It is not the occasion but the ulema’s assessment of women per se which is of interest, for it pervades the fatwas through and through. ‘For the Qura… - Arun Shourie

The organisers had invited Arun Shourie to give the Hindu assessment of the work of missionaries in India. Arun Shourie addressed the Archbishops, Bishops and others on 5 January 1994. ... The organisers asked Arun Shourie to write a paper based on his talk.... As the controversy snowballed... [they] invited several senior churchmen to discuss Missionaries in India on a public platform with Arun Shourie.

While our leaders and the Supreme Court keep chanting, ‘All religions are one’; while they keep recalling the Vedic pronouncement, ‘Truth is one, only the sages call it by different names’; while they keep recalling Ashoka’s rock edict, ‘One who reveres one’s own religion and disparages that of another, due to devotion to one’s own religion and to glorify it over all others, does injure one’s own religion certainly’, the ulema proclaim the very opposite set of values, the truly Islamic values to be fair to the ulema. Thus we have Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan descend as an avalanche on persons who countenance processions in which books like the Gita and Quran are carried with equal respect; he declares that for a Muslim to even say, ‘Hindus should live by the Vedas, Muslims should live by the Quran,’ is kufr; a temple is the abode of Satans, he says, a Muslim is forbidden from going into it; to describe the Holy Quran as being like the Veda is kufr; to say that Hindus should live by the Veda is to ask people to follow kufr, and to ask people to follow kufr is kufr...

And so on – among the highest piles of rubble in the world of the sacred temples of another religion, among the highest piles of corpses of those venerated by another religion. Yet, in the reckoning of our eminent historians a policy of ‘Broad Toleration’! A policy of toleration guided by purely secular motivations!