All very well, but we should not forget that that point could have been reached fourteen or more years ago. What the recent excavations have merely c… - Koenraad Elst

The causes of two other riots are stated in the well-known indeterminate terminology: "Alleged misbehavior with a girl of the other community". but the two remaining riot causes, the only ones clearly saying which community was attacked (and leaving little doubt as to which community attacked), are these : "Stoning of Holi procession passing a place of worship", and "Alleged murder of the president of VHP, Kheda District, by persons belonging to other community". One might of course start blaming any possible (I hasten to prefix alleged) provocative slogans uttered by the processionists and by that local VHP leader; but normally, people who start the violence, like throwing stones or committing murder, are held responsible for these acts, and at least partly responsible for the reactive violence which they may trigger. It is humanly quite feasible to listen to objectionable and insulting slogans without having a knee-jerk reaction of throwing bombs. It is a free human decision to react with violence. At worst, slogans can be a reason for violence ; given human freedom, they can never be the cause. This fake excuse of the provocative slogans leading mechanically to stone-throwing and worse, is used routinely by biased reporters. For another example, on October 30 there was a riot in Bijnor, with officially 14 people killed, others say 55. A procession with about 100 women members of Durga Vahini had gone out to the Ghanta Ghar area. "There they raised communal slogans, resulting in stone-pelting and bomb-throwing." This cheap excuse for a pre-planned bomb attack is even contradicted by other information in the same article.... This case proves that newspapers keep on blaming the slogan-shouters even when it is crystal-clear from their own information that the violence was premeditated and engineered by the other side.

India only calls itself secular since 1975, when Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship inserted the words ‘secular, socialist’ into the Constitutional description of India as a ‘democratic, federal republic’. That makes these two words the only ones in the Constitution that never went through a proper parliamentary debate; the least democratic part of it. In the days of the Constituent Assembly, by contrast, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee, explicitly refused to include ‘secular’. When, twenty-eight years later, the term did get inserted, it had acquired the meaning ‘anti-Hindu’, yet most Hindus accept the term because they naïvely assume it still has the meaning ‘secular’.

In modern India scholarship, or rather “South Asia Studies”, this anti-Hindu bias is supported, either by hiding it and denying that it even exists (“India’s secularism is threatened by Hindu majoritarianism!”) or, more rarely, by openly acknowledging and defending it. Thus, in her keynote address at the 2014 conference of the European Association of South-Asian Studies in Zurich, Delhi Law Professor openly admitted and speciously justified the anti-Hindu discriminations, to general acclaim. These academics, whose authority is based on the public’s assumption that academia equals objectivity, are in great majority partisan on the anti-Hindu side, passively or actively.