When a knave writes a book, he is soon followed by a bunch of fools. - Koenraad Elst

Jha seems to suggest that publishing these allegations (which he doesn’t refute) was only safe with the NDA in power. Apparently the UPA would have done the Eminent Historians’ bidding and arrested Shourie for slander.

But the solution is not to “get around these stubborn, disturbing facts” of astronomy by smugly dismissing them as testimonia non grata. Nor to declare dogmatically that “we know that it can't be correct”.

Long ago, when I looked in the Leuven Theology library for the Niyogi Committee Report, which documents the misbehavior of the Christian missionaries in Central India in the 1950s, I couldn’t get it (someone whispered that it was in their confidential collection, but don’t know), while the Christian reply to it was readily available. The dominant view of India in Catholic circles remains that Hindus and Muslims are barbarians killing people who don’t belong to their own religion, but that the few Christians among them are innocent sheep. Thus, our press has reported the riots against Christians in Orissa in 2008, but not the trigger of those riots: the murder of a Hindu monk and four of his assistents by Christians (whom spokesmen of the Church then tried to disown, blaming the Maoists). If you don’t go to the source of the information, you are a victim of the control of the information stream by various anti-Hindu forces, and so the European-Christian understanding of Indian religious affairs in completely warped.