Prof. Irfan Habib, in a combine with Dr. Jahnawi Roy and Dr. Pushpa Prasad, dismissed this inscription as stolen from the Lucknow Museum and to be no… - Koenraad Elst

A wholly different political element in Prof. Hock's contributions concerns his characterization of the non-invasionist school. He repeatedly identifies it as the “Hindu nationalist” school. But this mistakenly attributes a political identity and motive to a scholarly hypothesis about ancient Indian history. I don't call the AIT party “the European racist school” or the “Dravidian chauvinist school” eventhough those terms do explain the motives behind at least a part of the pro-AIT polemic, past or present.

Further, it says that the religious minorities must "not claim any privileges", something with which any democrat and secularist would wholeheartedly agree: privileges on the basis of creed are against the equality principle which is fundamental to the law system of a modern state. It is one of the absurdities of Indian "secularism" that it contains a number of communal inequalities in law: · Separate family law codes for Muslims, Christians and Parsis, epitomized by the Muslim right to polygamy; this constitutes the denial of the very first defining principle of the secular state, viz. legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion;
· exemption of mosques and churches (as opposed to Hindu temples) from intervention in their management and appropriation of their funds by the secular authorities;
· special safeguards of the communal character (in recruitment of teachers and students, in the contents of the curriculum) of Christian and Muslims schools all while retaining their subsidies, which are denied to Hindu denominational schools (Art. 30 of the Constitution);
· a large number of occasional advantages for the minorities in everyday political practice, e.g. subsidies for the Muslims who perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, as contrasted with pilgrimage taxes to be paid by Hindus going to Amarnath and other Hindu places of pilgrimage.

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).