The political equation behind all this intrigue is rarely understood by non-Indians. Thus, it requires quite a historical excursus to explain why dec… - Koenraad Elst

It is also instructive to see for oneself what Eaton’s purported “eighty” cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton’s list, we find “Delhi” under Mohammed Ghori’s onslaught, 1193, or “Benares” under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb’s temple-destruction campaign, 1669. On each of these “three” occasions, literally hundreds of temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble.

The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with his pet spinning wheel, but the Nehruvian alternative won through: ‘Ashoka’s wheel’, in blue. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘India’s last viceroy’, was a champion of both the Moghul and the British colonial cultures and quite ignorant of the native culture, so he did not know that the twenty-four-spoked wheel long predated Ashoka. It was the symbol of the Chakravarti, or the ‘wheel turner’, the axis in the wheel of the samrajya, ‘unified rule’, ‘empire’, a principle already sung in the epics. Making India into a Chakravarti-kshetra was an old ideal, and Ashoka admittedly came close to realizing it: He was almost a ‘pan-Indian’ ruler. However, he did not originate this notion. The spoked wheel embodies the relation between a single centre and numerous (‘twenty-four’) secondary centres on the periphery, i.e., the central authority spreading its umbrella over the several states with their swadharma (ca. ‘own mores’) and swatantra (‘autonomy’). As such, it is a fine symbol of India’s federalism, for ‘unity in diversity’.

But on Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat. Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective, then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the California Textbook Affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this I can say eventhough my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic bullying.