Koenraad Elst on Justice

"The buffoon of the affair is the Western class of India-watchers .... they have swallowed the anti-Hindu propaganda hook, line and sinker."

"He doesn’t find it difficult to show that the term “Hindu” is fairly recent and introduced by Muslims in the catch-all sense of “any Indian non-Muslim”."

"The line about Muslims not tolerating a Muslim girl marrying a Hindu boy even in a movie refers to Mani Ratnam's movie Bombay, a target of Muslim protests for showing just such an affair."

"As so often in Indo-Pakistani and Hindu-Muslim comparisons, the argument is reminiscent of the inequality between the contenders in the Cold War: you could demonstrate for disarmament in the West, but to demonstrate for this in the East Bloc would have put you in trouble."

"The author notes that colonialism in its last phase justified itself no longer as an instrument to “civilize the savages” but to “protect the minorities” . The reader can take the hint that neocolonial interferences in South Asia, often through NGOs, use the same justification."

"There is in Sanskrit literature exactly "one 'goldhaired' person that is not a god".... Quite possibly was not gold-haired at all: he may have had one of the epithets of the solar deity Vishnu as his given name, just as most people called Nilakantha, "blue-throated" are not blue-throated at all."

"Nehru's absolute refusal to support the Tibetans even at the diplomatic level when they were overrun by the Chinese army, cannot just be attributed to circumstances or the influence of collaborators: his hand-over of Tibet to communist China was quite consistent with his own political convictions."

"The unanimous and entirely coherent testimony that the wars in Hindustan were religious wars of Muslims against Kafirs is a different matter altogether: denying this testimony is not a matter of small adjustments, but of replacing the well-attested historical facts with their diametrical opposite."

"Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect."

"Finally, there is one more kind of India-watcher or India-fan in the West, with a typical and remarkable attitude to the Ayodhya affair: the"seekers". Some people staying in India for spiritual things, and who were told that I was writing about this Ayodhya affair, immediately came out with their superior scorn for such unspiritual quarrels: "What are those Kar Sevaks going to Ayodhya for? To lay the second brick?" What these people should realize, is that the society which has allowed ashrams to flourish, has only survived because it also had a martial component. Why are they not going to Afghanistan for yoga? because Hinduism in Afghanistan got militarily defeated and annihilated. Because Islam, which in their own woolly world-view is just as true as any other religion, has weeded out the kind of Pagan practices that they come to India for. If there is a part of the world left where the gurus can continue their traditions, it is because Hindus have fought. It is a non-violent part of the same martial tradition, that today Hindus are asserting themselves in Ayodhya."

"The Bhagalpur riot of 1989, one of the biggest massacres in India since Partition, provides a case study in manipulation at the source, viz. the politically appointed official enquiry committee. The one-man commission consisting of Justice R.N.Prasad was not finding a BJP or otherwise "Hindu communalist" hand behind the riots, so the Stte Government of Bihar led by Laloo Prasad Yadav expanded the commission to three members. The two new members then duly made the required "discoveries" and brought out another report..., finding the BJP guilty... The Bhagalpur riot took a terrible toll among Muslims, which the fact that the Muslims started the violence in the first place cannot justify; nevertheless, Bhagalpur still has a large Muslim population, and Bangladeshi infiltrators still consider it safe enough to settle there in their thousands. In fact, the migration figures are the best refutation of the "Hindu bully, Muslim victim" myth: as against the constant trickle of Hindu refugees out of Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is no Muslim flight out of India, but on the contrary a massive Muslim influx into India."

"The fact that Hindu temple materials have been used in the Babri Masjid is not an unusual feature requiring a special explanation; on the contrary, it was a fairly common practice meant as a visual display of the victory of Islam over infidelity. It was done in many mosques that have forcibly replaced temples, e.g. the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi , the Adhai-Din-ka-Jhonpra mosque in Ajmer, the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, or, outside India, the Jama Masjid of Damascus ... There are Hindu temple materials in mosques attributed to Babar in Sambhal and Pilakhana. Local tradition affirms that the Babri Masjids in Palam, Sonipat, Rohtak, Panipat, and Sirsa have replaced Brahminical or Jain temples. The contemporary Tarikh-i-Babari describes how Babar’s troops “demolished many Hindu temples at Chanderi” when they occupied it."

