent on this. As it is on the millions in Bengal starved to death by Churchill, who appropriated their harvest, said that Indians dying of starvation by millions was of no importance, and muzzled media.

So India doesn't trust West or its media.

That has counterparts only in the few who are either of a slave mindset or have got used to perks such as publications, lecture tours and awards. They kowtow, but they too know facts.

................................................................................................

Elst quotes from criticism of RSS by Abhas Chatterjee.

"Chatterjee describes in some detail some of the climbdowns performed by the Sangh Parivar after striking militant postures initially, e.g.: “The ideological muddle of the RSS was starkly exposed by its ambivalent conduct of the Ayodhya movement. … A clear national vision would have told the RSS that the Babri mosque had no business to stand on the Râma Janmabhûmi and its demolition was a rightful aspiration of the Hindu nation. But the RSS never developed this conviction. It soon started talking of ‘making a new temple on RJ’ instead of ‘liberating’ it. … It avoided facing the basic issue—no temple can be built unless the original site is liberated and restored to the Hindus. Soon the Sangh Parivar was taking recourse to new subterfuges. They said that the mosque was not a mosque at all but a temple (!), that they wanted to ‘renovate’ it and not pull it down, that they wanted to do so because it was a temple, and that it should be called a ‘disputed structure’ instead of Babri mosque, and other such nonsense.”70"

Neither Chatterjee nor Elst get it. Opposition in India did.

................................................................................................

"According to Chatterjee: “As time passed, the Sangh Parivar was hedging further. … They talked of acquiring the site through legislation, building a temple without damaging the mosque, ‘relocating’ the mosque with respect and Muslim co-operation, making construction only on surrounding land (77 acres) and so on. Stalwarts of the Sangh Parivar were also giving undertakings in courts and political fora that they would protect the Babri mosque! The president of the VHP proclaimed the nonsense that Babar was a tolerant ruler who did not demolish temples, that it was his general Mir Baqi who built the Babri mosque without Babar’s knowledge, and that ‘offering namâz on a disputed site is forbidden in Islam’. The Sangh Parivar tried to fool the Muslims, and begged that RJ be handed over by Muslims as ‘a gesture of goodwill’.”72

"It would not be unfair to say that here, Chatterjee is rebuking the BJP for not being sufficiently fanatical. Whereas the BJP hopes to settle the Ayodhya affair by legal means, Chatterjee calls for a revolutionary gesture disregarding the law and the institutions of the State. This has to do with a fundamental assessment of the character of the Indian State from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint. For Chatterjee, the “Nehruvian” state is an imposition like the Islamic and British regimes, and the declaration of India as a Hindu state constitutes a revolution; for the Sangh, Hindu society is largely responsible for the Indian state as it exists, and it should take control of the state and gradually reform it in accordance with the genius of Hinduism. The Indian state as it exists is indeed largely a creation of Hindus, perhaps insufficiently committed Hindus, but at least not non-Hindus, and consequently, Hindus should indeed assume responsibility for the good and bad points of the state, implementing reform where necessary. Chatterjee is mistaken in condemning the BJP’s attempt to stay on the right side of the law, even from the Hindu nationalist viewpoint.

"A valid point made by Chatterjee is: “The Sangh Parivar tried to fool the Muslims”. It is an apt description of the RSS attitude towards its declared enemies: it tries to deny that there is a conflict, to have its way without a fight, by misrepresenting the stakes in the conflict and hoping that the opponents will grant its wishes. Of course, this tactic has never worked; those who tried to fool others have only fooled themselves. Thus, the RSS insisted that Ayodhya was not a religious conflict between Hindu and Muslim, but a secular conflict between the foreigner Babar and the Indians, both Hindu and Muslim: “Babar came to India as an aggressor and defeated the joint force of Hindus and Muslims. … to cause a rift between the Hindus and Indian Muslims, he demolished the Rama Janmabhoomi temple and built a masjid in its place.”73

"The anti-Babar “Indian Muslims” referred to must be the Afghans: the Lodi dynasty of Delhi which fought Babar but was defeated by him, and then the Bengal-based Suri clan, who fought Babar’s son Humayun and grandson Akbar. The Suri clan employed a Hindu general, Himu (who got captured and was beheaded by Akbar), which is what the RSS spokesman describes as Hindu-Muslim unity. All the same, from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint, the fact that the Afghans fought the Moghul invaders and took the help of Hindus in their desperation does not nullify the fact that the Afghans themselves were foreign occupiers in the first place. The RSS man also fails to pinpoint just how the demolition of the Babri Masjid interfered with this instance of Hindu-Muslim unity, a scenario unsupported by any evidence and obviously made up for the sake of presenting a “secular” case against the Babri Masjid. Faced with this kind of casuistry, absolutely no one in the Muslim or secularist camp has conceded the RSS claim that Ayodhya was a “national” rather than a “Hindu” concern.

"Chatterjee continues: “When the fateful day of 6th December 1992 came, ... As Babar’s mosque was demolished, Hindus rejoiced while … the Sangh Parivar started hiding its face behind excuses. They disowned the act and the heroes who had performed it. … And that was the end of the Ayodhya movement. The Sangh Parivar simply dropped a movement which they had promised would be the greatest mass movement in human history. They meekly agreed to surrender to a secularist judiciary the right to decide whether the RJ belonged to the Hindus at all.”74"

Subsequent history shows differently.

................................................................................................

"Here again, Chatterjee, a law-abiding citizen, criticises the principle of recognizing the legitimacy of existing institutions. In Chatterjee’s view, the capitulation of the BJP before the Nehruvian state is no small matter, worse even than the abandonment in 1967 of the anti-cowslaughter agitation:75 “The midstream jettisoning of the Ayodhya movement has been the most severe blow to Hindu interests since the Partition. It has demoralized Hindus, confused them and created doubts in their minds about the legitimacy of their aspirations. It has left the Hindu society even more directionless and less self-confident than ever before. … The RSS betrayal of the Hindu society was complete.”76"

Reportedly, a spiritual leader who was one of many in that movement, had informed the then PM that her descendents would suffer the affliction she wasn't liberating cattle from, as Gaumata, the Mother of butchered cattle, had cursed her; it took a few years to come to pass. Why the Gaumata doesn't curse the rest of offenders is a good question.

" ... “The RSS, suffering from intellectual impoverishment, was unable to counter the Gandhi-Nehru onslaught or equip the Hindus to reject its ideas. Instead, the Sangh was sucked into the thought-stream of a perverted secularism. Since then they have largely obeyed the secularist track-rules, except for making occasional noises to the contrary.”82 This is in agreement with my own findings outlined above."

And wrong. No Hindus nor any Hindu scriptures have a problem with secular values. It's the appeasement of creeds associated with former colonial regimes of a millennium and half that Hindus disapprove of, since that amounts to reducing rest of the world -not just Hindus but all other faiths that survived, prospered, or were born in India - to save or nonhuman status. The very word "secular" has been twisted, by the so-called progressive liberals who stick all these labels on themselves falsely, to mean the appeasement of creeds that definitely aren't secular and do not tolerate secular values.

................................................................................................

"Common origins of Hindus and Muslims"

" ... A follower of Savarkar, Dr. Shreerang Godbole, criticizes the chummy Hindû-Muslim bhâî-bhâî positions taken by Sangh Parivar stalwarts K.S. Sudarshan, M.M. Joshi, Dattopant Thengadi, K.R. Malkani, S. Gurumurthy, Devendra Swarup, Muzaffar Hussain, P. Parameswaran and M.G. Vaidya at a seminar held in Pune on 27-28 July 1996, one of these positions being summarized as: “If Muslims are told of their common ancestry, they will unite with Hindus.”

"Godbole comments: “How foolish! As if Muslims are not aware that their forefathers were converted to Islam. However, for Muslims, pre-Islamic period is a period of darkness (jâhilîya). Prophet Mohammed is himself reported to have said that his mother and beloved uncle were sent to Hell because they were non-Muslims.”90 Savarkar’s and Godbole’s position is that while the Indian Muslim community has been cut out of the flesh of Hindu society and should ultimately be brought back to its ancestral religion, it is no use denying that the Muslim leadership is hostile to Hinduism, known to be their ancestral religion. More generally, they consider it necessary to take the challenge of Islamic doctrine and its “separatist” impact seriously, rather than spirit it out of sight with a clever little explanation about common ancestry."

"The presence of the green colour in the Janata flag was meant to represent greenery and agriculture, the “people’s party” being largely a peasants’ party. In the BJP flag, it is obviously included as the colour of Islam, which means that to prove its secularism, the BJP thinks it necessary to do that which on other occasions it calls “Muslim appeasement”. Whether one applauds or deplores it, the actual facts are that the BJP, like the pre-Independence Congress, goes out of its way to put some token Muslims (or in this case, Muslim symbols) on display."

It's a mistaken assumption that green has been ceded to Muslims by Hindus, and no matter how exclusively Islam prefers green, Muslims don't own the colour any more than Islam owns Moon crescent or otherwise, with or without a star or planet next to it.

Hindus, moreover, hold green in its place of importance, signifying growth, wealth, and more, and in most religious or festival or celebratory occasions of family or personal nature, a worship ceremony uses various greens at various places, at least in regions not total desert.

From regular worship of a Tulasi planted significantly at entrance or in back of a home, to worship of a Watavrksha by married women one day annually, to placing mango leaves and banana leaves in appropriate places - over and around entrances, for example - on special occasions including weddings and other special worships, to including specific greens in worship of specific deities - Dourvaa for Ganapati, Bel for Shiva, Tulasi for Krishna, and so on - greens are an inseparable part of Hindu religion.

Saffron is higher in significance, symbolising renunciation of self for spiritual cause; green is heavens blessings of life, vitality and growth in life and on earth. Each has its place, amongst others. It's black, not green, that's avoided at all occasions in Hinduism, except as a tiny dot to ward off evil.

................................................................................................

"POLEMIC AGAINST CHRISTIANITY"

" ... The Hindu perception is that “residues” of past imperialisms which colonized India have stayed on and continue to attack Hindu society even after Independence.

"The most direct threat is the conversion of Hindus. Even though the success of Islamic and Christian missionaries in India has been very limited when seen in relation to the vast efforts in man-power and finances expended for the purpose, the very fact that an impressive apparatus is at work to take Hindus out of Hinduism is a major irritant.101 In the Hindu view, this is like having a snake inside the house, waiting around for a chance to strike.

"Of course, every religion is under siege in the sense that preachers from other religions may be on the prowl, that Liberal and Communist authorities propagate atheism through the schools, and that the media spread crass godless hedonism. Still, the deliberate effort to lure people away from their ancestral religion is perhaps nowhere as serious in magnitude as in India, partly because the country puts no substantial hurdles in the way of internal and foreign missionaries, as opposed to most of its neighbours."

So Elst continues blaming crime on insufficient barriers and policing.

" ... By contrast, the missionary religions in India, along with Marxism, have a tremendous organizational advantage over Hinduism, being well-entrenched in political and/or educational institutions and in the media sector, and often enjoying lavish foreign funding. ... "

Elst girgets how those well-entrenched institutions were imposed via colonial regimes by invaders, for well over a millennium.

" ... If any comparison can be made, it is with the well-funded US-based Protestant mission in Latin America, against which the Pope protested during his visit to Guatemala, pleading that the people there had been Catholics “for centuries”.102 In a letter to the editor, Mumbai VHP president Ashok Chowgule commented that this is a case of double standards, for Hindus have been Hindus “for centuries” too, yet the Pope is not cancelling the Catholic mission project among Hindus."

Chowgule is correct. Vatican imposes as much as any colonising institution in India.

"Meanwhile, for more recent history, it should be kept in mind that the power of the Churches in India is totally out of proportion to the numbers of Indians they represent. The Catholic Church by itself is among the biggest owners of real estate, publishing-houses, print media and educational establishments; the situation of the Baptists and other Protestant Churches is, in relative figures, similar. Christians are on the average among the more affluent communities, and have a strong presence in the administration, especially in the two southernmost states.104 In quarrels between the Hindutva forces and the Muslims or the secularists, the Christian institutions and media are invariably on the anti-Hindu side. Conversely, in some of the polemics between Hindus and Christians which we shall discuss, the secularist media are generally also on the Christian side. There are also Christian armed separatist movements in Nagaland and Mizoram."

That power and land property is evidence of erstwhile colonial regime, not donations by poor indigenous people.

"As Christianity still constitutes a very real challenge to Hinduism, Hindu revivalist authors, most notably non-Sangh authors Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, N.S. Rajaram, Arun Shourie and Ishwar Sharan, have produced a handful of polemical works against the Christian missionaries. A first and easy target is of course the Churches’ alleged record of cultural destruction in India and in other parts of the word, as exemplified by some church buildings in South India standing on the debris of Hindu temples.

"This literature includes S.R. Goel: Catholic Ashrams—Sannyasins or Swindlers? (1988, 1994), and Arun Shourie: Missionaries in India, which, after unexpected hostile reactions from his former Christian dialogue partners, received a sequel: Arun Shourie and His Christian Critic, and one more after the media commotion on Hindu-Christian clashes in 1998-99: Harvesting Our Souls. Likewise sections of Ishwar Sharan: The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, and of N.S. Rajaram: Secularism, the New Mask of Fundamentalism, about the strange collusion between the Indian secularists and Church interests against their common enemy, Hinduism.105 In this respect, anti-Christian polemic is a variation on the better-established tradition of anti-Islamic polemic.

"Secondly, Hindu authors have imported the Western secular critique of Christianity and of the Bible into India. Some of this polemic is harsh and implacable, e.g. Goel’s book Jesus Christ, an Artifice for Aggression contains chapter titles like “Jesus is junk”, and “Christianity is a big lie”, while his introduction to Vindicated by Time, the reprint of the Niyogi Committee Report (see below), contains the allegation that the Nazi Holocaust was the logical outcome of centuries of Christian anti-Jewish indoctrination."

It's not patented, this criticism of something so obviously made up, even if it did take place first in West due to sheer need of West to be able to breathe at all. Fir that matter, West isn't paying copyright on decimal nber system or use of zero, yoga, or even the regularly stolen bits from Aayurveda by US corporations who patent things known to India and most of Indians for centuries.

"Indeed, Goel, Rajaram and Sharan profusely quote Western critics of Christianity, such as Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell. In Arun Shourie’s dialogue with Catholic bishops (recorded in his book Missionaries in India), this most prominent Hindu revivalist thinker repeatedly challenges the bishops to inform their flock of the findings of modern scholarship on the Bible and the genesis of Christianity. N.S. Rajaram was the first to present to the Indian public the story and relevance of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the doubts they cast on certain unicity claims of Christianity (for example, the celebration by a Jewish sect of a Last Supper rite decades before Christ’s birth should indicate that the Last Supper was but a dramatization of an existing practice, not its origin).108"

That wasn't the only ritual overworked only because it was prophesied in Jewish traditions for messiah, a great deal was.

"He has also reiterated all the allegations from the Western Leftist press about Vatican intrigues in Italian politics, the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, the strange death of Pope John-Paul I, rumoured links with the Mafia, the controversial role of Opus Dei, the alleged cover-up of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all rendered more relevant to India by the warning that Sonia Gandhi may be an agent of this Popish Plot.109 It is remarkable that the so-called Hindu Right has adopted all the rationalist and Leftist arguments against Christianity, highlighting its imperialism and connivance with colonialism and secular exploitative regimes, its miracle-mongering reliance on people’s gullibility, its oppression of Pagans and women, etc. Conversely, it is totally ignorant of or uninterested in the Rightist critique of Christianity (as being sentimental, feminine, plebeic, egalitarian) developed by a Friedrich Nietzsche or a Julius Evola.

"A third line of polemic is more specifically Hindu, and has been developed by Ram Swamp.110 It is a spiritual critique, and questions the spiritual value of conversion, e.g.: “Regarded from a deeper angle, Christian proselytising is an arrogant idea, a denial both of God and of one’s neighbour; it denies God, denies His working in others, denies the many ways in which He fulfils Himself. It helps neither the missionaries nor the converts.”111"

Correct, to say the least.

"Ram Swarup attacks the principle of “proxy religions”, meaning religions in which contact with the Divine is established through privileged intermediaries, the Prophet or God’s Only-Begotten Son, as opposed to religions of direct experience. Though to my knowledge no formal rebuttal of Ram Swarup’s positions has ever been attempted, one could argue that (like Swami Vivekananda) he reduces Hinduism to its spiritual component, disregarding more problematic aspects, i.e. the common reliance on ritualistic mediation by a monopoly-holding priesthood which is, in a sense, also a “proxy”. To be sure, this could at worst only be a mirror-image of the more common reduction of Hinduism to only its problematic aspects, its caste oppression and widow-burning and all the other classics of drain inspection.112"

The fifference is, unlike church, priests aren't forced on devotees in Indian tradition any more than a university library at Harvard or Princeton is forced on students across US. They are there for members to benefit and not allowed to charge, benefit from bargaining, or deny services.

But alongwith those, there are alternatives. Spiritual life in India isn't controlled by an institution nor disallowed by caste, even gender - its only a husband who must ask his wife permission to leave world behind, but one without a wife needs no permission from society.

................................................................................................

"The myth of Saint Thomas

"A special point in the Hindu-Christian debate concerns the myth of the apostle Thomas coming to India to bring Christianity there in AD 52. This would make Christianity in India older than in Europe and thus form a strong argument against the association of Christianity with colonialism. The case against it has been argued by Ishwar Sharan in his Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. He points out that even Christian historians in the West have become sceptical of this story, and that they favour the account of Christianity being brought to India by Syrian refugees from the Persian empire in AD 345."

Germans are most vociferous denying the legend.

"For one thing, the legend’s textual basis, the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, is ambiguous at best.113 Its setting of the story indicates Arsacid Iran (several Persian names, “a desert country”) more than India, and its use of the term India should be seen in its context: in the pre-colonial age, “India” often meant “Asia” from Yemen to Japan, e.g. when Columbus thought he had landed in Cathay/China or Zipangu/Japan, he called the natives “Indians”. Furthermore, if the Church relegated the Acts of Thomas to the apocryphal dustbin, it was not without reason: the text paints an unflattering picture of both Thomas and Jesus."

Columbus habitually called all foreigners Indian, but church denying everything unflattering points at lies by church in the first place - bishops were in pain regarding desert scrolls because there the little boy was a bully, not saintly and beatific. But that bullying gits nit only a little boy, it fits the grown guy who fought with Temple authorities. Lies by church are documented by authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

"First of all, Thomas is called Jesus’ twin-brother, so what with Jesus as “God’s only-begotten son”?"

"Thomas" literally means twin, as authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail point out. About the latter, church lied, as about much else.

" ... Thomas is also said to be sold as a slave by his brother Jesus (the redeemer!), then to have made a career as an unscrupulous magician who had a boy killed by magic for not serving him quickly enough, and who lured women away from their families. Finally, Thomas’s “martyrdom” came about when he arrogantly refused to heed the request to leave, a request made by the king who had protected him against the anger of the people yet found it impossible to do so any longer given the apostle’s persistent anti-social behaviour. Can such a problematic text be upheld by Christians just because it supports their claim to an Indian sojourn of an apostle?"

That it should be rejected merely for being unflattering is the position acceptable only to those who couldn't care less if church lied for seventeen centuries.

"At any rate, Indian and missionary Christians continue to invest heavily in defending the Saint Thomas story. This is understandable; less so is the support they are getting from the secularists, who are always full of contempt for religious myths such as those pertaining to Rama’s Ayodhya. It is a standard phrase in political speeches (by Nehru, by presidents Rajendra Prasad and S. Radhakrishnan)114 as well as newspaper columns by secularists that Christianity was brought to India in its very first years. Ishwar Sharan’s book started as an article written in reply to an article by Christian author C.A. Simon, affirming the Thomas legend.115"

"Simon’s article had been published in the Madras edition of Indian Express, which refused to publish Sharan’s reply except in truncated form as a “letter to the editor”. He and several of his friends tried to get the true story across to the Indian Express readers, but to no avail: the esteemed paper’s pages were open to Christian legend, not to Hindu scholarship. Instead, the editor, along with his colleague at The Hindu, chose to greet the first edition of Ishwar Sharan’s book with a renarration of the legend (but not as legend) on the children’s page. It is that kind of incident which convinces Hindus that secularism is but a euphemism for Hindu-baiting: secularist values like rationalism are laconically dropped the moment they threaten to support a Hindu cause or to undermine the cause of an anti-Hindu party."

"Another aspect of the Thomas legend is that it contains blood libel against the Hindus, particularly the Brahmins. According to the Acts, Thomas was killed twenty years after his arrival, in AD 72, by king Mazda’s soldiers, in punishment for his “sorceries” and “evil deeds” and after the king had exercised “long patience with thee”.116 He was killed be ruhme, Syriac for “with a spear”. Centuries later, these consonants (Syriac usually writes no vowels) were reinterpreted as rendering brahma, “(by) a Brahmin”. No location for the execution is given, but the sixteenth-century Portuguse colonizers decided that it was on the Mylapore beach outside Madras, where a Jain and a Shaiva temple were demolished to make way for the San Thome cathedral in commemoration of the apostle’s martyrdom."

Obviously the transfer of Mazda to India and interpretation of Mazda as Brahmin is the fraud perpetrated to cover up the deliberate destruction of Indian temples.

"One could say to this: “So what? The European landscape is studded with churches containing false relics of false saints to whom false martyrdom is attributed.” But look at it from the Hindu angle: Hindus had the good grace to give asylum to the Christian refugees in AD 345, allowing them to maintain their separate identity in full freedom for seventeen centuries, and now the thanks they get for it is that visitors of the San Thome cathedral are told about fanatical Brahmins murdering the noble founder of Indian Christianity. And then the secularist establishment makes it worse by blocking the public’s access to the scholarly view and continuing to instil the blood-libel legend. It is highly significant for the power equation in India that this state of affairs is possible at all."

................................................................................................

"Is there a conversion strategy?

"A strange element in the Indian conversion debate is that secularists and even some Christian spokesmen deny the existence of a conversion programme. In the case of the secularists, this is a purely opportunistic position: they perforce have to deny whatever the Hindu revivalists say, and they have to take the position which best serves the interests of the latter’s enemies. In the case of Christians, we are dealing with doublespeak, though usually honest in the sense that they themselves really believe in it: they claim that conversion work somehow isn’t really conversion work, that “only the Holy Spirit can work conversion” so that the missionary’s work must be something else, say “bringing the Pagans in touch with Jesus Christ’s liberating message”, which is, not the same thing as converting people (an example follows)."

If they were honest, they wouldn't be trying to convert and then denying it. Times of Hindus do not have to advertise. In fact in proper temples a priest wouldn't approach or disturb a devotee, only help if approached, unlike at ISKON.

"However, that the goal of converting the (i.e. all) Hindus and other non-Christians still animates the missionaries, has been ascertained by Hindu authors (and can be ascertained by anyone) from Christian sources.117 Even the general media could not keep such first-hand testimonies out of view altogether. In autumn 1999, the synod of the Southern Baptists (USA) reiterated the classical Christian position that Hindus live in darkness and are in need of Jesus Christ, and a few weeks later the Pope came to Delhi to say in so many words that the Church wants to “reap a rich harvest of faith in Asia”. The secularists felt badly let down by the Pope, because they had been dismissing as paranoid hate propaganda the Hindu misgivings about Church designs on the Hindu soul. To all those, secularist or Christian, who wanted to blur the issue, the Pope’s unambiguous statements came as a most unkind cut."

Those so-called secularists could read publications in Australia, and even Bangladesh, about the respective programs to convert, and separate pieces of India, respectively, if the secularists were honest.

"Now for an example. To limit the damage caused by the Pope’s speech, Christian theologian Ambrose Pinto hurried to explain, in a fine example of convoluted apologetics, that “there is Christian jargon in the document and exclusivist language… But to interpret such language without proper knowledge of Christian theology is dangerous and misleading.” What the Pope really meant was that he wants Asians to “follow the inspiration of Jesus Christ to provide a better quality of life to their people especially the poor and the disadvantaged among them”.118 But the difference between becoming a Christian and “following the inspiration of Jesus Christ” is not explained."

Obviously Pinto lied verbosely, that's all. No flock in German churches between wars WWI and WWII behaved like their supposed worshipped figure. And Churchill starving millions of Indians to death by stealing harvest, and saying it didn't matter if millions died in India, didn't get him a rebuke from any church either.

"Next, as a Liberation theologian, Pinto stoops to making his religion subservient to socialism: Christians in Asia should “move away from religious practices and charitable works to works of change of social structure”. Yet, even then he doesn’t lose sight of the propagation of Christianity: the Church should “align itself with the larger secular forces that believe in the tenets of social change, socialism and egalitarianism to make Christ known all over Asia”. So, even when trying to soften the Pope’s naked announcement of further conversion campaigns, this Church spokesman cannot bring himself to denying or concealing the plan “to make Christ known all over Asia”.

"Pinto also gives new flesh to the myth of the apostle Thomas coming to India: “Since among the countries of Asia Christianity is the oldest in India, the Pope decided to promulgate the document from India.”119 As if the Pope had the choice to promulgate it in any other Asian country (except the Catholic Philippines, where he had made the same statement about a rich harvest of faith in Asia a few years earlier). Christianity was brought to India by Syrian Christians from Iran, but could the Pope have made his statement in Damascus or Teheran? Or Islamabad or Kabul or Rangoon or Beijing, for that matter? The Pope could not go and make his statement in Teheran or Beijing: as long as Islam and Communism (and in some countries, Buddhism) prevent Christian proselytizing in their domains, the conversion of Asia essentially means the conversion of India, which may then function as a base for further expansion once the rest of Asia becomes more accommodating.

"But the main point here is that the Pope’s Hindu critics were absolutely right in identifying the conversion of Hindus to Christianity as the main goal of Christian activity in India. That Christians must spread the faith can be ascertained from the basic texts of Christianity. As Saint Paul said: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!”120 It has also been certified from official Christian sources, and the Pope himself has come to the land of the Hindus to say it to their faces. For those who are in the habit of dubbing every claim made by Hindu revivalists as “lies”, here is a very clear-cut case where Hindu spokesmen along with the Pope were speaking the verifiable truth, while some of their Christian and most of their secularist opponents were saying something else. "

Elst avoids saying they were lying while Hindus were right.

................................................................................................

"Conversion and “dialogue”"

"The Ram Swarup school writes against Christian efforts from a love for Hinduism itself: every conversion means that a person abandons the practices which make up Hindu tradition. In the present situation, this concern implies first of all vigilance against the more subtle new ways of enticing Hindus out of their native traditions, particularly under the cover of “dialogue”.

"One might be tempted to wonder: considering newer approaches like “acculturation”, “dialogue” and “fulfilment (of native religiosity) through Christ”, can conversion still be described as an “attack” on the converts’ former religion? The Hindu answer is simple: yes, because conversion, if successful on a large scale, means that the abandoned religion is left to die for want of practitioners. The empirical argument that “enough Hindus still remain” is rejected: it is not said in any official Islamic or Christian publication that conversion should stop halfway, that it should stop at this border or that percentage. The intention is and remains the complete conversion of the Hindu population, which amounts to the final death of Hinduism.121 One theatre in this war is the dialogue front.

"From 1980 to 1995, Sita Ram Goel was the treasurer of the Abhishiktananda Society, a Christian platform for Hindu-Christian dialogue, which included big names like Raimundo Panikkar and Bettina and Odette Bäumer, and James Stuart, along with Ram Swarup.122 Though Goel ultimately quit when he found its Christian members were backbiting against him or avoiding him, but never confronting him, he had certainly proven his willingness to engage in dialogue. All the more reason for him not to accept any compromise on this point of conversion and its new strategies. His experiences made Goel especially sceptical of the recent theologies of “acculturation” and “fulfilment”. Less experienced Hindus may have a less solid scepticism, but usually also less of an interest in comparative religion, so the dialogue wing of the Church has a hard time finding valid Hindu partners in the first place."

................................................................................................

"The “theology of fulfilment”, which admittedly presents a welcome “change from calumny to expressions of empathy”,123 teaches that Pagan spirituality has “prepared” the Pagans for Christianity, and now only a small addition is needed to bring the religious evolution to its fulfilment, to turn the hidden “unknown Christ” contained in their ancestral religion into an “acknowledged Christ”.124 Thus, the Indian tribals are told that they have been “monotheists” all along, almost-Christians with only the Gospel information on the historical Christ missing. Similarly, the Upanishads are searched for uplifting and potentially monotheistic or Salvation-oriented statements (“Lead us from death to immortality”), so that Sanskritic Hinduism can equally be presented as a natural preparation of the Pagans for Christ.125"

A good comparison is treating a doctoral dissertation in chemistry as a preparation bar hopping, a career compared to savants of Manhattan project as a preparation for a military sargeant, or a career of an artist among impressionists as a preparation for painting houses in Germany a uniform brown.

But all that is merely bringing out the ridiculous, outrageous, presumptuous nature of church and West, which is racist to its core and unable to see value that's plain. What Elst describes above is no different from conquistadores destroying priceless objects of worship in colonies across Atlantic to impose church upon them.

"Against this focusing on the continuity between a convert’s former and new religion, Hindu revivalists point out that conversion, if successful on a large scale, still means that the abandoned religion of the converts is left to die for want of practitioners. And the fact itself of dialogue and similar gentle-sounding concepts being conceived as instruments of conversion, is ascertained from primary sources. A Vatican document of 1990, Redemptoris Missio (“The Redeemer’s Mission”) confirms that “dialogue” is still a means of conversion rather than a meeting between equals. Winand Callewaert, a prominent Catholic Indologist (and in spite of religious and political differences, a friend of Ram Swarup) summarized Redemptoris Missio (RM) thus:

"“The Church is by definition missionary. … For our subject, it is important to note that RM strongly emphasizes the need of missionary activity in Asia. For this mission, ‘dialogue’ and ‘inculturation’ are recommended as the best strategies. The challenge consists in tuning that dialogue to the primordial goal, viz. evangelization. … After all, [RM declares:] ‘the obvious road to salvation is the Church, which alone is entrusted with the fulness of the instruments of salvation.’ … RM continues to assert that ‘Christ is the only redeemer of all men’, ‘the only mediator between God and men’.”126"

It's unclear whether church in particular and West in general are filled with mentally incredibly blind, stupid people, mentally blinding stupidity brought on by racism and arrogance, or is it fat more evil, a deliberate conspiracy to harvest souls for Satan.

Again to refer to the comparison that seems to fit - it isn't Princeton that goes all out to catch every student in every school in Asia and Africa to become a member of the institute, however lowly their status due to their racially irredeemable skin; its the tobacco and alcohol companies that are untiring in efforts to get young to get addicted, knowing they are thereby being inducted into a life of struggle with penury and death.

"In spite of secularist attempts to blur issues, Hindu revivalists conclude that this one is crystal clear: as per the official Christian sources: the goal of the missionaries in India is to convert every non-Christian to Christianity. This means that if Hinduism chooses to survive, it finds itself in a life-and-death struggle with missionary Christianity. That need not imply the inevitability of armed struggle, but a no-nonsense scepticism would be a minimum."

Fact.

Hindus see it, and state it like it is.

"A different aspect of this matter pointed out by Ram Swarup is that the syncretistic practices of the “Christian Swamis” and other acculturationists (an Om sign on a Cross, saffron robes, talk and practice of meditation) is not approved by Church authorities in the Vatican, nor by many Indian Christians.127 Indeed, his book Pope John-Paul II on Eastern Religions and Yoga: a Hindu-Buddhist Rejoinder (1995) was occasioned precisely by one of the Pope’s statements (Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 1994) condemning the incorporation of yogic practices in the spiritual discipline of Christian clerics and laymen."

Doubly deceptive, and still preferring the alcohol-tobacco stupor over University library, doesn't Vatican!

"It is, incidentally, a little disappointing that as the former mastermind of Indian anti-Communism, Ram Swarup fails to acknowledge the crucial role of this Pope in the fall of Soviet Communism. While an opponent in the religious sphere, it should be reckoned important enough that he has also acted as an ally in the political sphere. Further, the whole Hindu argument against the acculturationist tendency does not stop to acknowledge the sincerity with which many Christians profess this new approach. They may be self-deluded about the possibility of Hindu-Christian syncretism, but in most cases they are not animated by an intention to deceive others. On the contrary, many dialogue-prone Christians are genuine admirers of Hinduism."

Au contraire - it'd be delusional to imagine that Hinduism was warring against left, any more than India went to war against other faiths. Obviously it's the others, each individually and all together, that, like pack of wild beasts, are attempting to murder India and her treasure of knowledge that's labelled Hinduism, merely to tear flesh of the carcass that'd be the then harvest of souls.

And besides, church has left other beasts not only alive but quite well feeding on the mortally wounded Russia - jihadists, China, and of course, church.

No reason for Ram Swarup or any other Hindu to thank church or get complacent for demise of Soviet Union!

................................................................................................

"The fate of Paganism

"For the long-term effects of conversion, reference is frequently made to the fate of Pagan religions in now-Christian countries, considering the “great similarity between old European Paganism and Hinduism”.128 Thus, the searching of Greek philosophy for elements which could be reinterpreted by the Church Fathers as a “preparation” for Christianity, prefigured a similar exercise with the Upanishadic, Bhakti and tribal traditions. The Church Fathers managed to incorporate the Old Testament as the preparation of the Jews for Christ, and Plato as the preparation of the Greeks for Christ, so now it is simple enough to reinterpret Hindu philosophy as the appropriate Hindu form of preparation for Christ."

Any lie to get sober in, to induct them into a career of drunken stupor!

"When Christianity converted Europe, it already “acculturated” and adopted a lot of Pagan lore: the Yuletide became Christmas, ancient gods were turned into Saints, Virgil was still read as a matter of Latin language training for clerics, etc. It is therefore no surprise to see “Christian swamis” dress up as Hindu swamis, use Hindu or tribal symbols in their church interior, if possible locate churches on pre-Christian sacred sites (common in the colonial period, still done in tribal villages), incorporate Vedic one-liners in the peripheral parts of their liturgy."

Horrible cheats!

"But from the Pagan viewpoint, these elements of continuity were and are small consolation. The decisive change in Europe was that the sacred fires on the altars to Vesta, Zeus, Lug or Wodan were extinguished, their hymns forgotten, their worship suspended. Like Latin, Pagan mythology became a dead language. Conversion also meant that Aristotle and the Stoics were banished and forgotten for a thousand years because their teachings were in conflict with Christian dogma. True, some argumentative techniques and metaphysical concepts of the philosophers were incorporated into nascent Christian theology. But the fundamental spirit of philosophy, its radical doubt, its fearless inquisitiveness, was curtailed by the basic Christian attitude of faith, or what Ram Swamp calls “proxy” religion. Only marginal Pagan doctrines and practices remained alive among the illiterate masses, increasingly distorted, unrespectable (“superstition”, “witchcraft”), and finally disappearing as well. It is that very fate which Hindus with an attachment to their tradition want to avoid.

