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The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with… - Koenraad Elst
" "The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with his pet spinning wheel, but the Nehruvian alternative won through: ‘Ashoka’s wheel’, in blue. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘India’s last viceroy’, was a champion of both the Moghul and the British colonial cultures and quite ignorant of the native culture, so he did not know that the twenty-four-spoked wheel long predated Ashoka. It was the symbol of the Chakravarti, or the ‘wheel turner’, the axis in the wheel of the samrajya, ‘unified rule’, ‘empire’, a principle already sung in the epics. Making India into a Chakravarti-kshetra was an old ideal, and Ashoka admittedly came close to realizing it: He was almost a ‘pan-Indian’ ruler. However, he did not originate this notion. The spoked wheel embodies the relation between a single centre and numerous (‘twenty-four’) secondary centres on the periphery, i.e., the central authority spreading its umbrella over the several states with their swadharma (ca. ‘own mores’) and swatantra (‘autonomy’). As such, it is a fine symbol of India’s federalism, for ‘unity in diversity’.
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About Koenraad Elst
Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.
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Elst, Koenraad
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Additional quotes by Koenraad Elst
Moreover, the majority of humanity belongs to nations who entered their present habitat less than 5000 years ago.,, Labelling inhabitants of 5 millennia as invaders is the most cranky form of irredentism ever enacted; it can have no place in serious political thought, and it is tells quite a story that such things are heard in India... ‘Trying to disprove that one’s ancestors migrated into their present habitat 5000 years ago, should be a strictly academic exercise with absolutely no political consequences for the present, if only because it is applicable to the majority of mankind, including many “natives” who have (by committing mostly unrecorded aggressions) displaced other natives. Unfortunately, India, with its sense of organic unity in disarray, is attracting vultures who have the effrontery to label the bulk of the Hindu population as invaders in order to justify their own imperialist or separatist schemes.
Of course I have nothing to do with racism and xenophobia, and I have my life-story to prove it. Given the democratic slump in Europe, I am convinced that a measured and carefully monitored immigration is necessary. My hometown is host to people from every country, and I have a lot of foreign friends, mostly Indian and Chinese. So, I am not at all against immigrants, and I have personally helped some to integrate or to get naturalized as citizens of my country. But my criticism of Islam stands: Islam is intrinsically separatist and hostile to neighbour communities.
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