Considering that blood is a priceless influencer of people's sympathies, riot reporting is a favourite hunting ground for aspiring moulders of public… - Koenraad Elst
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Considering that blood is a priceless influencer of people's sympathies, riot reporting is a favourite hunting ground for aspiring moulders of public opinion. ... the English-language papers which determine the international impression of India's communal situation have specialized in the anti-Hindu variety, at least in the 1980s and early 90s.
Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.
The VHP-employed team presented the already known documentary and archaeological evidence and dug up quite a few new documents confirming the temple demolition (including four that Muslim institutions had tried to conceal or tamper with).
This book contains some strong criticism of Church and missionary policies. For me personally, formulating this criticism has not been easy. I have missionaries in my family, and in a sociological sense, I am a member of the Catholic community in my country. Therefore, some of this will not go down well with people near and dear to me. Criticizing Islam, is simple, criticizing Christianity is more complicated, because my own relation with it is more com- plex, and because Christianity itself is a more complex doctrine and movement than Islam. However, Christianity in India is not the toothless, softened Christianity which I am familiar with, but has retained the aggressiveness and self-righteousness of the colonial period; and even the European Churches become a little bit aggres- sive again when advertising their work among the wretched Pagans of India. Therefore, I see no reason to mince words and to spare the Christian establishment when it comes to exposing its divisive and subversive role.
In 1996, when I delivered a lecture... a Communist student group called Chingari, "spark", along with Biju Mathew of FOIL, the Forum of Indian (now Inqilabi, "Revolutionary") Leftists, distributed a pamphlet in which they demanded that I be denied a platform. This demand was later supported .... by Prof. Michael Witzel and Prof. Robert Zydenbos. (262)