"The comparison between the known fate of European Paganism and the missionaries’ designs for Hinduism is even more apt than the Hindu authors realize, for more parallels can be found than have hitherto been pointed out. The modernmost trends in Christian mission policy in India were already in evidence in the christianization of Europe. Thus, the association of Christianity with the most advanced civilization of the day, material as well as intellectual, was and still is used as a trump card in effecting voluntary conversions. The Russian elite converted after it was impressed by the brilliance and artistic perfection of Byzantine liturgy. The Germanic tribes were impressed by the technical know-how and organizational efficiency of the Roman Empire, appropriated by Christianity (which had had no merit in their development). For an Old Saxon as much as for a contemporary Santhal or Naga, the great civilizational step of first learning to read was cleverly fused with indoctrination in the Christian religion. This way, a general association of Paganism with backwardness and Christianity with progress played a role in both early medieval Europe and British India, and even in the backward areas of independent India."

It was even simpler in India, cheating whole villages by throwing bread in village wells and informing people they were already unclean beyond redemption to remain Hindu, or simply keeping jobs at higher rungs reserved for their own across all institutions. Chinese were given rice for converting, during famines.

"Nationalism is totally out of the question here: Ram Swarup evokes a world-wide struggle between proselytizing Christianity and Islam on the one hand, and all the traditional native religions on the other. He does not accept the purely defensive attitude of the many Hindus who (in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi) consider all religions equally valid. In particular, he is skeptical of that Hindu nationalist attitude which considers it perfectly right if someone is a Christian, but which objects to this if that Christian is a convert from Hinduism. From a critique of conversion, he proceeds to a critique of Christianity itself, both from the Enlightenment angle and from a specifically Hindu spiritual angle. Consequently, he invites all Christians to rediscover their spiritual heritage,"

Brilliant guy.

................................................................................................

"Sangh polemic against Christianity"

"The single most frightening moment for the Christian missions in independent India was in the mid-1950s, when the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was hardly in the picture as a political force. Not the BJS but the Congress governments of Madhya Pradesh and Madhya Bharat (a state now merged with Madhya Pradesh) ordered investigations of allegedly fraudulent conversions through social pressure and material inducement by Christian missionaries in the tribal belt. At that time, Congress was still a largely Hindu party, with an important Hindu revivalist section holding out in the provinces against Nehru’s increasing grip on the party. The power equation was such that Nehru could not prevent the state governments from commissioning the Report, but they, in turn, could not make Nehru take any action on the basis of the Committee’s findings.134"

"Surprisingly, many Sangh Parivar stalwarts, at least in their public statements, do not see conversion to Christianity as a problem, and when they do, they still try to put it in a Christian-friendly way, e.g. Swami Ranjeet invokes Jesus Himself as an argument against conversion: “Christ never ordered conversion. He was a reformer of his own religion—Judaism. He lived and died a Jew”.136 If they go out of their way to attack the missionaries, it is usually about the way in which conversion is effected, rather than against the right to convert itself. Thus, Guru Golwalkar said: “We have nothing against the Christians except their methods of gaining converts. When they give medicines to the sick or bread to the hungry, they should not exploit the situation by propagating their religion to those people.”137"

Former, fact, not surprising. Latter, again, fact.

"It seems to me that from a Hindu angle, focusing on the methods of conversion misses the point. To be sure, the use of service and material incentives for conversion purposes can again be certified from Christian sources, e.g. Protestant missionaries in Pakistan (not Hindu fanatics, they) allege that the conversion of thousands of Protestant converts to Catholicism on the occasion of famines was first of all the result of relief supplies: “Partition in 1947 left the Christian community financially poor and economically insecure, because many of their Hindu and Sikh landlords had fled the country. Severe floods devastated the Punjab in 1950, 1954, 1955 and 1959, destroying the homes and crops of thousands of Christians. Church World service and Catholic relief organizations poured in badly needed supplies. When the emergency situation was over, Church World Service diminished its supplies and later discontinued them altogether. … The Catholic Church continued to receive massive relief supplies. These were distributed to Catholic school children and church members. In order to be eligible to receive regular relief goods, thousands of nominal Protestants became members of the Roman Catholic Church.”138"

Here's a fact - one, they concentrated on recoverting from one church to another, in an Islamic nation born on hatred of all non Muslims. Two, they're concentrating now on India, leaving Pakistan Christians to be executed for their faith.

If they had it, in the first place! For those who converted to an earlier onslaught due to fear of life, and veered towards the new colonial fath at onset of British, just as easily could return to the official creed of the nation when alternative is imprisonment and execution, for any small act by a nonmuslim - such as holding a bible or drawing water from a Muslim well.

Not very long ago, a federal minister of the government of Pakistan was murdered for saying a few words in defence of a nonmuslim waiting for execution for such a "blasphemy "; his murderer had humongous crowds, well over a hundred thousand, celebrating the "martyrdom" of a "faithful" man at his funeral after the official execution sentence for murder was carried out.

"So there you have it: material incentives are used to gain and retain converts. This also came to light after the murder of missionary Graham Staines in late 1998: in spite of his family’s refusal to hand over copies of their despatches to the homefront bulletin Tidings to the police investigators, a few were traced elsewhere and turned out to monitor the harvest in souls gradually being reaped as a result of the missionary’s investment in material gifts and social service.139 That service was not purely altruistic, it was meant as a bargaining chip in order to get the natives to accept the missionary’s message. And indeed, every Christian parishioner the world over knows that the money he donates to the Church serves, among other purposes, to give some material flesh to the Good News propagation of the missionaries."

Fact!

"Yet, if Christianity were the true religion, the exclusive road to Salvation, this tricking of materially deprived people into the faith by means of material incentives would be a very small matter. Against this background, the fuss over the methods used becomes petty and sterile: either Christianity is true, and then the converts should be grateful for being tricked into it ... "

Why would something true need all this falsehood to be tricked into it, is a question Elst is unwilling to face. Wouldn't truth be obvious enough, unless smoke obliterated light thereof? And propaganda is certainly smoke, as temptations are dust thrown to blind people, and threats open or otherwise are far more so. If church had truth on its side, inquisition would never have happened.

" ... or Christianity is false, and then the focus should be on proving its falsity. ... "

Isn't the falsehood of church inherent in the drive to convert, via attempted and more destruction of all else, conversion of everyone at any cost being perpetrated by fraud in India but not in China, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan?

"Hindutva media prefer to pay attention to more superficial data, such as Hindu-Christian clashes: “Karungal, a Christian-dominated village in Kanyakumari district of Tamilnadu was the latest scene of Christian vandalism, when a Ganesha idol was smashed to pieces by a gang of Christian fundamentalists.”140 Or the Christian expulsion of the non-Christian Reang tribals in Mizoram, one of whom is quoted as saying: “If we embrace Christianity, we can settle down freely. This is what the Mizo terrorists want.”141 Or, of course, the cases of Christian separatism in the North-East, mostly in Nagaland and Mizoram, which have occasionally attracted international media attention.142 Older publications in this tradition include Thanulinga Nadar: Unrest at Kanyakumari (1983), and Major T.R. Vedantham: Christianity, a Political Problem (1984). The core message invariably is that Christianity encourages separatism, whether social (pitting converts against Hindus) or political-territorial."

And there you have the obvious manifestation of brotherhood of jihadists, uncovered in Islam and covert until they dare to threat openly from church. If it's a "true religion", why is it missing from Peshawar to Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia to Iran, Morocco and more?

................................................................................................

"A case study in Sangh polemic against Christianity"

"This insistence on the status of the tribals as “indigenous” has specific political implications: it brings the Indian tribals in the same category as the “indigenous peoples” of America and Oceania, and for them, the World Council of Churches has a declared policy of political separatism, laid down in the Darwin Declaration of May 1989, in which “the Churches confess to having been part of the problem and rise to become part of the solution, in keeping with the principles of the Gospel”. As a spokesman of the RSS tribal organization Vanavâsî Kalyân Ashram pointed out to me, this declaration includes the following political programme: “…(4) Indigenous peoples strive for and demand the full spectrum of autonomy available in the principle of self-determination, including the right to re-establish our own nation-states, independent of the jurisdiction of our invaders and their accompanying political structures. (5) Indigenous peoples shall control our own institutions of government, our economies and our social and legal structures.”143

"Nothing can spur an RSS man to action like a whisper about separatism. So, 99 per cent of RSS writings about the missionaries deal with their alleged involvement in “anti-national activities”. RSS author Bhanu Pratap Shukla starts his diagnosis with the typical RSS attention to matters of national identity: “To the majority of Indians, especially the Hindus, proselytisation means only a change of faith or way of worship and as such they do not take it very seriously, because they think that a faith or a way of worship is an individual’s relationship with his creator and as such every man should be free to have his own ideas in these matters. But Christian proselytisation is not that innocent. It not only affects a change of faith or way of worship but also tries to give them a separate nationality.”144

"In other words: we don’t mind if you convert Hindus, even all Hindus, as long as it is only a “change of faith” and not a “change of nationality”, as long as they remain loyal to India. Turn India into a Christian state if you want, as long as you keep it united and independent. Formulated this radically, it will of course be rejected by RSS men, but it is none the less the logical implication of Shukla’s position. ... "

That's a typical missionary zealots' argument, of course. He misses out the point deliberately. It's about the aim of church to destroy all other creeds, using temptations, frauds, and mass conversions. Individual conversions on the other hand, if those frauds were left out, would be a matter of choice of individual, already inherent in Hinduism. But church is neither about spiritual truth nir about enlightenment, its about power of church at any cost including massacres and genocides when other methods fail.

" ... Ths same implication is present in VHP spokesman Giriraj Kishore’s statement: “The pope should withdraw all foreign missionaries from our soil. Indian Christian missionaries are competent to do their job.”145 So, is conversion of Hindus to Christianity all right as long as it is done by Indian missionaries?"

Again, that isn't a logical implication, but a question natural to a church faithful who'd seek to destroy all other at any cost. If there were truth in Elst's position that missionaries are self-sacrificing people, why aren't the missionaries sacrificing their lives in China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Libya, Morocco and Iraq?

"Shukla builds up his evidence for Christian separatism by borrowing from Christian sources an enumeration of ethnic groups who, as Christians in non-Christian-majority states, had started separatist movements, e.g.: “When Indonesia became independent, the Ambonese, most of whom were Christians, revolted against their own government. When Burma went out of the British Commonwealth, a good number of the leaders of Karen who revolted against the state of Burma were Christians. Today some of the agitators for an independent Naga State apart from India are also Christians. … These facts have reinforced the suspicion that Christianity alienates the Asian from loyalty to his own country.”146

"So far, so good. The claim that being Christian and being separatist coincide in the case of some ethnic groups can be verified, notably for the Mizos and Nagas in the North-East. In the case of the Naga tribals, it is well-documented that they were purposely delivered to the influence of the missionaries by the colonial government: “The British, who had a policy of transforming the border regions into a protective cordon of the empire, ‘discovered’ the Nagas in about 1830 but prohibited the entry in this area to anyone without official or military capacity, which curiously did not exclude the Christian missionaries!… One might say that it was the administrators, and in their wake the ethnographers and missionaries who, by a need of rational classification and order, invented the Naga tribes and consequently Naga nationalism. … In a concern to protect the tea plantations of Assam (from, among other things, the Naga incursions), the British pursued a long process of pacification, administration and christianization, deeper and deeper into the hill country. The Nagas vigorously resisted this expansion; the response to their rebellions consisted of punitive expeditions and the ‘civilizing’ missions…”147 In that case, christianization was used as an instrument by a secular agency, viz. the colonial government.148"

"But before (even instead of) attempting to show a causal connection between Christianity and separatism, Shukla muddles his own argument by bringing in a third factor: the Western powers which are allegedly using the missions as pawns in their own neo-colonial strategy. He writes: “The Church acts as ‘sappers and miners’ of the Western army. … the Church is not merely a medium for propagation of Christian faith but is an instrument of the Western powers in their global strategy. The world Ecumenical movement itself was the result of the concern of the Western powers to consolidate their strength in the world at large.”150"

That's not muddling at all, it's uncovering and exposing the power grabing face of the church thats the Roman empire under a cloak provided by church since council of Nicea.

"Shukla sidetracks his own attack on Christianity by alleging the subordination of Christianity to a purely political conspiracy by foreign states. So now, the problem is not Christianity, but the political designs of the secular powers which stand behind the Christian missions. This is the RSS mind typically at work: reducing an ideological confrontation between religions to a purely political confrontation between nations."

It's Elst who's deliberately abusing Shukla who is exposing the facts.

"This clumsy “reasoning” results in part from an intellectual inferiority feeling: rather than facing the difficult challenge of properly preparing for a debate on the intricacies of religious doctrines, it is easier and safer to hide behind the rhetoric of patriotism versus foreign intrigue, for few people would want to be seen as unpatriotic and agents of a foreign power. In a variation on Dr. Samuel Johnson: patriotism is the last refuge of duffers."

One, it's obvious thst if truth were with church fraud would never have been used by church as an institution, nor temptations nor any other base methods, and two, spiritual truth isn't about arguments or debates or logic - if individuals arent transformed by visions in privacy of their souls, it is a conversion to false creeds by power grabbing institutions. Two, about the last bit, a famous patriot of Belgium was the celebrated king who stood up to the German onslaught, is Elst calling him a duffer? Or Stalin, Churchill, and French resistance who all opposed the might of the blitzkrieg?

"At any rate, Shukla’s focus is not on the religious concern that Hindu or tribal traditions are finished off when their practitioners are converted, but on the political concern that converts to Christianity allegedly become susceptible to separatist tendencies. We shall see it on a number of occasions: the RSS is more a nationalist than a religious Hindu movement. This is read by Hindu radicals as a sidetracking of a Hindu organization from its original goal of serving Hinduism to the secondary, seemingly less controversial and more respectable, more “secular” goal of serving India."

Elst forgets that it's all the attack brigades, not RSS etc. themselves, that label RSS, BJP and BJS, "Hindu", right-wing, et al; their own focus has always been India, and the reason they get branded Hindu is because - unlike the slave mindset brigade, they are neither ashamed nor viciously against ancient culture of India by any name, but instead value it at its worth. So when they argue for India and against missionaries, they are quite sincere. Fraud is perpetrated by those attacking them.

It's Elst and the anti-India brigade who is hellbent on their agenda that requires RSS and other Hindus to be virulent against other creeds, because Islam and Christianity are viciously virulent against everyone else including one another. If Hindus are not joining in this vicious propaganda against all "other"s, Hindus look different, and that's intolerable to those who profess a false secularism.

................................................................................................

"The BJP and Christian history"

"In Hindu-Muslim relations, a large part is played by historical memories, often accompanied by pseudo-historical stories. Thus, the Ayodhya controversy pertained to the history of Islamic iconoclasm in India. In the history of Hindu-Christian relations, similar sources of potential friction exist, though on a much smaller scale. Is there any chance of the Hindu nationalists raking up some old temple demolition story involving a Christian church?"

So Elst is calling Hinduism Indian culture et al, "pseudo-history"? How convenient a way to get the liar brigade on his side while he pretends to be not with them in attacking Hindus!

"In 1994, the BJP made its position absolutely clear on the occasion of a very small incident in the Chennai area. After reading Ishwar Sharan’s book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, which argued that a number of South-Indian churches including the one commemorating the alleged martyrdom of Saint Thomas had been built on destroyed Shiva temples, a back-bench member of the RSS-affiliated Tamil organization Hindu Munnani decided to restore the Hindu sanctity of at least one of these shrines.152 Equipped with the paraphernalia for pûjâ, he went to the Velankani Cathedral of Pondicherry, built by French Jesuits in forcible replacement of the Vedapuri Iswaran temple (AD 1748), and inquired where the Shivalingam was, so that he could worship it. Immediately, the Catholic Church was alarmed and warned that the Hindu fundamentalists were trying to create a second Ayodhya affair.153"

If the forcible replacement as elst calls it, amounting to destruction of the Vedapuri Iswaran temple, is so well known as to require being admitted as a historical fact, the rest of reactions including the "alarm"is merely invader mentality of destruction of India.

"In May 1998, it was exactly 500 years ago that missionary Christianity arrived in India with Vasco da Gama landing on the Malabar Coast. This was the exact counterpart of Christopher Columbus’ landing in America: the start of a campaign to win “pepper and souls”, to exploit and christianize. Due to very different power equations, the results were very different in scale, but only in scale, for the Portuguese intentions in India were exactly the same as those of the Spanish in America.154 The 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing was commemorated with a lot of soul-searching in essays and symposia, films and novels, and formal apologies to the Natives including one by the Pope during his visit to the Dominican Republic.155

"It was to be expected that Hindu nationalist organizations would organize similar events, albeit on a proportionately smaller scale, to commemorate Vasco da Gama’s landing in India. They could even have issued a demand for apologies from the Pope: no demolition, no riots, just words. Yet, even this much was too much for the “Hindu fanatics” of the BJP, who took no initiative at all, neither as a private organization nor as ruling party. No native American individual or organization has been denounced as “fanatical” for commemorating the destruction which started with Columbus’ landing, nor for demanding apologies from institutions associated with that history. Yet, so scared was the BJP of negative reactions to a similar initiative, or so little interested in historical commemoration, that it let the occasion pass.

"Likewise: “In Goa, where RSS man Manohar Parrikar is chief minister, the parivar is moving cautiously. Even though the VHP has been raising disputes about some churches built by the Portuguese, including the one on Diwar island off the Goa coast, the saffron brigade is unlikely to raise the issue as long as Parrikar is at the helm.”156 The Hindutva brigade is not all that eager for avoidable confrontation. Under BJP rule, India will remain the safest country for Christians on the Asian mainland."

The viciousness of attacks suffer Hindus today, since independence of India all the more, is a mirror reflection of those that decimated the culture of indigenous in the continent that stretches from pole to pole and has not even been allowed to retain any of its own original names from before the European takeover, but instead been named after a minor sailor.

So the natives of that continent, still falsely called Indian despite their lack of connection to India being universally known, aren't suffering vicious verbal attacks now, and even getting apologies, precisely because they are decimated - unlike India, which has every reason to fear the attacks against Hindus that could change any moment from merely verbal to lethal.

RT reports a plan by UK, US and co, post WWII, to attack Russia with nuclear weapons, to finish off her defences and then rob her of her natural wealth. This has been airing for a while as opening minutes of a documentary relating to NATO attack against various pieces of Yugoslavia, which during nineties came after the orchestrated propaganda that preceded a war purportedly for good of the people.

Any bets there are no such plans on paper in files against Hindus? Please take one, losers.

................................................................................................

"POLEMIC AGAINST MARXISM

"Early HMS polemic against Marxism

"In 1936, after the election of the foremost Leftist, Jawaharlal Nehru, as Congress president, HMS leader B.S. Moonje warned: “But a greater calamity is impending, nay, has practically almost fallen on the Hindu religion and culture, by the Congress leaders having enthroned socialism-communism in the Congress, by making room for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, to be elected President, unopposed, of the Congress for the next year. … This further means that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru will, with authority and the prestige of the Congress, preach for abolition of religion and for instituting Russian sociology and morality in place of Indian religions and cultures. Of course, he cannot preach it amongst the Musalmans, because if he were to do so, he won’t survive for twenty-four hours. As for Christianity, it has got the support of the mighty strength of the British Empire and the missionaries—all combined together spend about three crores of rupees every year for converting the lower classes of the Hindus. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru cannot affect them. The only people who I fear will fall an easy victim will be the Hindus who have no leaders to guide them and stabilize them.”157"

Intelligent, far seeing man.

" ... For Moonje, the problem with Marxism was not its economic doctrine, but its hostility to religion. Marxists themselves like to name “Capitalism” as their enemy, and invariably insinuate that those who oppose them are agents of Capitalism. In reality, the history of anti-Communism in the Cold War shows that, apart from a few economists like Friedrich von Hayek, anti-Communists rarely focused on the economic aspects of Communism; their concern was with democracy and civil freedoms, most notably freedom of religion. Indeed, many critics of Communism, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Pope John-Paul II, have also criticized Capitalism as merely another face of materialism, which matches Marxism in its reduction of man to his dimension of producer and consumer of material goods. B.S. Moonje, too, belonged to this mainstream of non-economist anti-Communism."

................................................................................................

"Sangh polemic against Marxism

" ... in 1938, Guru Golwalkar wrote that “socialism is modern Russia’s religion. … For the Russians, their prophet is Karl Marx and his opinions are their Testament. … The Russian Nation adheres with religious fervour [to Marxism].”158 I don’t think many Russians could agree with that; Communism was imposed on them by ruthless force, but Golwalkar described it as their fervently practised religion. ... "

But then, church and Islam too were imposed forcibly until opposition was literally killed off, silenced by sword or inquisition and repeatedly so, until Renaissance in case of Europe, but nevertheless remains subconsciously an imposition at pain of subconscious memories of horrors suffered by those seeking throw off the yoke.

"Sangh polemic against Communism was and remained nothing but an endless repetition of the allegation of Communist disloyalty to India, documented in K.L. Sharma: The Great Betrayers. According to the BJP, the Communist parties “have a hideous history of betrayal of the national interest at every critical juncture”.159 Here again, we see an ideological issue being reduced to a purely national issue: Communism is bad because its focus of loyalty is foreign. ... "

Isn't that the very reason US, too, bans it? It isn't about equality or economic opportunities that US opposes UT, surely? Or even as a matter of ideology, for that matter - else why befriend China? No, it's purely a political horror, of agents of USSR being used against US in guise of a political party. And that much was true in most of Europe in countries where leftists were not outright exterminated - they were indeed most part acting on instruction from Moscow. In India its far worse, it's instructions from China that operate all the moves of so called Marxists.

"The only opposition on philosophical grounds to left was by authors like Ayn Rand, who took Menace of Leftist philosophical verbiage seriously. Rest of the world, when not conquered by left one way or another, opposes it on feet, by voting on one hand and entrepreneurship on the other - silently. In short, ignoring it as one eould a preying beast, and shooting it fiwn as and when spotted near one's yard.

................................................................................................

"The BJS on Communism

"From the fact that the Indian Communist parties have always been the most virulent opponents of the BJS-BJP, and from journalistic descriptions of the BJS-BJP as “right-wing”, many people deduce that the BJS-BJP is anti-Communist. This is simply not true."

Communists are cuckoo in calling BJS or BJP "right wing", far more so than calling them "Hindu parties". Fact is, they stood for India, for Indian values and for Indian culture since antiquity, not as painted by outsiders but as known at heart by Hindus themselves. Since majority of India is Hindu, this in effect makes them left, unlike the Islamic or church related politics that stands for superiority of anything and everything associated with erstwhile colonial regimes and rulers, viewing majority of India as subjects, slaves. So do communists, with the only difference being their worship of, say, Mao, replacing Allah and Jesus.

So yes, BJS and BJP standing firm on India - while the alliance of three or four creeds, involving foreign loyalties, attacking them, does so because they attack Hinduism - is all entirely in true character. India hasn't attacked Jerusalem or Mecca or Vatican, or China for that matter. This last would be true even if Jawaharlal Nehru had not given Tibet up pretty much as Chamberlain did Czechoslovakia, without a protest.

"Their judgement of Communism was mostly limited to two elementary observations: the Communists felt no loyalty towards India, and they hated the Jana Sanghis.

"The first problem, however, had been somewhat diminished in importance by the Chinese Invasion of 1962, when in the teeth of public opinion anger, the Communists had been forced to eat their earlier pro-Chinese slogans (“China’s chairman is also India’s chairman”), and had refrained from actively supporting the invaders or sabotaging India’s defence. With the mobilization of Indian public opinion against China, the increasing hostility between the Soviet Union and China, and the American military presence in Pakistan and Indochina, the chances of a Communist take-over seemed to have receded. At heart the Communists certainly might have remained disloyal, but this was no longer feared as an acute threat. As for the second problem, the Jana Sanghis did not intend to reciprocate contempt with contempt: it was neither the first nor the last time that the BJS/BJP people, with their inferiority complex and their shopkeeper mentality, would bend and crawl to curry favour with people who despised them."

Left was active all right, under cover - for too many young in mid to late seventies spouted greatness of Mao before they left to settle in US, doing so via quick marriage with a fellow student. Presumably they shut up then.

"With the BJS approaching the Communist problem in terms of national security and of its own standing, it failed to do anything about, or even to seriously take notice of, the increasing Communist hold on India’s cultural sector, where “a number of former card-carrying members of the Communist Party … did make a major effort at influencing not just the polity but also a number of scientific and educational institutions, a variety of government and semi-government committees, inner councils of the [Congress] party and Parliament, a considerable cross-section of the mass media as well as important journals which they came to control.”161"

As said before, the label right wing being falsely stuck on Hindus, as we're many others, this spread of left controlling institutions, which was chiefly due to political moves of congress in power, could hardly be fought by Hindus verbally.

" ... Sanjay Gandhi, supported by the purely careerist and opportunist section of Congress, thwarted the Communist designs of a take-over of the party from within, but neglected to do anything about the stranglehold on the cultural and educational establishment which the Communists had acquired in the meantime. Later those circles were to provide a storm centre of the struggle against Hindu nationalism, as in the Ayodhya controversy."

" ... BJS had “all along stood for abolition of Zamîndârî [= landlordism] and the principle ‘land to the tiller’, for measures to prevent concentration of economic power in the hands of a few individuals, for the imposition of curbs on profiteering, and for the adoption of fiscal and taxation steps to remove the vast disparities in incomes of various sections”.165 In socio-economic policies, there was a lot of common ground with the Communists, especially after the latter were constrained to adopt a social-democratic strategy instead of their own revolutionary programme."

And that proves truth of BJS in both ways - standing for people, not for concentration of wealth in a few chosen hands, as feudal landownership does. That wasn't Indian, but brought in by foreign colonial regimes, as part of non-Indian caste system, useful in ruling India in way through were used to, with their selves and agents at top.

Pakistan, incidentally, not only kept feudal system but rewarded feudal lords, by the way. People stayed poor.

" ... Kosygin said that Vajpayee was more progressive than his own Communist comrades back home, and Indo-Soviet relations flourished. When Vajpayee presided over the founding of the BJP, he made the party adopt “Gandhian socialism” as its official ideology. For the sake of continuity, and because no one was able to unite Gandhism with socialism conceptually, it was decided afterwards that “integral humanism”, the name of the official party doctrine of the erstwhile BJS, meant the same thing as “Gandhian socialism”: a measure of the party’s lack of ideological sérieux. ... "

" ... BJP affirmed that nevertheless, it “would like to see further strengthening of Indo-Soviet ties”, and referred to the time when “the Janata Government [1977-79, with Vajpayee as Foreign Minister] had succeeded in deepening and strengthening the bonds of Indo-Soviet friendship”.168 And again: “The BJP is appreciative of the commonality of ties with USSR. We would work towards further strengthening of these ties on the basis of equality and mutual benefit.”169"

What choice did India have when US joined hands with China and Pakistan despite the horrendous genocide perpetrated in East Bengal, deliberately, by military of Pakistan sent for precisely the purpose, accompanied by systematic rape of half a million women in East Bengal just chained for use by the said Pakistan military? Bengal didn't have a trump fence separating the two, and India feeding well over several millions of refugees, who were fleeing from that horror, was bad enough, without Nixon threatening Indira Gandhi with abusive epithets juxtaposed with promises of annihilation of India, of which little changed, even after Bangladesh was recognised by UN, and the genocide was known, as was the horror of the rapes - it was the only time UN had, ever, sponsored abortion clinics, which it was forced to open!

India had no options - certainly not as long as US was using Pakistan for purposes of cold War, stupidly unable to foresee the beast would turn and bite the hand that fed it.

"The fledgling BJP also condemned the occupation of Cambodia by Soviet ally Vietnam in very mild terms. Here again, the choice of terminology is revealing: the expression “the heroic struggle of the people of Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea against American intervention in Indo-China”170 feigns to ignore the Cold War dimension of this struggle, and assumes unquestioningly that the Communist armies which took control of Cambodia and South Vietnam really represented “the people”, a position which no anti-Communist would readily accept.

"The expression of antipathy for “the tyrannical Pol Pot regime”171 pretends by implication that the Cambodian genocide was the idiosyncratic handiwork of an individual “tyrant”, as if the ideology motivating Pol Pot’s regime had nothing to do with it. The horrors of Pol Pot’s killing fields were a central piece in anti-Communist writing at the time, and a powerful trigger of massive defections from the Communist camp among Western intellectuals, yet the BJP throws away this occasion to score at least a rhetorical point against Communism."

Elst assumes again that West is to be trusted unquestionably, which isn't true for India, especially post Nixon befriending China.

"American attempts to contain the Communist menace did not get the sympathy of the BJP: “From Turkey through Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, the USA is creating a ‘cordon sanitaire’ in its attempts at containment of USSR. The BJP has already rejected such theories.”172 Since the BJP offered no alternative to the American strategy against Commmunism, we may have to conclude that it didn’t see Communism as a threat."

Didn't that 'cordon' result in jihadists celebration of their victories, as they perceived it, by attacking India in Kashmir and in various cities, with terrorism, and proceed thereafter to attack West, in their own home cities and capitals? Pakistanis haven't stopped bragging on internet, about breaking up Communism single handed, with "very little help from US", all across YT, for years now. They are convinced of conquering the world too, as per their faith requirements.

"And what strikes you in the following passage from a 1995 BJP publication? “With China our relations have been on a see-saw ever since the liberation of China. Now there is an opportunity to put the relationship on a firm footing of friendship and co-operation. For this purpose it is essential to solve the border question in a fair and equitable manner.”174 That the nationalist BJP renounces its explicit demand of full restoration of Chinese-occupied Indian territory to India is sensational enough: in the BJS days, this demand was always made very explicitly, even by other parties (a parliament resolution demanding 100% restitution, voted after the Chinese invasion in 1962, has never been withdrawn). But the truly shocking part is that the “anti-Communist” BJP describes Mao’s military conquest of China as a “liberation”. One might argue that “Liberation” has become a proper name rather than an evaluation of the event, but in that case, a capital L should have been used. And no genuine anti-Communist would concede this merely conventional use of a value-laden term like “liberation” anyway. The BJP has always been a non-Communist but never an anti-Communist party."

Is US then Communist, commie-friendly, and merely anti-Russian? Why, because Poland and Ukraine matter, but Tibet can be butchered, annihilated, no problem? Why fight the good fight then in Korea and Vietnam? Or was it all just ad hoc, no real long term policy?

................................................................................................

"The BJP and the implosion of Soviet Communism"

"The fall of Communism in the Soviet Bloc was the cause of some euphoria in Hindu nationalist circles. After the VHP had laid the first stone of the Ayodhya temple on 9 November 1989, Jay Dubashi wrote somewhat pompously that “on the very same day the first brick of the Ram Shila foundation was being laid at Ayodhya, the Berliners were removing bricks from the Berlin Wall. While a temple was going up in Ayodhya, a communist temple was being demolished five thousand miles away in Europe. If this is not history, I don’t know what is.”175

"The link between the European and the Indian revolution seemed just too good to be true. About the Nehruvians and Indian Communists with their opposition to the Ayodhya movement, this is Dubashi’s verdict: “These men are elitist by nature and for them any popular movement, no matter how democratic and mass-based, is almost ipso facto suspect, if it does not meet their prejudiced convictions. This is Stalinism of the worst kind, the kind that led to the building of the Berlin Wall, one of the ugliest structures in the world.… They belong to the same class as Stalin in Soviet Russia and Hitler in Nazi Germany, who presume to know what is good for you and me, the ordinary mortals. And these men will go the same dusty way as the tyrants whose bodies are now being exhumed all over the Soviet empire and thrown to the vultures.… The post-Nehru era began at Ayodhya on November 9 [1989], and it will gather momentum in the years to come, like the post-communist era in Europe and elsewhere.”176 To keep up the morale of a movement, it is certainly helpful to create the feeling of being on a historic mission echoed by history itself from the far corners of the earth."

" ... Since history … has disrobed them of all pieces of their ideological attire—be it anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, dictatorship of the proletariat and other such absurdities—they have now invented anti-BJP-ism as the last and the only fig-leaf to hide their irrelevance. The recent spurt in Marxist violence against BJP, RSS and ABVP cadres in Kerala is also a manifestation of their pique.”179"

" ... Many Marxists, though continuing to think within the Marxist framework, would no longer publicly call themselves Marxists, or would only go public with soft Marxist concerns (practical benefits for the poor) rather than with its doctrinal hard core (dictatorship of the proletariat etc.).

"But this softening of the revolutionary fervour went hand in hand with a hardening of Marxist hostility to the BJP. The struggle against Hindutva had been promoted from a secondary role to the central mission of the Indian Communist movement in the 1990s: “The most pernicious communist influence on Indian polity is today manifest in the way the BJP is sought to be isolated in the name of fighting communalism. The communists are prepared to go to any length—I repeat, to any length—in their bid to grab and retain power … even if the BJP has to be as good as illegally gagged out of existence.”181"

"It should not be forgotten that the BJP’s accession to power in 1998 was preceded by attempts to keep even eleceted BJP representatives and majorities from exercising their mandates, and even to bar the BJP from contesting elections orto dissolve the party. At the level of discourse, this tendency was probably at its strongest in 1993, after the Babri Masjid demolition, when Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh proposed to organize Maoist-style “people’s committees” to enforce the ban on the RSS. Two Bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha in 1993, the Constitution (80th Amendment) Bill and the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, which would have excluded parties which mix religion and politics from contesting elections, the obvious aim being to exclude the BJP and Shiv Sena (the Bills were defeated largely because to many in the Janata and regional parties they were eerlily reminiscent of the Emergency).

"There were also attempts to annul the election of BJP and Shiv Sena candidates on grounds of appealing to religion during their campaigns, attempts mostly struck down by the courts.182 There were several cases where BJP state governments were removed from power by procedures bordering on the unconstitutional, starting with the removal of the BJP governments of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in December 1992 though they were unconnected with the Ayodhya demolition and had kept communal peace in their states far better than the non-BJP governments in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. In 1996, Indian Express had to comment on the ruling “United Front’s decision to give the installation of an elected government in Uttar Pradesh a go-by”, that “when anti-BJP-ism involves disregarding all established conventions and Constitutional propriety, it becomes a threat to the very survival of democracy”.183 The crucial turning point had been President K.R. Narayanan’s refusal in late 1997 to impose President’s rule in Uttar Pradesh in lieu of BJP rule.

