I remember Vijay Prashad and Biju Mathew calling for a denial of any platform to myself, and big professors like Michael Witzel and Robert Zydenbos s… - Koenraad Elst

In 1994, the Churches created a similar stir, on the occasion of a very small incident in the Chennai area. After reading Ishwar Sharan's book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, which argued that a number of churches including the one commemorating Saint Thomas's alleged martyrdom had been built on destroyed Shiva temples, a back-bench member of the RSS-af­filiated Tamil organization Hindu Munnani went to a church in Pon­dicherry, equipped with the parapher­nalia for puja, and inquired where the Shiva lingam was, so that he could worship it. He had learnt that the Cathedral had been built on the site of the Vedapuri-Ishwaran Temple after the temple had been destroyed in 1748 by the Jesuits aided by the them French governor of Pondicherry. Immediately, the Catholic Church was alarmed and warned that the Hindu fundamentalists were trying to create a second Ayodhya affair... Though focusing on conflictual chapters in history has been decried and condemned in the strongest terms when Hindus did just that during the Ayodhya campaign, it is a per­fectly respectable activity in other parts of the world.

Tribals are emphatically called “not Hindu” in Christian and “South-Asianist” publications, but when they misbehave and kill Christians or Muslims, they suddenly get transformed into “Hindu rioters”. So, picking and choosing which manipulated meaning best serves their case is common among Hindu-bashers.

One such secularist, a modern man ready to deal with the matter pragmatically, was Rajiv Gandhi. He allowed the Hindus to prepare for the construction of a new temple with the ceremonial laying of a foundation stone (shilanyas) on November 9, 1989. He pressured the Chandra Shekhar government, which was dependent on Congress support, into organizing the scholars’ debate about the historical evidence, in the full knowledge that the temple party would win such a debate hands down. The thrust of his Ayodhya policy was to buy off Muslim acquiescence with some of the usual currency of the Congress culture: maybe nominating a few more Mians as ministers, banning a few Islam-unfriendly books (hence the Satanic Verses affair), raising the Hajj subsidy, providing cheap loans to the Shahi Imam’s constituency, donating government land for some Islamic purpose, things like that. Meanwhile, Hindus would get their temple. Muslims would have scolded their leaders for selling out, Hindus would have lambasted theirs for cheapening a noble cause with such horse-trading, but in the end, everybody would have accepted it....Whatever may be said about and against Rajiv Gandhi, he had the calibre and the cool secular distance from religious passions to see such a policy through....But in 1991 India’s top pilot was killed, and worse, in his years as India’s most important politician, dark forces had started fighting his reasonable and pragmatic policy tooth and nail. The problem was not with the obscurantist Mullahs, because in those days, a seasoned Congress leader knew how to strike win-win deals with them. The poison issued from the secularist intellectuals who raised a media storm against the historical consensus, the one factual certainty underlying all the political confusion. Their stance hardened Muslim intransigence, emboldened the Left in its anti-Hindu strategy and created international public opinion against the temple plan...