It explains, to name a current and important example, the grim and determined passivity of the Modi government regarding specifically Hindu demands, … - Koenraad Elst

Given the widely acknowledged importance of the Ayodhya conflict, one would have expected at least some of the well-funded Western academics to embark on their own investigation of the issue rather than parroting the slogans emanating from Delhi’s Jama Masjid and JNU. Their behaviour in the Ayodhya debate provides an interesting case study in the tendency of establishment institutions and settled academics to genuflect before ideological authorities overruling proper scholarly procedure in favour of the political fashion of the day.

Yet, almost all the Western papers have chosen to blacken Hinduism almost as thoroughly as the secularist Indian press has done. The first reason is that the Western correspondents in Delhi just don't know very much, and also don't feel the need to find out more. Their work is not considered important by their editors, because India is still perceived as a backward and economically unimportant country. Western correspondents in Delhi are very lazy. I have been to some press conferences concerning this Ayodhya affair (which involves principles, has generated an unprecedented mass movement, and has toppled a government), and not met any foreign press persons there. In Ayodhya and in the offices of those very people that could give authentic background information, again I did not see any foreign correspondents. I don't know what they tell their employers, but I can testify first-hand that they are not doing any journalistic work here, except for copying the Indian English-language papers. The second reason is that they very uncritically swallow that version of the facts which happens to reach them. Since they hang out a lot with the westernized clique that controls the media, education and the government, they don't know better than that those people's viewpoint is authoritative.

The effort by Indian Marxists, in league with their Western dupes, to mother the debate by imposing the theory inherited from the colonial age, needs to be defeated.... Good research is bound to eclipse dogmatism in the end. (196) Much of the effort of history distortion during the decades of unchallenged Marxist supremacy in the Indian history establishment was devoted to whitewashing this painful episode... (197)