"In the willingness of Congress and the then National Front (Janata plus regional parties), between 1991 and 1997, to explore unconstitutional means of keeping the BJP from power, one can easily recognize the influence of the Communists. They were always the most enthusiastic promoters of such attempts, having chosen Hindutva over capitalism as their newly favoured enemy. Having lost credibility on the economic front, they just had to redirect their energies to new battlefields. This way, the collapse of the Soviet Union had made the nuisance of Communism for the Hindutva movement not less but more intense."

................................................................................................

"SDFA polemic against Marxism"

"In Conquest of China, Goel demonstrated that Mao Zedong’s victory against Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was not determined by the level of popular support, but rather by hard military factors such as the supplies which Mao received from the Soviets (including lots of American weapons given to the Soviet Union for a war against Japan which it only declared when Japan was already defeated) and which Jiang did not receive from the US, first because of the American prioritary concern for Europe at the expense of the Chinese front, later (1946-48) as a result of an American arms embargo against “both parties in the Chinese Civil War”. Any man of action would hold it as self-evident that a war is won by the party which is militarily the strongest, but in academe the belief has caught on that the Chinese Civil War was a victory of proletarian enthusiasm over bourgeois-reactionary fire-power.184 To quite an extent, Goel’s critique, solitary and therefore looking like a querulous oddity next to the flood of pro-Mao literature, has recently been vindicated in Steven Mosher’s study of China reporting, China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality.185

"In general, the SDFA publications have stood the test of time: the collapse of the Soviet system and the subsequent opening of the Kremlin archives have given a clear (if belated) verdict in the polemic between the SDFA and the Communists. How many old Communists would like to go public today with what they wrote in the 1950s and 60s in praise of Stalin or the Chinese Cultural Revolution? By contrast, the SDFA veterans now claim with satisfaction that “the numerous studies published by the [SDFA] in the fifties exist in cold print in many libraries and can be consulted for finding out how the movement anticipated by many years the recent revelations about communist regimes”.186"

"In a paper written in 1956, Goel criticises the underlying philosophy of the American containment policy against Communism. ... "

" ... “The United States is trying to take care of our bodies. … The Soviet Union is taking care of our heads. The US builds schools and spreads literacy among the peasants. The Soviet Union provides them the newspapers they read. The US erects factories in which the workers earn a livelihood. The SU bands them into trade unions, trains their leaders. … The US gives scholarships to promising students for studies abroad. The SU equips them with political glasses through which they can survey the world. … The US spends on library premises. The SU stocks the shelves within with her own choice of literature.”193

"Not material conditions but convictions are what matters. While the Americans avoid people with the right convictions but without prestige, the Communists create prestige for the people with the right convictions: “Nor does the Soviet Union seek for any credentials of power or prestige in choosing her friends. All she cares for is their convictions. Let the convinced ones be obscure and unknown. She makes them famous overnight by powerful publicity. … If you can turn a phrase, you can be turned into a world-famous author. … People everywhere will be informed by the Soviet network that your wonderful works are under translation. … All you have to do is to believe in and seek for totalitarianism, and all the rest will be added unto you.”194 The reference is obviously to a string of Leftist writers in India whose literary qualities were inversely proportional to the publicity they received."

"It is not enough to make catalogues of Communist wrongdoings, it is also necessary to investigate its philosophical assumptions. This is a level of intellectual work rarely found among the Pentagon containment strategists and never in the Sangh Parivar publications. Yet, in the larger scheme, it is one contribution of which India has reason to be proud."

................................................................................................

"POLEMIC AGAINST ISLAM"

"According to R.C. Majumdar, the Muslim occupation of the larger part of India was as much and as certainly a colonization as British paramountcy has been. Islamic conquerors turned India into an exploitation colony and in some parts also into a settlement colony. The steepest inequality between colonizing ruling class and colonized underclass prevailed. True, there were concessions for some collaborating enclaves (Jain financiers, Rajput vassal princes), but that too formed an exact parallel with British colonial policy, which depended on the Sikhs, the Muslim League, Indian civil servants and other collaborator enclaves of the native society. There were also differences between the two systems, of course, and internal evolutions in both, surely, but in this essential respect they were similar: they were colonial systems and reduced the Hindus to colonial subjects.

"Yet, notes Majumdar, this glaring fact is hushed up by the post-Independence elite: “It is an ominous sign of the time that Indian history is being viewed in official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premise that India lost independence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.”197

"To Hindu revivalists, Islam is certainly one of the occupying powers from which India had—and partly still has—to liberate itself. Their polemic against Islam has consequently been quite thorough. ... "

................................................................................................

"Arya Samaj’s philosophical polemic against Islam"

" ... a Hindu critique of Islam that went beyond a curt dismissal of Islam as barbarism perpetrated by “the wicked Mlechchhas”, was only written more than twelve centuries after the first invasion: the fourteenth chapter of the Satyârtha Prakâsh (Light of Truth), completed in 1875 by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj.199 This critique is not very sophisticated but it attacks the very heart of Islam. Its paragraphs are organized as commentaries on quotations from the Quran (without reference to any secondary literature whatsoever), in Quranic order.

"Many of them concern alleged contradictions in the Quranic worldview. Thus, the Quran says: “Whichever way ye turn, there is the face of God”.200 True enough, says Dayananda, but in that case, “why [do] the Mohammedans turn their face towards Qibla (i.e. the sacred mosque at Mecca)?”201 The objection that the special status of the Ka’ba in Mecca amounts to a form of idolatry is an old one, which even Chengiz Khan brought up when a preacher explained Islam to him: why go on pilgrimage to Mecca when God is omnipresent?202 Islam abolished all forms of pilgrimage, except for the (originally Pagan) pilgrimage to Mecca, which thereby got invested with even more sanctity. In a comment on another Quranic injunction to “turn thy face towards the sacred Mosque [= the Ka’ba]”,203 Dayananda concludes: “Now is this trivial idolatry? We should think it is the crudest form of idolatry.”204

"The questions of the Qibla (direction of prayer) and of the pilgrimage to Mecca are troubling because these are typically Pagan practices in the heart of Islam. Any Islamic attempt to justify them could promptly be adopted by Pagans in their own defence against Islamic denunciations of their “idolatry”: if the Black Stone in Mecca’s Ka’ba can represent Allah, why should not the 360 statues in the Ka’ba which Mohammed and his nephew Ali destroyed also be legitimate representations of the Divine? Why not the Shiva Lingam in the Somnath temple which Muslim armies destroyed time and again as a “den of idolatry”? Dayananda challenges the Muslims: “They too, whom you call image-worshippers, do not regard the image as God. They profess to worship God behind the image. If you are image-breakers, why do you not break that big image called Qibla (the sacred Mosque)?”205 This question strikes at the very heart of the iconoclastic tradition.

"Dayananda also rejected the jump from the infinite to the finite, from eternity to time, which is implied in the doctrine of creation and in the doctrine of everlasting reward or punishment for choices made in this finite human life: “As the soul is finite, its deeds—good or bad—cannot be infinite. It cannot, therefore, be sent to an everlasting hell or heaven. … Human deeds being finite, their fruits—reward or punishment—cannot be infinite.”206

"Even the whole idea of a finite creation starting at a certain point in time by an infinite and eternal God is questioned: “The Mohammedans believe that the world has been in existence for less than seven or eight thousand years. One should like to know if God was sitting idle before Creation and will do the same after the day of judgement. These are all childish things, because God is ever active”.207 Most India-based philosophies including Buddhism and Jainism assume that the universe is eternal; in antiquity, Jainism has probably developed the most elaborate and explicit affirmation of the world’s eternity.208 From the existence of causality within the world, they do not deduce that the world itself must also be the causal result of an earlier act, viz. the act of creation by an extra-cosmic God."

................................................................................................

"Holy war"

"Dayananda comments: “The truth is that only the good and the virtuous will enjoy happiness, while the wicked will be subjected to pain and suffering, whichever faith they may belong to.”220 If at all there is a kind of retribution after death, it stands to reason that it would depend on universal criteria like “virtue”, rather than on sectarian criteria such as “belief’ in the particular claims of this or that prophet. In the same spirit, Dayananda rejects the fundamental Islamic notion that unbelievers are enemies of God, as in: “The curse of God is on the infidels”,221 or in: “God is an enemy to infidels”.222 He argues that “God is an enemy to none”.223 He denounces the Quranic division of mankind into two sections, Muslims and non-Muslims, having a radically different status both in this world and in the next.

"Highlighting militant verses in the Quran has remained a key element in non-Sangh polemic, even from the mild Swami Vivekananda, for example: “The Mohammedan religion allows Mohammedans to kill all who are not of their religion. It is clearly stated in the Koran, ‘Kill the infidels if they do not become Mohammedans.’ They must be put to fire and sword.”224 The claimed verse is not to be found anywhere in the Quran, but certain verses come close to the injunction “quoted” by Swamiji, like: “Make war on them until idolatry does not exist any longer and religion belongs to Allah alone.”225

"The late Suhas Majumdar has presented a detailed survey of the jihadic verses in the Quran and the major Hadîs collections and biographies of the Prophet. He deduces that Allah “enjoins perpetual war for … the abolition of all non-Islamic religions the world over”.226 Writing for an urban Hindu audience brought up on either Gandhism or secularism, Suhas Majumdar addresses their probable question: “Is this war allegorical? Since Mahatma Gandhi’s allegorical explanation of the Kurukshetra war, it has been the fashion in India to consider all types of religious wars as wars against the baser passions of the human mind. The contagion has not spared even Muslim scholars who are sometimes heard giving a non-violent interpretation of jihâd. But such interpretation is clearly contrary to Koranic verses.”227

"We might add that it is also contrary to actual usage: from the Prophet down to contemporary mujahedîn, Muslims have always consistently used the term jihâd for a specific type of warfare. This usage is not abrogated by an occasional metaphorical use of the same term, just as the metaphorical slogan “war on poverty” does not abrogate the primary meaning of the word war. Follow some verses in which the allegorical subtlety is hard to seize, like: “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him we shall bestow a vast reward.”228 The reference to the chance of being “slain” shows that no allegorical war is meant, but a physical confrontation with winners and losers, martyrs and killers.

"Majumdar concludes that jihâd generally meant offensive warfare, and that Islamic theology never bothered to hide behind a defensive justification: “Far from being an act of non-aggression, it could not even count as compensatory retaliation by any stretch of the imagination. … The theory of jihâd as defensive war must, in the circumstances, be rejected as a figment of the modern apologist’s imagination.” ... "

................................................................................................

"The violent verses"

"In the 1980s, the polemic against the Quran, highlighting its enmity-promoting verses, was taken to the popular level. At the same time, it was taken to the courts, in the form of a petition to ban the Quran.

"In India, it is not uncommon that books critical of Islam are banned, for example, R.M. Eaton’s published Ph.D. thesis, Sufis of Bijapur (1984), which in a few marginal sentences casts an unfavourable light on the Sufi tradition, and Arvind Ghosh’s The Koran and the Kafir, yet another annotated enumeration of Quranic injunctions which may adversely affect the relations between Muslims and unbelievers. The official motivation for this banning of books is that they have been maliciously intended to create enmity between communities or to hurt the religious feelings of a community (Article 153A and Article 295A of the Indian Penal Code). Under section 95 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the executive power must take action against such books.

"In 1984, Himangshu Kishore Chakraborty, a refugee from East Bengal, filed a petition with the Secretary of the Home Department of the West Bengal Government to ban the Quran in accordance with the said articles. He added a list of 37 Quran verses which “preach cruelty, incite violence and disturb public peace” (to use the terminology of the Penal Code), 17 verses which “promote, on grounds of religion, feelings of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different communities in India”, and 31 verses which “insult other religions as also the religious beliefs of other communities”.

"When the West Bengal authorities gave no reply to Chakraborty’s petition, one Chandmal Chopra, a Jain, took the matter to the Calcutta High Court, where he filed a petition asking the Court to direct the West Bengal Government to issue a ban on the Quran. He added a list with controversial verses from the Quran: 29 passages from the Quran (1 to 8 verses in length) which “incite violence” against unbelievers, 15 which “promote enmity”, 26 which “insult other religions”.

"Some typical examples cited are: “Mohammed is Allah’s apostle. Those who follow him are merciless for the unbelievers but kind to each other.”231 Or: “We break with you; hatred and enmity will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone.”232 Or: “The Jews and Christians and the Pagans will burn forever in the fire of hell. They are the vilest of all creatures.”233 On this basis, Chandmal Chopra stated in his writ petition: “The cited passages in the Quran … arouse in Muslims the worst sectarian passions and religious fanaticism, which has manifested itself in murders, massacres, plunder, arson, rape and destruction or desecration of sacred places both in historical and in the contemporary period, not only in India but in large parts of the world.”234"

"Beside Chakraborty’s and Chopra’s petitions, a third text which pointed to the Quran as a source of religious violence was a poster published in Delhi (1986) by Indra Sain Sharma and Rajkumar Arya, prominent members of the Hindu Mahasabha. The poster carried the caption: “Why do riots break out in this country?” It showed 24 combative Quran verses, such as: “Fight the unbelievers in your surroundings, and let them find harshness in you”237, and: “Kill the unbelievers wherever ye find them, capture and besiege them and prepare them every kind of ambush”.238 Both publishers were arrested and brought to trial, but they were acquitted. The judge ruled that they had made a “fair criticism”, for: “With all due respect to the holy Quran, an attentive perusal of the verses shows that these are indeed harmful and preach violence and have the potential to cause conflicts between the Muslims and the others.”239 The Government did not file an appeal against this judgement and when it did, the appeal was dismissed as time barred.

"Secular apologists of Islam tend to dismiss polemics centred on Islamic scripture as anachronistic and irrelevant; as if any Muslim worth his salt would dismiss the Quran as an “old book” which is no longer valid. Conversely, it could be said that Hindu polemicists err by going to the other extreme, viz. reading Islamic scripture as if it were a faithful rendering of contemporary Islam. In spite of the attempt by Muslims to emulate the Prophet, certain profound changes have nonetheless crept into Islam. Thus, slavery was approved of by Mohammed and the Quran; it was the cornerstone of the Muslim economy from the seventh till the nineteenth century, and when it was abolished by the French and British (in West Africa and India) or under their pressure (in the Ottoman Empire) in the mid-nineteenth century, the move was fiercely opposed by the guardians of orthodoxy.240 Yet today, no “fundamentalist” who preaches a return to the pure Islam of the Prophet advocates reintroducing the slave-trade; on the contrary, Islam is advertised among American blacks as a religion which has consistently opposed slavery. While this is crudely unhistorical, it does at least show to what extent Muslims have interiorized the un-Islamic rejection of slavery. This way, living Islam cannot be entirely reduced to its Quranic origins."

Quite contrary, as shown by jihadists since, who have not only massacred the non-muslims of West and Central Asia but turned the region into a slave market where non-muslim females of age over five are bought and sold, for usage in all forms of slavery, chiefly sexual and household chores. Wives of slave owners only worry that if the slave converted, she becomes an equal wife, no longer a slave to the prior wives.

................................................................................................

"Mohammed’s own holy wars

"Context is the key to the meaning of a text, and the jihadic verses in the Quran are part of the justification of actual warfare in which the Prophet and his companions engaged. It is nonsense to discuss “contemporary Indian Islam” as a subject in its own right without reference to the life and works of Prophet Mohammed in the seventh-century Arabia, for there simply is no Islam without the constant invocation of Mohammed’s mission and example, no Islamic Law without permanent reference to Mohammed’s model behaviour. The real meaning of and intention behind the concept of jihâd can best be checked at the very source where Islamic scholars learn the alpha and omega of their religion: the traditions concerning the words and deeds of the Prophet, or ahâdîs (singular hadîs).

"Suhas Majumdar claims that the purely aggressive nature of jihâd can be verified in the Hadîs literature: “Very many verses of the Koran and the whole of the Hadîs literature breathe the spirit of unqualified aggression. … not a single ghazwah … of the Prophet, barring that of Uhud (AD 625) and Ahzâb (AD 627), can by any stretch of the imagination be reckoned defensive war. In other words, 24 out of 26 ghazwahs of the Prophet were aggressive in intent as well as execution.”241

"It is Ram Swamp’s stated view that the Prophet brought a new ethics of warfare, a “total war” more ruthless than what the Arabs had known till then, and that one after another, he broke all the existing taboos which limited the scope of warfare in Pagan Arabia, like the prohibition to kill kinsfolk, the prohibition on warfare in the sacred months (the ones before, during and after the annual Pagan pilgrimage to Mecca), and the prohibition on cutting the scarce useful vegetation. This goes against the common apologetic claim that if Mohammed’s Islam was sometimes characterized by violence, it was due to the violent nature of Arab society, which was then gradually tempered by Islam.

"Ram Swarup also discusses the Prophet’s major raids and battles, and his policies vis-à-vis the non-Muslims, for example his warning to the Jews who were unwilling to accept Islam: “You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His apostle, and I wish that I should expel you from this land”, and his announcement to his lieutenant Umar: “I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian peninsula and will not leave any but Muslims”.242 Ram Swarup connects the destruction of Arabia’s multicultural society by Mohammed with the doctrine of monotheism: “Pagan Arabia accepted Jews and Christians but rejected their God for itself; Muslim Arabia accepted their God but rejected His people.”243 The testimony of stray cases of intolerance by non-monotheistic religions is rejected: “Religious intolerance was there before, but it was not supported by a theology. It was with the coming of Christianity and Islam that religious arrogance descended on the earth on a large scale and with a new power.”244

"Predictably, he pays detailed attention to the Prophet’s mass execution of about 700 Jews belonging to the Banû Quraiza, the last remaining Jewish tribe in Medina.245 Other paragraphs are devoted to the conquest of Mecca, with its iconoclasm in the Ka’ba, and to the assassination (before the conquest) or formal execution (after the conquest) of about a dozen of the Prophet’s critics. Ram Swarup argues, in a summary of the scriptural references given to the same effect by two Islamic scholars, that Ayotallah Khomeini’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie was nothing but the emulation of Mohammed’s model behaviour.246 This way, a critical look at Mohammed remains the key to understanding the problems which Islam poses today."

................................................................................................

"A Hindu look into Mohammed’s mind"

"The Hindu revivalist school connects the nature of Mohammed’s leadership with the nature of his status as prophet. The basis of Islam is the belief that Mohammed heard a voice dictating Allah’s own words. This is understood to have been a constant process of “revelation” from AD 610 (when Mohammed was 40) until his death in AD 632. The compilation of these “divine revelations” is the Quran. As Hindu students of Islam point out, many of Mohammed’s contemporaries were skeptical of his recipiency of divine messages: “The Meccans stood firm by their gods; their faith in the gods was not at all shaken by Muhammad’s attacks. Allah reports: ‘When it was said unto them, There is no God save Allah, they were scornful, and said: Shall we forsake our gods for a mad poet?’247 ‘And they marvel that a warner from among themselves had come. They say: This is a wizard, a charlatan.’”248-49 Some modern Western and even some Muslim-born scholars have diagnosed the process of revelation as a case of paranoid delusion.250 Others classify Mohammed as a kind of Shamanic medium, which still undermines his claim to a unique status as the final prophet.251 The specifically Hindu contribution to this perspective on Quranic revelation is to bring in the yogic experience.

"As an example of how yogic practice can go wrong, warning against the dangers of experimenting with yoga without competent guidance, Swami Vivekananda mentioned none other than Mohammed: “The yogi says there is a great danger in stumbling upon this state. In a good many cases, there is the danger of the brain being deranged, and, as a rule, you will find that all those men, however great they were, who had stumbled upon this superconscious state without understanding it, groped in the dark, and generally had, along with their knowledge, some quaint superstition. They opened themselves to hallucinations. Mohammed claimed that the Angel Gabriel came to him in a cave one day and took him on the heavenly horse, Burak, and he visited the heavens.

"“But with all that, Mohammed spoke some wonderful truths. If you read the Koran, you find the most wonderful truths mixed with superstitions. How will you explain it? That man was inspired, no doubt, but that inspiration was, as it were, stumbled upon. He was not a trained Yogi, and did not know the reason of what he was doing. Think of the good Mohammed did to the world, and think of the great evil that has been done through his fanaticism! Think of the millions massacred through his teachings, mothers bereft of their children, children made orphans, whole countries destroyed, millions upon millions of people killed!… So we see this danger by studying the lives of great teachers like Mohammad and others. Yet we find, at the same time, that they were all inspired. Whenever a prophet got into the superconscious state by heightening his emotional nature, he brought away from it not only some truths, but some fanaticism also, some superstition which injured the world as much as the greatness of the teaching helped.”252

................................................................................................

"Most yoga manuals emphatically warn against wrongly practising the techniques of Hatha Yoga, which are very powerful whether used properly or in disregard of the concomitant rules. Yogic masters can relate anecdotes of pupils or colleagues who spurned the precautions and practised dangerous forms of prânâyâma (“breath control” or “control of the vital energies”) till they impaired their nerve systems.253 Many mystic phenomena the world over come about as cases of stumbling upon certain states of consciousness, which may lead to some kind of “enlightenment” but also to serious delusions (most typically megalomania, witness the self-importance of the assorted messiahs in the modern cult scene). Hindu yogis claim to have left these dangerous mind games behind because their forebears have developed a safe and sound method laid down in such classics as Patanjali’s Yoga Sûtra. Ram Swamp argues that the methodical and systematic “science of yoga” has a substantial qualitative edge over other forms of mysticism or mediumism.254 From this angle, it is unfair (even if fashionably in tune with the “equal truth of all religions” doctrine) to put yoga in one class with the experiments of Shamans taking hallucinogenic plants, or with the uninvited voice-hearing experiences of Mohammed.

"In recent years, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel have further developed Swami Vivekananda’s position on the nature of Quranic revelation.255 They conclude that the Pagan Arabs had every right to reject Mohammed’s claims, born from a deluded consciousness but propagated on a war footing, but that they made the one mistake which history does not forgive, viz. the mistake of being defeated. However, “the fact that they failed to understand the ways of Mohammed and could not match his mailed fist in the final round, should not be held against them. It was neither the first nor the last time that a democratic society succumbed in the face of determined gangsterism. We know how Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung succeeded in our own times.”256

"As far as I can see, the foregoing constitutes the single most radical criticism of Islam available in the world. Christian critics, no matter how fierce, usually appreciate at least Mohammed’s monotheism, which does not impress these Hindu authors. Though “irreverent” and “demythologizing” are among the most specious words of praise in the review columns of modern newspapers, few people have the stomach for something as irreverent and demythologizing as the Hindu revivalist analysis of the Prophet’s mission.257 Most spokesmen of the organized Hindutva movement, at any rate, stay as far away from it as possible."

................................................................................................

"Holy war in Indian history

"Swami Dayananda had based his polemic against Islam purely on Islamic scripture. His follower Pandit Lekh Ram (1858-97) brought in another type of evidence against Islam, viz. Islam’s actual history. In his Risâla-i-Jihâd ya’ni Dîn-i-Muhammadî kî Bunyâd (Urdu: “A Treatise on Holy War, or the Basis of the Mohammedan Religion”, Lahore 1892), Lekh Ram argues that Islam has always been intolerant and aggressive compared to all other religions, and that it is incapable of peaceful co-existence except as a matter of temporary truce, in the ongoing struggle to turn the whole world into an Islamic state.

"The context of Lekh Ram’s argument was the tendency in late-nineteenth-century Islamic apologetics to downplay the importance of jihâd in Islam. After the enthusiastic participation of Muslims in the 1857 Mutiny (which was largely an attempt to restore the Moghul empire), the emerging class of modernist Muslims led by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898, a civil servant who remained loyal to the British during the 1857 Mutiny) adapted their discourse in order to assuage British suspicions about the political and military programme of Islam. They repudiated the nominal loyalty which Indian Muslims owed the Caliph in Istanbul and affirmed that they were loyal subjects of the British Government.258"

"The reinterpretation in a purely moral or pacifist sense of the term jihâd was part of this charm offensive, though it also showed the genuine influence of the newly dominant Enlightenment mentality, which favoured pluralism and abhorred the use of force in the service of religion. Pandit Lekh Ram observed: “Since then some naturalist Mohammadis are trying, rather than opposing falsehood and accepting the truth, to prove unnecessarily and wrongly that Islam never indulged in Jihad and the people were never converted to Islam forcibly.”259

"Lekh Ram countered this new line in Muslim apologetics by quoting at length from Muslim accounts of self-described jihâd in Indian history, featuring conquerors like Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mohammed Ghori, Timur, Alauddin Khilji and Aurangzeb.

"Recent variations on this approach are the books by Sita Ram Goel: Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, and, focusing specifically on the aspect of temple destructions: Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them. The backbone of this class of books essentially consists in a list of quotations from Muslim sources describing the destruction of Hindu lives and Hindu culture. As to facts, the view of history presented by them, though obviously selective, is not really controversial; we encounter the same facts in standard history books by Western authors, even by those who sympathize with Islam.

"Thus, French Indologist Louis Frédéric, who emphasizes in his introduction that the Muslims in India created an “original civilization, combining Hindu and Muslim influences”, frequently mentions forced conversions, massacres and temple demolitions: “Mohammed Ghori had the Hindu temples of Ajmer demolished and ordered the construction of mosques and Quran schools on their ruins. … He plundered Kanauj and Kashi and destroyed their temples” while his generals “destroyed in passing the remaining Buddhist communities of Bihar and destroyed the universities of Nalanda”.260 Bakhtiar Khilji “established a Muslim capital in Lakhnautî (Gaur) on the Ganga and destroyed, in 1197, its basalt temples. In Odantpurî, in 1202, he massacred two thousand Buddhist monks.”261 Meanwhile, back in Delhi: “This Quwwat-ul-Islam (Might of Islam) was built in a hurry using the debris, chiefly sculpted pillars, of twenty-seven dismantled Hindu temples.”262 Thirty years later, “Iltutmish did not forget that he was a Muslim conqueror. He showed himself to be very pious, never forgetting to do his five devotions daily. … He likewise showed himself totally intolerant vis-à-vis the Hindus who refused to convert, destroying their temples and annihilating Brahmin communities”.263

"However, in India a literature has developed which denies, minimizes or whitewashes this history.264 For Goel as for Lekh Ram, the stated motive for collecting and publishing primary evidence is indignation at the contrast between the negationist claims of modern Islamic apologetics (often adopted by leading secularists)265 and the testimony of historical records no less Islamic: “There was a time, not so long ago, when the exponents of jihâd minced no words and pulled no punches. They were brutally frank in spelling out what jihâd really meant. But times have changed. … Standards of moral judgements have increasingly tended to become universal, and no statement of faith can escape scrutiny simply because it is made in a book hailed as holy by some people. Defenders of jihâd have been forced to develop an apologetics. They are now trying to protect by means of scholarship a doctrine which has so far been sustained by means of the sword.”266

"The view of Islam represented by authors from Lekh Ram down to Sita Ram Goel is widespread in Hindu society. Swami Vivekananda (who, unlike Lekh Ram and Goel, also had some nice things to say about Islam) merely voiced the communis opinio when he wrote that “the Mohammedans used the greatest violence”,267 and when he asserted: “You know that the Hindu religion never persecutes. It is the land where all sects may live in peace and amity. The Mohammedans brought murder and slaughter in their train, but until their arrival peace prevailed.”268"

................................................................................................

"Hindu and Muslim ethic of warfare"

" ... Hindu apologists have a point when they assert that Hinduism knows of no jihâd or “holy war” concept. The “corresponding” Hindu concept of Dharma-yuddha means “war according to a chivalrous deontology”, not war for religion but war subject to “religious” or at least dharmic rules. This much is a fact, that Hindu scriptures do prescribe strict rules of chivalry, e.g.: “One should not kill the enemy who is lying unconscious, who is crippled, devoid of weapon, or is stricken with fear and also who has come for shelter (asylum). A strong and brave warrior should not chase and kill any fleeing enemy, who is stricken with fear.”269 And: “The person who is asleep, who is in a drunken state, who is devoid of clothes or weapons, the lady, the minor, the helpless, the afraid one who deserts the battlefield should not be killed.”270"

That's a statement of facts and reason for pride, not apology.

Comparing this with Alauddin Khilji and his conduct, of Khilji exterminating Chittor, when his demand that the King surrender the Queen Padmini, his wife, to the invader, was refused, helps see the contrast; this demand is so typical of Muslim ethos, that even now, citizens of Pakistan are not horrified at Alauddin, but extol him as a warrior and more, and seek to excuse the Chittor refusal instead, that only based on a "they seemed to love one another", with no moral or ethical horror of a man forcing another to "surrender his wife", and no tear shed for the women of Chittor, all of whom preferred to step into funeral pyres, after having sent their men off to a final battle.

"This tradition of chivalry is often contrasted with the allegedly more barbarous Muslim style of warfare, for example Golwalkar cites an application of these rules to prove Hinduism’s moral superiority: “The famous instance of Shivaji who sent back honourably and laden with presents the beautiful daughter-in-law of the Muslim Subedar of Kalyan captured in war (though it appears exceptional in the eyes of the foreign, especially Muslim, historians) is a very ordinary instance of the sublime culture of this land.”271 On the other hand, this chivalry is also blamed for the most decisive Hindu defeat against a Muslim invader in the second battle of Tarain in 1292: a year before, at the same site and against the same army led by the same Mohammed Ghori, a victorious Prithviraj Chauhan “could now have easily consummated his victory by chasing and annihilating his routed enemy. But instead, he allowed the defeated Muslim army to return unmolested.”272 The Hindus made the same strategic mistake as the Pagan Arabs during the Ridda (“return” to Paganism, apostasy) war just after Mohammed’s death: they defeated Abu Bakr’s Muslim army but failed to pursue the fleeing Muslims, so that the latter could regroup and return victorious."

And when Ghori had murdered a defeated Prithviraj, his patron saint demanded that the widow marry the winner; on her refusal, the "saint" (who is worshipped at Ajmer since), ordered her to be stripped and raped by every soldier.

This is when tradition of Hindu females preferring to die, instead of being raped, led to until then the legend, of Sati, turning into a tradition instead, with widows ending themselves on the husband's pyre, and unmarried women ending lives in other ways before being molested, whenever possible.

During partition in 1947, Sikhs in Pakistan killed their women before trekking to India, avoiding their dishonor at any cost, and the women so saved from dishonour, preferred it, as witnesses recounted decades later - the said witnesses having then been boys, who saw their intimate relatives going through this.

................................................................................................

"It remains an interesting topic for research to what extent the scriptural code of chivalrous warfare was a reality or merely an ideal. It certainly had its limitations. No less a person than Krishna used, and advised others to use, deceit and below-the-belt strikes at critical moments in the Mahâbhârata war (at least against people to whom no moral appeal proved possible), apparently assuming the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Thus, Karna was killed while he was pulling his chariot up when it got stuck.273 The justification given was that the enemy side had proven so treacherous that against them, a dharma-yuddha (war which follows the code of chivalry) was impossible. It stands to reason that many a Hindu general in history must have considered his enemy equally unworthy of chivalrous treatment."

One, in the context of Mahâbhârata, it was indeed an enemy that had been unjust and uncivil for decades, beginning with attempted murder of a widow with five children, attempted public gang rape of a sister-in-law, and more; slightly less relevant but true, the said uncivil and unjust enemy had greater quantity of force, including military forces of Krishna, because when asked, Duryodhana (literally, "bad fighter") had chosen to ask for Krishna's army, while Arjuna asked for Krishna. Finally, Karna himself wouldn't have necessarily been fair, as evidenced by his enjoying the dishonor of a Queen, and participating in the murder of a young boy, son of Arjuna, by unfair means and by a lot of men ganging up on the boy alone, surrounded by enemies.

But one, if elsewhere on other occasions, if unfair practices were used, it would be known too, just as much; two, had India been used to uncivil war and behaviour, India wouldn't be so helpless before islamic barbarians, and Prithviraj wouldn't have let ghori go alive even once. Finally, even if a stray warrior here or there were unfair in war, behaviour in civil life or otherwise, with anyone unarmed or not ready to battle, was civil, else ill-fame of his deed would survive for ever.

But this cynicism from West is typical against Indian civilisation, evidence of West's unwillingness to believe how far more civilised India always was.

European colleagues, for example, said that they thought it was obvious, that soldiers raping women in conquered lands was not only natural but a well deserved reward. This was a Hungarian colleague, male. His North Carolina wife and European colleagues had no disagreements to express.

A German woman, speaking of WWII, said German women were afraid US forces raping German women. She did not mention Russian or German soldiers doing so, which they had in fact done. So the fear was about racial gap.

Even in Mahâbhârata, for that matter, even during the war, conduct generally was according to rules, exceptions being few and far between. Both sides laid down weapons at sundown, for instance, every day; Arjuna visited his elders at night, when they were dying, in the opposite camp, without fear, regularly. Uncivilised conduct, such as murder at night, when it was done by one, resulting in universal condemnation and a dire curse, of an eternal life in pain without relief.

................................................................................................

"The mirage of Hindu-Muslim unity"

"A number of Arya Samajis have written pamphlets against Islam, others have cursorily made critical remarks about it. The most famous example of the latter type is probably Lala Lajpat Rai’s letter to C.R. Das on the theme of Hindu-Mohammedan unity, after the 1922 Khilafat riots: “I have devoted most of my time during the last six months to the study of Muslim history and Muslim law and I am inclined to think, it [= Hindu-Muslim unity] is neither possible nor practicable. Assuming and admitting the sincerity of the Mohamedan leaders in the non-cooperation movement, I think their religion provides an effective bar to anything of the kind. … I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders, but what about the Quran and the Hadis? The leaders cannot override them.”274

"Swami Vivekananda is likewise sceptical: “Mohammedans talk of universal brotherhood, but what comes out of that, in reality? Why, anybody who is not a Mohammedan will not be admitted into the brotherhood; he will more likely have his throat cut.”275

"An important part of the Congress view of the Hindu-Muslim conflict was that it had been created (rather than just exploited) by the British. Aurobindo ridiculed this as escapist myth-making. When a disciple said that “it is because of the British divide-and-rule policy that we [Hindus and Muslims] can’t unite”, Aurobindo replied: “Nonsense! Was there unity in India before the British rule?”276

"He believed that the Hindu-Muslim conflict had deeper roots than British machinations, and consequently rejected any expectations of imminent Hindu-Muslim reconciliation as a result of Gandhi’s policies: “You can live amicably with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is ‘I will not tolerate you’? How are you going to have unity with these people? Certainly, Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be arrived at on the basis that the Muslims will go on converting Hindus while the Hindus shall not convert any Mohamedan.”277

"Though Aurobindo himself was never personally involved in the Hindu-Muslim conflict, he did countenance the possibility that the Hindus would have to fight against the Muslims: “I am sorry they are making a fetish of this Hindu-Muslim unity. It is no use ignoring facts; some day the Hindus may have to fight the Muslims and they must prepare for it. Hindu-Muslim unity should not mean the subjection of the Hindus. Every time the mildness of the Hindus has given way. The best solution would be to allow the Hindus to organize themselves and the Hindu-Muslim unity would take care of itself, it would automatically solve the problem.”278 This last statement put Aurobindo squarely in the camp of Hindû Sangathan, “Hindu self-organization”, a project launched by Swami Shraddhananda and taken up systematically by the RSS.

