Koenraad Elst on Art

"The strange thing about the BJP is that its voters consider it a Hindu party, its enemies denounce it as a Hindu party, but the party will call itself anything except a Hindu party."

"This book is part of a polemic. So far, the polemical arrows have all been shot from one side, replies from the other side beignn extremely rare and never more than piecemeal."

"Articles and Books by Dr. Elst"

"Ever since I have been writing on secularism and religious conflict, and particularly about Islam, I have had plenty of mud thrown at me. What I have never seen so far is an actual refutation of my central theses."

"The more books and articles on Ayodhya and on "communalism" I look into, the more I feel confirmed in my assessment that the Hindu presentation of their own case regarding Ayodhya is the single worst public relations job in world history."

"As for myself, I am my own man, not a party man. I deserve to have my viewpoints examined not on their real or imagined associations but on their merits. I want my real and stated positions attacked, not those at my declared enemies' convenience."

"Without really noticing, the Western press has become the mouth-piece of the Marxist-Muslim alliance which dictates political parlance in India. I assume only a few frontline journalists are conscious participants in the ongoing disinformation campaign."

"Hindu society is a terrorized society. During the Muslim period, all those who stood up and spoke out against Islam were eliminated; and under Nehruvian rule, they were sidelined and abused. The oppressed Hindus started licking the boot that kicked them, and this has become a habit which in their slumber they have not yet identified and stopped."

"Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”. Check the editorials of Syed Shahabuddin's monthly Muslim India, or the Jamaat-i-Islami weekly Radiance: they brandish “secularism” in every issue... Other Milli resolutions include a call for separate electorates and the creation of autonomous states in Muslim-majority areas."

"It seems that white people on average are quite silly, for most of us have lapped up the version of Indian history propagated by India's "eminent historians" whose eminence results from their toeing the hegemonic party-line rather than from a respect for the data in the primary sources."

"The VHP-mandated scholars have, in their argumentation, pointed out no less than four attempts where scholars belonging to the anti-temple party have tried to conceal or destroy documentary evidence. Those are of course cases where the attempt failed because it was noticed in time, but the question must be asked how many similar attempts have succeeded."

"Let us note finally that on this issue, Audrey’s book is representative of a wider concern to whitewash Aurangzeb. In their all-out war on Hinduism and specific Hindu ideas, the South Asia scholars tend to practise Groupthink; there is rarely anything original, they only outdo each other in how daring they can make their own articulation of ever the same position."

"One was the shrill and intimidating campaign of history denial by a section of partisan academics and journalists, with most Western India-watchers in their pocket. Screaming “secularism in danger!” and raising the stakes beyond all proportion, they continued to dominate public discourse until at least 30 September 2010. They managed to turn the old consensus into a mere ”claim” by “Hindu extremists”. But Rajiv Gandhi tried to call their bluff."

"The VHP-mandated scholars, for their part, have not been aggressive enough to take the struggle into the enemy half of the field by focusing public attention on the quality of the evidence presented by the BMAC-mandated scholars and their allies in academe and the media. That is why the latter have gotten away with creating the false impression, at least among those unacquainted with the actual contents of the debate, that the pro-temple case is weak and fraudulent while, purely by implication, their own case must be unassailable."

"Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialized in symbols. What more suggestive than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva's consort, whose body, divided after her death in fity-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, theorfore revered as 'tithasthans', throughout the Indian peninsula? .... Kautilya, in his secular treatise on statecraft, the Arthashasatra defined the chakravarti-kshetra, the domain of Vedic culture which an energetic ruler should strive to unite , as extending "from the Himalaya to the seas",.... The final editing fo the Ramayana and the Mhahabharata is not dated later than the first encturies AD, and they are fully familiar with the concept and surface of India, as are Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha and the Puranas."