It should be obvious to anybody that the most vicious anti-RSS propaganda is at heart anti Hindu propaganda. So long as the RSS is identified with Hi… - Ram Swarup

A fateful thing has been happening. The East is waking up from its slumber. The wisdom of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism is becoming available to the world. Already, it is having a transforming effect on the minds of the people, particularly in countries where there is freedom to seek and express. Dogmas are under a cloud; claims on behalf of Last Prophethood and Only Sonship, hitherto enforced through great intellectual conditioning, brow-beating, and the big stick, are becoming unacceptable. Religions of proxy are in retreat. More and more men and women now seek authentic experience. Borrowed creed will not do. Men and women are ceasing to be obedient believers and are becoming seekers. They no longer want to be anybody’s sheep, now that they know they can be their own shepherds. An external authority, even when it is called God in certain scriptures, threatening and promising alternately, is increasingly making less and less impression; people now realize that Godhead is their own true, secret status and they seek it in the depth of their own being. All this is in keeping with the wisdom of the East.

All this was obvious enough at the time even though it was not always put forward exactly in this form and in this language. Schlegel found India "the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race." J.C. Herder asked the question: "All the peoples of Europe, where are they from?" And he answered: "From Asia." Schopenhauer thought that India was the "fatherland of mankind," and he expressed the hope that European peoples "who stemmed from Asia ... would re-attain the holy religions of their home." All this however changed under a growing consciousness of Imperial power and Euro-centricity. New theories reflected new power realities and new Imperial needs. Aryan dispersion from a common centre was retained, but its direction was changed and it became the theory of the Aryan invasion of India. The theory was meant to justify and to help the British Imperialism. The theory has little intellectual respectability left, but it has not lost its political usefulness and it is quite popular with the representatives of preceding Imperialisms and their Hindu apologists.

Having proved its value, the politics of taunts and accusations continues unabated. Those who benefit by it have merely to hurl the epithet ‘communal’, and there is a panic all around and the accused try to establish their secular credentials by the only way they know - by denouncing Hinduism. All this has led to competitive minorityism, selective communalism, the politics of out-musliming the Muslims and Hindu-bashing. But this politics is already getting discredited and yielding opposite results. It is awakening the Hindus and it is making them realize that the whole lot is rotten and that they should now take things in their own hands.