"V.D. Savarkar did not believe the Congressite assurance that the Hindu-Muslim conflict was merely the result of British machinations: “These well-meaning but unthinking friends take their dreams for realities. That is why they are impatient of communal tangles and attribute them to communal organizations. But the solid fact is that the so-called communal questions are but a legacy handed down to us by centuries of a cultural, religious and national antagonism between the Hindus and the Muslims.”279

"The view of Hindu-Muslim hostility as profound and ultimately intrinsic to the very nature of Islam has been articulated most sharply by Sita Ram Goel, and could be summarized as follows.280 Islam started as a movement to destroy the traditional religion of Arabia, a pluralistic and polytheistic religion typologically similar to Hinduism. The Islamic war against Hinduism waged by a long series of invaders (AD 636 to 1761) was nothing but a continuation of the war waged by Mohammed himself against Arab Paganism. This explains Islam’s fiercer and more intolerant policy vis-à-vis Hinduism as compared with Christianity and Judaism.

"Due to the demographic magnitude of Hindu society and the resultant power equation, Muslim rulers, who frequently had to contend with palace revolutions by fellow Muslims, were forced to compromise with the Hindus, using the model already instituted in the “toleration” of Christians and Jews in West Asia (including the payment of the jizya or toleration tax), and even incorporating semi-independent Hindu princes as vassals in the imperial command structure under Akbar (1556-1605). But the spirit of uncompromising hostility remained alive among the clergy; it was reinstalled as state doctrine by Aurangzeb and revived on a smaller scale on numerous occasions during the colonial and post-colonial periods. According to Goel, a basic awareness of this implacable hostility to Hinduism has lingered in the Indian Muslim mind due to Quranic indoctrination, and it is this mentality which explains phenomena like the Partition of India (1947) and the Bangladesh genocide (1971)."

................................................................................................

"In praise of Islam?

"At the turn of 1993, the year in which Swami Vivekananda’s 1893 trip to America and speech before the Parliament of Religions in Chicago was to be commemorated, the CPI, CPM and various militant secularists were brandishing Swami Vivekananda’s name in their campaign against the Hindutva movement.281 They claimed that Swamiji had been a “secularist” (a concept which was simply non-existent in Vivekananda’s India), and in particular that he opposed the aversion for Islam common among Hindus and allegedly cultivated by the contemporary Hindutva movement.282 When Arun Shourie challenged these claims, they tried to back them up with a selection of quotations.283"

"While ostensibly agreeing with the present-day Muslim claim that conversions were related to injustice in Hindu society, Vivekananda’s position can hardly be called sympathetic to Islam: he considers its progress as a divine punishment. Secular psychologist Sudhir Kakar aptly warns the secularist Vivekananda quoters: “Swami Vivekananda, too, I am afraid, belongs to the Hindu nationalist camp as far as the Muslim question is concerned.”288

"Likewise, Kakar cautions against the incorporation of Sri Aurobindo into the secularist pantheon on the basis of a stray Muslim-friendly quotation: “In his Evening Talks, Sri Aurobindo’s evaluation of Muslim rule is uniformly negative.”289 The Evening Talks contain Aurobindo’s stray comments on politics after he had formally retreated into a life of yoga; during his political and especially his revolutionary period (up to 1909), Aurobindo made little distinction between Hindu and Muslim, as was common in the revolutionary movement. He is frequently applauded for saying that “the Mussalman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule … even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest”.290 This statement is at variance with the refusal of all Muslim rulers until the eighteenth century to learn an Indian language, the court language being Persian; but its inaccuracy does not stand in the way of proving young Aurobindo’s “secularism”.

"To counter the impression created by this single line, Kakar quotes the following passage: “The Mohamedan or Islamic culture hardly gave anything to the world which may be said to be of fundamental importance and typically its own; Islamic culture was mainly borrowed from others. Their mathematics and astronomy and other subjects were derived from Greece. It is true they gave some of these things a new turn, but they have not created much. Their philosophy and their religion are very simple and what they call Sufism is largely the result of gnostics who lived in Persia and it is the logical outcome of that school of thought largely touched by Vedanta. [Except for Indo-Saracenic architecture], I do not think it has done anything more in India of cultural value. It gave some new forms to art and poetry. Its political institutions were always semi-barbaric.”291

................................................................................................

"Hindu stagnation under Islam"

"According to Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu effort to resist Islam entailed a stagnation of Hindu culture in most other respects: “Of course, we had to stop advancing during the Mohammedan tyranny, for then it was not a question of progress but of life and death.”293 This is a sweeping statement, proposing a single state of affairs over centuries and in a large area. It is not implausible, in this sense that wartime does not favour the subtler cultural pursuits. I am at least not aware of discoveries, inventions and other objectively optimizing innovations made in India under Muslim rule. (The replacement of one building style, literary fashion etc. by another does not by itself constitute objective progress.) Ancient India was famous for certain scientific advances, but no trace of creativity in those fields is in evidence in medieval India, a condition quite like the collapse of scientific progress in China (which had made such promising strides in the preceding Sung period) under the Mongol occupation in the thirteenth-fourteenth century.

"Till today, this is a frequent Hindu criticism of Islam, e.g. N.S. Rajaram writes: “Here is one telling statistic that should help give a true picture of Medieval India. … Pre-Islamic India was renowned for its universities. Great centres of learning like Nalanda, Vaishali, Sarnath, Vikramashila, Takshashila and many more—they attracted students from all over Asia and the world. Following the Islamic invasion of India, all these universities were destroyed. In the centuries following, not a single university was established by any Muslim ruler. This was a Dark Age darker than the one that overtook Europe.”294"

"However, the impression exists that Hindu civilization had already entered a stage of sclerosis before the Muslim invasions. Thus, the ancient Hindus had been great astronomers, but when Albiruni visited India at the time of Mahmud Ghaznavi’s incursions, he found Hindu astronomers unable to point out in the sky the constellations which they knew from their astronomical tables.295 Possibly the temporary dominance of Buddhism with its anti-worldliness had diminished Indian inquisitiveness, but the matter deserves deeper investigation. It also seems that in the period under consideration, scientific progress and creativity were as conspicuous by their absence in the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in South India as they were in Muslim-dominated North India. So, India’s stagnation cannot entirely be blamed on Islam."

Elst seems unfamiliar with Nilkanth in Kerala having written of differentials before Newton, and this was after 11th century; also, Elst is avoiding thinking about consequences, of islamic barbarians burning libraries everywhere, in Persia and India, apart from murdering thousands of scholars in universities of India, which would destroy all records of any scholarly advances. Finally, if Chinese visitors to India, at universities in India during Islamic barbaric attacks, found Indian scholarship level impressive, and someone from West didn't, was the latter eager not to meet those who were impressive?

It's entirely possible for a US faculty member to scoff at Russian claims, for example, but then it wasn't so long ago that the Fields Medal was won by a Russian with impressive work.

................................................................................................

"Reconversion"

"Both the modernist critics and the Shuddhi campaigners insist that their problem is not with Muslims, but with Islam. I have yet to see the first study or critique of the Hindu revivalist movement which manages to seize this crucial distinction; most inaccurately allege that Hindu revivalism is “anti-Muslim”. And this is not because the Hindu spokesmen have failed to explicitate the distinction. As Sita Ram Goel writes: “The most malevolent of these residues [of bygone imperialisms] is Islamism, the residue of the Muslim invasion of India spread over several centuries. … Let it be clear that the reference here is not to our Muslim brethren who are our own flesh and blood, except for that microscopic minority which takes pride in the purity of its Arab, Persian or Turkish descent. Instead of being the proponents of Islamism, the Muslims are its victims whom it is trying to use as vehicles of its poisonous virulence. The vast majority of Indian Muslims were converted to Islam by force or allurements. … The Muslims of India, therefore, have to be freed from rather than accused of Islamism.”300"

................................................................................................

"Savarkar on Islam"

" ... Savarkar’s own position on Islam can be summed up thus: rather than being brothers belonging to a single nation, naturally inclined to unity, Hindus and Muslims are separated by an old and profound cleavage, though not on equal terms: Hindus are just Hindus regardless of their views of Islam, while Muslims are ex-Hindus in whom an artificial hostility to Hinduism had been fostered as a necessary component of their loyalty to Islam. Remove that hostility, and Muslims would naturally gravitate back to their Hindu mother society."

................................................................................................

"Golwalkar on Muslim disloyalty"

"Golwalkar routinely referred to Muslims as foreigners who treat India as a sarai.310 He neglected to provide evidence even for the subjective sense of foreignness among the Muslim elites, though other authors have collected such evidence from the writings of educated Muslims, e.g. in the closing line of Mohammed Iqbal’s poem Shikwa (1909): “No matter if my idiom is Indian, my spirit is that of Hejaz”, i.e. of Mecca and Medina.311 A decade earlier, Hali had expressed “his pessimism about the prospects of India’s Muslims under democracy”312 as follows: “Farewell to thee, o ever-green garden of India. We foreigners have stayed long in this country as your guests.”313

"Pakistan’s official self-history squarely identifies it as the successor state of the Moghul Empire and considers the “subcontinental Muslims” for whom Pakistan was created as the cultural if not the biological progeny of the foreign Islamic invaders. This was illustrated by its 1998 missile test featuring the Ghaurî missile, named after Mohammed Ghori, who forced the decisive Muslim breakthrough into India in 1192. (At this point, we must emphasize the distinction between the masses of native Muslim converts, and the elites which traced their ancestry at least partly to the Turkish and Iranian invaders: the sense of foreignness was quite real among the latter, much less among the former.)

"In his 678-page book Bunch of Thoughts, Golwalkar devotes just one 15-page chapter plus a handful of brief passages to Islam. His main objection is that Islam makes its adherents less loyal to India: “Conversion of Hindus into other religions is nothing but making them succumb to divided loyalty in place of having undivided and absolute loyalty to the nation. It is dangerous to the security of the nation and the country. It is therefore necessary to put a stop to it.”314 As a full-blooded nationalist, he expected people to have a total and exclusive loyalty to the nation and did not consider for a moment that people can and do have loyalties at many levels, both larger and smaller than the nation."

That last cryptic comment, does that imply condemnation of church for preaching falsely against Jews for two millennia?

"In history, there have been cases of Muslim disloyalty to their Hindu employers at critical moments, the most consequential occasion being the battle of Talikota, on 23 January 1565, which broke the back of the Vijayanagar empire, the last Hindu stronghold against the southward advances of the confederacy of Islamic states including Bijapur and Golkonda: “At first the Hindus fought with success and nearly won the battle; but the issue was decided by the desertion of two Muslim commanders of Rama Raya’s army, each in charge of seventy to eighty thousand men.”315"

"But Golwalkar never took the trouble of looking up historical anecdotes to buttress his argument (much less to discuss anecdotes which might contradict it), except for one large-scale event which took place during his own lifetime: the secession of Pakistan. The Partition of the Motherland in 1947 provided Golwalkar with a vivid proof of the disloyalty of the Muslims, many of whom had none the less remained behind in truncated India:"

"But"????? Wasn't every Hindu aware of facts without producing documented evidence, documented often envy invaders themselves? Or was partition and accompanying genocide of non-muslims, amounting to several millions of victims, not evidence enough?

As for those that chose to remain, it wasn't due to loyalty to India and her past, as much as, more often than not, absence of need to move, unwillingness to sell property and move, and even an assurance of ruling India instead of just a piece.

"“It has been the tragic lesson of the history of many a country in the world that the hostile elements within the country pose a far greater menace to national security than aggressors from outside. … Is it true that all pro-Pakistani elements have gone away to Pakistan? It was the Muslims in Hindu majority provinces led by UP who provided the spearhead for the movement for Pakistan right from the beginning. And they have remained solidly here even after Partition. … In those elections [1945-46] Muslim League had contested making the creation of Pakistan its election plank. The Congress also had set up some Muslim candidates all over the country. But at almost every such place, Muslims voted for the Muslim League candidates. … It only means that all the crores of Muslims who are here even now, had en bloc voted for Pakistan.”316

"It is a fact that in the 1945 elections, the Congress claim to also represent the Indian Muslims was completely defeated by the Muslim electorate, of which 86.6 per cent voted for the Muslim League and its one-point programme: Pakistan. B.N. Jog, a contemporary RSS author argues that even the 1937 elections, though often mentioned as proof that the Muslim electorate was largely “secular” because of the poor results for the Muslim League, had already disproven this Congress claim: most Muslim votes had gone to other Muslim-dominated parties, chiefly the Unionist Party of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Panjab and the Krishak Praja Party of Fazlul Haq in Bengal.317 Even the supposedly defeated Muslim League had won 108 of the 492 Muslim-reserved seats in 1937, against 26 for Congress. So, Jog concludes, the Muslim vote was largely motivated by sectional interests rather than by commitment to the national struggle.

"Golwalkar and Jog overlook the fact that many Muslims had not voted for Pakistan simply because they had been excluded from voting under the census system. Though one cannot say that the non-voting Muslim masses ever expressed a determined opposition to the Pakistan scheme in any way, the historical fact remains that we will never know how the non-enfranchised Muslims would have voted if given a chance. Golwalkar also overlooks the fact that a part of the Muslim elites in U.P. and East Panjab who spearheaded the Pakistan movement did move to Pakistan. They are known as the Mohajirs, “migrants”, those who made the hijra to Pakistan on the model of Mohammed’s migration/hijra from heathen Mecca to the more Islam-friendly city of Medina. The fact that the Mohajirs’ integration in Pakistani society was not too successful, and that they feel seriously discriminated against in the country of their own creation, is often cited by Hindus as a case of just desserts."

"In Golwalkar’s view, the creation of Pakistan has not removed the problem of “disloyal Muslims”, on the contrary: the “enemy within” has become doubly dangerous, for now he possesses a base beyond the control of the national Government. Golwalkar’s distrust of the Muslims inside India is total: “It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan which had become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country.”318 And again: “The Muslim looks upon Partition only as a springboard for further aggression.”319 And so: “From the day the so-called Pakistan came into being, we in Sangh have been declaring that it is a clear case of continued Muslim aggression.”320"

ZH would agree. He promises Conquest and conversion of India, and is known to YT as red cap.

"Golwalkar calls Muslim pockets in India “miniature Pakistans”: “Such ‘pockets’ have verily become centres of pro-Pakistani elements in this land.”321 His evidence is not very hard, though: from the fact that Pakistani radio mentioned a Hindu-Muslim riot in Mumbai “within a few hours”, he deduces that “there must be some pro-Pakistani gentleman with a pro-Pakistani transmitter and he must be in constant touch with Pakistan”.322 The striking feature of this chapter of Guruji’s worldview is not its rightness or wrongness, but the way it is based on stray impressions and vague rumours. This man passed as the great ideologue of the largest mass movement in India, yet he never bothered to give a decent factual and conceptual basis to his view of urgent matters such as the Hindu-Muslim conflict. As to contents, his entire discourse on Islam boils down to raising suspicions that the Indian Muslims are a fifth column of world Islam as incarnated in the state of Pakistan."

Was the closely coordinated attack in Mumbai, with Taj burning for days, while attackers were on phone with ISI, evidence enough for Elst?

................................................................................................

"Other voices on Muslim disloyalty"

"In support of this view of Muslim disloyalty, a number of facts are mentioned. One of these is the deliberate adoption of foreign elements by the Indian Muslims, starting with their names. Many native converts to Islam cultivate imaginary genealogies connecting them with the Prophet and his companions or with the Turkish conquerors of India. It is often alleged that Hindu nationalists claim that Indian Muslims are foreigners, but exactly the reverse is the case: it is Muslims themselves who claim foreign descent, while Hindus try to remind them of their Indian roots. K.R. Malkani writes: “I will give here just one example of these grand illusions. In the 1872 census, Bengal had a Muslim population of 17.5 million; 2,66,000 (i.e. less than 1.5 per cent) of them claimed to be persons of foreign origin. In the census of 1909, out of a Muslim population of 21.5 million, as many as 19.5 million (i.e. over 90 per cent) claimed to be persons of foreign origin! Fact is that not even one per cent of Muslim population is immigrant; and even this one per cent has been too completely Indianised over centuries of residence and intermarriage to have any ‘foreignness’ about them.”325

"A secularist journalist expresses his sympathy for Indian Islam, yet acknowledges that Hindus may get the impression that Islam’s loyalty is conditional on its perceived chances of seizing power, in the sense that weak Muslim minorities espouse secularism and multiculturalism but drop these minority-protecting values as soon as the lure of Muslim majority power looms on the horizon: “Indeed it is Indian Islam which has the greatest potential to emerge as a model where faith and culture and nationalism form a harmonious continuum. If this model does not emerge, then in view of much of what is happening in the Islamic world many non-Muslims in India will be well within their rights to ask whether Indian Muslims espouse secularism only because they are not in a majority and, no less important, not in power.”326"

In fact, instructions to that effect are in place in Islamic scripture dictating policies on behaviour, depending on percentage of population they are, and their behaviour in various lands does confirm to that policy.

"Then there are the statements of Muslim leaders, e.g. at the First Asian Islamic Conference at Karachi in July 1978, leading Indian Muslim cleric AH Mian said: “Muslims all over the world including those of India were hopefully looking up to Pakistan for help and guidance and whatever happened in Pakistan or any other Muslim country cast its shadow on the Indian Muslims also. The Pakistani debacle of 1971 had caused immense grief to Indian Muslims.”327"

Which justifies all verbal lashings they receive from Tarek Fateh on the topic, since they couldn't care less for their brethren in East Bengal, the more populous half until 1971; since, it's the scarcely populated greater part which was forcibly occupied by Pakistan in the first place, Baluchistan, that has been at the receiving end of atrocities, apart from minorities which include not only all non-muslims but also Shia and other sects.

"Another point of reference is the occasional statement by international Muslim leaders that peace with non-Muslims is only a temporary ploy to build up strength for a future showdown, e.g. by Yasser Arafat. On 10 May 1994 in Johannesburg, Arafat “called for jihad to liberate Jerusalem” and “the Palestinian leader put himself in the shoes of Prophet Mohammed who in 628 concluded a peace treaty with the Quraish and violated it two years later with the conquest of Mecca. Yasser Arafat said in Johannesburg that the treaty signed by Prophet Mohammed was equally non-binding as the treaty which he himself concluded with Israel.”328 Such statements are cited as nourishing the impression that under Islamic law, the Muslim ummah is permanently at war with the rest of humanity, with peace treaties only serving to bridge periods of Muslim weakness in preparation of future victories."

Which is supposed to go on until all "other"s are wiped out.

"It also disturbs Hindus that Muslim spokesmen apparently cannot bring themselves to condemn the foreign Muslim conquerors of yore: “the Indian Muslims should shout this out aloud and dissociate themselves from the idol-breaking and destruction of temples carried out by Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb”.329 Nor to reciprocate Hindu syncretism: “The Hindu is willing to say, ‘Ram Rahim ek hai’; is the Muslim also prepared to say it? Gandhiji had said: ‘There is in Hinduism room enough for Jesus, as there is for Mohammed, Zoroaster and Moses.’ Does Islam in India have room enough for Ram—as Islam in Indonesia has room enough for Rama?”330"

No, since they aspire to emulate Pakistan and be taken for Arab, Turks, or anything other than Indian. While various Muslims of India are proud of their ignoble ancestry elsewhere and gaining prominence in India after migration, if not as part of invasions then as warriors with British against Hindus, Pakistan in fact attemps to align itself with Arabs and Afghanistan by turns, until spurned to face. For a while even the official language of Pakistan was Arabic, until it became ridiculous.

"And yet, many Indian Muslims I have talked with are definitely not “Pakistani patriots”, but tend to speak rather scornfully about Pakistan, a failed state if ever there was one, a terror-ridden clerico-feudal narco-state kept together by Kashmir-obsessed gun-and-moustache men. Even the Mohajirs, the Uttar Pradesh Muslims who clamoured loudest for Partition, but who have been at the receiving end of ethnic violence in Sindh, have voiced their disillusionment in their self-made Promised Land."

And the only sympathy they have is from India, but not from the section that seeks to appease Pakistan despite all the terrorist attacks.

"Pakistanis have had to accept that Pakistan is not very popular among the Indian Muslims for whom the state was created: “On a recent visit to India, a young Pakistani writer Sameen Tahir Khan discovered to her dismay that anti-Pakistan sentiments abound among Indian Muslim youth.”333 Ms. Khan quotes an Indian Muslim as saying: “I think our future over here is brighter than yours in Pakistan.” A young student is quoted: “In the past, our grandfathers used to live in India but their heads belonged to Pakistan. I don’t believe in that. I was born here and I love India. In fact, I don’t even like Pakistan. I find it a hypocritical country.” Ms. Khan comments: “I was impressed by the spirit of nationalism among Indian Muslims. I felt envious and wished we in Pakistan could learn a lesson from them.”334"

In fact there are illegal migrants from both sides across the border, pretending to be Indian. While those from East simply cross over, those from West Pakistan come with a visa, lose passports and get lost in general population. Any attempts by a government to assign identity cards to citizens is immediately opposed by the leftists as communal, even though it's to be applied to everyone.

"Therefore, enthusiasm for Pakistan among Indian Muslims is low, and in that sense, there is no reason to mistrust the self-description of modernist Indian Muslims like journalist M.J. Akbar as “nationalist Muslims”.335 Enlightened Indian Muslims find Pakistan a pitiable state: “Pakistan … fought wars with us; it assisted secessionism in Punjab and Kashmir; it raised the Kashmir issue in international fora; time and again it tried to embarrass us in the Organization of Islamic Conference. In brief, it set itself up as a state in opposition to us in perpetuity. But wasn’t this what Pakistan was supposed to be? After all, it came into being on the basis of the two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims were two separate states, that Hindus and Muslims could not live together. We are because we cannot live with them. That was Pakistan’s raison d’être. Supposing by some black magic they converted to another way of thinking: we are even though we could have lived with them, Pakistan would collapse. Therefore one of the planks of Pakistani statecraft was to keep reminding its people and the world at large of that mantra of survival: we are because we cannot live with them.”336"

Exactly.

"Among the Indian Muslims, the 1990s have witnessed an acceleration in the acceptance of their Indianness. This has been at least partly the result of the refocusing of national attention on liberalization, modernization and informatization. Here was a non-communal development offering hope and perspective to all young Indians regardless of their religious background, which suddenly looked like being just that—a mere background to the real facts of life.

"Consider the following testimony about the reaction to a cricket match (which, in the RSS rumour mills, has become the standard test for Muslim loyalty to India, disproven if Muslims cheer for a Pakistani victory): “Time, too, does its work, and the young generations of the millat, unlike their elders, are not so sensitive concerning Pakistan. We have recently seen a highly symbolic and revealing demonstration of the new behaviour: during the cricket world cup games in March 1996, young Muslims of the old city of Delhi have enthusiastically celebrated India’s victory against Pakistan in the quarter finals. Sweets were distributed. Such a thing had not been seen since Partition.”337 Reality is having its effect on the imaginary foreign identity of Indian Muslims."

Very telling admission there - "Such a thing had not been seen since Partition."!

That testifies to truth of reasons why the distrust existed, not against any other minorities, including even Anglo-Indians, who used to dream of migrating to U.K., aaspiring to become English and hoping to forget about the Indian ancestry.

................................................................................................

"Golwalkar on Muslims vs. Islam"

"It is extremely important to understand that Golwalkar’s position, which has remained the RSS and BJP position till the time of this writing, is a deviation from the Hindu revivalist position established by the Arya Samaj, maintained by the Hindu Mahasabha, and kept alive today by some sections of the VHP as well as by independent authors like Abhas Chatterjee. What Golwalkar says, is: Islam is all right, the problem lies with the Muslims.340 The view of Hindu revivalists from Dayananda to Ram Swarup is exactly the opposite: the problem is not Muslims but Islam, Muslims are simply “our estranged countrymen” who have to be liberated from the mental stranglehold of Islam. Remark how Golwalkar’s refusal to criticize Islam (and preference to foment suspicion against Muslims as Pakistani agents instead) led to more, not less, hatred of the Muslim community. This is the view which most modernist Hindus (including the Sangh Parivar membership) cherish: the true Islam as conceived by the founder is impeccable, the only problem is that some followers misunderstood him, or that purely nominal Muslims with little interest in the true Quranic message falsely used the label “Islam” as justification for their un-Islamic selfish acts. Thus, VHP treasurer Anand Shankar Pandya exonerates Mohammed of all the problematic aspects of Islam: “According to scholars, after the passing away of prophet Mohammed, power-hungry leaders made many anti-Islamic changes in Shariat and Hadis, and in the name of Islam, looted the weak and raped women.”341 Though a good many Hindutva ideologues are anti-Muslim at heart, the point to note is that they are not anti-Islamic at all. Even when attacking Muslims, they invariably hasten to exonerate Islam as such from the alleged misbehaviour of its votaries."

"Golwalkar’s view of Islam as good and Muslims as bad is the direct explanation for the paradoxical twin fact that the RSS has produced no anti-Islamic polemic worth mentioning, but that its rank-and-file regularly gets embroiled in Hindu-Muslim street-fighting. His de-ideologization of the Hindu-Muslim conflict, reducing it to a conflict between two tribes rather than two worldviews, has proven to be a consequential mistake. A certain amount of Hindu-Muslim violence was probably unavoidable, but things might have looked much less tense if Golwalkar had trained his following in a mature intellectual attitude which distinguishes between a doctrine and the people who are conditioned by that doctrine to a greater or lesser extent."

................................................................................................

"Blaming British mischief"

"In contrast with Aurobindo and Savarkar, Golwalkar supported the Gandhian and secularist view that the Hindu-Muslim conflict in 1921-47 culminating in the Partition was purely a British machination unrelated to the political doctrine of Islam as such. To the question what would happen to Hindu-Muslim relations if India reconquers Pakistan, and whether the Hindu-Muslim problem would continue, Golwalkar said: “No, it will not. This so-called Hindu-Muslim problem is only a political problem. When the whole country becomes one, the problem will be solved as there will be no power to support the separatist Muslim tendency. It is only the British who gave a fillip to the Muslim communal frenzy. Before they came, there was the process of their identification with the mainstream of our national life. Now that the British have left, that process can be resumed provided we prove ourselves to be the masters of the situation.”346"

"This much is probably true, that Hindu-Muslim violence in the pre-British period was far more a matter of oppression of the Hindus by Muslim armies, largely consisting of foreign-born mercenaries and conscripts, than of street riots between Hindu and Muslim commoners. Considering the persistent Muslim-Hindu demographic differential, the Muslim masses must have been relatively much less numerous in the seventeenth than in the twentieth century, and more importantly, most of these converts were still very close to their non-converted neighbours in their daily way of life. In those circumstances, Hindu-Muslim animosity must have been a much smaller problem at the mass level than it has been in the twentieth century; but that is not the same thing as the Hindu-Muslim friendship which Ahuja suggests, nor is it proof that the modern boom in Hindu-Muslim riots was due to British intervention."

It's slightly more compliicated.

The personal accounts, from various sources that aren't aligned either left or pro-muslim, do suggest that there was more than truce, especially in North - there was a routine sharing of sweets at festivals, across the divide, for example, with Muslims even going to the extent of accommodating the Hindu strictures, by employing appropriate chefs.

India still observes propriety with offerings of sweets at Indian festivals across the border by Indian military to the opposite side. Indian forces refrain from major action at Muslim festivals. Pakistan and China, however, deliberately attack on and around major Hindu festivals, especially Deepaavali.

As for the British, they followed the Macaulay policy, faithfully, in tearing India to shreds in every possible way; encouraging Muslims to separate was an extraordinarily convenient way, since that offered free use of military bases for West against USSR.

Muslim League was in fact formed only at insistence of a British officer, by the Muslims he invited for the purpose realizing that he'd convince another group if they persisted in refusing.

"For all their “divide and rule” tactics at the diplomatic level, especially in their dealing with princes and top clergy and office-holding native lawyers (Gandhi, Jinnah, Ambedkar, Nehru), the British never encouraged communal rioting. It is a plain fact that in the period of unchallenged British power, between 1859 and 1919, communal riots were far fewer and less serious than in the subsequent period of native self-assertion, both before and after Independence.349 Indeed, when counted in deaths caused by violent confrontations between Hindus and Muslims, those sixty years were definitely far more peaceful than any other sixty-year period between 1192 and the present."

Well - India was slightly busy those years dealing with massacres and genocides by British, from Dyer using tank and machine guns against a civilian crowd of all ages and genders, killing thousands and firing till all were down, to Churchill starving millions to death when harvest was stolen by British regime, and Churchill declared that millions of Indians starving to death was of no importance whatsoever - so much so, he didn’t allow the aid sent for India by FDR, a ship filled with grain, to come past Australia.

So no, poor Indians were rather busy during British regime, but then British did do precisely nothing whatsoever as a responsible administration, to contain massacres and genocide of non-muslims, in regions marked for pakistan, preferring to run away in a hurry;

Mountbatten, who was in a hurry so he could make Lord of Admiralty, to make it up for his father having to step down, had precipitated the date by a year or more; he worried about his Muslim servants in Delhi, but said not a word about Hindu massacred by several millions in Pakistan, including when he saw the burnt homes in Lahore where fire department had assisted the Muslims by pouring gasoline instead of water on the Hindu homes set on fire. He'd given Lahore to Pakistan in the first place, despite Muslims being in minority - Sikhs were with Hindus, since Pakistan was exclusively for Muslims.

"The lingering popularity of anti-Britishism in divergent corners of India’s political spectrum is at least partly due to the perfect comfort and safety of blaming a party which has left the scene more than fifty years ago. It is, for instance, much simpler than elaborating a balanced assessment of the conflictual role of Islam in Indian history, which avoids both scapegoating today’s Muslim community and wilful blindness to unpleasant historical facts. On this point, the Sangh Parivar is largely on the secularist wavelength, viz. dismissing the Hindu-Muslim conflict as a false and artificial conflict manipulated by non-religious vested interests."

There his Elst again, insinuating and saying false things in a wave of air but stinking enough. He's pretending British were blameless in the matter, and Hindus are blaming them only after Independence has been a few decades ago. Both untrue.

"The disagreement is only about pinpointing the clever conspirator who managed to turn this artificial conflict into a persistent reality— depending on the speaker, it may be the British, or the Hindu communalists, or Congress vote-bank politics, but never the fighting people themselves (the “people” being a holy cow of socialism/populism), nor their religious convictions (Hinduism and the minority religions being holy cows of the Sangh Parivar). A recent addition to this line of rhetoric is blaming the Americans for the Indo-Pakistani conflict because of their sales of weapons to Pakistan. At any rate, from Golwalkar to Vajpayee, the Sangh Parivar has studiously kept Islam itself strictly outside its range of targetable scapegoats."

Now Elst exculpates US from deliberate use of Pakistan for its war against USSR, during which hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into Pakistan in currency, arms and ammunition, no accounting given or demanded, and using blinkers for a pretended ignoring of terrorism perpetrated by Pakistan in India.

What's the argument, "we sell liquor under police protection outside your high-school but it's your children who are at fault fir their addiction"? Wasn't that the silent argument from tobacco when they did exactly that in Thailand, or soft drink corporations when they knowingly used HFCS?

How did it feel when the Rottweiler bit the master? Why be so sure it wouldn't, after being trained on terrorising "other"s?

How far is the mental laziness of West , in preference for abrahmic, and a racist refusal to see worth of Indian culture, going to go? As far as annihilation of world by jihadists? As it did once or twice before, in preferring Germany, until German war machine turned?

................................................................................................

"Indianization"

" ... To Golwalkar, it didn’t matter what citizens believed in, as long as the system as a whole would be Hindu. Apparently, the recent well-publicized cases of Indian Muslims cheering an Indian sports victory against Pakistan would fulfil the Sangh Parivar criteria of “indianization”."

Elst is being condescending, at the very least, ridiculing an Indian viciously without expecting anyone to question, much less more, more likely.

Racism in Europe wouldn't, of course, be satisfied with a migrant, much less any descendents of an invader and genocide perpetrator, be satisfied with mere cheering at a sports victory, or even such a migrant joining nation's military and giving life in war for nation, as Jews indeed did gor bany nation's in Europe.

And they weren't descendents of anything comparable with muslim invaders that perpetrated atrocities in India - the only comparable are war criminals from WWII who, with few exceptions, were allowed to live and prosper post WWII, whether in Germany or across the ocean.

But Elst forgets, that cheering a sports win in privacy of your homes and community neighbourhoods, without knowing if anyone is going to notice, isn't an act of false drama. Nor can it be performed by someone who hates the country and loves, revers, dreams of the enemy. Not an ordinary citizen, anyway.

Few Muslims would qualify for the kind of sleepers that for example were depicted in the recent television serial Americans.

" ... Madhok’s point was that instead of India seeking to integrate itself into the Muslim world, the Indian Muslims should seek integration in India.

"“Indianization” has remained the Sangh Parivar’s final solution of the Muslim problem in India: Muslims should not be expelled or exterminated, they should not even be assimilated into Hindu society, they should simply “identify with India”. Or as the Organiser once put it: “Let Muslims look upon Ram as their hero and the communal problems will be all over.”354

"But can Muslims look upon Rama as “their” hero without ceasing to be Muslims? Guru Golwalkar used to answer this question by taking a leaf from the book of the Iranian Muslims: “Some Muslims say that Rustom is their national hero. But Rustom was a Persian hero. He has nothing to do with them. He was born long before Islam. If he could be considered a hero by the Muslims, why not Sri Rama?”355"

Indeed, and similar questions are true about othrr emblems of nation, such as flag; but there's a strenuous argument by opposition since 2014 against everything of such nature, with ridiculous arguments to demand individual and communal rights, such as saluting a flag, or standing up to honour a national anthem or song, is against one or all religions of monotheistic character.

