The British concoction hypothesis is not only untenable. It is so far off the mark, so totally out of tune with the known historical and cultural con… - Koenraad Elst

Fact is also that ever since the Ayodhya demolition, there has been a steady series of bomb attacks on RSS/BJP targets (e.g. killing a dozen people in the RSS office in Madras) and murders of BJP office-bearers.

In any Kulturkampf (culture war), control over the curriculum fed to the next generation is the primary issue. Note however that in India today, this is a war with only one warring camp. On the Hindu side, there is some grumbling on Twitter about biased textbooks, but nothing at the official level. Five years of BJP government (2014-19) have not yielded any impact at all on the curriculum, not even an attempt, and BJP ministers have expressed themselves as proud of that: “Look how secularist I am!” Their highest goal in life is a pat on the shoulder from the secularists, but they live in a fool’s paradise if they expect ever to get it. In the expression “BJP secularism”, the latter word has its acquired Indian meaning. In its original meaning, a “secular state” would be one where all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of religion. It would therefore not have a concept of “minority”. Statisticians are free to divide a population in any number of groups fit for their purposes, but in politics and law, the concept of “minority” has no place. In India, its impact is downright evil. So, I believe, India is a blatantly unsecular state, with separate Civil Codes according to religion, with Constitutional discriminations against the Hindus, and with numerous policies privileging this or that minority or the minorities collectively. When in office, the BJP (both under AB Vajpayee and under Modi) has kept on toeing the line laid down by the dominant Nehruvian discourse. It has not abolished any of these anti-secular arrangements in law or politics, and has continued to apply the Nehruvian categories in its own policies. In its election Manifesto 2019, it does not even pay lip-service to the interests of secular democracy in its original sense, let alone to those of Hinduism, but devoutly promises to work for the welfare of the enumerated minorities. Because in the rest of the world it is unambiguous: “secular” means disregarding the citizens’ religious identities. In India, by contrast, it means an endless concern with religious identities, at least of the minorities (who are hardly the poor, hapless groups suggested by that term, but are the Indian chapters of wealthy multinationals). It effectively means “anti-Hindu”, nothing else. That is why minority clerics whose Arab colleagues would abhor “secularism”, call themselves secularists in India. Deep down, many votaries of Nehruvian secularism have a bad conscience about their mendacious use of the term, and so they cackle endlessly about it.

The best example of this alleged similarity is the common complaint about the Islamic birth rate. On the Hindutva fringe, there are pamphlets which falsely cite the World Health Organization as having established that within twenty years or so, Muslims will be the majority in India. More serious publications, including Organiser and BJP Today, report a slower but nonetheless impressive increase in the Muslim percentage of India's population, recorded in every decadal census since 1881, and projected to continue at an even faster rate in the coming decades. In essence, this picture is correct: the percentage of Muslims shows a persistent increase at the expense of the Hindu percentage, with the rate of increase itself increasing. Given the higher Hindu participation in the birth control effort of the 1960s and 70s, we must now be witnessing a cumulative effect, of a proportionately smaller number of Hindu mothers (born in that period) having in their turn each a smaller number of children than the proportionately larger number of Muslim mothers, on average. On top of the higher birth rate of Muslims within the Indian Union, there is the dramatic influx of millions upon millions of Bangladeshis and also some Pakistanis.