So that is what an Aryan invasion looks like. And that precisely is what is totally missing in the archaeological record of India. As robustly as the… - Koenraad Elst

The Aryan invasion of India has somehow gone missing from the archaeological record.

The VHP-mandated scholars have, in their argumentation, pointed out no less than four attempts where scholars belonging to the anti-temple party have tried to conceal or destroy documentary evidence. Those are of course cases where the attempt failed because it was noticed in time, but the question must be asked how many similar attempts have succeeded.

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. If there could still be any debate about this in the 1990s (debate which was not really allowed, because overruled by an emphatically imposed new orthodoxy), there is no debate now, after the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 and the Court verdict of 2010. So, I was vetoed for being right, at the most for being dissident, not at all for being substandard nor for being “fundamentalist”.

When the medieval Muslim invaders brought the term into India, they used it to mean: any Indian except for the Indian Muslims, Christians or Jews. It did not have a specific doctrinal content except “non-Abrahamic”, a negative definition. It meant every Indian Pagan, including the Brahmins, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins”), Jains, other ascetics, low-castes, intermediate castes, tribals, and by implication also the as yet unborn Lingayats, Sikhs, Hare Krishnas, Arya Samajis, Ramakrishnaites, secularists and others who nowadays reject the label “Hindu”. This definition was essentially also adopted by VD Savarkar in his book Hindutva (1923) and by the Hindu Marriage Act (1955).