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On the one hand, there is the society that has continued the age-old civilization of this country. It has been badly bruised by centuries of foreign … - Koenraad Elst
" "On the one hand, there is the society that has continued the age-old civilization of this country. It has been badly bruised by centuries of foreign rule and oppression, with the moral losses more serious than the territorial and cultural ones : it suffers of self- forgetfulness and lack of self-respect. But it is still far better off than most of the cultures that have been overrun by the Muslim conquerors or the European colonizers. It has a real chance of coming through. On the other hand, there is a community, which is allowed to function within this larger society, but which has the roots of its separate identity outside this society's age-old civilization. These people's ancestors were in may cases pulled out of Hindu society and made members of the Muslim community under duress. Now, they would automatically evolve back into Hindu society, were it not for some politicians and theologians who instill a separate communal identity in them. The Ayodhya movement... is at the same time an invitation to the Muslim Indians to reintegrate themselves into the society and the culture from which their ancestors were cut off by fanatical rulers and their thought police, the theologians. It is thus an exercise in national integration.
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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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Elst, Koenraad
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Additional quotes by Koenraad Elst
To sum up, Edward Luce is a typical Western press correspondent in Delhi. He doesn’t hate India or Hinduism, but has innocently lapped up all the prejudices of the so-called secularists. On the Delhi cocktail circuit, trendy Indians gain prestige by showing off their Western friends and at the same time feed them their own view of things. The reading the correspondents do is mostly from the English-medium secularist press, which again corroborates these prejudices. And since exploring alternative viewpoints is both labour-intensive and unrewarding, indeed risky for their reputation in case they were to acknowledge any merit in the Hindu critique of the reigning secularist paradigm, they happily limit themselves to reproducing what their select group of native informers tells them.
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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