Koenraad Elst Quotes

A survey of the relevant Constitution articles with their discriminations against Hinduism shows unambiguously: India is not a secular state at all. The most poignant example is the discrimination in education by art. 30, which has led to the attempt by Hindu sects and organization to have themselves declared non-Hindu. There are no Christian or Muslim sects declaring themselves non-Christian c.q. non-Muslim (on the contrary: the Mormons call themselves Christian and the Ahmadiyas Muslim, though their parent religions have doubts about acknowledging them), but a big handful of Hindu sects do clamour for the exit: there you have an objective criterion for the claim that being a non-Hindu brings tangible privileges that would not exist in a secular state. This Article 30 is the basis for the Right To Education Act (2008), which imposes a heavy burden on Hindu schools alone, forcing hundreds of them to date to close down.

Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their first line of attack, the “secularists”. He has pioneered some valid insights into the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, which did not oppress vernacular languages from Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” thesis. .. This is not very original, in fact it is only a sophisticated formulation of widely-held views. Thus, Pattanaik attributes the same viewpoint to another big name we just met: “Doniger’s essays on the Puranas make you see Hinduism as a violent authoritarian force challenged by non-violent egalitarian Buddhism.” But in this discourse of hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with, Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993 he published a paper arguing that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahminical par excellence) sits at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s well-documented destructive role in Hindu history. But he has never retracted this position and has remained a leading voice in anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin discourse.

If in secular Europe, the pope speaks out against the Scorsese film on Jesus' temptations, without even trying to pressure governments to ban it, the European secularist press, as if to pre-empt any suggestion of a ban, makes it quite clear that there can be no question of anyhow restricting the public's access to the film. If people don't want to see it, let them not go see it. That is their freedom, like it is other people's freedom to go see it, unimpeded by papal or governmental bans... In Europe, we have come to protect our constitutional freedoms, and hardly any bigot will even think of either seriously campaigning for a ban or using violence to punish people who show interest in the material to which he objects. All right, there was a bomb attack on a movie theater showing the Temptation film. But the culprit was simply caught and put in jail. Nobody has suggested that we should ban the film in order to avert violence. If at all there is a threat of violence, then there are no two opinions about the duty of the state to uphold the constitutional freedoms, and to prevent terror-mongers from dictating who can see what.

Why, in fact, has Romila Thapar been interviewed? Though she was already well-known, her hour of glory came with the unnecessary and artificial Ayodhya controversy. But in that controversy, she was on the wrong side. It doesn’t always come about, but in this case it did happen: justice. The wrong side, though absolutely dominant for more than a decade, was proven wrong. Her major claim to fame is now as the historian who was proven wrong, and this in a self-created controversy. I feel for her, she threw away her good reputation at the end of her career. Then again, she can still win it back by crossing the floor in time. She is in an excellent position, for instance, to create the much-needed dialogue between the different schools and disciplines in East and West; to stop the stonewalling, the guilt-by-association and the ridiculing that obstruct or poison the debate.

Today, most Anglophone secularists are nearly as knowledgeable about Hindu culture as first-time foreign tourists who have crammed up the Lonely Planet Guide’s few pages summarizing India’s religious landscape.

He was essentially a Western-educated man, and had imbibed some of the condescending incomprehension so typical of westernized Natives. Yet, among this class of Western-educated Indians, there is hardly any who has to such extent freed himself from pervasive prejudices and fashionable beliefs, such as the claim of a racial basis of caste. Because he himself had suffered the humiliation which many caste Hindus kept on inflicting on the untouchables, it is not abnormal that he was intemperately bitter against Hinduism. Nevertheless, he remained loyal to Hinduism in the broad sense, and rejected eager offers to take his followers into mass conversion to soul- greedy and imperialist religions.

