Koenraad Elst Quotes

But of course, if Wallis hopes to make me say that Shaivism is un-Hindu after all, he is living in a fool’s paradise.

But I do notice that someone who knows nothing about me except for my scholarly comment on his own work, gladly embarks upon an unsolicited psycho-analysis. And this is again entirely part of the Zeitgeist in his circles. He may find himself so very special, but in fact he is a very banal and predictable follower of the Wendy Donigers, Paul Courtrights and Jeffrey Kripals of this world.

The crucial fact here is that the academics’ position proved to be wrong, while my position was simply the scholarly position and proved to be right. If there could still be any debate about this in the 1990s (debate which was not really allowed, because overruled by an emphatically imposed new orthodoxy), there is no debate now, after the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 and the Court verdict of 2010. So, I was vetoed for being right, at the most for being dissident, not at all for being substandard nor for being “fundamentalist”.

“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 have written thousands of pages on that very subject, on that which outsiders call “Hindu fundamentalism”, and I have several times promised a symbolic euro if anyone could substantiate the common accusation that I, not even a Hindu, am a Hindu “fundamentalist”. That euro is still with me, so I can award it to Wallis if he finally does the job. Among civilized people, allegations come with evidence instead of with “bile” and “vitriol”. He may also try to explain away my own publications thematising specific criticisms of Hindutva. The difference with the secularist and especially the Western theses about Hindutva is that my critique is based on primary knowledge, not on hearsay from partisan sources.

He would like to impute his own conformism with the dominant school of thought to a jaundiced perception caused by sour grapes. Note again that I have given no occasion for this, it is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

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.

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.

Christian missionaries as the most strategically savvy part of the secularist coalition just love the fragmentation of Hinduism. Instead of a potentially solid enemy, they would find a string of separate sects ready to be swallowed each on its own terms. Most Indology Departments share this strategic vision, though they are less explicit about it.

Tribals are emphatically called “not Hindu” in Christian and “South-Asianist” publications, but when they misbehave and kill Christians or Muslims, they suddenly get transformed into “Hindu rioters”. So, picking and choosing which manipulated meaning best serves their case is common among Hindu-bashers.

And you don’t even have to utter this hate: most Hinduism-haters have perfected the art of claiming to love what they seek to destroy.

In modern India scholarship, or rather “South Asia Studies”, this anti-Hindu bias is supported, either by hiding it and denying that it even exists (“India’s secularism is threatened by Hindu majoritarianism!”) or, more rarely, by openly acknowledging and defending it. Thus, in her keynote address at the 2014 conference of the European Association of South-Asian Studies in Zurich, Delhi Law Professor openly admitted and speciously justified the anti-Hindu discriminations, to general acclaim. These academics, whose authority is based on the public’s assumption that academia equals objectivity, are in great majority partisan on the anti-Hindu side, passively or actively.

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

But if riots are deemed so important, surely attention is paid to the far larger killing of the Sikhs in 1984 by Congress secularists; or to the East Bengali massacre of Hindus in 1971 that dwarfed all Indian communal killings since Independence combined? No, this book only notices killings when Hindus are (or can be portrayed as) the perpetrators.

About the outspokenly partisan perspective of the book, we can be brief because no attempt is made to hide it. Thus, if we are going to discuss "democracy in India", it should be hard to leave the Emergency and the Sangh Parivar's opposition to it unmentioned; yet these are carefully and completely hushed up.