Indian authors are right in pointing out that this (scriptural references) is systematically the weakest part in AIT argumentations, as the knowledge… - Koenraad Elst

The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with his pet spinning wheel, but the Nehruvian alternative won through: ‘Ashoka’s wheel’, in blue. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘India’s last viceroy’, was a champion of both the Moghul and the British colonial cultures and quite ignorant of the native culture, so he did not know that the twenty-four-spoked wheel long predated Ashoka. It was the symbol of the Chakravarti, or the ‘wheel turner’, the axis in the wheel of the samrajya, ‘unified rule’, ‘empire’, a principle already sung in the epics. Making India into a Chakravarti-kshetra was an old ideal, and Ashoka admittedly came close to realizing it: He was almost a ‘pan-Indian’ ruler. However, he did not originate this notion. The spoked wheel embodies the relation between a single centre and numerous (‘twenty-four’) secondary centres on the periphery, i.e., the central authority spreading its umbrella over the several states with their swadharma (ca. ‘own mores’) and swatantra (‘autonomy’). As such, it is a fine symbol of India’s federalism, for ‘unity in diversity’.

Tribals are emphatically called “not Hindu” in Christian and “South-Asianist” publications, but when they misbehave and kill Christians or Muslims, they suddenly get transformed into “Hindu rioters”. So, picking and choosing which manipulated meaning best serves their case is common among Hindu-bashers.

In trun­cated India, the Muslim population has grown 2.69% in forty years (from 9.91% to 12.6% in 1951-91), but Muslim leaders like Imam Bukhari routine­ly claim that the true figure of the Muslim popul­ation in the Indian Repub­lic is about 3% high­er. There are indeed some probl­ems with the official figur­­es­­ for the Indi­an Republic, e.g. there is a suspic­ion that many illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are lying low and avoid­ing the census personnel because they are used to a regime which is not so leni­ent with un­sol­ici­ted im­migrants (Banglad­esh pushed back the Muslim Rohin­gya refug­ees from Myanmar in 1992-93). But for the present­ dis­cus­sion, it is probably best to keep these al­leged un­registered mil­lions outside our considerations and stick to verified figures. Even without this unknown "dark figure" of unregistered Muslim inhabitants, it is only very slightly exag­gerated to say that in the Indian Repub­lic, ever since 1951, "the propor­tion of Mus­lims has been gradually but steadily increa­sing every decade by roughly one percentage point"­.