So, you may continue to throw mud at me. But I trust that through all this mud, an inconvenient fact will shine through: I have done only this much, … - Koenraad Elst

Thapar and Sharma are quoted as representatives of Indian Marxism in Tom Bottomore’s History of Marxist Thought, Oxford 1988, entry “Hinduism”; Habib has subtitled his recent book Essays in Indian History (Tulika, Delhi 1995) as Towards a Marxist Perception.

To explain the popularity of the myth even among local Muslim writers in the 19th century, most of them say it was a deliberate British concoction, spread in the interest of the divide and rule- policy. They affirm this conspiracy scenario without anyhow citing, from the copious archives which the British administration in India has left behind, any kind of positive indication for their convenient hypothesis - let alone the rigorous proof on which a serious historian would base his assertions, especially in such controversial questions.

And why stop our conclusion with finding the Hindu position right? The data just surveyed also teach us something about the secularists who have ridiculed and thoroughly blackened the said Hindu position: they are wrong. We have not used any esoteric figures inaccessible to the common man; all these data were at the disposal of the secularists. Yet, some of them insist that the Muslim percentage will remain constant, or that the Muslim incre­ase is proportionate to relative Muslim poverty. The fact deserves to be noted: a whole class of leading intellec­tuals brutal­ly denies easily verifiable facts, i.c. the accelerating increase of the Muslim and the decrease of the Hindu per­centage, and the inten­tionality behind this Muslim demographic offensive.