"Madhok’s book on the subject starts with a 21-page chapter “Indianisation: What?” But there, unfortunately, we find little except for the well-known arguments about how not India but the Muslim world had benefited from the contact, how India had been pluralistic since Vedic times, and how the Indian Muslims “are mainly converts and not foreigners”.357 The latter point at least provides a clue: “The change of way of worship under duress or for other reasons has not changed their forefathers or their culture. Culture is associated with a country and not with a religion.”358

"In my opinion, this last sentence is an escapist device, a way to deny the Hindu-Muslim conflict by positing an over-arching unity based on culture based in turn on common territory. It is, at any rate, incorrect. Modern American culture is much more akin to European culture, also in religion, than to the country-based Native-American culture. ... "

Elst forgets, he's arguing on both sides. Nobody expects migrants, especially invaders who looted and perpetrated atrocities, to convert to becoming indigenous, much less transformed. But natives and their converted descendents are another story.

" ... Indian Muslim culture has remained fairly close to Hindu culture due to inertia, but has distanced itself from it as the impact of Islam grew stronger, and has always tried to be more like Arab Muslim than like Indian Hindu culture."

That's not comparable with European migrants and descendents in US, Canada or Australia; a fair, albeit not only, comparison would be, converted European muslims, in UK, Germany et al. And there aren't enough yet, but enough to give satisfaction to the Islamic onslaught.

"This example illustrates how the lingering attachment of Muslim converts to ancestral Hinduism is an unstable situation, a mid-way station on the way to either full Islamization or reconversion to Hinduism; this unstable mix can hardly be the basis of India’s cultural unity. It also shows how change of religion does entail change of culture, at least in many important respects: marriage customs, food habits and taboos, reverence of cows and Hindu epics, and likewise dress, script, language."

Missionaries in China didn't expect converts to give up on their local culture, and sustain on meat loaf and apple pie, did they? Nor do they now. McDonald's chains across the world might try selling the tried and proven staples from US, but eventually profits question changes the menu into a localised one, with tried and tested local best sellers. Churches in India are attempting to take pictures of Indian Gods and replace the face with Jesus, in an attempt to fool India. Yes, they continue abusing India and Gods of India, but they only have to reflect on the immense courtesy of Indians in not using one word that would return the attack - and the word wouldn't be Indian, because it's not an Indian cultural concept to blame children, holding them guilty for birth. That concept and words describing it came with invading barbarians, whether Islamic or European.

If churches had to provide for a total transformation of every convert into a Bold And Beautiful character, they'd go out of business. So of course they must tolerate local culture while sowing hatred of India and her culture in converts, as Muslim converters do.

But if conversion assured culture to change, there'd be no need of tablighis and of billions of dollars poured from abroad for conversions, from sources of both religions associated with erstwhile colonial regimes. That money voted instead go into benefits for the converts in education, jobs, hospitals, but no - the money is spent for conversion.

The converts realise too late that the equality promised doesn't exist, that visitors from Europe look down on them as always, that visitors from US ridicule them, and all they have achieved is bring to by church to not bathe and use fresh clothes every day, instead stink all week and be despised by locals who aren't converted.

"Even so, for the Sangh since Golwalkar, “Indianization” does not mean Hinduization through conversion: “‘Indianization’ does not mean making all people Hindus. Let us realise and believe that we are all children of the soil coming from the same stock, that our great forefathers were one, and that our aspirations are also one. This is all, I believe, the meaning of ‘Indianisation’. … The main reason for Hindu-Muslim tension is that the Indian Muslim is yet to identify himself fully with India, its people and its culture. Let the Indian Muslim feel and say that this is his country and these are his people, and the problem will cease.”360 In this view, Indian Muslims should “become” Indians, not Hindus. Once again, the Sangh Parivar proves to be a nationalist rather than a Hindu movement."

"Once again"????

It always was so.

................................................................................................

"The Sangh wooing the Muslims"

" ... Muslim columnist Sultan Shahin confirms that after the Demolition, the Muslims “discard[ed] their communal as well as professional secularist leadership” and “took the first avilable opportunity to open a line of communication with the forces of Hindutva”, many of them even “voting for the BJP and the Shiv Sena”.367 ... "

" ... To convince Muslims that they will be safer under a BJP Government, party leaders are cashing in on the fact that BJP-ruled states were largely free of communal riots and tension and the BJP governments did not discriminate against Muslims or any other community. … The West Bengal BJP put up 1,600 Muslim candidates—including 400 women—in the panchayat elections and a sizable number of them won. … In Madhya Pradesh, over 96 lakh people have signed the BJP’s appeal for construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. Of them, one lakh are Muslims.”369"

Riots obviously were as sponsored by other parties, chiefly congress, as Muslim League was brought into existence by, and at insistence of, British.

"The Muslim presence in the Lok Sabha rose by one in the 1998 elections, “due to the one prestigious win at Rampur by a BJP candidate, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi against Begum Nur Bano of the ex-ruling house of Rampur State in UP”.370 No wonder RSS chief Rajendra Singh said that “there was a slight, but encouraging, change in the attitude of the minority community”.371 ... "

He's still a member and a spokesperson of BJP, over three decades later.

" ... The whole Sangh Parivar really has a problem here: unable to conceptualize Islam as a problem and constrained to strike Muslim-friendly postures, the Hindu nationalists are nonetheless uncomfortable with Muslims. On this point, I must agree with secularist perceptions about RSS insincerity: at least in some cases, anti-Muslim feelings are hiding just beneath the surface of Muslim-friendly statements."

Why not see it the other way? Because of unease with suspicions of others if Elst were too Hindu friendly, so he has to occasionally go racist, abrahmic? Or is that the reality, with left-baiting only for a pose to be different?

................................................................................................

"The Sangh’s Muslims"

"Sikander Bakht was often shown off as the party’s token Muslim, but just as often, angry Muslims would write letters to the editor to explain that Mr. Bakht is not a Muslim at all.377 They say that he actually converted to Hinduism on the occasion of his marriage to a Hindu woman, and that his children were raised as Hindus. And how else could we interpret Bakht’s own statement: “I am a Ram bhakt first”?378 The fact is that he strongly identifies with the Hindu viewpoint, witness his pamphlet “Why Hindus in the Dock?”, which gives the classic Hindu case against the anti-Hindu bias of “pseudo-secularism”.379 He also protested when during L.K. Advani’s 1997 Swarna Jayanti Rath Yâtra (Golden Jubilee car procession), Advani and Uma Bharati cancelled the singing of Vande Mâtaram at interreligious functions in order not to offend Muslim sensibilities, precisely the kind of “appeasement” which the BJP had always attacked when it was practised by Congress."

"The Sangh Parivar notion of Muslims as “Mohammedi Hindus” was endorsed by M.C. Chagla: “In the true sense, we are all Hindus although we may practise different religions. … It is the distinction between Hindus and non-Hindus that has created all the trouble in this country and has even led to the partition of our motherland. … If the distinction were to go then there will be no conflict between Hindus and non-Hindus.”381 Chagla even said: “I am a Hindu because I trace my ancestry to my Aryan forefathers.”382 He gave a guest speech at the BJP’s first plenary session in 1980, full of praise for Vajpayee and Advani.383

"The late Hamid Dalwai, then introduced by Balraj Madhok as “the young pioneer of modernization of Islam in India”, and denounced in the Jamaat-i-Islami weekly Radiance as a “Sanghist Muslim”,384 was regularly quoted as saying the very things about the Indian Muslim mentality which Hindus could only say at the cost of being decried as “communal”. Here, he counters the usual secularist claim that Islamic separatism is the province of only a small and non-representative minority among the Muslims: “In post-partition India no significant differences now exist between western-educated and orthodox Muslims. The Muslim Majlis Mushâwarat, which is the united front of Muslim organizations in India, includes in its fold educated Muslims like Dr. A.J. Faridi at one extreme and orthodox Muslims like Maulana Nadvi at the other. The election manifesto of the Mushawarat at the time of the last general election contained a 9-point charter of demands which can only be interpreted as asserting that Muslim Indians constituted a ‘sovereign’ society. Since the Mushawarat represents practically all the Muslim organizations in Indian politics, it is reasonable to infer that most Muslim Indians subscribe to this view.”385

"Hamid Dalwai goes on to sum up a few signs of Islamic separatism, and he warns against worse to come: “The creation of Pakistan is not the end of this problem. H.S. Suhrawardy said in 1946 that Pakistan was ‘not the last but only the latest demand’ of Indian Muslims. … He recommended the creation of a number of ‘Muslim-majority pockets’ in India. The birth of the Mallapuram district is therefore only a sign of further demands to come. … The relaxation, on the eve of a mid-term poll, of the service rules enjoining monogamy on Central Government servants whose religion permitted polygamy was effected by the Government of India under the pressure of these organizations. … The leftists have gone even further by conceding the demand for a Muslim-majority Mallapuram district and by supporting Mushawarat demand for the recognition of Urdu as a second official language in States [in none of which] the constitutional requirement for such recognition is satisfied.”386 This is the standard Hindutva complaint against “Muslim appeasement”.

"According to Hamid Dalwai: “Leaders of secular parties … have so far made no serious effort to understand the true nature of Muslim politics in India.”387 In particular, Hindu-born secularists systematically join hands with Muslim communalists in bewailing the precarious position of Muslims in a Hindu-majority country, and explaining Muslim separatism as a reactive phenomenon against the “Hindu threat”. This, Dalwai argues, is completely mistaken: “That this understanding was wrong was made clear by no less a person than Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan himself. According to The Hindu of April 18, 1946, he declared that the demand for Pakistan today is not based on the fear of a Hindu majority at the Centre. … it is the urge of a nation to mould its own ideals and culture and cannot be satisfied without having a full sovereignty which necessarily implies full control over all departments of state without exception.”388 In other words, the Muslim desire for sovereignty is a necessary implication of the present-day Muslim self-perception as a separate nation, regardless of whether the Muslims find themselves “in danger” or in a comfortable majority position.

"Dalwai briefly endorses a whole catalogue of RSS demands: “We have to check Pakistani expansionism and protect our borders. … We have to support Muslim modernism in India. We have to insist on a common personal law for all citizens of India. … Religious conversion should not be allowed, except when the intending convert is adult and the conversion takes place before a magistrate. … Government should have control over the income of all religious property. … The special status given to Kashmir should be scrapped. All Indian citizens should be free to visit Nagaland. There should be opportunities for the development of Urdu. … However, the demand for giving Urdu the status of the second official language of a state should be firmly resisted. … The purdah should be legally banned. … Family planning should be made compulsory for all.”389 This was an RSS man’s dream of how a Muslim should be. Dalwai had not renounced Islam, and could consequently serve as a genuine Muslim who is none the less a nationalist. At the same time, he legitimized the standard Hindutva complaints about Muslim attitudes by endorsing them from a non-Hindu angle."

"The rationale behind the Tablîgh movement is the following: Muslim power weakens when Muslim commitment to pure Islam weakens; when Muslims turn or return to pure Islam, they will be able to restore Islamic power.392 ... "

................................................................................................

"Re-evaluation of Partition"

" ... The last offers made to Jinnah to make him abandon his Partition plans included 50% reservations for Muslims at all levels and an effective predominance of the Muslims in the government. What Jinnah gave up by refusing the offer was a Muslim-dominated Akhand Bhârat, an unassailable country with the highest population in the world, a Muslim superpower."

He had demanded, instead, a Muslim League government with him at its head and all power positions for Muslims,which wasn't acceptable even to followers of Gandhi.

" ... Akhand Bharat is now high on the Islamic agenda, and calculating Islamic strategists (among whom I would not count A.H. Khan) are welcoming and encouraging RSS daydreaming about reunification."

"Even a more neutral observer like K.D. Prithipaul records a discussion with an Iranian colleague, who “argued that the partition of India was a disaster for the Muslims as it split the community into three parts. I observed that the partition has been a boon for India, for the majority Hindus, after nearly forty years of non-violent struggle, would have been no match for the violence of the Muslim League and its lust for power.” ... "

................................................................................................

"Islam, the Arab national movement?"

"Another fresh arrival from the Muslim side in the Hindutva camp is Anwar Shaikh. He was a 19-year-old Muslim in Lahore when the Partition took place. After witnessing the arrival of a train full of dead Muslims slaughtered by the Sikhs in Amritsar station, he killed three Sikhs with his own hands. In the 1950s, he settled in Britain and became a successful businessman. Since the 1980s, he has been writing on religion and visibly distancing himself from Islam. In 1990, he published Eternity, a meditation on religions in general with the pride of place given to Vedic Hinduism. He also publishes a bilingual (English-Urdu) quarterly Liberty, in which he has developed a systematic critique of Islam. In 1994, Anwar Shaikh published a book which endeared him in a definitive way to the Sangh Parivar: Islam, the Arab National Movement, which we will discuss in this section.400"

"But if anything, the case of Anwar Shaikh pointed in the opposite direction: by rediscovering his Hindu heritage, a Muslim loses his Muslim identity. Islamic hardliners are wholly aware of this phenomenon, which is why they try to nip it in the bud, for instance, by prohibiting Hindu religious music on Pakistani radio. From the Hindu viewpoint as pioneered by the likes of Swami Shraddhananda, the message of the Organiser should have been: “Indian Muslims, follow Anwar Shaikh’s example, rediscover your Vedic heritage, and abandon Islam.”"

It requires only free thought, not vedic heritage, to realise fraud of conversionist abrahmic creeds, as in case of not only the whole Renaissance but also the very interesting interview of an African ex-muslim woman by Tarek Fateh, where she explains why she chose atheism over Judaism when decided to leave Islam.

"In his book Islam, the Arab National Movement, the apostate author Anwar Shaikh has accurately documented how islamization has meant external Arabization (names, clothes, script) for most converted populations, but has wrongly inferred that Islam is a form of Arab nationalism or Arab imperialism.403 It is generally correct that islamization of non-Arab populations has meant their progressive Arabization: their names, script, vocabulary, dress and marriage customs all tend to create the impression of a community frozen in seventh-century Arabia. But his conclusion is less uncontroversial: that Islam was a kind of Arab nationalism. We may compare Mohammed’s conquest of Arabia with Mao’s conquest of China: the real nationalists trying to preserve national culture and identity were his opponents, but his own imported ideology (prophetic monotheism, Marxism) pushed out the national mainstream by winning the war."

"As against Shaikh’s thesis, Sita Ram Goel has argued that “the Arabs were the first victims of Islam” (though he too had written, in his first publication on communal issues, that “Islamism is only another name for Arab imperialism which had, at one stage of its history, pillaged and populated with its own progeny many foreign lands and which even today keeps many non-Arab nations spiritually enslaved”).404 Nevertheless, if any movement in seventh-century Arabia can count as “the Arab national movement”, it was undoubtedly the so-called Ridda (“return” to god-pluralism) uprising against the Islamic state after Mohammed’s death, in which the Arabs tried to shake off Islamic rule and restore their pluralistic culture. Even A.A. Engineer admits that “the war of ridda (apostasy) was a general insurrection throughout Arabia”.405 Within a year, Caliph Abu Bakr put the uprising down and definitively plunged the Arabs into Islam.

"For the Sangh, the thesis that Islam is but Arab nationalism is doubly welcome: it recasts the Islam problem in the familiar, safely secular-sounding terms of nationalism, and it legitimizes Islam (“See we’re not against Islam?”) all the while limiting Islam’s legitimate geographical domain to Arabia, so as to exclude India from it. This yields a neat scheme: Hinduism is Indian nationalism, and Islam is Arab nationalism. This is certainly clever, though it only establishes an imaginary deal with the Indian Muslims, who are bound to reject the reduction of their universal religion to an Arab nationalism. Most of all, the Sangh Parivar’s fondness for this reduction of religions to nations and nationalisms confirms again that theirs is more a nationalist than a religious “fundamentalist” movement."

................................................................................................

"Reproach to Westerners and Christians"

"The West’s “colossal intellectual failure” regarding Islam has already led to serious policy mistakes, according to Majumdar: “It is against the background of this failure that a great many contemporary events have to be judged: the West’s prevarication with the events in Bosnia or in Kashmir; its impatience with Israel in its life-and-death struggle in surroundings where a single false step could spell its destruction; and, coming to a lower plane, the Prince of Wales’s breaking out into singing the glory of Islam from a public platform.”407"

"As for the Christian missionaries, “their latter-day flirtation with Islam is probably the stupidest thing these worthies have done. … Apparently this flirtation is aimed at peaceful conversion of the pagan peoples of Asia and Africa in some sort of active collaboration with the Islamic zealots”.411 In the past at least, they “did not fail to see jihâd for what it was—a code of murder and rapine disguised under a thin coating of religious verbiage” and they “knew that their greatest adversary in the business of proselytization was Islam”, even when they were “enamoured of the Koran’s full-throated pagan-bashing”.412"

"India already provides some examples of conflict between Christian converts and Muslims. In 1964, the mostly christianized Garo tribals were massacred and expelled from East Pakistan, resulting in large-scale violence between tribals and Muslims in the adjoining tribal belts of India: “In early 1964, there were bloody riots once more in East Pakistan between the majority and the minorities. The past six, seven years, the Muslims had been pestering the Adibâsîs … a stream of refugees had ensued … a mad anti-Hindu propaganda egged on the Muslims in East Pakistan, also against the Christians. It was the first time that Christians were systematically chased out from there.”415"

Look at why Talvar, a federal minister, was murdered by a jihadi in Pakistan.

"In the 1980s and 90s, there have regularly been clashes between Bangladeshi settlers and christianized tribals in India’s North-East, chiefly in Meghalaya and Tripura, most gruesomely in Nelli (1983): “Nelli was an unknown little village till over three thousand people were slain in one orgy of killing. It was Bangladeshi refugees killing Bengalis and Assamese; Assamese and Bengalis kiling each other; tribals killing non-tribals; Muslims killing Hindus and Christians; Christians killing Hindus.”416 No common Abrahamic monotheism or joint participation in the Minorities’ Commission could keep the Muslims from expropriating the lands of the Christians, nor the Christians from fighting back."

................................................................................................

................................................

January 31, 2022 - February 08, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

Hindu nation, Hindu state

................................................................................................

"HINDU NATIONALISM: SRI AUROBINDO"

"Sri Aurobindo’s Uttarpara Speech, first published in the weekly Karmayogin, June 1909, is a founding text of Hindu Nationalism. It was pronounced just after Aurobindo’s release from prison, where he had been kept as an accomplice in a terrorist conspiracy. In this speech, he identifies the national struggle for Freedom with the struggle for the Hindu cause.

"Prisoner Aurobindo sees the Light

"The opening lines declare that its contents had been conceived in prison. Aurobindo first sends some thoughts to his fellow fighters for independence, some far away, some rotting in jail, some present at the meeting. He describes his impression of the atmosphere in the country which he got when coming out of jail: “When I went to jail, the whole country was alive with the cry of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation. … When I came out of jail, I listened for that cry, but there was instead a silence.”1"

Elst and many others, not necessarily of West, get it wrong about India, about Hinduism, and most of all, about Sri Aurobindo. This is especially so when culture and knowledge of India, Hinduism, or what Sri Aurobindo said or wrote, is compared with, say, ten commandments or church preachings or injunctions in Islam about religion.

Latter are, all, sectarian, and motivated to increase membership of their own club, called conversion.

Hinduism, and also it's branches such as Buddhism or Jainism, do not talk of other faiths, or heaven being restricted gor members of their own sect. Ever. In thus sense they are as universal as astronomy and mathematics.

Sri Aurobindo, more than anyone else, is more so. Elst is a moron when he speaks of Sri Aurobindo being influenced by West. When one does astronomy, it isn't important that a telescope was invented in Europe. That does not give ownershhip of galaxies to West. Sri Aurobindo's writings, speeches or experiences, similarly, aren't a byproduct of his years in England.

So it's a distasteful anticipation to proceed to read at this point, having read some comments previously in this work by Elst on Sri Aurobindo.

Best to read and ignore the asinine part, such as comments by Elst on Sri Aurobindo.

"India in the service of Dharma"

" ... (Sri) Aurobindo moves from his own mission to India’s mission: “I realized what the Hindu religion meant. … Other religions are preponderantly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived. This is the Dharma that for the salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world.”5"

"“ ... This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish. The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism. This is the message that I have to speak to you.”7"

"“ ... Well, the protection of the religion, the protection and upraising before the world of the Hindu religion, that is the work before us. But what is the Hindu religion? What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal? It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages. But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and forever to a bounded part of the world.”8"

"Universal character of Dharma"

"“ ... What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal? It is the Hindu religion, only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this Peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages.”9 (Note that “Aryan race” here means “Hindu people”, neither more nor less)"

About the note by Elst - "here" is irrelevant; Aarya has, truthfully, no other meaning separated from connotation of inner culture of enlightenment and civilisation, and people who have it are expected to have it: Aarya is a Sanskrit word, and any other meaning to the word ascribed by West is simply false. It has nothing to do with any physical characteristics, in particular with colours of any physical parts.

"India happens to be the religion’s cradle, but the religion is none the less universal, somewhat like modern science is universal in spite of its undeniably European cradle: “But it is not circumscribed by the confínes of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and forever to a bounded part of the world. That which we call Hinduism is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.”10

"Hinduism is the religion for the modern age because it is essentially a science, an applied science: “This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. … It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realize it with every part of our being.”11

"The point is extremely important in the self-perception of modern literate Hinduism. In spite of the popularization of sentimental rhetoric of the “equal truth of all religions”, the more lucid tendency generated by the Hindu confrontation with modernity divides the religions in two radically different categories: irrational belief systems which are moribund before the light of science, and a vision of life and spirit which is basically scientific and therefore, after shedding some accumulated deadwood, bound to live on and flourish."

For someone brought up Roman catholic and not renouncing it, it's not merely racist to say "irrational belief systems which are moribund before the light of science", it's ridiculous to even pretend his own isn't the mist ridiculous, irrational, et al; and fir all that, thus comment on India is merely evidence of his own ignorance, apart from the racist arrogance.

"In a way, this vision of a scientific religion is thoroughly unsecular: “It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion.”12 European post-Christians, convinced of the benefits of the scientific worldview, had to separate religion from public life because the religion they knew (Christianity and to a lesser degree Judaism) was a revealed religion and intrinsically unscientific. Science being universal, the very idea of exclusive prophetic revelations supposedly sent down by God was necessarily in contradiction with it. Instead of religion, the Enlightenment philosophers wanted scientific insights to penetrate every aspect of life and society in the manner of religion’s omnipresence until then. It is Aurobindo’s point that Hinduism basically has the scientific spirit, so that unlike the revealed religions, it is perfectly compatible with the Enlightenment, and need not be removed from public life."

Absolutely.

................................................................................................

"THE HINDU NATION"

"Asserting Hindu nationhood"

"Hindu nationalism by definition assumes the existence of a “Hindu nation”. But among India-watchers, it is the dominant opinion that the “Hindu nation” is a myth. Thus, the original subtitle of Christophe Jaffrelot’s bulky book Les Nationalistes Hindous is Des Nationalistes en Quête d’une Nation: les Partis Nationalistes Hindous au XXme Siècle (French: “Nationalists in search of a nation: the nationalist Hindu parties in the twentieth century”).13 The reason usually is not so much a pedantic objection to the use of the term “nation” in favour of some other term denoting collective identity, but a radical rejection of the existence of any kind of collective Hindu identity, let alone one sufficient for calling it a nation."

If what mattered is opinion of all others, how many so called nations would qualify?

Scots decided only by a narrow margin to stay, Welsh is firmly ensconced back after centuries of punishment if a child spoke Welsh at school, and British parliament is headed by a PM of England, while the monarch is still Queen or king of England, holding on to the piece torn out of Ireland in name of church. Is Germany a nation, having acquired Austria and other property before relinquishing it? International birders still welcome one to Bavaria before doing so so Germany on a smaller sign for the latter. Baltic nations aren't fighting to join it, rather, for that matter. Texas retains right to secede, while confederacy still enacts Gettysburg regularly. Are natives of Australia or US, Canada treated as citizens yet?

No, it's Europe still imagining she and her far flung children retain all rights, not only to colonise, but to make all decisions for everyone in the world, from intimate personal to social to national. Get up and smell coffee, pinks.

"Hindu nationalists defy the dominant opinion, with which they are familiar enough, and insist on defining the Hindus as a nation. Thus, Abhas Chatterjee affirms: “We Hindus are a nation. … We Hindus are not just a religious community like the Mohammedans and the Christians but a nation unto ourselves. The term ‘Hindu’ is the name of our nationality.”14"

And those names were given by the same outsiders that seek to deny existence, nationhood and status thereof.

"Dominant"? By right of what, erstwhile butchering perpetrated by them, on Hindus?

"There are many ways of defining Hinduism, and it is an open question whether anything is gained by defining it as a “nation”. An obvious advantage is that no “essentialist” definition of Hindu is needed, no doctrine which encapsulates the common defining beliefs of all Hindus: whatever differences and contradictions may exist within the Hindu nation, these are no more an obstacle to Hindu unity than the existence of different political parties to the national unity of the English or the Americans.

"This definition of Hindus as a nation is also faithful to the reality that one enters Hinduism, just like one’s nation, by birth; or, marginally, by marrying into it or by getting “naturalized” (converted) at one’s own request and after a period of adaptation. In contrast with Christianity and Islam, nations and Hinduism do not go around to attract new members, though they may sparingly and after due evaluation admit a few who apply for membership themselves.15"

................................................................................................

"Essence of the Hindu nation"

"Conceiving the Hindus as a “nation” also allows for change: in contrast with Islam, of which the teachings have been fixed forever in the Quran and Sunna, any nation may evolve over time without seeing its identity questioned. Thus, today the taboo on beef may be an element of Hindu identity, which in the Vedic age it was not; yet, the Vedic Aryans constituted the same nation (or at least a part of it) which today we call Hindu. Nations, like human beings, may change their habits, and need not remain “the same” in characteristics. At least, that would be a commonsense implication, but some Hindutva ideologues reject this purely historical view of the identity of nations."

This absence of taboo is mentioned often enough by all sorts of those that would defend butchering cattle but are horrified at horse meat on a dish at a restaurant or boys torturing a dog. None of them so far have shown any evidence of this lack of absence of taboo, so to speak; nor has anyone shown anything like ten commandments in Vedic literature, which nobody does or should take as freedom to commit crimes or sins. But most deniers of importance of cattle to a tropical agricultural rural poor people are neither realistic nor well-wishers, merely conversionist abrahmic club membership enrolment pushers who couldn't care less if India starved, earth drowned by faster global warming, or worse.

................................................................................................

"Hinduism as India’s only unifier"

Author discusses caste, language, at al, questioning as most anti-Indians, and most anti-Hindus do, whether Hindus are a nation. Opposition since 2014 has been saying that with India replacing Hindu. Yet most Indians have little problem identifying other Indians when accidentally coming across elsewhere.

"Caste identity is real, linguistic identity is real, and religious identity is also real; but the point is that one collective identity does not exclude another. Most collective identities are subdivided into smaller collective identities, some of them even more binding, starting with the family ties. Moreover, if the over-arching “national” identity were not to exist, it might still be possible to foster such an identity (as the nineteenth-century unifiers of Italy and of Germany did). Indeed, that precisely was the Nehruvian project: to “make India” out of a diverse conglomerate of separate communities.28 ... "

No, it was Patel who did it, despite Nehru and Gandhi, who would and did let various parts of india be occupied by pakistan, spurned others who wished to unite with India, and even refused to help those that were victims of atrocities in various parts if they were Hindus.

"But most Hindu revivalists insist that a pan-Hindu collective identity has been in existence for millennia. Thus, Shrikant Talageri affirms an ancient “clear consciousness that India was culturally one, and distinct from all other nations—a consciousness of a special Indian religio-political identity. This was manifested in the innumerable Hindu pilgrim-centres dotting the whole of India from north to south and east to west; in the consciousness of the whole of India being a ‘holy land’ (a deva-nirmita bhûmi); and in the regular pilgrimages by Hindus from one corner of India to the other (regardless of the changing borders of the various kingdoms). No Hindu on pilgrimage in another part of India ever felt conscious of being in a foreign place.”29

"This tradition of India-wide pilgrimages is very ancient: “The Mahâbhârata in its Tirthayâtra section of the Vanaparva, gives details of the pilgrimage undertaken by the Pândavas to numerous sacred mountains, rivers, lakes and shrines all over India.”30 If there can be legitimate doubts about what interpolations have been made before and at the time of the Mahabharata’s final editing, there can at least be no doubt that it took place well before the Muslim period, not to speak of Queen Victoria and Jawaharlal Nehru, who “made India”."

One, disrespect for Hinduism is deliberately brandished there in "final editing", since it wasn't a committe report across centuries, but the greatest epic ever, anywhere ,, written by Vedavyaasa, son of Paraashara and Matsyagandha, with God Ganapati as scribe.

An equal stance would be India scientifically questioning factual human identity of progenitor of one Elst was taught to revere, and Elst can estimate how many tons of screaming publications, condemning such a factual question, would bring down on India, even diplomatically.

Elst can think over whether his racism is not an impediment in possibility if his learning anything whatsoever, despite being in contact with such immensely superior culture's treasures, and whether a confederacy baby biting a slave nanny while breastfeeding would be a sin.

"The pilgrimage cycles (e.g. that of the twelve Shaiva jyotirlingas) cover every corner of India.31 Talageri: “These Hindu pilgrim-centres range from Kailash and Mansarovar in the north to Rameshwaram in the south; and from Hinglaj in the west (in Sindh) to Parsuram Kund (in Arunachal Pradesh) in the east. The ‘seven holy cities’ of Hinduism include Kanchipuram in the south, Dwarka in the west and Ujjain in central India. … This concept of India as a holy land has persisted … down the ages. More than a thousand years ago, Adi Shankaracharya, who was born in Kerala, established his four mathas in Badrinath in the north (U.P.), Puri in the east (Orissa), Dwarka in the west (Gujarat), and Shringeri in the south (Karnataka).”32"

"Cycles"???

Incidentally, Shaiva is not a religion, nor do Shiva temples belong to that sect even if it's considered as such in a few places, and they, including all twelve Jyotirlingas, are open to all Hindus, as they've always been.

"Even some traditions claimed as non-Hindu pay allegiance to India as their holy land: ... "

Elst goes on to speak of Jains, and the non-Hindu status was deliberately imposed on them by British as per Macaulay policy of breaking India into pieces to loot better.

Neither Hindus nor anyone Jain or Buddhist, has ever, before British making false separations, claimed Jains or Buddhists to be non Hindu, though. So the "some traditions claimed as non-Hindu" is a racist, deliberately destructive imposition, by West for sake of further plunder.

It's as ridiculous, moreover, to claim that Jain or Buddhists are non-Hindu, as cataloguing Methodists and Southern Baptists "non Christian ", although the opposite is heard of quite often in U.S.- if someone tells you they are Christian, and unwilling to specify further, they are shocked if asked if they are Catholic.

"“Jainism originated in the north-east (in Bihar), but the majority of its followers are found in western states (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra), and the most famous statues of Gomateshawara are found in the south. Guru Nanak was born in Punjab, but throughout his writings, he speaks of Hindustan, not of Punjab. Guru Govind Singh appointed five disciples, calling them panj pyaras, and entrusting them with the task of ensuring that Hindu Dharma prevailed everywhere. These disciples were, respectively, from Punjab and Delhi in the north, Gujarat in the west, Orissa in the east, and Karnataka in the south. The four Takhts of Sikhism are at Nankana Sahib (Punjab now in Pakistan), Amritsar (Punjab), Patna (Bihar) and Nanded (Maharashtra).”33

"This argument (of which we shall see more varieties) is hard to refute: there is an ancient distinction between the whole of India, which had all the Hindu places of pilgrimage, and the non-Indian outside world, which had none. It is a different matter that Hindu traders who were abroad anyway would do their devotions at foreign shrines (e.g. the pre-Islamic Ka’ba in Mecca); no Hindu scripture ever required Hindus to make pilgrimages abroad to earn religious merit. For Hinduism, India was big enough."

................................................................................................

"Ancient fostering of Indian unity"

Elst continues deliberate contra arguments.

"V.S. Agrawala, the famous art historian at Bañaras Hindu University, draws attention to the Prthivî-Sûkta (“Earth hymn”) of the Atharva-Veda, which declares the Motherland (Mâtâbhûmi) to be the Supreme Goddess, “bearing on her bosom peoples with many languages and religions”.34 He comments: “It is a frank and bold recognition of the diversity of languages, of religions and of races, the three factors of Jana, Bhâshâ and Dharma in the making of the Indian people.”35 But even if the reading “Motherland” is conceded (could not the geographically limitless “Mother Earth” be meant?), this gives no positive indication of a conscious sense of pan-Indian national unity yet, at least not as long as the borders of this motherland have not been explicitated."

When the term motherland is used anywhere by anyone, it's generally understood in context; it's not equated with Earth, even when used by conquistadores out to claim the world.

India, called Bhaarata or Aaryaavarta by her people, was understood in the context of this term, when mentioned in Indian literature, and whether by Indians or by others, natural boundaties of India were the identical ones, recognised by everyone.

In questioning the term and asking if "could not the geographically limitless “Mother Earth” be meant?", Elst is deliberately and mischievously obfuscating.

"“1. Worship of the Motherland. In the Atharvaveda itself this attitude is clearly stated in the words: Mâtâ bhûmih putro aham prthivyâh (12:1:12), ‘The Earth is the Mother, I am her Son’. The concept of the Bhûmi as Devata is common to the Arya, Dravida, Kirata and Nishada cultures of India.”37 Remark that the “Mother Earth” glorified in this verse is not described as exactly coinciding with the geographical unit known as India, its confines are left unspecified. Nor is it common to exalt her as supreme deity; in that respect, the quoted verse is the exception, not the rule."

That comment by Elst following the quote is deliberately false. It's no different from questioning if someone really can prove he knew his intimate blood relatives, since there can be no mathematical proof thereof that is beyond foubts.

"“2. Holiness of the Motherland. … India’s religious leaders preached the doctrine of apotheosis of the Motherland by distributing the holy places throughout the length and breadth of the country.” Again, a deliberate strategy is imputed where a natural process sufficiently explains the pan-Indian distribution of sacred places. By the time Shankara (c. AD 800)38 set up his four mathas in the geographical corners of India, this was of course deliberate, but the ancient flowering of places of worship into traditional “sacred places” was more likely a spontaneous behaviour of “Hindus” scattered over the Indian territory, who set up local shrines without any grand design."

