Koenraad Elst Quotes

The line about Muslims not tolerating a Muslim girl marrying a Hindu boy even in a movie refers to Mani Ratnam's movie Bombay, a target of Muslim protests for showing just such an affair.

I was scheduled to do a debate with Prof. Chetan Bhatt.... But when he heard that the other panellist would be me, a known critic of the whole notion of secularism, he told the organizers that something had come up and he couldn't be there. ... how scared the secularists must be of facing an actual dissident. Perhaps it is that decades of unchallenged hegemony have made them weak.

Thus, after the cam­paign against the Banu al-Mus­taliq, the Mus­lims wanted to rape the hostages and asked Moham­med whether they should practise azl, but the Prop­het replied, with reference to the futility of human scheming before God's omni­potence: "It does not matter if you don't do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrec­tion will be born." Since this (and similar ones) is a later Hadis than the one containing his pro-azl in­junction at Badr, it over­rules the ear­lier one, at least accor­ding to the theologi­cal principle that in case of contradiction, the earlier pronoun­cement is overruled by the later one.

It is a fact as well as a matter of wonder that sixty-five years after India gained her independence, it still makes perfect sense to discuss “decolonization”. The omnipresence of the English language is the most visible factor of a permanently colonized condition, others are the total reliance on Western models in the institutions and in the human sciences. But unlike China, that has wholeheartedly suppressed its own cultural identity (except in language) to embrace Soviet and Anglo-Saxon standards and ideas, India has maintained more of its identity and shows a stronger resistance. That is why in India, the colonized condition can be an issue at all.

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)

The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.

In Ayodhya, police killed sixteen, or one hundred and sixty- eight, or five hundred, or who knows, people who were unarmed and singing Ram Dhun.

Then came Who Is a Hindu?, about whether tribals, Buddhists etc. are Hindus, also an item with important ramifications. I zoomed in on Buddhism in my Dutch book De Donkere Zijde van het Boeddhisme ("the dark side of Buddhism"), half of which is an analysis of the relations between the Buddha and Hinduism. This is a very consequential matter, as the Buddha has become a weapon against Hinduism and most scholars assume the "Hinduism bad, Buddhism good" principle. Again, I am the only one in the world to have thematized this issue.

Demography is a bigger concern today because Islam is fighting for its survi­val, if not for world supremacy. Muhammad Samiullah is explicit about the good reason for natalism: "There is no denying the fact that the politi­cal prest­ige and military strength of a country depends upon the size of its popul­ation. (...) In the Islamic context greater populat­ion has a double sig­nifica­nce because one cannot wage an effective Jihad without an expanding popula­tion."

And then it gets really bad: "Indian government funded in part the work of ISKCON (Hare Krishna) in re-forestation of Vrindavan. Department of environment is supporting temples to maintain sacred groves. Ecological aspects of Sanatana dharma have been included in the school text books of at least one state, UP." Let's put this in perspective. Most relevant secularist school textbooks, not only in UP, contain the highly disputable claim that Islam stands for "social equality", but we are asked to feel scandalized that a similar claim is made for Hinduism and ecology. Christian and Muslim denominational schools which receive state funding under Art. 30 of the Constitution (unlike Hindu denominational schools, which are excluded from this provision for not being "minority institutions"), mix their educational task with not just the exercise but also the propagation of religion. Yet the secularists never express any objection to this massive nationwide intrusion of religion into education at vast taxpayers' expense, not even when one of them is inflaming her audience against the participation of Hindu organizations in state-funded environmental policies.

Instead, at a time when their power in academe and the media was absolute and unchallenged by any capable Hindu opposition (as demonstrated in M.M. Joshi’s textbook reforms, a horror show of incompetence), it went to their heads and they thought they could get away with denying history. They did indeed get away with their bluff, and may well continue to do so for some more time. However, the prevalent power equation will not last forever, and one day the “secularist” exercise in history denial will be seen for what it was.’

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.

The status quaestionis is still, more than ever, that the Vedic corpus provides no reference to an immigration of the so-called Vedic Aryans from Central Asia. This need not be taken as sufficient proof that such an invasion never took place, that Indo-Aryan was native to India, and that India is the homeland of the Indo-European language family. Perhaps such an invasion from a non-Indian homeland into India took place at a much earlier date, so that it was forgotten by the time of the composition of the Rg-Veda. But at least, such an “Aryan invasion” cannot be proven from the information provided by the Vedic narrative itself.

The secular intelligentsia… could reasonably have taken the position that a temple was indeed demolished to make way for a mosque but that we should let bygones be bygones. Instead, they went out of their way to deny facts of history. Rajiv Gandhi thought he could settle this dispute with some Congressite horse-trading: give the Hindus their toy in Ayodhya and the Muslims some other goodies, that will keep everyone happy. But this solution became unfeasible when many academics construed this contention as a holy war for a frontline symbol of secularism.

It should be borne in mind that the number of people killed by the Soviet regime between 1917 and 1985 is estimated at between 34 million (on the basis of official figures) and 67 million (according to Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn). In the same order of magnitude we find Tse-tung's number of victims (some 30 million), during the communist take-over, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Till today, there is a Chinese Gulag archipelago in the occupied territories of Tibet (including Chinghai), East-Turkestan and Inner Mongolia.