For Grünendahl, this is merely an example of how the primary sources of German history contradict the free-for-all that amateurs make of it. - Koenraad Elst

In its early years, at the dawn of the Ṛg-Veda, the fledgling Vedic tradition was limited to king Bharata's Paurava tribe (descendents of Purū, himself a scion of the Lunar Dynasty) in northern Haryana, between the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī rivers. It is at his Court that priest Bharadvāja composed the first Vedic hymns. The Pauravas called the region "Ilā's footstep" (after the Lunar dynasty's foremother Ilā, daughter of patriarch Manu Vaivasvata), "the navel of the world", and "the best place on earth", true to people's universal attachment to their motherland. But compared to present-day India, it was an insignificant statelet. In its smallness it was perhaps best comparable to my own country, Belgium. But that was only the beginning. Some of Bharata's successor-kings, like Divodāsa and Sudās, conquered territory around this core area and ultimately made the Bhārata (i.e. belonging to king Bharata) territory as large as Northwestern India: from western Uttar Pradesh to the Afghan border. Sometimes even beyond, so as to include the Afghan region of Kambuja (the region from where the Vedic people imported their horses), though its population was mostly Iranian.

The expansion of the kurgan culture over Europe, in three successive waves, is fairly well-attested archaeologically. About the supposed spread of the Indo-Europeans to India and Iran, Mrs. Gimbutas does not give details, and in the extant literature no archeaologically supported scenario of the Asian movement of the Indo-Europeans is available, the way we have mapped their spreading into Europe. On the contrary, when it comes to Asia, we find even the topmost indo-europeanists relying on the outdated theories à la Mortimer Wheeler, the chief proponent of the “Aryans destroyed Harappa” scenario, without fully checking the factual basis of these theories... While the Indo-European expansion in Europe is being researched thoroughly, their presence in Asia is still perceived through the misty glasses of outdated but uncritically accepted hypotheses, Much of current thinking on early Indo-European history in Asia is a projection of the better-known patterns of their expansion in the Balkan.

All very well, but we should not forget that that point could have been reached fourteen or more years ago. What the recent excavations have merely confirmed was already well-known in 1989. The only problem was the mendacious denial of the historical facts by screaming and bullying secularists. Which, in turn, emboldened the Muslim hardliners into the most intransigent position in Court, in the political arena and on the streets. Think of the riots and the waste of energy that India could have been spared if the secularists had not obstructed the course of justice (or inter-communal negotiations, or a political settlement) with their denial of the historical reality underlying the Ayodhya dispute. I venture to put forth the view that these secularists have blood on their hands.