If ever the need arises, I will not have much difficulty in proving that 'Indian Marxists captured the institutes of learning' , that they 'enjoy the… - Koenraad Elst

Of the other arguments, he knew a few but more have been added since: (1) linguistic paleontology: agreed here not to prove a cold homeland or any homeland at all; (2) common developments with Greek, and generally the geographical distribution of the isoglosses, is better explained by an Indian “extreme” homeland than by radiation from the Russian centre; (3) Finno-Ugric has hundreds of Iranian loanwords but imparted no words to Iranian or Indo-Aryan (the seeming exception of Guṅgu, “moon”, can either be a coincidental homonymy, date from an earlier Nostratic period, or was somehow a loan from Indo-Iranian), which is typical for a colonial situation, with Scythian Iranian imparting words and also borrowing some but not communicating them back to the homeland; (4) Mitannic can be shown to belong to the youngest layer of the Ṛg-Veda, so allowing for the language to emigrate and to become a dead substrate of Hurrian (and the similar case of Kassite), the Ṛg-Veda must have been complete by 1800 BC or so; 5) geographical distribution has the homeland typically in a far corner (Amerind superfamily, Bantu/Austronesian family, Turkic group, Arabic/Russian language), not in the centre (IE: Volga), which also is not the zone of greatest diversity, on the contrary; (6) Vedic literature contains a few astronomical passages datable because of the precession (ca. 1° in 71 years), e.g. Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa 2300 BC instead of ca. 1000 BC, Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa 1300 BC instead of ca. 400 BC, incompatible with an invasion scenario ca. 1500 BC; (7) kentum substrate in Bangani, India, e.g. dokru instead of expected daśru, “tear”; (8) Vedic and Puranic literature refers several times to emigrations, never to early immigrations, and the Northwest was not venerated as an area of origin; (9) the agricultural terminology proves, contra Masica, to be compatible with an Indian homeland.

Among secularists, there is predictably an attempt to sow doubt about this. In his 2015 book Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi, Rana Safvi argues that the finds under the Purana Qila have not been established to be the Pandavas’s city, which was but “mythological”. In particular, they are claimed not to contain the characteristic Painted Grey Ware, as per the 1954 excavations by India’s top archaeologist BB Lal. However, 62 years later, the nonagenarian Lal edited the brochure of the present exhibition and, taking into account several excavations since then (which Safvi feigns to ignore), he asserts that PGW was indeed found there, and that it was certainly the city of the Pandavas. Mehrauli was not the oldest part of Delhi, Indraprastha was.

In India, and increasingly also in the West and in international institutions, we are faced with a similar phenomenon, viz. Jihad negationism. This is the denial of aggression and atrocities motivated by Islam. Among the differences, we note those in social position of the deniers and those in the contents of the denial. Jihad deniers are not marginals who have sacrificed a career to their convictions, on the contrary; they serve their careers greatly by uttering the politically palatable “truth”. In India, any zero can become a celebrity overnight by publishing a condemnation of the “communalists” and taking a stand for Jihad denial and history distortion. The universities are full of them, while people who stand by genuine history are kept out. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, most of these negationists hold forth on the higher humbug (as historian Paul Johnson observed) and declare themselves “secular”.