Leave alone Urdu pamphlets, a neatly published English book from the impec­cably Islamic Noor Publishing House (Delhi), Muham­mad Samiul­lah's Mus­li… - Koenraad Elst

It is interesting to watch these notions spreading from Indian secularist militants to their indological acolytes and on to the general Western intellectual, who simply has no clue on critically evaluating them.

The one difference between Godse and the so-called secularists in India is that Godse swore by genuinely secular and democratic principles, so that ‘all Indians should enjoy equal rights and complete equality on the basis of democracy’ and no special privileges on the basis of communal identity, such as weightage in parliamentary representation for the Muslims. Congressite and leftist secularists, by contrast, supported communal representation and weightage back then, and still support separate Personal Law systems for different communities defined by religion today. If words still have a meaning, Godse’s vision of independent India’s polity was more secular than that of the self-styled secularists.

The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history.