One thing which keeps on astonishing me in the present debate is the complete lack of doubt in both camps. Personally, I don’t think that either theo… - Koenraad Elst

Baljit Rai, a retired police officer who was a personal witness to India's failure in con­tain­ing the rising tide of il­legal im­migration from Bangladesh, refu­tes this ar­gument by poin­ting to the birth rate among Kerala Muslims, who have a high level of education and a relativ­ely high stan­dard of living. Mani Shankar Aiyar had clai­med on the basis of statewise figures for the south­ern states that "Muslim birth rates in all these en­light­ened states are very much lower than Hindu birth rates in unen­lightened states like Uttar Prad­esh". However, Rai's clos­­er­­ analy­s­is of the figur­­­­­­­­­­­­­­es­ shows that the Kerala Mus­lims have a higher birth-rate than the natio­nal Hindu average and even than the Hindu average in poor and back­ward states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan: the population growth (+28.74% for 1981-91) in the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram (with female liter­acy at 75.22%, far higher than among Hindus in the Hindi belt) is more than twice as high as the aver­age for Kerala (+13.98), and well above the Hindu national aver­age (+23.50).

So that is what an Aryan invasion looks like. And that precisely is what is totally missing in the archaeological record of India. As robustly as the Aryan invasion of Europe has been proven, as conspicuously absent is the evidence for an Aryan invasion of India.

Admittedly, a Muslim lobby had been formed which insisted on reoccupying this Hindu sacred site. However, the existing Congress culture notoriously knew how to deal with such problems: give the Muslim lobbyists some ministerial posts, some public largesse for their institutes or a raise in the Hajj subsidies, and they will come around. A small application of this approach was the annulment of Syed Shahabuddin's announced march on Ayodhya in 1988 in exchange for the governmental ban on Salman Rushdie's freshly-released book The Satanic Verses. A similar but bigger concession might have annulled the Muslim claim on the Ayodhya site. It would not have been the most principled policy, but it would have avoided a lot of communal blood-letting.