The Buddha made his own version of Hinduism, as any Hindu Guru is entitled to, and as arch-Hindus like the Vedic Seer Dirghatamas before him or the p… - Koenraad Elst

In trun­cated India, the Muslim population has grown 2.69% in forty years (from 9.91% to 12.6% in 1951-91), but Muslim leaders like Imam Bukhari routine­ly claim that the true figure of the Muslim popul­ation in the Indian Repub­lic is about 3% high­er. There are indeed some probl­ems with the official figur­­es­­ for the Indi­an Republic, e.g. there is a suspic­ion that many illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are lying low and avoid­ing the census personnel because they are used to a regime which is not so leni­ent with un­sol­ici­ted im­migrants (Banglad­esh pushed back the Muslim Rohin­gya refug­ees from Myanmar in 1992-93). But for the present­ dis­cus­sion, it is probably best to keep these al­leged un­registered mil­lions outside our considerations and stick to verified figures. Even without this unknown "dark figure" of unregistered Muslim inhabitants, it is only very slightly exag­gerated to say that in the Indian Repub­lic, ever since 1951, "the propor­tion of Mus­lims has been gradually but steadily increa­sing every decade by roughly one percentage point"­.

As we might expect from Marxists who seek to mould rather than inform public opinion, this listing of evidence has been done with some editing.

To be sure, the usual suspects are bound to oppose this civilizational viewpoint. With their studied superficiality, the secularists view India as a hodge-podge of “communities”, of which a very recent one, concocted by the “Orientalists”, is Hinduism. Just as I finish this article, my attention is drawn to a French magazine celebrating the appointment of an Indian secularist historian to the Collège de France with an interview. There, he speaks out against the very notion of a Hindu civilization. The whole is not real, only the fragments are. The notion of an over-arching civilizational unity and long-term continuity may be obvious in China, and get applause there, but in India it is “communal!” (Ch 18)