That is why Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan is only being true to the Faith when, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, he says that the glory of Islam … - Arun Shourie

Clearly, what our newsmen call 'hard-liners' have been vindicated.

In a word, denunciation, condemnation, calumnizing the gods and goddesses, pouring ridicule on our scriptures, sowing hatred in the followers is the course Ambedkar adopted. But it was not the only course available. Earlier one of the greatest of reformers of the last hundred and fifty years had adopted the exact opposite course, and thereby accomplished both— he had lifted the lives of millions, and at the same time he had transformed and raised our society. That reformer was from a caste which was not just untouchable but unapproachable— the reformer of course was Narayan Guru, who lived from 1854 to 1928.

And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation. Hinduism turns out to be an invention – surprised at the word? You won’t be a few pages hence – of the British in the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it has always been inherently intolerant. Pre-Islamic India was a den of iniquity, of oppression. Islamic rule liberated the oppressed. It was in this period that the Ganga-Jamuna culture, the ‘composite culture’ of India was formed, with Amir Khusro as the great exponent of it, and the Sufi savants as the founts. The sense of nationhood did not develop even in that period. It developed only in response to British rule, and because of ideas that came to us from the West. But even this – the sense of being a country, of being a nation, such as it was – remained confined to the upper crust of Indians. It is the communists who awakened the masses to awareness and spread these ideas among them.
In a word, India is not real – only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real – not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real – actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone; in any case, it was not, the averments in the great scholar, Horace Wilson to the House of Commons Select Committee notwithstanding, that it was the very basis, the living basis of other languages of the country; rather, it was the preserve of the upper layer, the instrument of domination and oppression; one of the vehicles of perpetuating false consciousness among the hapless masses.