All these points are so obvious that anyone who says that Hinduism is as foreign to India as Islam or Christianity, deserves to have his head examine… - Shrikant G. Talageri

At another point, Witzel writes: “Talageri also views as interpolations the vAlakhilya hymns of 8.49-59 (although these are, in fact, included and analyzed in zAkalya’s padapATha)” (§1). Is it, to begin with, Witzel’s contention that if a hymn or verse is “included and analyzed in Shakalya’s padapatha”, it automatically means that the hymn or verse in question is not an interpolation? All scholars are in agreement that the Valakhilya hymns are later than the other hymns in Mandala 8, and were inserted later into the middle of the Mandala in the Shakalya Samhita.

What is particularly notable in this special pleading is that it asks us to believe in a combination of abnormal phenomena and lack of evidence. Thus, for example, we could have accepted, in principle, that the river names of the Harappan areas (in an AIT scenario) may have been "Indo-Aryanised", if transformation of river names were the norm in such cases, even in the absence of evidence in this case of any earlier names. But it is not the norm: as Witzel points out, the names of most European rivers, to this day, ―reflect the languages spoken before the influx of Indo-European speaking populations [and] are thus older than c. 4500-2500 B.C. Again, we would have had to accept that such a transformation took place here, even if it went contrary to the norm, if earlier "non-Indo-Aryan" names of these rivers were on record at least in the texts. But there is not the faintest clue, even in the oldest hymns, that any such names ever existed. This pleading therefore goes both against the norm as well as against the available evidence.

The above provides the most perfect illustration of Witzel’s mode of academic(?) discussion: he does not raise points because he believes in them and wants to get them either clarified or accepted; he raises them only to heckle and raise a din, like a speaker in a political harangue or a schoolboy in a school slanging match between two rival groups, where the same accusation is repeated again and again with a deaf ear turned to the response or clarification.