The VHP-mandated scholars, for their part, have not been aggressive enough to take the struggle into the enemy half of the field by focusing public a… - Koenraad Elst

All the same, he paid homage to the gods on some occasions. His breakthrough to liberation was followed by an intervention of the supreme gods Brahma and Indra, asking him to share his bliss and teach his way to liberation with others – the very start of Buddhism. Had the Buddha or even the later editors of the Pali Canon been as anti-Vedic as the present neo-Buddhists imagine, they could easily have censored this episode out. At the end of his life, during which he was regularly consulted on political matters because he was after all very at home in statecraft, he was asked by the authorities of a republic to formulate the qualities by which a state prevents decline. In reply, he listed the “seven principles of non-decline”, and among them is an abiding maintenance of ancient religious traditions, including rituals and pilgrimages. The ancient religious practices which he knew, were Vedic or at any rate Hindu ones. Buddhist monks later carried Vedic gods such as Indra, Brahma, Ganapati and Saraswati to foreign lands. Japanese temples are dedicated to Benzai-ten or Saraswati, some house the “twelve Adityas/Ten”. The Shingon sect of Buddhism has a quasi-Vedic ritual called “feeding the gods”, exactly the same conception as in the Vedas. Thai and Indonesian Buddhists have adopted the cult of Rama, whom the Buddha did not really worship but whom he venerated as a great scion of the Aikshvaku lineage to which he himself belonged, and of whom he claimed to be a reincarnation. Neo-Buddhists object to the long-established Puranic teaching that both Rama and the Buddha are incarnations of Vishnu, but the germ of this teaching was planted by the Buddha himself when he claimed that Rama and he were the same person.

Christians are not above the human inclination to vengefulness. Christian channels of information in India like to take a holier-than-thou attitude vis-a-vis Hindu-Muslim violence, but it may be recalled that in Nagaland and Mizoram, armed separatism is 100% Christian, and Christian Kukis are ethnically cleansed by Christian Nagas. Less well-known but even more sinister is the role of the Church in Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. Many of the Tamil Tigers are Christian, including the late miss Dhanu, Rajiv Gandhi's suicide-murderer. The Church would like to get rid of the assertive Sinhalese Buddhists, who do not indulge in self-deluded Hindu nonsense that "all religions say the same thing", but firmly oppose the Christian mission. Consequently, it supports the creation of an autonomous territory for the Tamils, confident that the Tamils' ideological disorientation (a faint remainder-Hinduism weakened by decades of Christian schooling, Tiger Marxism and Dravidianist atheism) will allow Tamil Eelam to become a stronghold of the mission.

The official guru of the RSS is the Saffron flag [...] "it represents the tradition and history of the Hindus"[...] The flag's saffron colour evokes fire, the medium of sacrifice, and thereby encapsulates the whole Vedic religion.