Come to think of it, this is really a strident indictment of the entire tradition of "Hindu fascism" scholarship: so many faithful copiers and parott… - Koenraad Elst

Bhupendra Yadav’s nice little scenario is of course purely hyothetical and unsupported by any document whatsoever, but that doesn’t seem to trouble him. At any rate, after the cream of India’s secularist historians have used all their resources to create a semblance of credibility for the no-temple case, all that Bhupendra Yadav can come up with, is the hypothesis that: 1) the Hindus of Ayodhya had left the geographical place of honour in the middle of their city “vacant”, unlike the people of every other city in the whole world; 2) they had laid the foundations (the pillar-bases of burnt brick) for a pillared building which they never constructed, and waited for others to come and put these foundations to proper use. This hypothesis is pretty farfetched. But at least Mr. Yadav has the merit of explicitating what most people who deny the temple destruction scenario only claim by implication. ... This would mean that every now and then, these inconsistent Hindus or Muslims just made a hole in the ground, arbitrarily planted a pillar-base somewhere, never to build a pillar on it, then forgot about it till a few decades later, another joker repeated this meaningless ritual, coincidentally yielding an orderly pattern of pillar-bases. This is secularist archaeology for you.

This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the "evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.

At the end of it, I for one, am not aware of any point at which the Invasionists could honesttly say: “This here, this proves the Aryan Invasion.” Being convinced of an Indian Urheimat is yet another matter. The case for considering the Vedic and the Harappan culture as instances of one and the same civilization is fairly strong, though much research remains to be done. But this does not necessarily imply that the Harappan culture was purely Indo-European, nor does it prove that the Harappan language was native to India. The case for placing the Indo-European Urheimat in northern India is still too outlandish to mention in decent company, but we cannot say that solid findings are available that conclusively refute it. On the contrary, it is the dominant South Russian Urheimat theory that finds itself unsupported by most types of evidence. The Indian Urheimat theory...is at least fully compatible .... 162-3