We could say that Hindus are multicultural at heart, or open-minded. But that quality didn’t get rewarded, except with a betrayal by their Muslim reg… - Koenraad Elst

The Guru Granth equally contains writings of some non-Sikh bhakti poets including Kabir, and thousands of references to such Hindu concepts and characters as Rama, Krishna, Veda, Omkara, Amrit. (An near-exact count is given in K.P. Agrawala: Adi Shrî Gurû Granth Sâhib kî Mahimâ (Hindi: “The greatness of the original sacred Guru scripture”), p.2, and in Ram Swarup: “Hindu roots of Sikhism”, Indian Express, 24-4-1991. Examples: ca. 8,300 times Hari (630 times by Nanak alone), 2,400 times Râma (the god-name whose constant remembrance leads to Liberation), 550 times Parabrahman (the Absolute), 400 times Omkâra (the primeval sound Om).) Sikh names are full of Hindu elements: Hari (= Vishnu), Rama, Krishna and his epithets (Har-kishan, Har-govina), Arjun, the Vedic god Indra (Yog-indr, Sur-indr). (About Sikh devotion to Ram, see Rajendra Singh: Sikkha Itihâsa mein Râma Janmabhûmi.) The Hari Mandir, dedicated to Hari/Vishnu, is as sacred to Vaishnavas as any of their non-Sikh temples; its tank was already an old Hindu place of pilgrimage, where Maharana Ikshvaku is said to have performed yajnas. (The 1875 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica says in its entry on Amritsar that it has sacred tank with a temple dedicated to Vishnu in the middle). Ch. 8

For her class of people, a “professional historian” is a historian with academic status. They are very status-conscious and constantly pull rank, especially when faced with informed arguments. For a scholar, this is weak, but for sophomores, it is uppermost in their minds: climbing the status ladder. When you know the academic circles, you become far less inclined to be over-awed by academic status: many professors have obvious ideological prejudices and bend their findings to suit their presuppositions. Moreover, in many countries to some extent, and certainly in India, scholars in the humanities are selected for ideological conformity with the dominant school. After nearly half a century, this has led to a situation where a post of “eminence” is simply equivalent with ideological conformity, at least passively (not raising your head), often actively (furthering the dominant paradigm).

To allow the “freedom to convert” as part of the freedom of religion (as the Indian Constitution does) betrays a Christian bias. And of course, any account of the religious situation is not complete without identifying the utterly anti-Hindu design of India’s state religion, viz. secularism. In Europe, this was an arrangement created in defence against the influence of Christianity against the state, but in India, it was introduced as a weapon to belittle Hinduism, and is therefore strongly supported by the (disproportionately powerful) Churches.