In his seminal book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, independent Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel has listed two thousand cases where a mosque was … - Koenraad Elst

It is also instructive to see for oneself what Eaton’s purported “eighty” cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton’s list, we find “Delhi” under Mohammed Ghori’s onslaught, 1193, or “Benares” under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb’s temple-destruction campaign, 1669. On each of these “three” occasions, literally hundreds of temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble.

Swami Shraddhananda quotes from the 1911 Census Report (para 172 ff.) to show the reasons why the Muslim populat­ion is growing faster than the Hindu population, whose per­cent­age of the total population is steadily declinin­g. The Census Direc­tor had writ­ten: "The number of Muham­mada­ns has risen during the decade [1901-11] by 6.7 per cent as compared with only 5 p.c. in the case of Hindus. There is a small but continuous accession of converts from Hinduism and other religions, but the main reason for the relatively more rapid growth of the followers of the Prop­het is that they are more prolific."

But then, among the organizers of the Indology session, I am a controversial name because of my known skepticism towards the pious lies of my peers, their so-called secularism paradigm flavoured with anti-Brahmanism. That far at least the anti-Hindu "South-Asian Studies" school has penetrated in the Orientalist institutions, unlike in the other sections, where scholars aren't expected to militate against their chosen object of study. In spite of Said's fantasies, most Orientalists had or have a tendency to "go native", to sympathize or identify with the culture they study; most Sinologists can argue the case for China with conviction, or at least tone down and relativize any criticism that is unavoidable. By contrast, only in the case of India is a scholar accepted in his peer group if he gives proof of a bias against the country and religion he has chosen to study.

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.