The site [at Ayodhya] is venerated as Ram’s birthplace, and therefore deserves protection by a state that calls itself secular, not because something… - Koenraad Elst

The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.

In late 1995, "the Chalvey Muslim boys" in the Chalvey area of Slough (between London and Oxford), circulated a "notice" in and around the Slough & Eton Secondary School, informing the public that: "We Muslims don't want Kafirs such as Sikh and Hindu children to mix with our children, specially our girls. Two years ago a Sikh boy was friendly with a Muslim girl and we made his life so difficult that he committed suicide. If your children come to this school, we will bully your boys the way we did to the boy who committed suicide, and we will make your daughter pregnant and change them into Islam. We mean what we are saying, and if you ignore it you will be very sorry." (Appendix)

It is too early to say that linguistics has proven an Indian origin for the IE family. But we can assert with confidence that the oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat and for an Aryan invasion of India is wanting. We have not come across linguistic data which are incompatible with the OIT. In the absence of a final judgment by linguistics, other approaches deserve to be taken more seriously, unhindered and uninhibited by fear of that large-looming but in fact elusive “linguistic evidence for the AIT.”