Pakis­tan is Asia's­ fastest­-growing non-Arab count­­­ry,­ doubling its popu­lat­ion every 24 yea­rs. - Koenraad Elst

Considering the foolish haughtiness with which the Allahabad High Court had just decided, days before the gathering scheduled for 6 December, to postpone once more their verdict on the acquisition of some of the Ayodhya land by the UP government (intended as part of a strategy towards a peaceful solution), after a full 42 years of endless litigation, it is not fair to accuse the over-enthusiastic Rama devotees of disrespect towards the judicial process and the democratic order which it is supposed to uphold. Rather, they have shown disrespect towards the misuse of the courts for political games, and they have rightly revolted against the judges’ contempt for Hindu society, which was evident from their unwillingness to settle the dispute brought before them, concerning no less a site than the Rama-Janmabhoomi.

Certain scholars are just too attached to the stigmatizing power of the term 'racism' to drop it when it proves inaccurate. Confusing scholarship with a political crusade, they openly announce that they will go on using the term even when they themselves realize it is inaccurate... In serious discipline, such unabashed subordination of scholarly standards... to a political agenda would simply disqualify [Dipesh] Chakrabarty as a scholar, but in Hindutva studies, his attitude is the rule rather than the exception.

Further, it says that the religious minorities must "not claim any privileges", something with which any democrat and secularist would wholeheartedly agree: privileges on the basis of creed are against the equality principle which is fundamental to the law system of a modern state. It is one of the absurdities of Indian "secularism" that it contains a number of communal inequalities in law: · Separate family law codes for Muslims, Christians and Parsis, epitomized by the Muslim right to polygamy; this constitutes the denial of the very first defining principle of the secular state, viz. legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion;
· exemption of mosques and churches (as opposed to Hindu temples) from intervention in their management and appropriation of their funds by the secular authorities;
· special safeguards of the communal character (in recruitment of teachers and students, in the contents of the curriculum) of Christian and Muslims schools all while retaining their subsidies, which are denied to Hindu denominational schools (Art. 30 of the Constitution);
· a large number of occasional advantages for the minorities in everyday political practice, e.g. subsidies for the Muslims who perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, as contrasted with pilgrimage taxes to be paid by Hindus going to Amarnath and other Hindu places of pilgrimage.