In the name-change debate, the usual double standars apply: indignation over the Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena's "Mumbai", tacit acceptance of the Comm… - Koenraad Elst

This first volume also contains a list of over 200 temples destroyed in Bandgladesh in November 1989 under pretext of protest against the Shilanyas (laying of the first stone) ceremony of the prospective Rama temple in Ayodhya. Muslims have raised a hue and cry over the demolition of the Babri Masjid (which they had not used since decades), but few outsiders seem to realize that destruction of the religious places of minorities is a routine affair in Islamic states...

A wholly different political element in Prof. Hock's contributions concerns his characterization of the non-invasionist school. He repeatedly identifies it as the “Hindu nationalist” school. But this mistakenly attributes a political identity and motive to a scholarly hypothesis about ancient Indian history. I don't call the AIT party “the European racist school” or the “Dravidian chauvinist school” eventhough those terms do explain the motives behind at least a part of the pro-AIT polemic, past or present.

In its early years, at the dawn of the Ṛg-Veda, the fledgling Vedic tradition was limited to king Bharata's Paurava tribe (descendents of Purū, himself a scion of the Lunar Dynasty) in northern Haryana, between the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī rivers. It is at his Court that priest Bharadvāja composed the first Vedic hymns. The Pauravas called the region "Ilā's footstep" (after the Lunar dynasty's foremother Ilā, daughter of patriarch Manu Vaivasvata), "the navel of the world", and "the best place on earth", true to people's universal attachment to their motherland. But compared to present-day India, it was an insignificant statelet. In its smallness it was perhaps best comparable to my own country, Belgium. But that was only the beginning. Some of Bharata's successor-kings, like Divodāsa and Sudās, conquered territory around this core area and ultimately made the Bhārata (i.e. belonging to king Bharata) territory as large as Northwestern India: from western Uttar Pradesh to the Afghan border. Sometimes even beyond, so as to include the Afghan region of Kambuja (the region from where the Vedic people imported their horses), though its population was mostly Iranian.