Unfortunately, anti-Hindu intellectuals act as gate-keepers and make communication between India and the West difficult for non-established Indian hi… - Koenraad Elst

The greatest hurdle has been my own anxiety in treading unsure ground, where every hypothesis which is now carrying the day may be blown away by a new discovery tomorrow. Even now, it hurts to release a book in mid-debate, knowing that much of it will be dated by the time a new consensus will have evolved. But then, I am confident that this painful awareness of uncertainty has been the right attitude and the best starting-point for uprooting the false certainties of some and for clearing the bewilderment of others. While too many debaters are still at base one, unfamiliar with the newest arguments and insufficiently alert to the strong and weak points of the several types of evidence in the balance, I hope this books helps the debate in moving on and reaching its conclusion.

His presence soon became a crusade against Hinduism and Hindu self-defence as well as against me personally. On his labyrinthine website, now defunct, he posted some interesting and decent articles about European or general religious history, but when it came to India or Hinduism, he merely reproduced all the worn-out secularist hate rhetoric. ... no upper-caste chauvinists, RSS or non-RSS, would ever use the intrinsically anti-Hindu neologism Dalit (which, like Adivasi or “aboriginal”, is a falsely native-sounding recent Christian coinage)... Since the concert of anti-Hindu reporting is rarely interrupted by a corrective voice, you can spend a career parroting anti-Hindu “information” without even realizing that something is amiss. But if you then do get to hear such a corrective voice, you may feel highly embarrassed for having been fooled all this time by your trusted “secularist” sources. At that point, you can either revise your position, thus putting yourself in the despised camp of the objective reporters, routinely denounced as “Hindutva apologists”; or you can cling to the more profitable dominant camp and try to stamp out the dissident voices. It seems that, after having encountered my criticism of the secularist make-believe discourse somewhere, John Hopkins has made his choice and reconfirmed his adherence to the anti-Hindu camp.

Yet, in 1989, all this evidence was brushed aside by a group of 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists, who issued a statement denying the existence of any evidence for the temple: The Political Abuse of History. Not that they offered any newfound data to support this dramatic reversal of the consensus, all they had to show was some totally contrived reinterpretations of a few of the existing data plus the worn-out slogans against "Hindu communalism". But the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of "upholding secularism" assured the immediate worldwide adoption of the new party-line as Gospel truth: the demolished Rama temple had merely been a malicious invention of the ugly Hindu nationalists... I don't have the impression that the BJP's coming to power has made much of a difference. Earlier, you had schoolbooks denying historical facts that Tipu Sultan forcibly converted thousands of Hindus. Now, you may get textbooks denying that the Vedic Rishis ate beef. Apart from that, not much has changed. In the media, and academia, Hindutva is still in the opposition. True, under the market system, dissent is marginalised, ridiculed, suffocated financially, or rendered ineffective in other subtle ways, but I prefer all that to being murdered or imprisoned in a Gulag camp.