First-time arrival at the Babasaheb Ambedkar Airport in Nagpur. A local RSS worker is taking me to the RSS headquarters. According to Wikipedia, they… - Koenraad Elst

Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi thought he could handle this challenge, but the initiative was wrested from his hands by the secularist historians. With their shrill statements about “secularism in danger”, they raised the stakes enormously. The rest is history.

The facts here are very clear, but rest assured that they will be contested. Like most Hindu-Muslim riots, this riot started as a Muslim pogrom on Hindus, with some spectacular killings of Hindu policemen, but then Hindus started striking back, and ultimately the Muslim death toll surpassed the Hindu one. Similar to Gujarat 2002, which started with a Muslim pogrom of 59 Hindu women and children in the women's wagon of a train returning from Ayodhya, locked in and burned to death. Then the Hindus retaliated, and it ended with some 300 Hindus and 800 Muslims killed. In international reporting, the all-explaining opening move is scrupulously left out, as if you have WW2 start on 6 June 1944 with the Allied "aggression" on Europe and highlight the higher death toll on the German compared to the Anglo-American side. "Major media have been caught in the act of fabricating fake news, e.g. the Wall Street Journal brought an interview with policeman Ankit Sharma's brother, who described how a (Muslim) mob had stabbed his brother to death. In the published version, the WSJ inserted that this mob was shouting a Hindu battle-cry to shift the blame to the Hindus to save their narrative that the Hindus were committing a pogrom. Fortunately, the brother and other witnesses publicly denied this and pointed out the WSJ's manipulation. Scroll.in and other papers published a photograph of a Muslim mob on the attack, easily recognizable by their clothes, and captioned that this was a "Hindu mob". When this was exposed, Scroll removed the photograph, i e. the evidence, but maintained its mendacious narrative. Same manipulation in Wikipedia, which suppressed corrections; or how blatantly fake news was quickly turned into the received wisdom.

Mrs Gandhi invoked the "threat of fascism", meaning the RSS, as a justification for the suspension of democracy. On the strength of the evidence of 1975, the allegation of "fascism" and of anti-democratic intentions levelled against the Hindu movement is not that inccocent: it is a rhetorical preparation to anti-democratic measures of the "secularist" parties... We should also keep in mind that the amendment to the Constitution which declared India a "secular, socialist" republic was passed without proper parliamentary debate in 1976 at the height of the Emergency dictatorship. The facts of history do not support the linkage of "Hindu communalist" with "anti-democratic", nor that of "secular" with "democratic".