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.… - Koenraad Elst

If historians and linguists sometimes display great ingenuity in explaining away (or just ignoring) facts inconvenient to their pet theory, this should be seen as merely a case of the universal tendency to stick to established beliefs until the evidence to the contrary becomes really overwhelming. Scientists - in any field - abhor the disorder created by information which is incompatible with the established theory, and therefore rightfully continue to assume that a second look will smoothen this initial incompatibility and “domesticate” the new information. They have a very functional kind of immunity to facts disturbing the paradigm which underlies their research.

Come to think of it, this is really a strident indictment of the entire tradition of "Hindu fascism" scholarship: so many faithful copiers and parotters from Paris to Berkeley, and still this while school has never even produced a single "systematic analysis" of its favourite study object.

Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.