Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in… - Koenraad Elst
" "Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their first line of attack, the “secularists”. He has pioneered some valid insights into the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, which did not oppress vernacular languages from Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” thesis. .. This is not very original, in fact it is only a sophisticated formulation of widely-held views. Thus, Pattanaik attributes the same viewpoint to another big name we just met: “Doniger’s essays on the Puranas make you see Hinduism as a violent authoritarian force challenged by non-violent egalitarian Buddhism.” But in this discourse of hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with, Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993 he published a paper arguing that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahminical par excellence) sits at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s well-documented destructive role in Hindu history. But he has never retracted this position and has remained a leading voice in anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin discourse.
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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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Elst, Koenraad
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And yet, their sound and fury was nothing but smoking mirrors, a grand tamasha of fake moralism and non-existent facts. They claimed that the science of history could not allow the restoration of a temple that had never existed. In reality, they could not muster even a single discovery that would have questioned the old pro-temple consensus. The debate that ensued was totally asymmetrical: they demanded evidence from the pro-temple site, which was duly produced, both existing proofs and extra new discoveries; while they themselves never came up with anything. Later they were summoned to Court to divulge their expert opinions, but (as documented by Prof. Meenakshi Jain in her comprehensive book on the Ayodhya evidence, Rama’s Ayodhya, 2013) one after another, they confessed to their lack of competence in the matter. So, even though the media have kept the lid on this information, the pro-temple side has won the history debate fair and square. Of course there had been a temple, and for those who still feigned to doubt it, the temple foundations were fully excavated in 2003.
It is always easy to blame the state and the men in uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian Pakistani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not spoken out against the religious persecutions in his homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality. The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attitude among sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine.
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The Buddha made his own version of Hinduism, as any Hindu Guru is entitled to, and as arch-Hindus like the Vedic Seer Dirghatamas before him or the philosopher Shankara after him have also done. But he never broke away from any existing religion. On the contrary, when he was asked near the end of his life what the secrets of a stable society are, he mentioned among other things the continued respect for the existing sages, pilgrimages and (by definition pre-Buddhist) sacred places.
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