One thing which keeps on astonishing me in the present debate is the complete lack of doubt in both camps. Personally, I don’t think that either theory, of Aryan invasion and of Aryan indigenousness, can claim to have been "proven" by prevalent standards of proof; even though one of the contenders is getting closer. Indeed, while I have enjoyed pointing out the flaws in the AIT statements of the politicized Indian academic establishment and its American amplifiers, I cannot rule out the possibility that the theory which they are defending may still have its merits."

There, in Europe, we really have an invasion of Aryans moving in from the east. And now that we know what a real Aryan invasion looks like, we note that it is completely missing in India.

As recently also pointed out by Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara and Mr. Rajiv Malhotra, Western Hinduism experts are, with only little hyperbole, the only academic specialists who actively work for their own field of study to die. (Well, I’ll grant you the criminologists.)

https://twitter.com/Koenraad_Elst/status/1154125843008040962 Academic philosophy is very Asiaphobic, not because of "racial nationalism", as the reviewed author claims, but because of human inertia: all those Kant & Hegel professors fear losing their authority when having to deal with Bâdarâyana or Zhuangzi. 2019

Leave alone Urdu pamphlets, a neatly published English book from the impec­cably Islamic Noor Publishing House (Delhi), Muham­mad Samiul­lah's Mus­lims in Alien Socie­ty, is suf­ficiently explicit about the demog­ra­phic desig­ns of contemporary Is­l­am. Samiul­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­lah rejec­ts family­­ plan­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ning as a W­est­­­­­­­ern ploy to diminis­­h the num­bers of the Muslim population in order to maintain its hegemo­ny. The core of his argument is that birth control has no sanct­ion from the Quran nor from the example and sayings of the Proph­et. Since others have claim­e­d just the op­posite, a close reading of the source texts of Islam is needed.

The irresponsible and downright evil campaign of history denial by the secularist opinion-makers has prolonged the Ayodhya dispute by at least a decade. Denouncing all pragmatic deals, these secular fundamentalists insisted on having it their way for the full 100%, meaning the total humiliation of the Hindus. They exercised verbal terror against Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and all politicians suspected of wanting to compromise with the Hindu movement, making them postpone the needed steps towards the solution. This way, they exacerbated the tensions in return for the pleasure of indulging their self-image as implacable secularists. A real secularist would have sought to minimize a religious conflict, but this lot insisted on magnifying it and turning it into a national crisis. For them, it was a holy war, a jihad, just as it was for their Islamist pupils and paymasters.

In the name-change debate, the usual double standars apply: indignation over the Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena's "Mumbai", tacit acceptance of the Communist Party (Marxist)'s "Kolkata" or the ethnic-chauvinst Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's "Chennai". But that's so common we needn't discuss it here.

His presence soon became a crusade against Hinduism and Hindu self-defence as well as against me personally. On his labyrinthine website, now defunct, he posted some interesting and decent articles about European or general religious history, but when it came to India or Hinduism, he merely reproduced all the worn-out secularist hate rhetoric. ... no upper-caste chauvinists, RSS or non-RSS, would ever use the intrinsically anti-Hindu neologism Dalit (which, like Adivasi or “aboriginal”, is a falsely native-sounding recent Christian coinage)... Since the concert of anti-Hindu reporting is rarely interrupted by a corrective voice, you can spend a career parroting anti-Hindu “information” without even realizing that something is amiss. But if you then do get to hear such a corrective voice, you may feel highly embarrassed for having been fooled all this time by your trusted “secularist” sources. At that point, you can either revise your position, thus putting yourself in the despised camp of the objective reporters, routinely denounced as “Hindutva apologists”; or you can cling to the more profitable dominant camp and try to stamp out the dissident voices. It seems that, after having encountered my criticism of the secularist make-believe discourse somewhere, John Hopkins has made his choice and reconfirmed his adherence to the anti-Hindu camp.

Finally: I don't know if CW even means what he writes here, because he has to write it. If he wrote the truth, it would be denounced as ‘Hindutva’ and he could forget his academic career.