Notice what Elst is not saying, unwilling to admit that the holiness of these places wasn't imposed or set up, but realised and recognised. Yes, Shankaraachaarya set up his Mathas in four spots North, East, West and South, but the spots selected were not arbitrary. Else they could have been more corresponding to four corners, or even better, at least eight.

Lourdes wasn't "set up", and nor were the Hindu holy shrines of India.

"“3. Geographical consciousness. … the unity of the land was frequently emphasized and this entered the consciousness of the people, the poets, dramatists and religious teachers repeatedly declaring it.”

"“4. Glorification of the country. … Several Bhârata-Prashastis, or Hymns of Glory to the Country, occur in Puranic and epic literature.” Among three examples given, consider this one: “Bhârata is the most excellent continent in the whole world. Who can speak the full glory of Bhârata? What man under the sky can do is difficult even for the gods. Bhârata is verily Karma-bhûmi, a Moksha-kshetra, and the giver of both Bhakti and Mukti. In the soil of Bhârata there are seeds of all great ideals of life.”39 This definitely is an expression of a national consciousness, though it is not clear whether “Bhârata” refers to the whole of Bhâratvarsha, i.e. the subcontinent. A modern example of a hymn glorifying the country is the RSS litany Bhârata Ekâtmatâ Stotra.40

"“5. Institution of Tîrtha-Yâtra. (…) Each individual was expected to travel in all the four directions to the holy centres and places of pilgrimage and to cultivate the spirit of understanding and sympathy towards all peoples. … In this quest of a vision of the country, parochial boundaries melted away. … The demonstration of this unity is patent even today in the Kumbha [Mela] and other big fairs drawing at one place huge masses of population.”41"

Elst is a tad wrong in saying "expected". Hindus aren't "expected", not in the sense of observances imposed by church, to adhere to an imposed routine. There are a multitude of possibilities of what can be done positively, and people have freedom to make choices. Pilgrimages were such a choice.

Few were able to go everywhere. People counted themselves lucky if they could go to one, very lucky if it was to somewhere in or near Himaalaya, usually preferably somewhere near Gangaa. But one wasn't expected to do so leaving responsibility of family unattended to, so it was elderly, or those who had renounced worldly life, who were do able, in the era when life wasn't guaranteed and travel was mostly on foot, possibly partly in oxcarts for those who could afford it.

Now, with better roads and faster transport, places of pilgrimage are far more visited, by far more - and also by younger, not only older - people.

"“6. Festivals and feasts.” Some of these have a pan-Indian character (Diwali, Holi), but here again, it is hard to see how they could have been conceived as techniques for fostering national unity. They simply spread along with the myths to which they give expression (e.g. Vijayadashami celebrating Rama’s victory over Ravana), and some are but Indian variations on truly universal festivals, e.g. Holi with its chaotic and irreverent behaviour is a typical spring festival."

Again, they weren't deliberately set up; but Elst is more wrong in accepting part instead of looking at whole. Explanation of "Vijayadashami celebrating Rama’s victory over Ravana" is limited to popular explanation in North, but the festival predates that event, and all of India knows it as Tenth Day celebrating Victory, after nine days of worship of Mother Goddess, as Navaraatri (nine nights), or Durgaa Poujaa, as worship of the Deity Durgaa, who signifies Divine Victory.

"“7. Gods and goddesses. All gods and goddesses of diverse peoples and localities were accepted and given due place in the Hindu pantheon. … the overriding belief was that all the gods and goddesses are aspects of manifestations of one Deity.” This sounds like a projection of modern Arya Samaj-type reinterpretations of Hindu polytheism as crypto-monotheistic on to hoary tradition, but: “This is the doctrine called Vibhûti-yoga in the Gita in which the Tree, River, Ocean, Animals, Sun, Moon and many others are accepted as deities. The earliest demonstration of this doctrine is to be found in the Shatarudriya Litany of the Yajurveda, which offers the god Rudra as the unifying spirit of a number of local and tribal divinities.”42"

Again, Elst is throwing mud on what is perfectly clear to every Indian, and it's not a matter of sociological doctrine based on denying truth of Divine in Hindu understanding, culture or pantheon of Deities. The originsl quote, "that all the gods and goddesses are aspects of manifestations of one Deity" can be better termed as "that all the Gods and Goddesses, all Deities, are aspects, forms or manifestations of the ultimate Divine, which is formless, without qualities"; it was termed "energy", since sixties, popularly, by hippies touring India in search of spiritual sustenance, and termed quite well.

That's the only way a western mind can get anywhere near comprehension of concept of Divine, as understood in India - think atoms, particles, quarks, ....

"Reference is to Bhagavad-Gîtâ 10, which concludes (10:41): “Whatever object is verily endowed with majesty, possessed of prosperity, or is energetic, you know for certain each of them as having a part of My power as its source.” This is the basic idea of a theory of mûrti-pûjâ: though the Divine Person is omnipresent, one doesn’t take just any object as a representation of the divine; rather, one takes what is naturally impressive (sun, lightning etc.) or artificially evocative (a well-made image). In this approach, nature-based deities can be conceived as archanâvatâra, “incarnation for the purpose of worship”, of a more abstractly conceived God, thus incorporating more primitive types of religion into the philosophically more sophisticated and abstract Vedic-Upanishadic tradition."

Elst is connecting threads artificially in order to impose his concept of superiority of monotheism, completely unjustified and unjustifiable. What he quotes from Bhagawadgeetaa has no connection with mûrti-pûjâ, but he and everyone who goes berserk about idol worship should, in all fairness, outright refuse, when a passport officer questions "is this you?", and proceed to clarify indignantly that the bunch of dots on paper is an idol, an image. Even better, refuse to be photographed, preventing every possibility of being worshipped. Stop framing photographs of dear ones and hanging posters of stars up on walls. Demolish the statues in public spots, looking up to them is beginning of worship.

Moreover, those so going berserk, about idol worship, are presuming they know better, which is unjustifiable arrogance, and delight in excuse for assaulting others, no better than a security officer taking advantage to grope a traveller.

"“8. A common corpus of religious literature for all people to be accepted according to one’s own choice.” This downplays the relative exclusivism with which scriptures were guarded in secrecy, as in the case of the “esoteric” Tantras, or kept as a caste privilege, as in the case of the Vedas themselves. Then again, many philosophical and religious ideas were popularized through the medium of oral versions of the epics and other stories."

Here comes the racist arrogance again. Why not explain that Rome destroyed all but four gospels, which may have nit been written before council of Nicea, and actively discourage flock from reading Bible, insisting they go exclusively through church authority, no salvation otherwise?

As for India, did Elst know or deliberately hide, that knowledge was carried through memotisation, for several millennia? That any teacher could and did take any student of choice using only ones own judgement, and did, regardless of not only castes but much more? That a Brahmin was not supposed to charge for any services, accept what was offered, and in literature, Brahmins are always poor? That even if a student was a prince, teacher was only to ask for a one time offering from him as reward at end of the years of study that began st before puberty and came to finale at manhood of the student?

Some of this is different from universities of West- especially the part about charging - but surely Harvard or Oxford aren't forced to accept every student that applies, much less everyone from poor and deprived background, such as Africa, Harlem, Mississippi backwaters, Texas ranches? Surely their right to select students for admission can't be denied to Hindu teachers, just due to racist anti-Hindu arrogance of West?

And, finally, some tracts are not taught everyone, but those of West that did get hold of them, have misunderstood them, invariably, whether due to incapability, or worse, publicising deliberate distortion, but either way, justifying their being kept away from those not judged worthy by teachers.

"“9. The doctrine of tolerance, or as Ashoka called it, Samvâya, Mutual Concord.” This is fine because it limits conflict, but it is not by itself a factor of national integration, just as secularism is not a factor of positive unity, merely a negative neutrality.

"“10. One Sacred Language. From the diversity of speech one sacred language, namely Sanskrit, was accepted. Sanskrit is the Wish-fulfilling Mother of Indian culture.” Sanskrit was an elite language, by no means spoken by the entire Indian population at any time. On the other hand, national unification (and politics in general) has nearly always and everywhere been an elite affair."

Samanvâya, not Samvâya. And the last assertion might have been true of Buddha era onwards but not of era of epics. Such assertions are simply made by anti-Hindu, antanti-India brigade, regardless of facts ascertained.

"“11. A common pattern of domestic Samskâras for regulating the life of each individual was accepted of which three are most important: relating to birth, marriage and death.”43

"“12. Sadâchâra, Code of Ethical Conduct, prescribed for everyone.” This needs clarification: what Indian ethical code is prescribed for “everyone”? There are lists of virtues in many Hindu scriptures, many of them expressly not applying to everyone, only to the three upper castes, or only to the members of a particular sect.44 Sadâchâra, “good conduct”, is listed as one of the five commandments of the Shaiva Lingayat sect, in the effective sense of: “work for one’s livelihood, be righteous and help others”.45 This is commendable, but its contribution to nation-building is unclear. Perhaps more specific nation-wide common rules are meant, e.g. the taboo on cow-slaughter.

"“13. Assimilative Genius and Cultural Synthesis. … Religious anthropology has laid bare in a most surprising manner the extent of Austric borrowings in Brahmanical tradition. Even the followers of the higher philosophic way subscribed to a religion in which the primitive deities of the earth and the forest freely mingled with the gods of higher religion.”

"A pivotal role was played in this process by Vyâsa, “compiler”, traditionally the compiler of the Vedas and of the Mahâbhârata: “Vyâsa stands alone as the symbol of a mighty cultural synthesis. He compiled the orthodox Vedic hymns in the Trayî Collection on the one hand, and admitted to an equal sanctity the Austric beliefs in the compilation of the Atharva-Veda, also reckoned as the fourth Veda. … The Gîtâ was a document par excellence of this synthesis of philosophical rationalism with a proletarian belief in manifold gods and godlings.”46"

Over and over, Elst is using language of sociology and more to denigrate India, Hinduism and ancient treasures. Vyaasa wasn't a compiler of Mahâbhârata, but the author. As for Vedas, they might have been written down by him as a manuscript, but were known before and since, to those educated in the tradition, whether at one's own home or that of a teacher.

"The problem with this idyllic picture is that it seems oblivious of the role of conflict and war in human history. Was there less of it in Indian history? Or is it true that religion and war were neatly separated? The questions are not meant as purely rhetorical. The reply by V.S. Agarwala and other Hindu patriots would probably be that warfare, like the division of India into separate and sometimes hostile kingdoms, did not affect the basic cultural unity of India. If at some point certain parts of India were brought into the domain of Vedic civilization by conquest (e.g. Kerala by the mythical Parashurama), this painful beginning would still not nullify the effective cultural integration of that area into the Hindu commonwealth in subsequent centuries, so that whatever the initial scenario, the integration of every part of India into a cultural continuum is at any rate an accomplished fact twenty centuries or so."

"Mythical"? As in imaginary father of someone famous in church? Or just racism by European descent, calling everything of India myth?

Himaalaya rising out of ocean, remember, was called Indian myth by West? West ridiculed evolution, but India knew it as Divine descent in ten stages.

Kerala, incidentally, wasn't a state or a separate region, not until independence. Malabar was merely the Southern end of Konkan, region between Sahyaadri and the ocean West of India, all of which region was part of where Parashuraama reigned, not as a politician or administrator or ruker, but as a famed warrior; wedding of Raama and Sita was possible due to use of his bow, and he was present. This is at the other end of the Southwest - Northeast axis, almost, of India, tip at Northeas being Himaalaya.

"And while such violent scenarios cannot altogether be excluded, there is ample evidence that important regions have voluntarily and by their own initiative joined the Vedic civilization, e.g. Bengali and Tamil (and Southeast-Asian) kings invited Brahmin clans to come and settle in their kingdoms to establish the Vedic tradition and add to the lustre of their dynasties. That cannot be said of, say, the Roman Empire, which expanded by purely military means."

This smacks of Macaulay policy, in that, while it might be true in the invitation bit, is deliberately leading to inference of an assumption behind that Bengal and Tamil speaking regions were outside the Hindu culture, which could be true of Tamil regions before Vaalmieki era, but not Raama had been through on his way to Lanka. Also, the nomenclature changing, from Hindu to Vedic culture, seeks to chop India into parts further actoss time, and imply that former is without glory inherent in latter. This is fraudulent, and on par with the diatribe in West, chiefly US, that teaches children that yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism, that Vedic religion was different and Hinduism is abhorrent. It's fraud, pure and simple.

Truth is in parts about various countries of neighborhood of India joining the culture, from Central Asia, to Vietnam which was two kingdoms, both with Sanskrit names, as did Laos and Cambodia. And Cambodia still has the largest complex of temples preserved in forests. Indonesia has Hindu Gods and Goddesses on its currency.

................................................................................................

"Manu’s definition of India"

" ... Manu (or the editors of the book named after him) had a definite culture-based concept of “Indian” (regardless of the changing state boundaries) and “foreign”. A consciousness of belonging to one Hindu culture, of which the borders to the North, East and West were to remain fixed for millennia, already existed in the time of the final editing of the Mânava-dharma-shâstra.52 This was well before Queen Victoria “first united India under one sceptre”, let alone before Nehru “made India”."

Again, the supposition that authors of great works of yore in India weren't real, that unnamed army of scribes did it by compiling and using one name, .... that it's all myth, anyway! Get overvracism, Elst, and question if your own faith can stand one, just one, question.

................................................................................................

"After nationalism"

" ... foreign imprints on Hindu society are legacies of the past: they have to be dealt with, but not in a manner which disregards the fact of Independence, the fact that a Hindu majority is now master of its own destiny and responsible for any past misfortunes which it allows to linger. It is therefore high time that the nationalistic aspect of Hindu revivalism got reduced to more functional and realistic proportions."

................................................................................................

"HINDU RASHTRA"

"The BJP on Hindu Rashtra"

"At the same time, Advani claimed that “those residing in the country are Hindus even if many of them believe in different religions. … those following Islam are ‘Mohammedi Hindus’. Likewise, Christians living in the country are ‘Christian Hindus’, while Sikhs are termed ‘Sikh Hindus’. The respective identities are not undermined by such a formulation. Similarly, someone is a ‘Sanatani Hindu’, while the other is an ‘Arya Samaji Hindu’. It would be better if such a formulation comes to be accepted. As part of the same concept, I consider this country to be a Hindu ‘rashtra’. There is no need to convert it into a Hindu ‘rashtra’; this needs to be understood. But I certainly do not believe in forcing people to believe in this.”120

"Likewise, RSS leader Balasaheb Deoras replied as follows to the question, “Do you consider yourself to be a Hindu first or an Indian first?”—“I don’t find any difference between the two. When I use the word Hindu, I use the word in a national sense. The word Hindu does not connote any religion. For example, the sanatani Hindu believes in idol worship while the Arya Samaji does not believe in it. Both are Hindus. Our idea is that all the people, whether they are Christians, Muslims or Arya Samajis, are Hindus. Unfortunately, the Muslims and the Christians have not accepted this stand. When the Hindus are strong enough, the Muslims and Christians will also start saying, we are Hindus.”121"

................................................................................................

"The RSS on Hindu Rashtra"

"“Dadabhai Naoroji has said—‘The word Hindu is not communal. It is indicator of nationality.’ Journalist and writer Khushwant Singh has said—‘In my view, the word Hindu is indicator of nationality. In countries like America, the people inhabiting this country are called Hindus even to this day.’ … Radiance, the English newspaper of [the Jamaat-i-Islami] has written on 1st March 1970 that ‘Muslims can quite reasonably claim to be Hindus in the geographical sense’.”126

"Assuming that the quotations are correct, the question is what you gain by defining the word “Hindu” down to a mere geographical term. The result is, at any rate, that there is no longer a term to designate the religious or cultural identity now called “Hindu”, while the existing secular term “Indian” gets the unsolicited company of a new synonym, “Hindu”.

But doesn't Elst know that the two words are in fact the same, words of two different languages or cultures - West Asia vs Europe - but of the same root, Sindhu? He himself has pointed out that Hindu is Persian for Sindhu, while Indus is European, beginning with Greek, for Hindu.

................................................................................................

"Hindutva stalwarts on Hindu Rashtra"

" ... In an article by K.S. Sudarshan titled “Why Hindu Rashtra”, in the paragraph titled “Hindu Rashtra—eternal and perennial”, where we expect to be enlightened at last about this elusive concept, all we get is some more Sanskrit shlokas proving that the Vedic seers considered themselves sons of Mâtâbhûmi, “Motherland”, and that the Puranic poets defined Bharat as the region “north of the sea and south of the Himalaya”.127"

For Elst, if this is unsatisfactory, it's because he has no relationship with the subject he chose as an easy vehicle gir career. For an Indian the said should eoukd be wonderful and satisfying, but perhaps that's precisely why he withholds from quoting them.

" ... Hindu Rashtra is ‘unity in diversity’.”128 This platitude (on condition of replacing “Hindu Rashtra” with “India”) can be found in every tourist guidebook on India. It could even serve as a definition of “secularism”."

There's much one can scoff at whether from tourist books or Bible or old art museums and churches in Europe. Monument Men isn't ridiculed by India, nor is a lot rlse, not because it couldn't be done.

"K.S. Sudarshan explains “unity in diversity”: “The Hindu system of thought starts by accepting the fact that every entity has a distinct role to play and a special contribution to make in the evolution of the universe. As such, it is necessary that each one should get the full scope to play his particular role in keeping with his characteristic trait. At the same time, it should be made possible for all of them to realise the intrinsic unity underlying the multitude of diversities and come together in a spirit of amity and unity.”129 This is hard to find fault with, but it says nothing new."

Did or does Elst vomit at every restaurant in Europe where dinner isn't a nouvelle cuisine dish he'd never seen, heard of or dmelled before?

Does he advocate destruction of David and Madonna because they are old, and does he proclaim anything older than Picasso is unworthy of preservation?

Does he advocate scrapping numbers and geometry from school curriculum, because it's not exactly last year's publications from Princeton?

"Unaware that the harmony model of society is quite well-known in Western thought, from the Greek philosophers and Saint Paul down to modern Christian democracy, Sudarshan seeks to prove the originality of his harmony model by contrasting it with “the West”, that den of incomprehending individualism, class struggle and the conflict-prone variety of nationalism: “Unlike in the West, we did not consider family, society, nation and the world as … having conflicting interests with one another.”130"

He probably was thinking of the various conflicts such as capitalism emphasising an individual's rights vs leftist thought sacrificing individual to society, divorce rates in U.S. with wives and children left abandoned by men who were doing well and exchanged old models for new, or possibly even Cousin Willy who endangered lives of family of a first cousin and her children only because she'd spurned his proposal and married another cousin instead, ... and he wasn't used to the model whereby one satisfies oneself about virtue of meekness on a weekly basis for an hour or so, leaving one free to conduct affairs of slave ownership rest of the time.

"The second feature of Hindu Rashtra (and there is no third) is but a variation on the first: “Finally, even though Truth is one whole, a human being can at best comprehend only a fraction of it at a time because of his limited powers. Thus his understanding of Truth might well be different from those of others. The celebrated saying of our scriptures is: Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti. (Truth is one, the sages call It variously.) As such, we have held it wrong to project only one’s own view of Truth as right and that of others as false. … And out of this basic conviction was born the principle of ‘equal respect for all faiths’, which forms a shining characteristic of our national tradition.”131 Again, a harmless Gandhian statement with which Nehru and most other secularists could have agreed, and which fails to explain why there should be a separate Hindû Râshtra movement like the RSS. Note also the sloppy logic: because the truth can be formulated from different angles, it is “deduced” that all doctrines must be formulations of that one truth, as if false doctrines and untruths are impossible."

So he should have been a mirror image, instead, of preachers who conduct fraudulent propaganda against a victimised people, blaming them for acts of slave-owning subjugators of Europe warring against everything in sight, before turning around and claiming the sole pipeline to God and promising hell for all those who refuse to join the club? He's wrong because he's being polite, instead of exposing every lie of exclusionary conversionist doctrines? Well, he hasn't exactly said "false doctrines and untruths are impossible", at that, and while church has lied for most of two millennia, that too is part of truth of history. But he was only speaking about whether it's possible to find a way to Divine via more than one faith, and in that he's right about not claiming nobody else has a key. Elst continues abusing them personally, again, as if he's reassuring readers West of his not having gone native, but lacks the finesse of Mark Tully visiting Kumbha.

"C.P. Bhishikar has written a volume elucidating Deendayal Upadhyaya’s thought: Concept of the Rashtra. But when we turn to the chapter with the promising title “The identity of Hindu Rashtra”, we only find some general observations about nationalism, some bombastic neologisms (the “Science of Patriotism”),132 and the assurance that nations with will-power are unstoppable when they work to create a state of their own.

"The best publication on the “Hindu state” (no pussyfooting about the meaning of Râshtra here) is no doubt Balraj Madhok’s: Rationale of Hindu State, which carries a golden swastika on the cover. Here again, we get the whole Hindutva argument about Nehruvian “pseudo-secularism”, Muslim aggression, Hindu broad-mindedness and the like. The book is well-written, but on what a “Hindu state” would be like, all it offers is the assurance that it would be a pluralistic and democratic state without privileges for the minorities."

Did Elst expect series of five year plans of conversions of heathen who'd in this case be the ignoramuses of monotheism and so on? He must swallow his disappointment or regurgitate it as he did here, since a Hindu, determined to say what either of the authors did, won't just do a Sunday pulpit speech competing with other Sunday pulpit speeches around the globe, or even those of Friday, just to give satisfaction for Elst. Sun rises East, every day, on earth. For novelty, Elst should relocate to Mercury.

"Thus, “Muslim and Christian minorities will be more safe in a Hindu state than anywhere else in the world provided they accept the Indian ideal of ‘live and let live’, treat others as they would like to be treated by others, and show equal respect for other religions, forms of worship and places of worship. … In short, religious minorities in Hindu Republic of India will get much better treatment than the non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other Islamic States of the world. But they will have to be loyal to the State and learn to respect the rights and sentiments of the nation group. They will have equal rights but no special rights.”133

"This insistence that a Hindu State will be a truly secular state is purely defensive; while there is nothing wrong with it, it fails to tell us why a Hindu state should be preferred to its alternatives, such as the Nehruvian state. At most, it could mean that the aberrations from true secularism which characterize the Nehruvian system will be replaced with real secularism. As a VHP slogan has it: “Hindu India, secular India”. But then why not call your goal “secularism”, a fairly clear descriptive term, instead of this murky “Hindu Rashtra”?"

Elst is deliberately obtuse, or really stupid here, is unclear. But the whole point is that true and real secularism aren't separate, that in a Hindu nation minorities would be as safe as they, Parsis and Jews for example, for centuries, or Tibetans in recent decades, have been, only because they were in India; Nehruvian (or more correctly Gandhian, whether original Gandhi or most recent Italian variety unrelated except by name), "secularism" amounts to special privileges for faiths that came with invaders and were established preferred creeds during erstwhile colonial regimes; those privileges won't be part of a Hindu nation, which allows freedom of worship but not of preaching hatred against Jews or Hindus, for example, nor of converting masses by fraud or threat, nor of hurting others.

"Rather than coming out with a blueprint of what new benefits a Hindu state will bring, all that Hindu nationalists do is to assure the world that a Hindu State is something else than what its detractors allege. This extremely defensive discourse can be understood as the result of having been vilified and pushed around for half a century, but it remains disappointing."

The disappointment seems to consist of lack of opportunities to tear them up or stone pelting.

................................................................................................

"The BJS-BJP as a secular and modernist party"

" ... Historically, the enthusiasm of Hindu activists for the struggle against social evils has often been in direct proportion to their Hindu radicalism. Thus, Nathuram Godse, the murderer of the Mahatma, was an active participant in and organizer of inter-caste dinners and other actions to break caste discrimination and untouchability.136 This is only logical considering that the social evils of Hindu society are its major weakness, and that its enemies are concentrating all their efforts on exploiting these social evils."

So As per Elst, slavery as practiced by confederate states or by Islamic regimes whether in Africa or India or more recently in West Asia by ISIS, is nothing, or less, than caste system, which he seeks to identify with Hindu and India exclusively?

Does he deny that Europe had, and under monarchies still does, have a caste system? It's arranged differently from that of India, former based on wealth, power, race, gender, titles and similar criteria including faith, but just as fixed by birth as thry accuse caste of Hindu society to be? That Islamic societies have a caste system similar to West based on similar criteria but far more rigid due to their being dictated in scriptures, and accirding human status only to muslim males? That indian caste system is only different by being based on different criteria? He's himself been doing an expose of how it's far from what it has been portrayed, but conveniently forgets it so's to turn around on Hindus.

Apart from all that - his model of introduction of Godse must be emulated henceforth, at the very least, by all Hindus, even all Indians and Bangladeshis, in introducing Churchill (who was responsible for starving millions in Bengal to death), say, or Germany and Germans (who perpetrated blitzkrieg horrors apart from genocides in East Europe, and of course, the Holocaust), or first few U.S. presidents (who were in fact slave owners), and so on - say Custer (who massacred natives of U.S. because he wanted the land for European migrants), Cortez (who brought missionaries who destroyed priceless objects of art and other significance because they belonged to other cultures), .....

................................................................................................

"Minorities in a Hindu State"

"Hindutva spokesmen assure us that their movement could never have been anything but secular, because Hinduism is quintessentially secular: “The Hindu state has never been theocratic, there being never any institution like the Pope of Rome or the Caliph in Turkey. Therefore, to assert that the Hindu Rashtra, whose glory lies in its liberal values of life, is anti-secular, is only to betray one’s gross ignorance.”139"

"According to Hindu nationalists, history shows that a “Hindu can never be a communalist or a fundamentalist”.140 As proof, Hindu hospitality towards the Syrian Christians, the Jews and the Parsis is cited. A favourite quotation is this Israeli statement about Jewish history in India: “While most of the Jews came to Israel driven by persecution, discrimination and murder and attempts at total genocide, the Jews of India came because of their desire to participate in the building of their Jewish Commonwealth, because of their unshakable belief in the redemption of Israel. Throughout their long sojourn in India, nowhere and at no time were they subjected to intolerance, discrimination or persecution.”141"

"Those minorities who expect problems are told that they have only themselves to blame: they attribute to the Hindus the very motives which have inspired their own forebears to persecution and religious wars. The minorities themselves should make a move and drop their social and political separatism. K.S. Sudarshan presents the attitude of the Parsis, India’s smallest minority except for the Jews, as a model to follow:

"“In 1943, the then Secretary of State, Mr. L.S. Amery, invited some Parsi representatives and suggested to them that they should ask for separate representation in various legislatures. The suggestion was emphatically spurned in a representation sent to Mr. Amery and signed by nearly 2,000 leading Parsis, and affirming that ‘our interests are safe in the hands of sister communities’. Recalling this episode, R.K. Sidhwa, a prominent Parsi member of the Constituent Assembly, said that if minorities were encouraged to think in terms of permanent minority safeguards, ‘there will be a kind of perpetual instinct in the mind of the minority community representatives that the safeguards are to remain forever, and it will be difficult for these small communities to come nearer to major communities.’ Sidhwa added: ‘The ultimate phase of political life of all Indians should be one nation, one community.’”142"

All true.

" ... It is best summed up by Shrikant Talageri: “Muslims, whether they remain staunch Muslims or awakened (weaned-away)143 ones, should be assured that as individuals and as general groups, they will get full justice in every sense of the term: the position of a Muslim individual or group will be exactly the same as that of a Hindu individual or group. The BJP’s slogan ‘justice for all, appeasement of none’ says it in a nutshell. But there will be no religious appeasement or pampering, no positive discrimination in their favour, and absolutely no tolerance of any expansionist agenda.”144"

................................................................................................

"INTEGRAL HUMANISM"

"The official doctrine of the BJS/BJP is called Integral Humanism (Hindi: Ekâtmatâ Mânawawâd), a doctrine formulated in four lectures given by BJS ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya in Pune, April 1965, vaguely on the basis of ancient Hindu social philosophy.145 It is the alpha and omega of ideological training sessions of RSS and BJP workers. Typically for intellectual functioning of the RSS, the term “integral humanism” had already been enshrined in the BJS’s Principles and Policies (a programmatic statement adopted in January 1965)146 on the basis of its intuitive meaning as explained in a single paragraph, before Upadhyaya explicitated it into a more or less full-blown philosophy in the said lectures. ... "

"It is remarkable that most reputed India-watchers have never even heard of the official doctrine of the largest political party in the world’s largest democracy.149 Even when they mention it, they trivialize it and don’t take it seriously. Thus, of three sentences which Salim Lakha devotes to Integral Humanism, the first is: “Upadhyaya’s idea of integral humanism can be traced back to 1965 and the Jana Sangh party’s attempt to define a separate ideological identity from the other major political parties.” As if that separate ideological identity was an artificial creation just for the fun of having an “identity”. In reality, Integral Humanism was an explication of an already well-established but insufficiently articulated identity. It is because of the BJS’s underlying Hindu identity, that it “rejected the materialism of Western political ideologies” (Lakha’s second sentence) and “argued in favour of an ‘integral approach’ that combined mental, physical and spiritual needs of the people” (his third).150 Whatever the reason for their negligence, the status quaestionis is that, as far as the professional students of Hindutva are concerned, this topic of research ... "

Elst uses an obscene expression instead of a plain "neglected" or "unexamined", so its omitted from the quote.

................................................................................................

"“Integral”"

Elst quotes from Deen Dayal Upadhyay, mentioning M. N. Roy before going on to Bipin Chandra Pal, to briefly discuss "Nârâyana", and going on to do a bit of stone pelting -

"The idea is not new nor exclusively Hindu.157 Even the application of this paradigm to society, where the parts are said to be dependent on the whole and consequently forced to co-operate in harmony like the different organs and limbs of the body, is a metaphor found in many places and cultures. ... "

Unlike corporations West, which India had to fight in courts about their taking out patents claiming research while they had merely stolen stuff known to Aayurveda and hence to most of India - not just professional doctors but every householder, especially most or all grandmothers of India - for millennia, India hasn't gompne to court to take out a patent; but it's equally true that concept of Nârâyana, if it's indeed known to "many places and cultures", is a well kept secret except in India. Elsewhere, church claiming sole connection to salvation and exclusive escape from hell is the model, emulated even more stringently and stridently by the later abrahmic faith, by denying "other"s right to life.

" ... This is arguably a modern rationalization of the “essence” of Hindu civilization, but there may be something to it."

Usual condescension from Europe, when not advising or criticising.

................................................................................................

"“Humanism “"

"This humanism is an integral humanism: social and political structures must do justice to the multi-dimensionality of the human person: “Thus, even though Dharma regulates Artha and Kâma, all the three are interrelated and mutually complementary.”163 In its historical context, this is a reaction against the one-dimensionalization of man in a biological (racism) or economic sense (Marxism) or in terms of his religious identity. This mild talk of “the whole human person” implies, in practical politics, rejection of totalitarianism (emphasizing that “the state is not above all”164), a compromise between free entreprise and regulation by the state, and preservation of family values."

" ... “In our view society is self-born. … In reality, society is an entity with its own ‘Self’, its own life; it is a sovereign being like an individual; it is an organic entity. We have not accepted the view that society is some arbitrary association.”166 Consequently, class struggle, which is an outgrowth of the “social contract” theory, is rejected in favour of the harmony model of society."

"A “humanist” doctrine is hard to reconcile with the theocratic principle. ... "

To someone brought up in any other than Hindu culture, certainly. To someone brought up in a Hindu culture or with an integral comprehension thereof, it's impossible to understand that statement.

Unless one is familiar with what Elst means by theocracy - inquisition, persecution of Galileo and burning at stake of Jean D'Arc, ... or corresponding regime under another conversionist abrahmic creeds.

"Yet, Upadhyaya writes: “The ideal of the Indian State has been Dharma Râjya.”168 The latter term would be translated by most secularists as “religious state”. However, the BJS ideologue continues: “Tolerance of and respect for all faiths and creeds is an essential feature of the Indian State. Freedom of worship and conscience is guaranteed to all and the state does not discriminate against any one on grounds of religion either in the formulation of policy or in its implementation. It is a non-sectarian state and not a Theocracy. … The nearest English equivalent of Dharma Râjya is Rule of Law.”169 At that point, one is entitled to ask: if all you mean is “rule of law”, why don’t you just call it that, why create confusion by using a less straightforward or at least more complex term?"

Elst in particular and West in general, with a racist arrogance, demand exclusive catering to, with such questions - never dreaming of reflecting on shortcomings of their own languages and cultural concepts. An Indian on the other hand is addressing, for most part, his own country, which, for most part, knows what he means when he uses an infant word, often impossible to translate.

" ... For RSS men, activists who have chosen to dedicate themselves to an ideal, it is more natural to discharge duties than to claim rights; it is also this attitude which is inculcated in boy-scouts and in pupils of religious schools of any denomination. ... "

Correct upto the "boy-scouts", but not thereafter.

" ... But it is hard to see where this takes us when we want to conceive a political structure. There is an obvious danger, viz. that rights will be denied to the individual in the name of the “rights of society” (equivalent with the duties of the individual vis-à-vis society), the old Soviet justification to muzzle dissent and reject pleas for “human rights”."

This isn't possible precisely when the term "Dharma Râjya" has been used. Elst is questioning on basis of other societies, irrelevant to this term.

Elst continues his tearing at writing of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, whether deliberately obfuscating or genuinely uncomprehending, is unclear.

"The point is often made by Hindu reformists that Hinduism itself provides the mechanisms which can free it from its social evils. Indeed, the very genesis of those evils illustrates the adaptability of Hinduism, for instance, the low status of women in the Manu Smriti has a prehistory which shows how Hinduism evolves: “Regarding the right of a daughter to her father’s property, the opinion of Manu is quoted at length in the ancient book of Etymology and grammar, Nirukta of Yaska. … He, in a discussion of the rights of girls to property, clinches the argument by giving the opinion of Manu that both sons and daughters had an equal share in the property of their father. He claims that this decree was given in the beginning of the world. This particular shloka of Manu is not found in Manusmrti. … The implication is that the present Manusmrti was compiled much later. And that the ancient Hindus gave equal rights to women.”175 This would mean that the so-called “Laws of Manu” were a continuously evolving document (or oral tradition), which allotted an equal share to sons and daughters at one stage and instituted inequality between them at a later stage, the stage which happens to be frozen in the textus receptus of the Manu Smriti we now know."

