The clumsy performance of Hindu-American organizations in debates and struggles such as the one about the California textbooks (which gave a hostile … - Koenraad Elst

We have to agree that it [Hindu nationalism] is a type of nationalism, though as such it really is only the most conspicuous tendency within a broader movement vaguely known as Hindu revivalism. Some Hindu thinkers usually classified with Hindu nationalism, such as Ram Swarup and Girilal Jain, explicitly questioned nationalism as the right paradigm for the concerns of Hinduism in the 20th century. ... Hindu nationalism entirely falls outside the category vaguely designated as "authoritarian nationalism".

This assumption of Christian categories is typical of “Nehruvian secularism”, the state ideology in India and in the South-Asian Studies departments of the West.

According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.