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… - Koenraad Elst

As recently also pointed out by Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara and Mr. Rajiv Malhotra, Western Hinduism experts are, with only little hyperbole, the only academic specialists who actively work for their own field of study to die. (Well, I’ll grant you the criminologists.)

The greatest hurdle has been my own anxiety in treading unsure ground, where every hypothesis which is now carrying the day may be blown away by a new discovery tomorrow. Even now, it hurts to release a book in mid-debate, knowing that much of it will be dated by the time a new consensus will have evolved. But then, I am confident that this painful awareness of uncertainty has been the right attitude and the best starting-point for uprooting the false certainties of some and for clearing the bewilderment of others. While too many debaters are still at base one, unfamiliar with the newest arguments and insufficiently alert to the strong and weak points of the several types of evidence in the balance, I hope this books helps the debate in moving on and reaching its conclusion.

This is already clear if we limit our count to the 20th century, omitting all the killings and other crimes against humanity since the first (failed) naval invasion in 636 or the first occupation of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in 712, and all that happened in the intervening centuries. In the Partition of 1947, the Hindu-Sikh death toll easily amounted to 1 million+ in West Pakistan alone. In East Pakistan, it ended up becoming a similar number, though the killing there was drawn out over several years. In 1971, in the repression campaign that led to the war that led to the country’s liberation and recreation as Bangladesh, the Pakistanis and their Jamaat-i-Islami allies killed nearly 2,4 million Hindus, 80% of the total death toll of some 3 million (as per the government of Bangladesh itself). Add the great killings of many thousands in the Moplah Rebellion of 1920-21, the Direct Action Day of 1946, the many recurring pogroms in East Pakistan, the large-scale riots in India (admittedly with a two-sided death toll), the constant petty terror in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the expulsion of the Pandits from Kashmir (1990), and you get very close to the 5,3 million estimated for the Holocaust.