Much changed with Islamic invasions, but elst isn't willing to admit that, since it exposes ills brought in by foreign rule, including by European powers.

" ... The “Rule of Dharma” is therefore not to be understood as a polity based on ancient quasi-religious law-books, but rather as a dynamic polity which seeks its own solutions, guided only by very general principles of Hindu civilization, such as responsibility, social coherence, “integral humanism”."

If Elst were not being deliberately argumentative through this section, even chapter, he'd understand very well the term that any Hindu would, as soon as it's mentioned - the context of Dharma Râjya, indeed, is more of Raama and his Raama Râjya, to be understood via Raamaayana, and far more via Bhagawadgeetaa where the concepts are explained in detail.

................................................................................................

"Similarities with Christian-Democracy"

"In its assumption that man liveth not by bread alone and its opting for the harmony model of society, Integral Humanism is most akin to the Christian-Democratic movement in Europe.176 It is significant that one of the fundamental statements of the Christian-Democratic vision, by the French Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, is titled Humanisme Intégral (1936), though the homonymy is probably purely coincidental.177 No RSS man would have been sufficiently familiar with Continental ideological trends to be aware of this French book, and to my knowledge, until recently no Sangh Parivar publication ever mentioned it.

"Indeed, Upadhyaya, with his typical Indocentric worldview, reduced Western civilization to its modern materialist manifestation and explicitly denied Western inspiration: “There have been a number of schools that have propounded humanism. But their thinking has been rooted in Western philosophies and so it is essentially materialistic. … If you deny spiritualism, then human relations and behaviour and the relationship between man and the Universe cannot be explained.”178 As if there is no spiritualism in the West."

West seeks to claim supremacy and primacy of Europe in everything, but won't admit that church began from Paul, and name of a king of Jews, executed by Rome, was used later to bring back power to tome via terrorising people with fear of hellfire, with fraudulent assumption and declaration of bring sole conduit to salvation.

" ... In general terms, Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism amounted to a social-democratic programme combined with a non-materialistic philosophy."

................................................................................................

"Integral Humanism and the world"

"As Hindu nationalists, the Sangh Parivar activists have suffered of a deep inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Nehruvian elite. But as Hindus, they share in a widespread and profound confidence, deep down inside, in the ultimate superiority of Hindu civilization, a remote hold-over from the time when India was world leader in arts and sciences, thousands of years ago. This feeling that Hinduism has a tremendous liberating message for the whole world, already articulated by Swami Vivekananda, had been pushed in the background by the discovery of nationalist ideology and the remoulding of Hindu self-assertion in Savarkarite nationalist terms. Though Deendayal Upadhyaya was undeniably a nationalist too, his Integral Humanism has brought the universalist self-understanding (and ambition) of Hinduism back in focus."

Elst is wrong about the first sentence. Values inherent in Hinduism do not revere what Elst calls "Nehruvian elite", or even royalty, whether of Europe or Mughal variety.

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

" ... In essential respects, the Sangh Parivar is continuing the vision of India enunciated by Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and the freedom movement. This is also proved a contrario by the continuity between the discourse of the Muslim League against the freedom movement and that of recent secularists against the Hindutva movement: “majoritarianism”, “Islam/secularism in danger”.

"The idea of India as a Hindu state means two different things. One is that India already is a Hindu state and can only exist as a Hindu state, in the sense that Hinduism is India’s natural and only unifier, that even if its Constitution does not pay any lip-service to its natural Hindu identity, India can only exist as a united state by being Hindu. The proof given for this position is that those factors which created an awareness of India as a distinct entity are intimately connected with Hinduism: the Sanskrit language nurtured by the pan-Indian Brahmin caste, the pilgrimage cycles, the Vedic rituals, the ideal of the pan-Indian ruler or Chakravarti, and (though the Hindu nationalists are reluctant to highlight it) the varnâshramadharma. Also, the literature in which the earliest awareness of cultural Indian unity is shown (Manu-Smriti, Mahâbhârata, Arthashâstra) is undeniably Hindu. Another proof is again a contrario: all separatists justify their struggle by claiming to be non-Hindu and therefore out of place in India, that obviously Hindu country."

................................................................................................

"34. Atharva-Veda 12:1:45. Religion is used as the (ever inaccurate) translation of dharma, a term which may be used as an uncountable (“the essence of the Hindu nation is dharma”) but also as a countable noun: Hinduism consists of many dharmas, i.e. the distinct traditions of each caste and sect."

Here they ho again, harping on identifying India with very concrpt of caste, which is an Anglo Saxon word not invented for India but they pretend India has castes and no other culture or faith do, which is completely false.

As for Dharma, it's not just each caste, or individual, but far more - a lion's Dharma conflicts with that of deer, for example - but even on individual level, Dharma of a person is different in each role of the person. A mother's Dharma is not identical with that of a wife, and a soldier's or king's Dharma clashing with that of a husband can be easily envisioned.

"37. V.S. Agrawala: India—a Nation, p.3. At the time of his writing, Kirâta and Nishâda were often understood to mean “Tibeto-Burmese”, “Austro-Asiatic”, the two main language groups in India after Indo-Aryan and Dravidian; but this identification is flimsy. Ethnic terms were often unrelated to language, e.g. the “Turanian” enemies of the sedentary Iranians were not the Turks (until the Turkish expansion in the early Christian era) but fellow Iranians who had a more barbaric and nomadic lifestyle, broadly known pars pro toto as the Scythians."

"38. Among Hindus, the date of Shankara is controversial; some date him to c. 500 BC. In this case, I wholeheartedly support the conventional date established by indologists, among other reasons because his choice of Dwarka for his Western matha, and not Hinglaj (west of the Indus) as intended, fits neatly with the fact that the latter area had passed under Muslim control in the early eighth century."

This may or may not be true, because there is no record of yet another problem - and a far more grave threat to existence - on horizon when Shankaraachaarya was at work, so to speak, to bring life back to the society gone into a renunciation mode due to Buddhist influence. As for Hinglaj, it certainly isn't a superior or more primary choice just due to being further West. Dwaarakaa has importance of being city settled by Krishna. Fir that natter, Shankaraachaarya set up his Northern Matha at Jyotirmatha, which is comparatively Northeast, instead of at a northern extremity in Himaalaya; his Eastern Matha is at Kanchipuram, not at Eastern extremity somewhere in Assam.

Generally West has derogatory opinion of Hinduism at subconscious level fir no reason other than overinflated importance given to a skin colour of Europeans that's direct result of living mostly in dark of Nordic latitudes, which - racist arrogance -deprives them of ability to learn.

"185. RSS general secretary H.V. Seshadri (The Way, p.37) gives an example: “The reflections of Bhiku Idate … are typical. He comes from a nomadic tribe. … He was jailed during Emergency because of his active part in Sangh. During his jail days, he once told his Socialist jail mates: ‘I have been working in the Sangh for the past 12 years but none enquired my caste. For the first time, this inquiry was made in jail—and that by a Socialist!’”"

................................................................................................

................................................

February 09, 2022 - February 11, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

Specific Hindu grievances

................................................................................................

"Nothing is more revealing for the poor state of Hindutva-watching among scholars and journalists than their silence about the Hindu grievances which feed Hindutva activism, or their automatic dismissal of these grievances as being fictitious. Most observers are caught in the over-all bias of secularist writing on the phenomenon of “fundamentalism”, viz. that external (non-doctrinal) factors can account for it. A very common expression of this bias is the reassuring explanation that there are no inherent religious reasons for the recent upsurge in Islamic militancy, and that it is all due to post-colonial frustrations or rising unemployment: essentially a variation on Karl Marx’s dismissal of religion as “the opium of the people”. In the case of “Hindu fundamentalism”, the usual explanations are full of Marxist phraseology about “the urban traders seeking to assert themselves” or “an upper-caste ploy to prevent Backward-casteist mobilization”, or other conspiracies of secular socio-economic interest groups masquerading as cultural or religious movements.

"Such an approach, in my opinion, is bad scholarship. It is right to look for someone’s “real” intentions after his ostensible intentions have been shown to be incompatible with the actual data of his situation and behaviour. But simply disregarding his explicit reasons so as to impose your own alternative explanation without giving him a fair hearing is not acceptable. We must not refuse to look at facts as they present themselves because of the a priori assumption that what you see is not what you see, that there is something else behind it. And the pertinent fact here is that Hindus as such do have a lot to complain about."

................................................................................................

"INJUSTICE IN DISCOURSE"

"The India-watcher in a state of denial"

"While any “Hindu fundamentalist” you talk to, will tell you first of all that Hindus feel like second-class citizens in India, no India-watcher has made an attempt to find out the factual basis of this complaint. Thus, BBC reporter Brian Barron was told by a Hindu interviewee, a Sadhu, that Hindus are discriminated against. Instead of jumping at this long-awaited occasion to find out the why of Hindu activism, he simply ignored the point.1 Likewise, Susan Bayly makes it impossible for herself and her readers to comprehend Hindu activism by assuming beforehand that the said complaint is absurd considering that India guarantees “constitutional even-handedness to citizens of every religious community and ethnic group”.2 That is precisely what Hindu revivalists deny, what they have argued against at length.

"If the fact of Hindu grievances (leave alone the contents of those grievances) is ever mentioned, it is invariably to laugh them off as mendacious or, in Bruno Philip’s words, “fantasmatic”.3 This then is the major reason for the general misperception of the Hindu movement in the West: ignorance or denial of the objective factors of the Hindu unrest, one of them being the easily verifiable legal inequality which Hinduism suffers in India, another the distorted presentation of Hindu-Muslim relations in the dominant secularist discourse. ... "

"The very fact that Hindutva-watchers ignore the Hindu grievances is itself considered as an injustice towards the Hindus, an injustice of discourse. ... "

................................................................................................

"Damn the Hindu victims of terrorism"

"The very first Hindu grievance is that Hindus are being killed: in Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Kashmir, during bomb attacks in Mumbai, Coimbatore and other cities. Large-scale street riots, the ones in which Muslims as well as Hindus get killed, have receded from memory in the decade following the Babri Masjid demolition, but terrorist attacks solely targeting Hindus have continued with high frequency. Moreover, Hindu activists are specifically singled out and have been assassinated in sizable numbers throughout the 1980s (including several hundreds of Sangh Parivar activists by the Khalistani terrorists) and 1990s (mostly individual murders and a few public bomb blasts, as on Advani’s meeting in Coimbatore killing over 40 BJP supporters in February 1998, by Pakistan-backed Muslim groups).4

"Among lesser-known types of anti-Hindu aggression, note the use of riots, targeted assassinations and minor forms of pestering (eve-teasing) in order to “ethnically cleanse” lucrative Hindu neighbourhoods, making the Hindus sell off their properties at dumping prices to Muslim mafia dons, as in Ahmedabad.5 The ethnic cleansing which non-Muslims have suffered in Bangladesh has now followed the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants into the border districts of West Bengal and the north-eastern states, where Hindu and Buddhist refugees (such as the Buddhist Chakmas from the Chittagong Hill Tracts) find themselves both unwelcome from the part of the natives and chased onward by the ever-increasing Muslim settler population.6"

" ... Any type of regime faced with the variety of terrorists besieging India would find this an uphill battle."

Certainly, if they were as unwilling to see it, or were bent on lying about it, as gandhian politics was, joined with the rest of appeasers.

"The second and related grievance, however, does concern an identifiable and articulate party, a prominent section of India’s establishment and of the leading international academic and media network. It is that this killing goes on without anyone paying attention: not the state, not the establishment media, not the scholars. Professionals paid to follow and analyse South Asia’s Hindu-Muslim conflict, somehow ignore the single largest category of violence characterizing this conflict: violence against Hindus.

"The total number of riot victims in India since the Partition massacres, which ended in January 1948, is variously estimated as up to almost twenty thousand, Muslims as well as Hindus, with the former outnumbering the latter three to one, and a high proportion of these Muslims having been killed in police firing.7 However, more than that total number, and almost exclusively Hindus, were killed in 1950 in East Bengal alone.8 Smaller massacres still rivalling the biggest Indian communal riots have been inflicted on the Hindus of East Bengal every couple of years, such as the one hitting both Hindus and Christians in 1964.9 Recent instances took place in 1989 and 1992, both in “retaliation” for phases of the Ayodhya controversy in India, the first one being the entirely peaceful Shilânyâs ceremony.10 The Hindu death toll in post-Independence riots in East Bengal already outnumbers the Muslim death toll in Hindu-Muslim clashes in the whole of South Asia by far.

"What reader or writer of any book or paper on “communalism” would suspect that not Muslims but Hindus are the main victims? The impression generally created is that we have to go and protect those poor hapless Muslims from the swaggering Hindu bullies.

"All these riot data are, moreover, dwarfed completely by the East Bengal genocide of 1971. The first Bangladesh Government estimated the number of people killed by the Pakistanis and their local (chiefly Jamaat-i-Islami) allies at three million. This may well be an overestimate, but if we play safe and put the number at one million, it still leaves all the other communal massacres since Partition (and even the sum total of the Partition killing) far behind. Moreover, Western as well as Indian observers noticed that the prime target group were the Hindus.11

"As for the non-Hindu victims, they too were killed by Pakistani or pro-Pakistani Muslims, not by Hindus (who were fleeing or hiding), and often also for anti-Hindu reasons: to the Pakistanis, Bengalis with their Sanskritic script, their saris and their Tagore songs were still almost-Hindus, which explained their un-Islamic cultural nationalism. It should be obvious that the Bengali Muslims killed by Pakistanis do not enter the Hindu-Muslim victim tally, in case anyone was thinking of using them to obscure the steep inequality in Hindu vs. Muslim victimhood in 1971. The simple bottom-line is that since 1948, the mortal victims of Hindutva are counted at most in thousands, those of Islam in hundreds of thousands.

"So, who is aware of this? In the news bulletins, names like Rwanda or Cambodia are rarely mentioned without a little background reminder of the mass killing that rocked those countries in the recent past. Even the Armenian genocide of 1915 is frequently mentioned. But Bangladesh? All South-Asian governments discourage interest in the events of 1971, particularly in the communal dimension, because each one of them wants to avert the anti-Muslim conclusions which the data might suggest to a section of the public. Foreigners, meanwhile, feel no need to know or remember the massacre. When Hindus are killed by Kashmiri terrorists, admittedly a routine occurrence, then nobody is bothered. One white Australian missionary killed by Hindu tribals is world news (Graham Staines, killed in 1998), but Hindus might as well go to the gas chambers in their millions and still nobody would care.

"The misperception of Hindus as bullies and minorities as their victims in turn conditions a distortion of the information flow concerning new instances of communal violence. Thus, when a series of bombs damaged churches in Goa, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh between 21 May and 9 July 2000, Christian and secularist fingers were immediately pointed at the RSS though this organization had never been associated with the specific methods of bomb terror in the past, simply because everybody “knew” that the RSS is that big bad wolf terrorizing Christian children. In the West, even tabloids otherwise poor in international news “informed” their readers about Hindu terrorism against noble dedicated Christian missionaries, India’s only cure for leprosy and caste injustice. In India, editors and Church spokesmen laughed off the RSS defence that the Pakistani ISI had to be behind it.

"But then on 9 July, two of the real perpetrators made a technical mistake, killing themselves and exposing their identities and the Pakistani origin of their equipment. So their gang was arrested: a branch of Deendar Anjuman, a Muslim sect founded in the 1920s under the Nizam’s patronage to convert Lingayats (a Shaiva sect) to Islam, and now with headquarters in Pakistan. Though not an ISI intiative, the campaign did have the backing of the Pak foreign hand. If I handn’t been a reader of the Indian press for professional reasons, I would not have known that the whole bomb campaign had been the handiwork of a Muslim outfit.12 For, the Christian and secular press worldwide continued to refer to “Hindu bomb attacks on churches”, obviously relaying the stories fed to them by Indian Church sources. A full two months later, Church spokesman John Dayal went before an American Congressional hearing (mandated by a law which makes US relations with foreign countries dependent on their “religious freedom”, including freedom for American missionaries to proselytize) to reiterate the same old allegations of Hindu bomb attacks.

"The point here is not the dishonesty of Church spokesmen, but the fact that they correctly expected to get away with repeating their calumny against the RSS even after police investigations had cleared it of any involvement and the real culprits had been arrested and had confessed. A climate has been created in which every allegation against Hindu activists enjoys a priori credibility while every complaint of Hindu victims is shrugged off or even maligned as hate propaganda."

Interesting, that bit - "The point here is not the dishonesty of Church spokesmen" - as if it's a given, not to be lingered on, can't be helped, move on, ... all of which is true, because spokesmen of fraudulent terrorists couldn't possibly be otherwise, could they!

It also explains the about turn by two supposedly decent, well educated presidents of U.S., after a very friendly visit to India that went well beyond - over and above - expectations, the about turn generally attributed to paki influence by baffled India. The last is a factor, of course, as long as the need of use of free military base against Russia remains a fetish in wedt, but the root of the disease is in Rome, with secondary roots having sprung and gone down widely, especially in the evangelical mid West and bible belt.

................................................................................................

"Secular-Hindu self-hate"

First and foremost, being secular doesn't promote hatred of Hinduism, much less so in a Hindu, but only in the group that has been taught to hate Hinduism and rever almost everything brought in by foreign regimes, and the word secular here is used wrongĺy here for them. They themselves, falsely, label themselves secular, progressive, liberal, and so forth, but are in fact none of these.

"Leaving aside the violence department, the greatest irritant in the opinion climate for activist Hindus is the tendency to “Hindu-baiting” or “Hindu-bashing” among born Hindus who profess their adherence to “secularism”. Ram Swarup explains the phenomenon as follows: “When two cultures meet on unequal military terms—as the Hindu culture met the West and earlier met Islam—it gives rise to grave problems of self-identity for the defeated party”, so that in practice, many elite Hindus “disowned their nationhood and their culture and adopted the ways and attitudes of the victors whom they regarded as their superiors. They saved their self-respect through self-alienation. … Even people who eventually came to fight the British politically surrendered to them culturally.”13

"Jawaharlal Nehru was the most typical example of this phenomenon, but most of the England-returned lawyers who led the Indian National Congress displayed this attitude to some extent. To be sure, there was also a counter-tendency of self-rediscovery and cultural self-assertion, probably best expressed by Sri Aurobindo, but the “self-alienated” tendency became the dominant one after Independence. More than the colonial dispensation, the new ruling class of free India demonstrated the most durable success of the colonizers: “A dominant ruling people or race also creates a dominant ideology. It gives birth not only to economic and political compradores but also to intellectual compradores. In India, too, we developed a local satellite ideology derived from the dominant imperialist ideology. It believed what it had been taught, namely, that India was not a nation but only a name for a geographical region occupied by successive waves of invaders, that its past was dark, its religion degraded and superstitious, and that its social system was a tyranny of castes and creeds.”14"

Funny thing is, when it came to it, not only Jawaharlal Nehru disapproved strongly of the bridegroom his daughter selected, but explicitly said he wished she'd marry a nice Kashmiri Pandit boy. This could be considered communal rather than adherence to Hindu ethos, but when the wedding - and further weddings in family, with exception of that of Rajeev Gandhi with an Italian catholic Sonia Maino - were all conducted as per Hindu rituals, at least for public consumption. This could be construed a political drama in the Italian branch of the family not willing to lose their claim to inheritance of a position, but in case of Jawaharlal Nehru conducting his daughter's wedding it was, most likely, the least manifestation of attachment to his roots.

Nevertheless, the humongous gap between the reverence accorded to priest class of dominant minority faiths associated with erstwhile foreign regimes can only be contrasted with the irreverent, even deliberately derogatory and pejorative, treatment of those of religions of India, with possible exception of the Sikhs who only came under a negative treatment post Pakistan provoked Sikh terrorism.

And yet, not only Jawaharlal Nehru’s own antecedents were of Brahmins, but even the quarter Italian branch of his descendents are claimed to be of that community; the spokesmen of the party have publicly bragged that the great-grandson rightfully wears the sacred thread, and it was on public display when subsequently he went on a tour of temples in Gujarat just before elections.

People did point out, that -

a), he wore the thread over clothes including a coat, which is not how it's worn if it were properly worn, real and habitual;

b), when he entered the temples, while no one questioned his right or propriety thereof, a companion of his wrote his faith in an entry register as not Hindu (subsequently it was explained that the said companion was not authorised to fo so by the family, but whether he liked was never explained);

c), no one thought to ask when, how, where were the sons and grandsons of Indira Gandhi were actually inducted into Hinduism, when and where was the ceremony performed, why was it kept a secret, it certainly was never known that it had happened, but if it had, it couldn't have been kept a secret, and it stinks if it was.

If the said induction was only just before they participated in the very publicly conducted cremation of a parent, then it's purely public drama, since the said ceremony is usually done at or before puberty.

In this instance, it smacks of being done because the cremation was for a show of their having been Hindu, but in reality the last member of the family that was unquestionably Hindu was Indira Gandhi.

Her husband having been Parsi, or so st least is claimed, why weren't the sons Parsi is a question no one asks. And as for later, it's hardly possible that a catholic and one that comes to political prominence after marrying is allowed by Rome to kaiser, or that the children weren't baptised, however secretly.

................................................................................................

"Much of the Hindu revivalist argument discussed in this study pertains precisely to the “self-alienated” positions taken by Hindu members of the ruling class. For the present purpose of illustrating the anti-Hindu bias in the world view of these “alienated Hindus”, we may be satisfied with a close look into one typical example, an article by Ms. J.G. Sharma published in 1993, when polarization between Hindu nationalism and the “self-alienated” secularist Hindus was at its most intense.

"Ms. Sharma imagines what a BJP regime would be like, and assumes that it would first of all replace the existing legislation with the ancient code of Manu, the Manu Smriti. In fact, the BJP never had the intention of making the Manu Smriti into law, and it never really was a law book anyway, but let that pass.15 So, she starts lampooning Manu: “Manusmriti is not against fashion. It is all for propagation of ethnic chic, but only in its pristine purity. That way, you spend less on cloth, and it is healthier for a warm country like ours.”16

"Western-dressed secularists describe the dress of their less advanced countrymen as “ethnic chic”, a neo-colonial term,—“ethnic” meaning “tribal” or “native”, and “chic” wrongly pretending that it is not the colonials but the natives who put on airs. A secularist’s “ethnic chic” is simply a common man’s common-sense wear, sârîs and dhotîs, praised by ecologists for their objective advantages such as being comfortable, cheap, economical with labour, and “one size fits all”. Not really an important matter, but quite significant for the petty intolerance of a certain elite vis-à-vis any and every expression of native culture.

"More serious is her allegation that Manu condones genocide of India’s tribal populations: “As for the tribals, they would be beyond the pale, so you would not have to bother about their rights at all. You could build as many dams across their land as you wished, and drown the whole lot of them in one go.”17

"The standard reply to this is that Shâstra-abiding Hindus have, albeit from a distance, co-existed with the tribals for millennia, otherwise the tribals would now not be available for inclusion in anti-Hindu rhetoric. It was Jawaharlal Nehru, self-described as “a Hindu only by accident of birth”, who applauded factories and hydro-power generators on dams as “our new temples”; and these have destroyed tribal livelihood and tribal culture far more thoroughly than Manu ever thought possible."

There's no evidence that Manu, or anyone Hindu before or after Manu, went after tribals or any other race or community, not as such; it was, as recorded in Raamaayana, a need of defence of Aryans, from not tribals but Raakshasa inclination, to attack and assault, that Raama and his next brother were taken by a sage on a tour before they went to get married. Again, it wasn't a community being attacked due to race, but one being defended from assaulters as and when necessary, with no preemptive strikes. For that matter, after Raavana and his army stood defeated, the good brother was enthroned by Raama before leaving, and regarded with friendly respect.

"In fairness, it must be noted that there are different shades to the secular colour. Some vocal secularists do uphold native culture at least in some respects, see e.g. leading feminist Madhu Kishwar’s attack on the English water-closet, the “imperial throne of the sahibs”, in which she decries “the mindless aping of the Western drainage and sanitary systems, which are unhygienic and not suitable for Indian conditions”.18

"Some of them even criticise fellow secularists for their unsympathetic anti-Indian attitudes. Secular columnist Dipankar Gupta defends the “everyday Indian aesthetics” at which psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar has been poking fun: “Mind you, the decor of rooms that Kakar is so condescendingly describing happen to be homes of people who have been kind enough to extend hospitality to him. But locals can never do things right by Indo-Anglian standards.”19 Westerners have recently learned to be shy about inequalities, and they are shocked when they hear Hindu upper-caste traditionalists speak scornfully about low-caste people: no European aristocrat would dare to speak about the paupers in his own country like that. The same crude and unabashed condescension is in evidence when the new upper caste, the Westernized secularists, speaks about lower beings such as Hindus."

................................................................................................

"Sati, the much-highlighted ugly face of Hinduism"

Sati is a legend that only became tradiion after Queen Padmini along with all women of Chittor resorted to the extreme step rather than suffer enforced alternatives at hands of Alauddin Khilji and his soldiers, when they had said final farewell to their men going fir a final battle of the war conducted by Khilji demanding the queen be given to him by her husband the king. Then on, it became the way Hindu widows protected their honor from barbaric Muslims kidnapping and using them as slaves fir every purpose.

When eventually after British rule had established and Hindu women were safer, Hindus were happy enough for most part to welcome a law prohibiting it, since it had only been most necessary in North and least in South anyway. Rajasthan resists most, due to its traumatic history duting the centuries of fighting against Islamic invaders.

What non Hindus fail to understand is that Agni, Fire, is a God in Vedic tradition, and every serious religious occasion is centered around offerings to God's via the ceremonial fire, whether weddings or a boy's thread ceremony or celebration worship, including in Arya Samaj.

So when a woman, beginning with legendary Sati, entered fire, feeling accompanying it was herself offered to Agni for protection. Suicide can be accomplished in a myriad ways, but if the body is possibly saved from desecration after death, it was important to them to do so.

Another Hindu queen, or more than one, later, married a Muslim ruler who respected her faith; they weren't seen with any question of disregard by Hindus, then or now. It was never about communal, but about a woman's right to honour, about her will.

................................................................................................

"Secularist columnist Ms. J.G. Sharma makes the predictable allegation that Hinduism as represented by Manu is anti-woman: “O what a lovely world it would be, one governed by Manusmriti. All these women libbers would be put in their rightful places, and any talk of burning a bra would be instantly answered by a bout of bride burning. A man could marry as many times as he liked, while the women would all be suttee. And he could easily afford to marry and marry on, because every time he would get a fat dowry.”20"

This is nonsense, drivel, nothing but sheer hatred and disparagement due to lack of respect bred by a slave mindset that only respects conquistadores.

Murders of brides are never labelled Sati, even apart from the deliberately spiteful spelling he's used. It's a crime and was always seen as such, whether the victims relatives were able to prosecute or not. There never were two opiabout it amongst Hindus.

"The reference to the Western feminist campaign of “bra burning” (as if Manu’s wife ever wore a bra) and the obsolete British spelling suttee say a lot about Ms. Sharma’s cultural horizons. ... "

As a matter of fact female as well as male attire in India was essentially of two pieces of fabric, a long one as an overall wrapping protecting from elements, and a smaller strip tying up loose parts; for a woman that latter was for upper body, called Kanchukie in Sanskrit and later choli in Hindu, Marathi etc, tied up at back before tailoring was established, or front afterwards with small sleeves stiched along.

Properly tailored blouses, with separate bras, came in after British, and stay in normal use of not those too poor to use one; but often in fashionable attire of rich, at celebratory grand occasions one may see a richer variety of variations of older styles, even worn by occasionally a Miss World of Indian origin, one now settled in US with an Italian husband.

" ... She has not bothered to actually read Manu, the arch-Hindu and proverbial bogey, and she is right in so far that one need not have read Manu to surmise that this patriarch must have “put women in their places”.21 ... "

No, that again is a deliberate falsehood imposed by those that seek to attribute virtues to military victims, but fact is Hindu women were far more capable and free, until barbaric invaders after inception of Islam and its agenda if world conquest endangered eomen everywhere.

European and US women were captured by hundreds, used to "whitewash" descendents, before US acquired a navy to protect her ships, and what's more thus was done in pakistan too as per autobiography of Tehmina Durrani, except for the kidnapping bit. It was pretended love if necessary but in reality the women only mattered for results of the breeding.

" ... On the other hand, actually reading his text would have taught her that neither dowry (dahej) nor self-immolation of widows (satî) figure in it.22 Even a Manu-Smriti-abiding Hindu can do without satî, which always had its Hindu opponents (including some of the eighteenth-century Maratha princes who prohibited it in their domains) because momentous decisions should not be taken in the emotional condition of just having been widowed.23 ... "

That wasn't the reason, real reason for prohibition was such a ruler proud of being able to promise protection to women under his rule. Thus wasn't always possible in heyday of Islamic barbarians in North, but South and Maratha rule were another story.

" ... In Manu’s case, we need not assume he was an opponent, he may simply have been more interested in other subjects."

Again, that's nonsense. Sati was never a tradition before Alauddin Khilji forced the eomen of Chittor to choose between death and dishonour.

"Comparative study of Indo-European cultures suggests that the incidence of satî is inversely proportional to the status of women: from very common among the Celts (“massively!”, says Bernard Sergent), where women were rather independent, to a mere epic memory among the Greeks, where women were men’s property and not considered to have much “honour” to uphold by means of heroics.24 The low status which Manu accords to women may then be directly related to his not acknowledging satî."

The verse always quoted from Manu isn't about putting women down, but attributing duty of their protection to closest capable males. If there were any sayings of his going as far as, for example, Saudi clerics or Taliban, whose diktats forbid a woman to step out, except when accompanied by a close male relative, such a thing would have been advertised against Hinduism over last three centuries, over and over. This is so despite the fact that Hinduism never was a matter of dictatorship by any person or institutions, there isn't one supremo whether institution, woman or man, every family is mostly free to make its own decisions, and every man free to disagree with another. So even if there were such a verse it's doubtful people would obey, and responsibility for one's conduct has always been understood in Hinduism to be one's own, via the very well understood doctrine of Karma.

" ... Indeed, Nandy informs us that the last “large-scale epidemic of sati” (in Westernizing Bengal of the early nineteenth century, where new British inheritance laws turned a surviving daughter-in-law into a pecuniary rival) was a “logical culmination of rational, secular cost-calculation against the background of a large-scale breakdown in traditional values. … if anything, modern values, not traditional ones, were to blame”.27 Indeed, “the epidemic was a feature of exactly the part of the society—the Westernizing, culturally uprooted, urban and semi-urban Indians—that was most dismissive towards the rest of society as a bastion of superstition and atavism.”28"

Rings true.

"This is even more true of the dowry murder plague, a typically modern, consumerist phenomenon, historically unconnected to satî. The Christian scholar J.N. Farquhar wrote in 1914 that “the evil seems to be largely a result of the progress of Western education”.29 He adds an example of a girl in Calcutta who committed suicide “to release her father from the impasse”. The first dowry deaths in the nineteenth century were indeed suicides by daughters who tried to spare their fathers the huge debts, and this was in the most anglicized communities: Parsi and Sindhi businessmen. Next, consumerism and democratization spread the dowry custom to classes which could ill afford it. Though the dowry murder plague kills thousands of women per year (as opposed to one satî every so many years), it is much less of an issue than satî, judging by the scholarly and media coverage. But, as peasant women from Deorala (where the last much-publicized sati took place in 1987) pointed out, burning to death in a Delhi suburb is no less painful than in Deorala, and “Deorala women were not accustomed to burning their daughters-in-law to death the way urban women did”.30"

Very true, all of that.

................................................................................................

"However, the Indo-Anglian elite has achieved complete success in passing on its self-interested version of the facts to the outside world, as is evident in numerous anti-Hindu allegations made in passing in articles about Hindutva, such as this one by the late French commentator Jean-Edern Hallier: “The BJP [is] a party supporting the self-immolation of widows and the burning of brides for not paying sufficient dowry”.31 Or this one by David Aikman: “Widow-burning has returned to thousands of Indian villages that have no police on hand. A senior leader of the Janata party even tried to organize public rallies in support of sati. Meanwhile, there are about 500 registered cases of bride-burnings a year, the murder of young women whose financial offering to the groom is considered insufficient. As outdated as these practices may seem, they’re being justified by a resurgent Hindu nationalism.”32 Aikman is a former Time magazine correspondent in India, and ought to know better than to:

"1) grossly overstate the incidence of satî (“thousands”);

"2) confuse the Hindu-nationalist Bhâratîya Janatâ Party with the Left-populist Janatâ Dal, the party of the late Kalyan Singh Kalvi, who did indeed defend the Deorala satî and, less controversially, the subsequent displays of mass devotion;33

"3) ascribe the defence of the traditional practice of satî to the reform-Hindu BJP;

"4) amalgamate the traditional practice of widow self-immolation with the modern secular-consumerist practice of bride-burning, falsely described as ancient (“outdated”);

"5) ludicrously ascribe the defence of bride-burning to the Hindu nationalists.

"For one who has lived in India for years, it would be inexcusable to write such things out of sheer ignorance. Instead of inferring bad faith on David Aikman’s part, I shall assume he has been misinformed by the anglicized-Indian circles in which most press correspondents hang around. At any rate, it provides an illustration of how the current demonic image of Hindu nationalism has been created."

On the other hand it's inexcusable for a journalist to do false reports based of gossip in glitterati circles instead of walking the beat to get to reality, and this level of falsehood is criminal. As for bad faith, that's more than likely, what with attack against Hinduism being inrerest of every church, apart from left and Islam.

................................................................................................

"Ashis Nandy finds it “remarkable how, since the Deorala event, there has been a revival of efforts by anglophone, psychologically uprooted Indians—exactly the sector that produced the last epidemic of sati in eastern India—to vend sati as primarily a stigma of Hinduism, not as one of the by-products of the entry of modern values in India.”34 The commotion about the Deorala satî was just one expression of the colonial mind-set of the ruling class: “At one time, most such efforts were closely associated with attempts to justify British rule in India. Now, as a cultural projection of a new form of internal colonialism, these efforts are primarily associated with the rootless, Westernized Indian haute bourgeoisie who control the media, either directly or through the state.”35

"The abysmally negative image which Hinduism has acquired has a lot to do with Nandy’s following observation: “Colonialism has to try to discredit the cultures of the colonized to validate the colonial or quasi-colonial social relationships that it itself has created. Culture can be resistance, and those seeking hegemony in the realm of political economy cannot afford to leave that area alone. The self-declared social engineers in the Third World and their support base within the tertiary sector of that world know this fully.”36

"No Hindu revivalist could have said it better. Only, as Nandy also frequently points out, the BJP is more part of the westernized establishment than of any form of nativist opposition to it: “The BJP is designed to serve modern nationalism, the modern state, and meet the needs of people who have lost ties with their culture.”37 On issues of women’s rights, satî, women’s protection against bride-burning, as also on the principle of secularism or the desirability of modernization, the BJP’s positions differ but little from those of its main rivals. That may well be the right position on a number of counts, but at least it should make us drop any Romantic illusions about the BJP as a nativist party opposing modernity."

