Koenraad Elst Quotes

More fundamentally, the concept of "minority" is reprehensible in itself. Every democrat can understand that the law should equally apply to all, regardless of religion. Every Indian citizen may sociologically be a member of one or more communities, but legally, he is just an Indian citizen. That is the minimum for a state to be secular. India today is not a secular state at all. An Indian political analyst or a foreign India-watcher outs himself as incompetent when he asserts or implies: "India is a secular state." It is not.

The very notion of conversion is un-Hindu, it is a projection of a Christian concern.

To take Sikhism as a separate religion, after summarizing its genesis as a sect within the Hindu movement of Nirguna Bhakti (“devotion to the one without qualities”), is another compromise with prevailing opinion. The scholarly but isolating view is that this is simply a Hindu sect.

So, we plead against this rhetoric of excluding opponents from the debate. It is unbecoming of scholars to declare themselves above pertinent evidence, even if coming from a school alleged to have unpleasant motives.

And this moronic Hindu love of Christianity and Islam does partly go back to Vivekananda’s sayings like the famous “Islamic body, Vedanta brain” quote. Vivekananda could not foresee that the next generations of Hindus would degenerate to such a level of loss of the power of discrimination that they (including monks from his own Ramakrishna Mission) would start to pontificate about an illusory “equal truth of all religions”. So he never focused on that problem, and later thinkers like Ram Swarup and now Rajiv Malhotra had to take it up.

All it demonstrates is the bullying rhetoric so common in the debate between the scientific and the secularist schools of Indian history.

Long ago, when I looked in the Leuven Theology library for the Niyogi Committee Report, which documents the misbehavior of the Christian missionaries in Central India in the 1950s, I couldn’t get it (someone whispered that it was in their confidential collection, but don’t know), while the Christian reply to it was readily available. The dominant view of India in Catholic circles remains that Hindus and Muslims are barbarians killing people who don’t belong to their own religion, but that the few Christians among them are innocent sheep. Thus, our press has reported the riots against Christians in Orissa in 2008, but not the trigger of those riots: the murder of a Hindu monk and four of his assistents by Christians (whom spokesmen of the Church then tried to disown, blaming the Maoists). If you don’t go to the source of the information, you are a victim of the control of the information stream by various anti-Hindu forces, and so the European-Christian understanding of Indian religious affairs in completely warped.

Why are acclaimed Hindutva-watchers unable to see the obvious? What coloured glasses are they wearing? It is these academic ideologues of distortion who should be made the object... of research... To actually quote statements which might exonerate Hindutva spokesmen is not normally done in academic "research" on Hindutva... It is not far-fetched to surmise that Pandey and Jaffrelot were so eager to stigmatize Hindu nationalism, to criminalize as "racist" a doctrine which is admittedly not "eugenic or biological", that they just could not bring themselves to respect the established meaning of the central term in their plea.

Note that we need not agree with the Śāstrakāra-s that the varnāśramadharma is truly “Vedic”, for we do not find it in the first nine books of the Rg-Veda. Even in the tenth book, the last and youngest one, we find it mentioned only once, and there only in the vaguest use, viz. the Purusa Sūkta’s recognition of the existence of four functions in society, without any details of how their personnel is recruited nor of how they should conduct themselves vis-à-vis one another, the very stuff that is the main focus of the Śāstra-s. Like medieval and contemporary Hindus, the Śāstra composers may have considered as ”Vedic” everything they held sacred, regardless of whether a particular norm or custom is indeed traceable to the Veda-s.

The negationist stand against the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple was an extreme example of how the Humanities often serve to provide a scholarly veneer to theses that arise purely from political motives. (Ch 19)

A modern lawyer like Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah completely thought inside the modern democratic framework where numbers are important. But to an obscurantist like Azad, this didn’t matter: democracy was only a temporary circumstance that need not stand in the way of turning a united India into a Muslim empire. Moreover, Muslims could convert Hindus, and through their superiority in demographic growth (from 19% to 24% in the sixty years before Independence), they would eventually become the majority. Moreover, Azad seized upon Mahatma Gandhi’s proposal to form an all-Muslim Cabinet as the ultimate “compromise” (i.e. surrender) to avert Partition. So, he dreamed of Islamizing all of India rather than only the Pakistani part of it.

There are more points in Ms. Nanda's paper which are worthy of further discussion, but for now I will conclude with an observation on what seems to be her sincere declaration of interest. Among the points that "worry" her, she mentions this as the final one:... Here, she really lays her cards on the table. It is very good that, unlike many other "secularists", she does not try to be clever and claim to speak for "true Hinduism" against a "distorted Hinduism" of the Hindu revivalists. Instead, she clearly targets Hinduism itself, deploring any development which might make Hinduism "gain prestige". Let us see if I can translate that correctly: wanting something or someone to suffer rather than to prosper is what we call "hate". She hates Hinduism, and her academic work is written in the service of that hate. To me, that is not the end of the matter. As a Catholic, I was taught never to give up hope, one of the great Christian virtues along with faith and charity.... I don't mind discussing this matter, for there is nothing shameful about the day when I saw through the usual hateful misrepresentation of "Hindu chauvinism", meaning Hindu self-defence against the aggression by so-called "secular" religions and ideologies. There is nothing shameful about my outgrowing silly beliefs such as the still-widespread belief in India's mock secularism. (Ch 3)

As everyone knows, the New York Times is a secularist, anti-Christian and pro-Israeli paper. That should give it a fair amount of common ground with the Hindu nationalists, yet in reality we find the New York Times to be as hateful in its reporting on Hindu nationalism as are more obviously hostile media emanating from Islamic or Christian-missionary circles... in the Hindu-Muslim conflict of the past decade, the New York Times has consistently supported the Muslim side and amplified all the Muslim propagandist story lines. ... Yet, when the Christian missionaries launched a slander campaign against the Hindus in the winter of 1998-99, and even when their allegations had been refuted in official investigations, the New York Times retained its usual anti-Hindu bias, effectively supporting the missionaries.

But the Marxists think that religion is an evil, because it is anti-reason ; while reason is a good in itself, which moreover emancipates man by equipping him with the intellectual as well as technological means to determine his own destiny. Now this notion of reason and religion stems from a specifically European situation, that conditioned Marx' thought about religion. The fact that Indian Marxists have simply transposed Marx' limited view to the Indian situation is just another example of how dogmatic Marxists generally are. It also shows how utterly ignorant the Indian Leftist (and generally secularist) intelligentsia is of India's home-grown religious culture.

Modi as an economic miracle-worker surely helped, but Modi as the man who has survived an unparallelled twelve-years-long onslaught by the secularists, that is what made him the Emperor of the Hindu Heart (Hindu Hrdaya Samrat).