I have studied Hindu nationalism for 24 years, reading its less-known literature and interviewing hundreds of activists including 3 presidents of its… - Koenraad Elst
" "I have studied Hindu nationalism for 24 years, reading its less-known literature and interviewing hundreds of activists including 3 presidents of its core organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and 3 presidents of the Bharatiya Janata Party (which no scholar on which Gielen bases himself, has ever done), and inevitably also getting to talk to its many enemies; and I have never encountered a single case of a “forced conversion to Hinduism”. Among Christians, this notion of their victimhood at the hands of the ugly overbearing Hindus is very popular, but if you look more closely, little remains. Anyway, if there were a case of forced conversion, it would not prove the strength but the weakness and clumsiness of Hinduism. Forced conversions are not much practised anymore. Today Islam and Christianity, which in the past had millions of forced conversions to their credit, operate more subtly. When a Hindu falls in love with a Muslim, he or she is almost invariably pressured by the Muslim family to convert. Christians use untold billions of dollars to make it materially and socially profitable to convert, and use every trick in the book to lure the tribals and other poor Hindus. Strictly speaking, however, their conversions are not forced – but nonetheless ethically questionable.
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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
Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a Guru is followed because he is a “father figure”. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.
So this is the evidence given, the whole reason for abandoning a well-researched view of history: “One could argue...” It is in the nature of historical evidence (as opposed to evidence in physics) that it can always be “argued”, that is, explained away if inconvenient. Fossiles disprove the Biblical Creation Theory? No, for one could argue (and some Evangelical fundamentalists do argue) that God created the world with fossiles and all, if only to put the faith of palaeontologists to the test- Of even the hardest evidence one could argue that it may have been planted, doctored, misplaced, and that it should therefore be rejected by historians.
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