Most non-academic readers will be surprised to hear it, but the ruling convention among India-watchers is to have and express a fierce hatred of Hind… - Koenraad Elst

In normal academic practice, the debate on an issue on which such a consensus exists, would only have been opened after the discovery of new facts which undermine the consensus view. The present debate is between a tradition which numerous observers and scholars had found coherent and well-founded, and an artificial hypothesis based on political compulsions instead of on newly discovered facts.

For those who still have a sense of proportion, it will be clear that Hindu acceptance of or complicity with or overreaction against Islamic aggression is but a secondary phenomenon, which on a scale of moral guilt comes nowhere near the primary phenomenon of Islamic self-righteousness and intolerance. The Muslim death toll in 20th century South Asian interreligious violence is much smaller than the Hindu death toll... at least one and possibly several million of Hindus killed in East Bengal... In fomenting so much hatred against the unbelievers as has been witnessed in action in the Subcontinent in the past decades and centuries, Islam has given a testimony of itself. (Preface)

Let us now look in more detail into the organizational estrangement between Godse and his mentor Savarkar. Of the events ‘which painfully opened my eyes about this time to the fact that Veer Savarkar and other old leaders of the Mahasabha could no longer be relied upon’, Godse mentions the following examples. In 1946, Savarkar went out of his way to personally reprimand Godse when Apte and he had heckled Gandhiji during a prayer-meeting in a Hindu temple in Bhangi Colony (Delhi), where Gandhiji had read passages from the Quran in spite of protests by the Hindu worshippers, and where he had spoken in defence of Bengal Chief Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the man possibly politically (and probably also directly) responsible for anti-Hindu pogroms in Calcutta and Noakhali.