This is a phrase absolutely no one will disagree with; though it conceals the more pressing question how weighty the different contributions are, and… - Koenraad Elst

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This is a phrase absolutely no one will disagree with; though it conceals the more pressing question how weighty the different contributions are, and the false implication that these are all equal. Yet, it is here for a reason, part of The Hindu’s editorial line: it is meant as a punch in the face of the Hindu Nationalists, who stress unity. Not racial unity, as is here falsely intimated, but still some kind of pan-Indian sense of national unity, translating today in e.g. the conviction that Kashmir belongs with India. Therefore, among secularists, it is always welcomed if an anti-unity statement of any kind is smuggled in. .... Here we get the bulwark part of the secularist view of ancient India: the Harappan population spoke a different language than the Northwest-Indian population today, mostly taken to be Dravidian; and their civilizational innovations starting with agriculture had been borrowed from abroad, viz. from West Asia. This latter point is important to stress, as Hindu Nationalists might get the pretentious idea that some inventions had been done in India and even by Indians; Allah forbid!

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About Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.

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Alternative Names: Elst, Koenraad
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Last March I participated in a conference of Indian archaeologists in Delhi. One archaeologist after another testified how his own Harappan excavation site only threw up cultural continuity instead of an Aryan immigrant revolution. Everybody there was skeptical of the invasion theory. I was sitting next to the nonagenarian éminence grise of Indian archaeology, Prof. BB Lal, who had just publicly said: “Vedic and Harappan are but two sides of the same coin.” At that very time, I received an e-mail from a top American linguist defending a westerly Homeland theory, shared by virtually all his colleagues. I then realized that this was a unique situation: a consensus of top scholars for theory White, and a consensus of scholars in a very related field for theory Black, with neither feeling challenged to respond to the other. Historians ignoring the astro-chronological evidence, linguists ignoring the archaeological evidence: this is abnormal and unhealthy, and the first thing to do now is to break through these walls and get people to listen to the other side.

So that is what an Aryan invasion looks like. And that precisely is what is totally missing in the archaeological record of India. As robustly as the Aryan invasion of Europe has been proven, as conspicuously absent is the evidence for an Aryan invasion of India.

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Christianity’s self-righteousness due to a belief in being the sole possessors of the truth, and the consequent contempt for non-Christians, a far more negative attitude than anything the Pagans could muster; or in other words, the unmatched power of hatred; as well as the consequent importance they attach to religious identity, which means the pressure to convert in a mixed marriage is usually on the Pagan partner.

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