Koenraad Elst Quotes

K.P. Agrawal took the trouble of counting how may hundreds of times Hindu names and concepts, like Parambrahma, Omkara, Veda, Hari, appear in the Guru Granth. "Ram" figures about 2400 times.

In American academe, the demand of objectivity, on which scholarly authority is based, is suspended in works about Hindu politics.

There is in Sanskrit literature exactly "one 'goldhaired' person that is not a god".... Quite possibly [he] was not gold-haired at all: he may have had one of the epithets of the solar deity Vishnu as his given name, just as most people called Nilakantha, "blue-throated" (after Shiva when he had swallowed poison) are not blue-throated at all.

An audience calculated to be trapped in exonymous terminological games about "Lebensraum" can also be counted upon to recoil in horror when the word "Aryan" enters the scene.

That is still entirely true. Name me a single established professor who made his career all while being known as a Hindutva supporter. I, by contrast, can easily enumerate a lot of professors who have been known all along as Communist or as generally anti-Hindu and certainly anti-Hindutva, without this standing in the way of their promotions.

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.

In their own internal functioning too, the AAR scholars and Indologists don’t put a premium on the freedom to express dissident opinions. Here I speak from experience, having been banned from several forums where Wendy Doniger and some of her prominent supporters were present and gave their tacit consent. The most high-profile target of this policy has probably been Rajiv Malhotra, a sharp critic of Indologist mores and anti-Hindu bias, some of whose experiences in this regard have been fully documented... Briefly: while everything pleads against this act of book-burning, the American India-watchers are not very entitled to their much-publicized indignation... To an extent this is simply true, there is no level playing field, and the American academics including Wendy Doniger herself have done their best never to give the Hindus a fair hearing....

Sindh, the province around the lower Indus River, happens to be the root of the name ‘India’ itself, derivative from the Greek river-name Indos, from the Persian form ‘Hindu’ of Sanskrit ‘Sindhu’, i.e., the Indus river. It contains Mohenjo-Daro, with the Priest King, the Dancing Girl and Shiva Pashupati, famous icons not of ‘5,000 years of Pakistan’ but of Hindu civilization. Of course, Sindh deserves to return to India. One day, when Pakistan has lost its reason for existing, it will.

The sudden denial of this history by a circle of Marxist historians was not based on any new evidence but purely on political compulsions. It seems that their long enjoyment of a hegemonic power position in academe had gone to their heads, so they thought they could get away with crude history falsification.

The Indian Constitution is a mighty case of Hindu accommodation to some minorities' demands for privileges, but that hasn't stopped the Khalistanis from burning it, nor has it stopped the Babri Masjid movement from calling for a boycott of Republic Day 1987.

Until recently, the most common smear was of a different type: the projection of Christian intolerance and of the enemy-image of "Islamic fundamentalism" onto Hinduism.

Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialized in symbols. What more suggestive than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva's consort, whose body, divided after her death in fity-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, theorfore revered as 'tithasthans', throughout the Indian peninsula? .... Kautilya, in his secular treatise on statecraft, the Arthashasatra (9:1:17) defined the chakravarti-kshetra, the domain of Vedic culture which an energetic ruler should strive to unite , as extending "from the Himalaya to the seas",.... The final editing of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata is not dated later than the first centuries AD, and they are fully familiar with the concept and surface of India, as are Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha and the Puranas.

And that from historians who themselves have distorted evidence in order to satisfy certain political compulsions : apparently a case of what psychologists call projection.

The best example of this alleged similarity is the common complaint about the Islamic birth rate. On the Hindutva fringe, there are pamphlets which falsely cite the World Health Organization as having established that within twenty years or so, Muslims will be the majority in India. More serious publications, including Organiser and BJP Today, report a slower but nonetheless impressive increase in the Muslim percentage of India's population, recorded in every decadal census since 1881, and projected to continue at an even faster rate in the coming decades. In essence, this picture is correct: the percentage of Muslims shows a persistent increase at the expense of the Hindu percentage, with the rate of increase itself increasing. Given the higher Hindu participation in the birth control effort of the 1960s and 70s, we must now be witnessing a cumulative effect, of a proportionately smaller number of Hindu mothers (born in that period) having in their turn each a smaller number of children than the proportionately larger number of Muslim mothers, on average. On top of the higher birth rate of Muslims within the Indian Union, there is the dramatic influx of millions upon millions of Bangladeshis and also some Pakistanis.

My job was not to survey other people's opinions about the Hindu movement. That would have been an interesting exercise, especially if it is called by its name, viz. a survey of outsider opinions, and not (as many such academic publications are) falsely presented as a study of the Hindu movement itself. By contrast, I endeavoured to get beyond the secondary--source and mainly hostile-source "research" that has so disastrously filled up this field of study, and focus on the primary sources instead.