In the preceding years, India was tormented by communal riots over all kinds of issues, most of them unrelated to Ayodhya. The demolition led to a br… - Koenraad Elst

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In the preceding years, India was tormented by communal riots over all kinds of issues, most of them unrelated to Ayodhya. The demolition led to a brief round of Muslim revenge actions plus the Shiv Sena retaliation in Mumbai, but then rioting stopped for nine long years. The demolition clearly had a cathartic effect on the rioters. To be sure, Islamic terrorism has continued, but Hindus refused to be provoked. They did not take out their anger on their Muslim neighbours after the Mumbai blasts of March 1993, nor after any of the numerous massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir, nor after the bomb attack in Coimbatore, nor after the attacks on the parliament buildings. Hindus have shown remarkable restraint... My favourite among Indian Prime Ministers is definitely Narasimha Rao. He undid the Nehruvian legacy and stemmed the rising tide of the fateful consequences of Nehru's follies. He actually implemented the BJP programme, just as Atal Behari Vajpayee is now implementing the Congress programme. Rao started liberalizing the economy, lifting the stifling socialist controls. He opened diplomatic relations with Israel. He defeated the Khalistani terrorists, nipped the beginnings of Tamil Tiger separatism on Indian soil in the bud, and pushed back Kashmiri terrorism to the point where the Kasmiri people stopped supporting it so that it is now manned entirely by foreign mercenaries. And he allowed the demolition of the Babri Masjid... After that event, general Perwez Musharraf seriously counted with an Indo-Israeli attack on its nuclear capability, even with the destruction of the Pakistani state. So he saw no way out but to offer his services to the US. But he made it clear, in an Urdu speech to his people, that he was not becoming America's friend. He related how the Prophet Mohammed had used alliances as stratagems in order to eliminate other allies: using the Jews to eliminate the Pagans of Medina, than befriending the Pagans of Mecca to eliminate the Jews, and finally breaking his treaty with the Meccans to defeat them. But since the CIA has explained that none of its employees know Arabic, I guess they didn't pick up those Urdu hints either. Imagine, in the war on terrorism they don't care to learn the two languages most commonly used by terrorists. Musharraf is taking the Americans for a ride. I understand that president Bush wants to keep the Muslim world divided by enlisting some Muslim regimes in his own crusade, but I doubt he will outwit them. I think he is in for a serious humiliation. I admit this sounds like the old European armchair scepticism of American interventionism. But let's face it: American foreign policy is utterly confused, and mere muscle-flexing cannot be a substitute for a coherent vision.

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About Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.

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Alternative Names: Elst, Koenraad
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Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (...) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(...) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.

Mrs Gandhi invoked the "threat of fascism", meaning the RSS, as a justification for the suspension of democracy. On the strength of the evidence of 1975, the allegation of "fascism" and of anti-democratic intentions levelled against the Hindu movement is not that inccocent: it is a rhetorical preparation to anti-democratic measures of the "secularist" parties... We should also keep in mind that the amendment to the Constitution which declared India a "secular, socialist" republic was passed without proper parliamentary debate in 1976 at the height of the Emergency dictatorship. The facts of history do not support the linkage of "Hindu communalist" with "anti-democratic", nor that of "secular" with "democratic".

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Unfortunately for all of them, the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) and the Allahabad High Court (2010) reconfirmed the old consensus: of course, a Hindu temple had stood at the site and had been forced to make way for the mosque. So, all these Leftist efforts to impose a rewritten version of history had been in vain. Moreover, in her recent book Rama and Ayodhya, Meenakshi Jain has documented what a sorry figure these supposed “experts” have cut when they were questioned in court during the Ayodhya proceedings. One after another was forced to admit that he didn’t really know, that he hadn’t been to the site though pontificating on its archaeology, that is was all just a hypothesis. So, those were the people who had been cited as authority by all the politicians, journalists and India-watchers. If the truth of their politically motivated deception is given proper publicity, their game will be over. (Ch. 16)

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