................................................................................................

"Unexpected support for the Hindu complaint"

" ... To impose discriminatory measures on Hindu institutions, state governments have to take the initiative; the combative CPM Government in West Bengal did go out of its way to harass the Ramakrishna Mission schools, but most Congress Governments never did anything of the kind. And sometimes, attempts are made to take control of minority institutions as well, for example in 1992, the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed the Recognised Private Schools (Regulation) Amendments Bill and Recognised Private Colleges (Regulation) Amendments Bill, empowering the state government to exercise some control over the private schools and colleges: “The Bills are strongly supported by the unions of university, college and school teachers and other staff. But they are equally strongly opposed by Christian and Muslim school and college managements.”59"

" ..

Indeed, the complaints about discrimination against Hindus as formulated here by Abhas Chatterjee, are considered reasonable even by some non-Hindus. Thus, a Christian author, Thomas Abraham from Madras, writes: “Let the Hindus also be given the same right as any other minority to run educational institutions, protect their language, etc. That is to say, the ambit of Article 30 in our Constitution should be changed. The state must be debarred from regulating, supervising or interfering in any way with the administration and practices followed in Hindu temples. Educational institutions run by Hindus will be free to propagate and preach Hinduism with the same constitutional protection now afforded to the minority religions.”60 What he proposes is simply the extension of the special rights enjoyed by the minorities to the Hindu majority."

"Like so many Private Bills, Shahabuddin’s Bill never made it to the voting stage, but it showed how he is aware of the mobilizing potential of the Article 30 issue. Apparently, he wanted to defuse it before the BJP would acquire the acumen to perceive and exploit this potential."

................................................................................................

"Article 370"

"Another de facto discrimination, though no religious denomination is mentioned, exists in the articles giving a special status to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir and the Christian-majority states of Mizoram and Nagaland. As Abhas Chatterjee says: “In whichever state of India a non-Hindu community is numerically predominant, there the state government has been granted special rights under the Indian Constitution. You are all aware, I’m sure, about the Article 370 applicable to the State of Jammu & Kashmir. Similar special provisions have been made applicable to Nagaland under Article 371A and Mizoram undere Article 371G which provide that laws made by India’s Parliament would not be applicable to these states unless their own state legislatures endorse them. That is, a state would have greater autonomy where the legislatures have preponderance of the minorities and where the government is in the hands of the minorities. No such autonomy is available to states where Hindus predominate.”63

"As a consequence of this separate status of Kashmir under Article 370, non-Kashmiri Indians cannot acquire property and citizenship in the state: “About one lakh Hindus—Sahajdharis and Sikhs—who had fled Pakistan during the post-Partition carnage in 1947 and taken shelter in the State of Jammu & Kashmir, have not been granted state citizenship till this day. They have no right to vote in the elections to the State Legislature and the Panchayats, no right to get loans etc. from government institutions, no right to get their children admitted in the medical and engineering colleges of the State. Why? Because they are Hindus.”64"

................................................................................................

"The Constitution also contains several provisions which do not formally discriminate, but which are to the disadvantage of the Hindus in practice. One sore point is the right to convert, which in theory also protects the rights of Hindus to convert non-Hindus to Hinduism, but was in fact enacted (overruling Hindu opposition) to protect the rights of Christian missionaries to convert Hindus to Christianity.65 Abhas Chatterjee protests: “The right of ‘propagation’ of one’s religion that has been bestowed by Article 25 of the Constitution on followers of different religions also means, for all practical purposes, that the adherents of alien and anti-Hindu religions will be at liberty to convert any follower of Hinduism—even if he be a minor—to their own creed.”66

"To be sure, the right of propagation applies to all religions, including Hinduism. Yet, this formal equality conceals a factual inequality: Hinduism and Zoroastrianism do not have a tradition of proselytization, while Christianity and Islam do. It is like giving wolves and sheep the “equal” liberty to eat one another."

The non-coverting faiths also include Judaism, Jainism, etc; in theory one can convert to Buddhism and Sikhism, but in practice they too aren't militant in going after recruitment of those not yet of their faith.

"Ram Swarup warns that giving a free hand to conversion squads can lead to the total destruction of the native culture, as exemplified by the systematic conversion of Pagan Africa to Christianity and Islam. He questions the justice of the unilateral right to convert: “Thanks to the powerful Missionary lobby in the United Nations, there is a Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that everyone has a right to embrace the religion of his choice. But where is a similar Declaration which says that tolerant philosophies and cultures have a right to protect themselves against aggressive, systematic proselytizing?”67

"A prohibition on missionary work in any form is in force in countries as diverse as China, Myanmar, Israel, Greece and (for non-Muslim missionaries) most Islamic states. In theory, the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal should be added to the list, for the Nepali Constitution, Article 14, says: “Right to Religion. Every person may profess his own religion as handed down from ancient times and may practise it having regard to the traditions. Provided that no person shall be entitled to convert another person from one religion to another.”68 In practice, after the replacement of the partyless Panchâyat system in Nepal with multi-party democracy in 1992, Christian missions are having a field day, and there are now hundreds of churches in Nepal.69 Islamic missionaries, moving in along with the hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi immigrants, are also active there."

Hence the many steps, since then, against India in Nepal.

"“ ... the converts are, by and large, being alienated from their village communities. Moreover, converts also become estranged from their own kinsfolk. They are prohibited by their own religion from taking part in the ritual offerings and ceremonies [for the ancestral and other deities]. These ritual practices and ceremonies … act as a strong unifying force among the household and family members.”71 The change in religion similarly brings about changes in food habits and many other socially important aspects of life. This way, the Christians automatically form a separate community, breaking the age-old bonds of tribal solidarity: “Cutting themselves off from many aspects of their old community life, the converts find themselves members of a new community, the Christian community.”72

"Anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf reports that “missionary influence has eroded much of the tribes’ cultural heritage, which was inseparably linked with the traditional mythology, beliefs and rituals, and wilted when these were abandoned. Above all, the conversion of part of a community tends to destroy the social unity of the whole tribe.”73

"Thus, the Nishi tribe in the North-East finds that in Christian mission schools “a good many Nishi youths have been converted to Christianity. This in itself need not have created any difficulty, for Nishis, like most tribals, are not greatly concerned about the beliefs of their fellow-tribesmen, and if the Christian converts had been equally tolerant, their rejection of traditional Nishi religion might have been ignored by the great mass of conservative tribesmen. However, the converts seem to have been lacking in tolerance and tact, and educated young men of villages affected by the ideological split to whom I spoke in 1980 complained bitterly that Christians deliberately disrupted the harmony of community life. They allegedly refuse to share the houses of adherents of the old faith, and this meant that old parents were abandoned by their converted children, who claimed that they could not stay in dwellings where ‘devils’ were worshipped. … My informants insisted that the missions encouraged the establishment of separate settlements for Christians, and that the Christians refused to participate in village festivals, thereby demonstrating their dissociation from the tribal community. It was alleged, moreover, that converts, not satisfied with this symbolic withdrawal from village life, went a step further by abusing and physically attacking priests as they invoked the gods in the performance of traditional Nishi rituals.”74

"And this is the result: “Nishi teachers at the government high-school in Yazali, who were members of a youth organization formed to promote traditional tribal culture, told me how frustrated they were because they could not match the large sums lavished by the missions on propaganda which is undermining the old Nishi life-style.”75

"And yet, not every type of religious development or adoption of new religious practices need be the result of mission campaigns nor lead to social separatism: “The conflict created by the impact of Christianity on the Nishis of the Subansiri district stands in striking contrast to the developments in the neighbouring Kameng district, where tribal groups such as the Khovas have come under the influence of Tibetan Buddhism. … Among the Khovas there is a spontaneous trend towards Tibetan Buddhism; in two villages small gompa are under construction, and the villagers have invited Monpa lamas to perform Buddhist rituals. … Unlike the Christian converts among the Nishis, those Khovas who are attracted to Buddhism do not opt out of the social life of their community and continue to participate in the traditional tribal rituals. In the same way the Sherdukpens combine their adherence to Mahayana Buddhism with the communal worship of tribal deities. … Among the Monpas too, elements of the ancient Bon religion coexist with the dominant Buddhist faith, and the practice of both religions within the same communities has not sparked off any conflicts comparable to those which threaten to destroy the social fabric of Nishis affected by religious rivalries.”76"

This is the difference between conversion to an Indian versus an abrahmic religion.

"This explains the assurance given by Hindu revivalists that while conversion to Christianity or Islam is socially disruptive, conversion to religions of Indian stock, in particular conversion or reconversion to Hinduism, need not have such a negative effect. However, in a modern law system, it is hardly feasible to allow one type of conversion (to any school of Hinduism in the broad sense) and to disallow another (to Christianity or Islam), though in Islamic states, this legal inequality exists. So, the choice is whether to oppose the Constitutional right to convert and suspend the Hindu reconversion programme, or to let it stand and face competition from well-organized Christian and Islamic missions in the conversion arena. This difficulty has so far prevented the BJP from taking up, even on paper, the scrapping of the “conversion” part from Article 25."

................................................................................................

"Banning Hindu political parties"

" ... The Chief Election Commissioner issues an order for intensive revision of electoral rolls in Assam so that the rolls may be purged of names of Bangladeshi infiltrators, but the courts rule that it would be illegal to do so.”193-94

"Specifically, courts have challenged the right of Hindu election candidates to stand on an explicitly Hindu platform, all the while condoning the explicitly Islamist programmes of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (Hyderabad) or the Indian Union Muslim League (Kerala): “The Bombay High Court on Tuesday set aside the election of Shiv Sena candidate Suryakant Mahadik from Nehru Nagar constituency in the state Assembly elections of February 1990 for having garnered votes on the basis of Hindutva and a religious appeal. … The judge held Mr. Mahadik guilty of using corrupt practices mentioned in section 123, sub-sections (3) and (3A) of the Representation of the People Act and set aside his election from Nehru Nagar constituency”. The plaintiff, the defeated Congress candidate Mrs. Saroj Bhosale-Naik, had alleged that at Mr. Mahadik’s election meetings, SS and BJP leaders had “appealed to voters to cast their votes on the basis of Hindutva”.195"

" ... “The election commission today censored the election speech of BJP leader Kalyan Singh to be broadcast over All-India Radio on the ground that it has misused religion for electoral purposes. In a directive to the chief electoral officer of Uttar Pradesh, the three-member commission asked him to ensure that the references to the BJP leader’s promise on the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya are deleted.”197 More seriously, on 11 March 1994, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of the erstwhile BJP governments which had been dismissed following the Babri Masjid demolition." ... "

" ... On 19 February 1992, the Election Commission under T.N. Seshan rejected petitions by Congress leader Arjun Singh and four others demanding the deregistration of the BJP as a political party. The petitioners pleaded that the BJP had mixed religion and politics by organizing a religious procession, viz. L.K. Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra to Ayodhya (stopped in Bihar with Advani’s arrest), and that the use during the procession of the party symbol, the lotus flower, confirmed the suspicion that this was a purely religious symbol which should henceforth be barred from use in electoral propaganda. Seshan explained: “Objections cannot be entertained on the ground that the ideologies, policies and programmes of a certain political party are opposed to those of another political party”.199

"In 1995 the Supreme Court upheld the right of several Shiv Sena and BJP candidates to appeal to the voters in the name of “Hindutva”.200 The Supreme Court held that the mere mention of the words Hindu and Hindutva in a speech does not bring it within the prohibitions listed in the Representation of the People Act: “It may well be that these words are used in a speech to promote secularism or emphasise the way of life of the Indian people and Indian culture or ethos, or criticise the policy of any political party as discriminatory or intolerant.”201 And in 1996, the Delhi High Court struck down the 1992 decision of the Election Commission to deregister the Hindu Mahasabha for being an explicitly “Hindu” and therefore “communal” party.202"

"In its note of dissent, the BJP pointed out that while the Statement of Objects and Reasons appended to the Bills, on the pattern of earlier legislation of this type, mentions the aim of curbing disharmony “on grounds of religion, race, caste, community, language, place of birth or residence”, the actual text of the Bills only deal with the factor “religion”, and thereby implicitly “virtually confer legitimacy on the abuse” of divisions based on caste or language.205 The BJP further alleged that the Bills constituted a serious infringement on the freedom of association, because it would “arm the Executive with wide-ranging powers to outlaw not only political parties and trade-unions … but even social and religious organizations like the Arya Samaj!”206"

"The Bills were defeated because other parties joined the BJP in opposing it. The main reason cited was that politicians who remembered the Emergency dictatorship heard an alarm bell ring when faced with a Bill which would give an occasional majority in Parliament or even an unelected High Court judge the power to outlaw and dissolve a political party. When you consider moreover that the Bill was aimed specifically at creating an instrument to outlaw the largest opposition party, the BJP, representative of more than 20 per cent of the voters, it was clear that this Bill would open the floodgates for a high-handed muzzling of opposition voices by the establishment."

"A BJP leader commented: “By what leap of logic does a compulsory rote of the Red Book remain ‘democratic and secular’, when Marxism-Leninism is in practice a state religion, and yet, any other expression of faith becomes a near sacrilegious act against secularism.”211 Indeed, even though this doctrine is responsible for the largest mass killings in world history, for thousands of killings during Communist uprisings in India, and for hundreds of murders of Hindu activists even in recent years, its operative category of discrimination and hatred, viz. economic class, is conspicuous by its absence in the list of unmentionable social divisions: religion, language, caste etc. The strictures against “mixing religion with politics” are not based on objective human rights concerns, because religion, for all its frequent inhumanity, has not done worse than purely secular ideologies like National-Socialism and Communism."

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSION"

"Demanding equality before the law is hardly a revolutionary position in a republic committed to equality and democracy. Thus, there is no secular excuse for not supporting the Hindu demand of equality under Article 30: under the laws of any genuinely secular state, the Hindus would be enjoying the same rights in setting up denominational subsidized schools or in managing their own places of worship as the minorities. It is in fact a serious indictment of the spokesmen of secularism and of their foreign sympathizers that they have left this concern to denominational Hindu interest groups. There is nothing “communal” about demanding equality before the law regardless of religion."

................................................................................................

"12. The story is told by S.V. Seshagiri Rao: “Church blasts: truth and propaganda”, in David Frawley et at.: Crusade in India, pp. 10-19. A similar case is the rape of four nuns in Jhabua, also in 1998 (discussed in Arun Shourie: Harvesting Our Souls, p.7): in spite of Christian allegations, it turned out that Hindu militancy had nothing to do with the crime and that half of the gang of perpetrators were tribal Christians themselves, yet this “rape of nuns by Hindu fanatics” keeps reappearing in press stories about “Hindu atrocities on Christians”."

"21. Famously in Manu 5:148: “In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons’. She should not have independence.” Yet, Friedrich Nietzsche (in Der Antichrist, and discussed in W. Doniger: Laws of Manu, p.xix-xxii) praised Manu’s affection for women."

Elst provides incorrect translation. It's not should as much as is, not under control but protection and care, and certainly not "should not have independence" but "does not need"; needles to say, this does not dictate absolute control but speaks of care, protection and necessity.

Nowhere is there anything comparable to the Saudi or taliban dictatorship forbidding women to step out or meet anyone, much less education. Ashram system had female students too. Even now, Kashmir girls can get education, only as long as Kashmir is part of India.

Taliban on the other hand stone pelted women out without a husband, so sick women with dead husbands were left to choose dying at home for lack of care or by publicly administered stone pelting.

Across the border Malala was shot in head point blank because taliban issued diktat to people to stop education of girls and surrender all girls over puberty to taliban for sexual use, and Malala didn't stop going yo school.

"24. Bernard Sergent: Les Indo-Européens, p.223. A famous case of satî among Indo-Europeans outside India is that of Brunhilde, widow of Sigurd/Siegfried, as described in the Edda: she orders her slaves (and invites her free servants) to join her in death, and before embracing death on her husband’s corpse, she predicts the future of all her relatives, a testimony to the special powers attributed to a satî woman."

"45. As lovingly described in B. Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde. Unlike Shrikant Talageri and other nationalists, he acknowledges diverse ethnic and even geographical origins for different elements in Hindu civilization, but unlike the Dravidianists or the lunatic fringe of the Dalit movement (or their Western supporters), he does not deduce that Hindu civilization is a myth, but rather that it is an admirable synthesis."

"48. Quoting from memory, I recall that to the same question of the Illustrated Weekly of India, the film director Satyajit Ray had replied: “I am not a Hindu, I am a Bengali.” At Indological conferences, I have heard at least a dozen Hindu-born Marxists insist that they did not want to be described as Hindu. (KE)"

"69. The Dutch Protestant broadcasting corporation Evangelische Omroep regularly shows documentaries about successful conversion campaigns in Nepal, complete with Nepalese converts breaking the idols they used to worship."

................................................................................................

................................................

February 12, 2022 - February 12, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

General conclusion

................................................................................................

"SUMMARY"

"From the ideological viewpoint, the most interesting formulations of Hindu revivalist thought have been provided by individuals outside the said organizations, from Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) and Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) to Ram Swarup (1920-1998), Sita Ram Goel (1921-) and their younger friends. While the said organizations focused precisely on “organization”, sangathan, on the assumption that this was what Hindus had lacked and what could make them invincible again, these authors focus on consciousness-raising about the exact nature of the different forces in the field. About their work, at least that of the post-Independence generation of Hindu revivalist authors, no scholarly research has been undertaken until now. Yet it is they more than the Hindutva organizations who are the true heirs of the colonial-age trail-blazers of Hindu revival."

"Closely connected with this terminological confusion is the politicized climate of Hindutva studies, mostly in the sense of an unabashed hostility. A brief look into some remarkable cases of partisan reporting on the Hindutva movement shows us how great the impact of the Indian Marxist school has been on bonafide Western scholarship, which tends to dismiss as ridiculous and mischievous many of the positions taken by the Hindutva movement, even when these positions studied in isolation turn out to stand up to critical verification, like the claim that the controversial Babri Masjid stood on a destroyed Hindu temple, or that Muslim demography is eroding Hinduism’s majority position in parts of India, or that the BJP demand for a Common Civil Code is in conformity with secularism as understood in the rest of the world. It is noted, however, that the recent rise of the BJP, its accession to power and the conspicuous failure of all the dramatic predictions about BJP rule (“the BJP will build gas chambers for the Muslims”) have already caused a softening of this hostility in wider circles of observers though not among the hard core of ideological opponents."

"Hindu revivalism, with the temporary exception of the Arya Samâj (1875-), is by no means a “fundamentalist” movement. The notion “fundamentalism” refers to the effort by purists within a religion to impose their scripturalist views on a more lax or more modernist majority within their own religion. That is not at all the issue for the movement under consideration. To the extent that it is an “anti” movement, it may be anti-Islamic and anti-Western, but it is not particularly worried about impure or modernist forms of Hinduism. To the extent that it criticizes born Hindus, these will not be Hindus who smuggle Western ideas into Hinduism, but Hindu-born secularists who attack Hinduism, more as outsiders than as insider harbingers of impurity. This way, the Hindutva movement is by no means a danger to non-mainstream groups within Hinduism, the way Islamic fundamentalism has proven to be a headache for minorities within Islam such as the Shiites and Ahmadiyas in Pakistan."

"One thing which comes out very clearly from the election manifestoes of the BJS-BJP, and from similar texts by related organizations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (1964-), is that nationalism is a higher priority for them than any specifically religious issue, for in every case, the toughest language is used in denouncing real or perceived threats to the unity and integrity of India.

"Another discovery is that the Hindu nationalists speak a progressive and egalitarian language in their designs for political reform, from socialist land redistribution plans in the 1960s to women’s emancipation and “empowerment” in the 1990s. Skeptics may deride this as mendacious or as hollow election promises, but the fact is that at least in its official expressions, Hindu nationalism does not live up to the “fundamentalist” and reactionary image which its critics have propagated."

................................................................................................

"THE COLONIZED MIND"

"Hindu revivalism perceives itself as the cultural chapter of India’s decolonization, which tries to free the Indians from the colonial condition at the mental and cultural level, to complete the process of political and economic decolonization. The emerging analysis among Hindus of their own society’s condition is as follows.

"During the past millennium, India has gone through two colonizations, one by Islam and one by semi-Christian, semi-secular Europe. At the political level, the native society proved relatively victorious against both, though not without retaining a considerable residue of what they brought. The problem with that, for Hindus attached to their culture, is not that in the wake of the Islamic conquests, a considerable amount of West- and Central-Asian human material enriched the Indian gene pool, nor that British rule brought an immense transformation in material culture. What they see as the problem for Hindu society is that the Islamic and Western regimes brought world-views which instil a profound contempt for and hostility to Hinduism.

"The challenge facing Hindu activists is that for half a century after India’s formal Independence, Hindu society has remained under the spell of a colonial psychology, in three different ways. First, power came in the hands of a westernized elite which had been estranged from the native culture, and which had established the same relationship with native culture which the British overlords used to have. If anything, its members displayed more animosity in their assertion of a non-Hindu identity for themselves and for India, apparently because they had to exorcize the remnants of Hinduness out of themselves. At the same time, they had the self-confidence, not to say arrogance, which comes with being securely in power."

"The second face of the lingering colonial condition as defined by Hindu revivalists is that a sizable section of the native society has passed under the spell of the religions brought by past imperialisms. They have been (or are being) artificially estranged from their mother society, at least in their core religious convictions (in the case of the Christians) and often in their entire culture and way of life (in the case of the Muslims). For Hindu revivalists, decolonization in the case of the estranged minorities would mean: freeing them from the beliefs and concomitant loyalties instilled in them by past imperialisms. The main Hindu revivalist position on this, since the late nineteenth century, is that Muslims and Christians should be persuaded to return to their ancestral culture. By contrast, the Sangh Parivar has settled for the less ambitious and somewhat unclear position that the minorities should “Indianize” themselves, develop love and loyalty for India, though it is never explained how that would square with their dictinctive religious beliefs.

"The idea that the Muslim minority is seen as a “residue of a past imperialism” may come as a shock to many. If this were to mean that present-day Muslims are held responsible for the wrongdoings of the past Islamic invaders and rulers, that would indeed be worrying. Most authors assure us that that is not their intention at all. On the other hand, as a matter of history, a fair case can be made that except in marginal instances, the genesis of the Indian Muslim community is inseparable from the conditions of Muslim hegemony which prevailed from the late twelfth till the eighteenth century. But ultimately, such facts of history may not be a sufficient reason to argue against the legitimacy of Islam being in India: many national histories have their blood-soaked episodes without thereby delegitimizing the existence of the nations concerned. However, some Hindu scholars have endeavoured to supply this reason by means of a fundamental critique of Islam: regardless of whether Islam is foreign, regardless of whether it was imposed by force, if it can be shown that Islam is not good, or not true, that should suffice to make Indian Muslims reconsider their religious beliefs.

"Meanwhile, the Hindu mind has remained a colonized mind, and this is the third residue of the colonial condition. In spite of occasional bouts of bluster about past greatness, or of genuine admiration for the ancestral heritage, the Hindu as Hindu still had little self-respect or self-confidence, often showing the effects of a deep inferiority feeling. Some sections of Hindu society, most strikingly the Sikhs, have even reformulated their own religion in the mould of the prophetic-monotheist religions and turned against the mother society, though probably not in a definitive way. Here again, the historic factor of opportunistic collaboration with the powerful or the prestigious ideology suggests that the aversion to Hinduism is fairly superficial and may be reversed easily once Hinduism acquires more prestige again. A related phenomenon is that contemporary educated Hindus have been getting increasingly ignorant about Hindu tradition, and this affects not only the secularists but also the emerging Hindu middle class which votes for the BJP."

"A final thing to note here is that the situation just outlined pertains only to four-fifths of the territory and population for whose freedom the Indian national movement has fought. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is no decolonization of Hindu society whatsoever. There, the stranglehold of the Islamic occupation force is stronger than ever in history. In the Hindu revivalist vision, these parts of Indie civilization will one day also have to be liberated, though this mission of honour is not on anyone’s agenda for the near future. But the implosion of Soviet Communism has alerted people to the possibility that giants on clay feet can crumble surprisingly fast, and in particular, that Pakistan and indeed the rest of the Islamic world may soon see the collapse of their dominant ideology from within."

................................................................................................

"HINDU SOCIETY UNDER SIEGE"

"It has been a standard perception of Hindu revivalists in the twentieth century, from at least Swami Shraddhananda to Sita Ram Goel, that Hinduism is “under siege”. This view could be summarized as follows:

"1. Hindu civilization has been badly wounded by foreign invasions and occupations, it is the tired and exhausted survivor of two determined attacks which were intended to be deadly: the Islamic invasion which sought to replace Hinduism with Islam and managed to destroy numerous Hindu people and institutions, and the European invasion, which sought to replace Hinduism with either Christianity or secularism, and which had a less brutally destructive but far more penetrating impact.

"2. In spite of its breakthrough to freedom in 1947, Hindu society has not definitively shaken off its old enemies; it has enemies inside India, each with its allies abroad, chiefly Christianity, Islam and Marxism.

"3. In India, these forces have suspended their mutual differences for a joint fight against their main enemy, Hinduism.

"4. This fight sometimes takes the form of physical attacks on Hindus (as in West Panjab 1947, East Bengal 1971, Kashmir 1989-90), but mostly tries to destroy Hinduism in the minds of Hindus, by converting them or at least by making them lose all respect for and attachment to Hinduism.

"5. The main strengths of these enemies are their organization, their (mostly foreign) money-power, their devotion to their project of conquest, in the case of Islam also sheer demography, but most of all the weaknesses of the Hindus: disunity, lack of organization, unconcern based on lack of knowledge and understanding of the forces in the field, lack of energy or self-esteem.

" ... The movement is a fight for survival. ... "

"It is all very fine to point to the decline of Christianity in its heartlands, but the conversion bulletins of the missionaries still show gains to Christianity, while Hindus count their losses. Islam may feel challenged by modernization and the information revolution penetrating its societies, but demographically it continues to make inroads in ever more parts of India. Even a Hindu nationalist government proves unable to stop the penetration of India by millions of Bangladeshi illegal immigrants and the continuous slaughter of Hindu and Sikh citizens by Pakistan-backed terror squads. In spite of the new self-confidence which Hindu society is drawing from its recent technological and economic successes, the sense of foreboding and encirclement by hostile forces refuses to subside."

................................................................................................

"THE INCOMPLETE DECOLONIZATION"

"In the case of Swami Vivekananda, the Western influence was of the reverse type: trying to present Hinduism as contrasting with the “materialist West”, trying to live up to the Western orientalist image of the “spiritual East” as the West’s Other. This reduction of Hindu civilization to its spiritual component was unjust to the variegated Hindu traditions in art, architecture, statecraft, mathematics etc., not to speak of India’s historical status as a country of fabulous wealth. At the same time, Vivekananda also imitated Western models, for instance, by involving his Ramakrishna Mission in social service work after the Christian model (not that Hindu society had no notion of social relief work, but it was not the business of monks), and by advertising Vedânta as a “scientific” religion."

Once again Elst is wrong, because he's understood neither Hinduism, nor, of course, Vivekananda. In india, spiritual is not contradictory or poles apart from "art, architecture, statecraft, mathematics etc.,", or even worldly life- it's awareness of infinite space and more, rather, not necessarily leaving earth behind but ability to soar. Elst needs to understand that most revered spiritual sages were for most part not vowed celibate, and their wives were regarded with respect.

For that matter, he needs to learn of Janaka, the King of Mithila and father-in-law of Raama (and his brothers, since the four princes married four sisters, daughters of Janaka). He was revered for his spiritual status.

"In some cases, from Sri Aurobindo to Arun Shourie (1941-), the intellectual leadership roles in Hindu revivalism have been taken by people who were quite at home in Western civilization, and who were consequently less exalted about it and more discerning in choosing what to adopt from among its contributions. The option to simply go back to the pre-colonial period as if nothing had happened is of course not really open, and a purely traditionalist leadership is inevitably marginal and not in a position to change the existing power equations. Moreover, in the more universalist segment of the Hindu movement, from a Rammohun Roy to a Ram Swarup, there is no objection to things Western, not because these authors are any the less Hindu, but because they see Hinduism as part of a continuum of human civilization."

................................................................................................

"FROM SECULARISM AS ANTI-HINDUISM TO THE HINDU STATE"

"A very large part of Hindu nationalist discourse consists of complaints about the injustices which Hindu society suffers at the hands of the secular state: discrimination in favour of the minorities in education, in the management and financing of places of worship, in government-aided loans, in the extraordinary autonomy for non-Hindu-majority provinces, in the treatment of religion-based Personal Law systems, in cultural and media policies; discriminations against Hindus by the Constitution, the laws, the political practice and the cultural institutions of the Indian Republic. They go as far as alleging that secularism so far has only meant anti-Hinduism."

" ... The most important legal grievance concerns Article 30 of the Constitution, which allows the minorities but not the Hindus to set up state-subsidized denominational schools. That the discrimination sanctioned by this article is real enough, has been demonstrated by the attempt of the Ramakrishna Mission to get registered as a non-Hindu sect entitled to this educational privilege, after hostile attempts by provincial governments to nationalize its schools. Likewise, discrimination in matters of temple management has been illustrated by the authorities’ attempt to get the Shirdi Sai Baba temple reclassified as a Hindu temple so as to create legal grounds for taking it over.

"Many complaints are directed against the private sector, especially against the media, the academic world and the Indian film industry, all of whom are accused of having an anti-Hindu bias. Of course, the truth of this wide-ranging allegation has to be established case by case. One important case where it can effectively be verified is the processing of the East Bengali massacre by the Pakistani Army (1971) in all types of information channels; we find that this massacre is given little attention, its predominantly anti-Hindu thrust even less, and that attempts to give it more attention are either muzzled or maligned as “anti-Muslim propaganda”. More generally, the impression which the public has acquired of Hindu-Muslim relations is seriously skewed in the sense of not conceding to the Hindus their martyrs, i.e. of denying or obscuring the fact that the victim toll has so far been far higher on the Hindu than on the Muslim side, both in premodern and in recent history. However, a general observation concerning such wrong but widespread impressions which imposes itself is that Hindus largely have themselves to blame: being the majority, they could easily influence the opinion climate and the decision-making bodies to their own advantage if only they applied themselves to such action rather than to sterile complaining."

In a nutshell, no church, no imposition of a sole conduit to salvation, no persecutions of Galileo and Jean D'Arc.

................................................................................................

"To rename or reclassify India as a “Hindu state” would therefore not make much difference, certainly not of a threatening nature. And in a way, it would only formalize a state of affairs already imposed by reality in spite of the hot denials by the secularists. Attacks on Hindu nationalism or simply on Hinduism are more often than not also attacks on India. Conversely, verbal as well as armed attacks on India are invariably committed by anti-Hindu forces, whether “Khalistani” neo-Sikhs, Muslims, Christians or Communists, and their targets are also mostly Hindus as such. This means that India is perceived by its enemies as a naturally Hindu state in which non-Hindus or non-Hindu provinces have no place and no reason to remain. The declared enemies of Hinduism thereby testify that “India is a Hindu state”, not because its political and legal system has a pro-Hindu bias (which it doesn’t), but simply because it encompasses a mostly Hindu-majority territory which Hindus consider their homeland, and of which the very landscape has acquired a Hindu character by virtue of its millennial integration in Hindu religious practice.

"Most Hindu revivalists agree with this perception of the intrinsically Hindu character of India, pointing to the fact that the common Hindu cultural background is the only conceivable reason for bringing so many racially and linguistically diverse communities together in one state. In their view, declaring India a Hindu state is merely a confirmation of a well-established historical fact on which Hindus and anti-Hindu separatists agree. History and religious customs are brought in to deepen this insight: the Hindu pilgrimage cycles and other pan-Indian institutions have contributed mightily to a sense of Indianness, of Indian “nationhood” in modern terms, firmly rooted in Hindu civilization. When we consider the evidence, we must admit at least this much, that India has had a sense of cultural distinctness and of its geographical boundaries for much longer than most existing nation-states.

"The unity and integrity of India is one point on which all tendencies of Hindu revivalism agree, regardless of whether they profess a nationalist political philosophy. While in the past, cultural unity of the subcontinent could subsist without political unity, in the modern age the state has acquired such importance that a unitary state is the best expression and guarantee of India’s cultural unity. Moreover, the sorry fate of Hindus in non-Hindu states serves as a constant reminder of the need for a state which Hindus can call their own."

There's also the example of Roman persecution of Jews and their expulsion from Israel resulting in two millennia of homelessness,pogroms, and finally holocaust. India does not deserve that, Jews did not either, and India must guard against this.

................................................................................................

................................................

February 12, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................

December 30, 2021 - February 13, 2022.

Purchased December 30, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 678 pages

Published July 1st 2005

by Rupa Publications India

(first published January 1st 2001)

Original Title

Decolonizing the Hindu mind:

Ideological development of

Hindu revivalism

ASIN:- B018TVABDM

................................................

................................................................................................

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4513786830

................................................................................................

Decolonizing The Hindu Mind

2nd Rupa reprint/2007 Edition,

Kindle Edition

by Koenraad Elst (Author)

Format: Kindle Edition

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B018TVABDM

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rupa Publications India;

2nd Rupa reprint/2007

edition (1 July 2005)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Purchased December 30, 2021.

Decolonizing the Hindu Mind

Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism

KOENRAAD ELST

................................................

December 30, 2021 -

Kindle Edition, 678 pages

Published July 1st 2005

by Rupa Publications India

(first published January 1st 2001)

Original Title

Decolonizing the Hindu mind:

Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

ASIN:- B018TVABDM

................................................

Published by

Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2005

7/16, Ansari Road,

Daryaganj New Delhi 110002

2001, 2005

ISBN: 979-81-291-0746-5

................................................................................................

Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism, by Koenraad Elst.

Light Explodes Across Heavens

Blog Archive

Serene, Reflecting

Contributors

Followers

My Shelfari Bookshelf