The present book is my last contribution to the literature on what is known in India as “communalism”, meaning the conflict between the different rel… - Koenraad Elst

Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”. Check the editorials of Syed Shahabuddin's monthly Muslim India, or the Jamaat-i-Islami weekly Radiance: they brandish “secularism” in every issue... Other Milli (i.e. of the Muslim nation) resolutions include a call for separate electorates (MPs elected by joint electorates are denounced as “lackeys of the Hindus”) and the creation of autonomous states in Muslim-majority areas.

In their own internal functioning too, the AAR scholars and Indologists don’t put a premium on the freedom to express dissident opinions. Here I speak from experience, having been banned from several forums where Wendy Doniger and some of her prominent supporters were present and gave their tacit consent. The most high-profile target of this policy has probably been Rajiv Malhotra, a sharp critic of Indologist mores and anti-Hindu bias, some of whose experiences in this regard have been fully documented... Briefly: while everything pleads against this act of book-burning, the American India-watchers are not very entitled to their much-publicized indignation... To an extent this is simply true, there is no level playing field, and the American academics including Wendy Doniger herself have done their best never to give the Hindus a fair hearing....

Outsiders notice how the inward-looking education of Muslim youth in Muslim schools (facilitated by their constitutional privilege of subsidized yet totally autonomous communal schools, a privilege denied to Hindus in the prevalent reading of Art.30) leads to their unemployability in the modern labour market; but the Muslim leadership, encouraged by the secularist media, prefers to deny its own responsibility and blame Muslim disadvantage on others. This mentality of resentment feeds terrorism, as indeed acknowledged in the Indian Mujahedin manifesto. Likewise, that the police more easily suspects Muslims and tends to associate them with terrorism is true, but not unrelated to their own actions (e.g. the Jamia Millia VC's recent refusal to cooperate with the police when some of his students were suspect).”