"Moreover, the Hindu case for the Rama temple has survived a 20-year-long storm of ridicule and denunciation, only to be proven right in the end. The world media and the professional India-watchers in Western universities had all the while parroted their Indian secularist contacts and ridiculed the Hindu position. As Dr. Meenakshi Jain... has documented, when the case was finally taken up by the Court of Justice, the “eminent historians” had to admit under oath that they hadn’t studied the matter, that they were not qualified, that they had not visited the site, all while they had pontificated against the old consensus that the mosque had forcibly replaced a temple. So, Hindus can now hold their head high when building the temple, while the secularists have only covered themselves with shame."

"The poison issued from the secularist intellectuals who raised a media storm against the historical consensus, the one factual certainty underlying all the political confusion...The irresponsible and downright evil campaign of history denial by the secularist opinion-makers has prolonged the Ayodhya dispute by at least a decade. Denouncing all pragmatic deals, these secular fundamentalists insisted on having it their way for the full 100%, meaning the total humiliation of the Hindus. They exercised verbal terror against Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and all politicians suspected of wanting to compromise with the Hindu movement, making them postpone the needed steps towards the solution.... For them, it was a holy war, a jihad, just as it was for their Islamist pupils and paymasters. ... So, the blood of all the people killed in Ayodhya-related riots from 1989 onwards is at least partly on their heads. The spate of violence in Gujarat in 2002, the “genocide” about which they can’t stop talking, and which was triggered by the Godhra massacre of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, may well have been a late result of their slanderous effort to identify Ayodhya with deceitful Hindu fanaticism. Those holier-than-thou secularists are not so innocent... But now, the historical evidence has definitively been verified. After every single historical and archaeological investigation had confirmed the old consensus, the secularists have now been defeated in the final test. The deceit turns out to be their own. Their lies stand exposed and recorded for all to see. Their strategy to sabotage peace and justice in Ayodhya was based on history falsification. With all the blood on their hands, they have disgraced the fair name of secularism... Ideas have consequences, and so do lies."

"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 confirmed was already well-known in 1989. The only problem was the mendacious denial of the historical facts by screaming and bullying secularists. Which, in turn, emboldened the Muslim hardliners into the most intransigent position in Court, in the political arena and on the streets. Think of the riots and the waste of energy that India could have been spared if the secularists had not obstructed the course of justice with their denial of the historical reality underlying the Ayodhya dispute. I venture to put forth the view that these secularists have blood on their hands."

"The claims she makes there about my own position are factually wrong and seem to be based on what Prof. Meenakshi Jain has aptly called "the Marxist bush telegraph". ... Ms. Nanda has described how environmentalism in India is often clothed in Hindu language and symbolism. Thus, in trying to protect trees, women tie rakhi-s, the auspicious red threads which sisters tie around their brothers' wrists on the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan, around these trees. ... And then it gets really bad: ... Let's put this in perspective. Most relevant secularist school textbooks, not only in UP, contain the highly disputable claim that Islam stands for "social equality", but we are asked to feel scandalized that a similar claim is made for Hinduism and ecology. Christian and Muslim denominational schools which receive state funding under Art. 30 of the Constitution , mix their educational task with not just the exercise but also the propagation of religion. Yet the secularists never express any objection to this massive nationwide intrusion of religion into education at vast taxpayers' expense, not even when one of them is inflaming her audience against the participation of Hindu organizations in state-funded environmental policies."

"But the blot on the encyclopedia’s fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature.... If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn’t Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities. ..."

"The same would have counted in principle for the Ram Janmabhoomi. However, there the situation has been slightly more advanced : in 1949 it already became a Hindu temple again. And it is not the Hindus who have been demanding a hand-over, it is actually the Muslim groups like BMAC, BMMCC, IUML, Jama'at Islami. It is unbelievably arrogant that some Muslims could be against the hand-over of even one of the thousands of stolen Hindu places, and still have dared to demand the hand- over of that one mosque that they let slip through their fingers in 1949. They demand the return of 100% of the places they lost, and want to return 0% of the places they took. Who said that Islam believes in equality?"