In NRI papers, you can occasionally read the testimony annex war­ning of Hindu women who sorely regret their mistake of having married a Muslim. E.g.… - Koenraad Elst

Nonetheless, the Marxist historians had their way. In their shrill manifestoes, these secular fundamentalists slandered the genuine historians who stood by the facts, and they denounced the Hindus' perfectly reasonable expectation that a Hindu sacred site be left in the exclusive care of the Hindus. They did this with such titanic vehemence that the pragmatists were thrown on the defensive.

Still, sum total, linguistics has so far only provided a malleable type of evidence, a probability but not the final word. At any rate, the findings of Historical and Comparative Linguistics turn out to be perfectly compatible with a scenario of Indo-European emigration from an Indian Homeland, and marginally even indicate it. ... Archaeology is a harder science, though less informative about the language of the society studied. It failed to find any traces of the momentous event that an Aryan invasion must have been... Today the nonagenarian dean of Indian archaeology (B.B. Lal) concurs with most of his younger colleagues that there is no archaeological trace of an Aryan invasion.... The invading Aryans are taken to be fundamentally different in culture from the Harappans, and since the Harappan cities declined only after -1900, the invasion must be more recent than that, and the Vedic corpus (clearly set in India though tortured in vain to yield mentions of a westerly homeland or an invasion) even more recent.

There are more points in Ms. Nanda's paper which are worthy of further discussion, but for now I will conclude with an observation on what seems to be her sincere declaration of interest. Among the points that "worry" her, she mentions this as the final one:... Here, she really lays her cards on the table. It is very good that, unlike many other "secularists", she does not try to be clever and claim to speak for "true Hinduism" against a "distorted Hinduism" of the Hindu revivalists. Instead, she clearly targets Hinduism itself, deploring any development which might make Hinduism "gain prestige". Let us see if I can translate that correctly: wanting something or someone to suffer rather than to prosper is what we call "hate". She hates Hinduism, and her academic work is written in the service of that hate. To me, that is not the end of the matter. As a Catholic, I was taught never to give up hope, one of the great Christian virtues along with faith and charity.... I don't mind discussing this matter, for there is nothing shameful about the day when I saw through the usual hateful misrepresentation of "Hindu chauvinism", meaning Hindu self-defence against the aggression by so-called "secular" religions and ideologies. There is nothing shameful about my outgrowing silly beliefs such as the still-widespread belief in India's mock secularism. (Ch 3)