And, of course, they never asked of the Muslim party by what right a mosque had been imposed on the temple site, even though it directly implicates t… - Koenraad Elst

But the innermost and actually religious level of Hindu culture is an individual affair. And it could not have been otherwise. Action and ritual may be community affairs, but the basis of real religion is a culture of consciousness, and consciousness is individual.

This is very clear when we take a long-term perspective: in the fifty years between 1941 and 1991, their per­cent­age has risen 5.64% (from 24.28% to 29.92%), substan­tially more than the 4.31% gain in the sixty years bet­ween 1881 and 1941. At this rate, the Muslims in the Subcon­tinent must have passed the 30% mark in the mid-1990s and will pass the miles­tone of becoming more than half the num­ber of Hindus (ca. 32% to ca. 64%) before the census of 2011.

In 2001, Rupa published the bulky book version of my PhD thesis, and reported to me that it became a bestseller. It is not the usual RSS self-praise but not the usual RSS-bashing of the "experts" either. In that year, I also brought out the two-volume The Saffron Swastika. On the Notion of ""Hindu Fascism", the only book in the world to analyse this much-used line of discourse (except for my sequel from 2006, Return of the Swastika), both by foreign India-watchers and by the Indian secularists; and Gandhi and Godse, the analysis of the reasons for the Mahatma murder through the murderer's self-justification speech.