Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”, opposing “multiple truth… - Koenraad Elst

Their effort has indeed been very strenuous... They were issuing statements all the time, grim one day, furious the next, scholarly never.

Sita Ram Goel imaginatively fills in the details in a Hindi historical novel: Sapta-Śı̄la, BibliaImpex, Delhi 1960; 2nd edition 1999. Incidentally, in the 1957 Lok Sabhā election, Goel stood as candidate for the opposition (anti- Communist, free marketeer) Swatantra Party in the Khajuraho constituency. Many readers noticed in the rendering of Vars.akāra’s conduct the mannerisms typical of Jawaharlal Nehru and connected this with Goel’s politics. In the preface to the second edition, Goel tries to dispel this notion but settles for the assessment that such a likeness is inevitable. The saboteur Vars.akāra tries to subvert a society, corrupting it from within and taking away its commitment to its civilizational values, as a precursor to its eventual decay and defeat; and Nehru was often accused precisely of just such civilizational subversion.

The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. How else should we call the practice of seemingly learned publications advertising themselves as "objective" studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties? ... The VHP scholars have pointed out 4 cases of attempted fraud by their opponents (removing relevant old books from libraries, adding words on an old map).