Far from being an idiosyncratic innovation, Savarkar’s definition is in fact coterminous with the original understanding of the term “Hindu” by those… - Koenraad Elst

If it had been otherwise, the large and well-funded industry of Hindu-baiting would have dug up all the incriminating evidence long ago and publicized it no end.

Until Mr. Van Lysebeth shows an authentic Hindu source explaining these destructive historical references as the real meaning of the elements of the Vedic sacrifice, 1 would describe his suspicion that “Indians are careful not to tell us”, as a good example of interpretative delusion, a common symptom in paranoia patients. ‘When someone is obsessed with a belief which is not well supported by reality, he starts giving distorted interpretations to ordinary events, e.g. seeing a genocide commemoration in an ordinary sacrifice ritual. The most lucid students of Vedic and other rituals have lately been emphasizing that rituals are not meant to “symbolize” anything in the first place. And if throwing grains into the fire symbolizes the destruction of someone else’s harvest, are we going to accept that all sacrifices of animals, flowers etc. in all the religions of the world prove that all the communities concerned have a history of genocide and that their commemorative rituals seem harmless only to the naive observer? Clearly, one of Mr. Van Lysebeth’s sources has been projecting his own ethno-paranoid notions onto normal religious practices which are merely the Vedic representatives of a world-wide tradition of ritual and sacrifice.

However, it is not Rajaram’s school of thought which has given political implications to the question of the geographical provenance of India’s population. As we have seen, it is precisely the AIT which has been used systematically as a xenophobic political argument against those groups considered as the progeny of the “Aryan invaders”. Even most AIT opponents subscribe to the prevalent theory that mankind probably originated in Africa, so that all Indians, like all Europeans, are ultimately immigrants. The ridiculous argument of doubting the legitimacy of a community’s presence in India on the basis of an ancestral immigration of 3500 years ago has been launched in all seriousness by interest groups wielding the AIT as their major intellectual weapon, not by the critics of the AIT.