Koenraad Elst Quotes

It is in this context that in 1940, Savarkar launched his slogan: “Hinduize all politics, militarize Hindudom.” This slogan is nowadays often quoted out of context to impute to Savarkar a fascist-like fascination with “war for war’s sake”. But it meant nothing of the kind. He wanted Hindus to get military experience for a specific purpose, viz. that after the war, England would find a vast number of combat-ready Indian troops before her...

“To toe a party line” is usually said of people who hide their real convictions to parrot an officially sanctioned doctrine. In Wallis’s case, there is no longer any reason to assume that he has to conceal his own belief in order to toe the party-line. From his writing, it appears that he genuinely believes the party-line, which he has interiorized.

I scrupulously distinguish between "Hindu" & "Hindutva", as do Shashi Tharoor etc., correctly if the history of these terms is any guide. Wikipedia ignores my many explicitations on this (first in BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence, 1997) when it mendaciously associates me w Hindutva.

These riot vultures do a lot of damage to India, among other reasons because they are so eagerly believed abroad.... Since approximately the Stone Age, Engineer has been travelling to riot spots in India (butchering of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh somehow doesn’t interest him as much) with prefabricated riot reports invariably showing the same ingredients: Hindu pre-planning, Muslim victimhood, anti-Muslim complicity of the police and some local politicians. With the “facts” of the matter fixed beforehand, the main purpose of his visits is to note down some local names in order to give his reports more credibility. ... Undeniably, Asghar Ali Engineer remains a formidable master of disinformation. This makes him an excellent representative of Indian secularism and of the anti-temple campaign in particular.

It is only when the interest in Classical culture was revived and when secular modern medicine discovered the importance of cleanliness, that the missionaries started including this un-Christian value in their kit of trinkets with which to bribe the jungle-dwelling Heathens.

Here we meet the problem once more that we just discussed: scholars willfully ignoring the conclusions from related disciplines. Western linguists who support a more westerly Homeland (hence an Aryan invasion from there into India) ignore the findings of Harappan archaeology. The latter only confirms a complete cultural continuity since before the Harappan cities and lasting through their abandonment. It has failed to find a single trace of Aryans entering India. By contrast, in Central Europe, an invasion from the east ca. 2900 BCE, amply attested both by archaeology and by genetics, has been identified with Indo-Europeanization. That is what an “Aryan invasion” looks like, and it is completely missing in India. Yet, of this state of affairs in Harappan archaeology, Western scholars are completely ignorant; or else they fail to draw conclusions from it for their own field.

At least since the Bombay blasts of 12 March 1993, bomb attacks against Hindu Nationalist targets have been a regular fact of life, though I know of no Western paper or academic publication which has cared to mention the phenomenon.

Under India’s secularist regime, Hindu society is an underground society, and sometimes it is inevitable that moral imperatives in the service of Hindu society can only be realised by such surreptitious surprise action.

To say Mahmud patronised Alberuni is a bit of a stretch - for Alberuni was a captive from one of Mahmud’s western campaigns and, while he travelled in Mahmud’s train, he enjoyed no special privileges. (his bitterness towards Mahmud is quite explicit in his Kitab-al-Hind.)

The present book is my last contribution to the literature on what is known in India as “communalism”, meaning the conflict between the different religions, principally Hinduism and Islam.... I am very fortunate in having discovered the problem at an earlier stage of life and being offered a forum where I could contribute to the research into and reflection on its causes. In terms of my own potential, I feel I have exhausted the topic and I now intend to move on (or return) to more fundamental subjects of philosophy and religion.

And now, I begin to wonder whether the people concerned really belong to the same team. While we are arguing against the Aryan Invasion Theory, they are declaring the Aryan debate over. While we are on the battlefield fighting, they are powdering their noses for the victory parade. Is this still the same team?

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.

This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the "evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.

In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy.

But because this blatant special pleading was in the service of the established theory and not of some “far- fetched” alternative, nobody objected. Well, I'd say: Occam's Razor applies.