Koenraad Elst on Knowledge

"This new Marxist line of anti-Hindu argument deserves closer scrutiny as a case study into the power of tenacious manipulation in influencing public discourse."

"There, in Europe, we really have an invasion of Aryans moving in from the east. And now that we know what a real Aryan invasion looks like, we note that it is completely missing in India."

"Prof. Asko Parpola's well-known decipherment of the Indus script as proto-Dravidian doesn't prove its own starting-point, and may turn out to be no more than an imaginative though admittedly masterly groping in the dark."

"As a general rule, you can predict what the secularist position on any issue will be once you know what the militant Islamist position is. From justifying terrorism to misrepresenting the Ayodhya evidence, the two are rarely very different."

"In the Hindu sphere of influence, by contrast, this kind of sobriety and intellectual discipline is the exception rather than the rule. Serious integrated teaching of Vedic tradition is as yet available only on the margin, as in the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam."

"As the Chinese philosopher Confucius has pointed out, we can only begin to set the world in order, if we call things by their proper names. This whole Ayodhya problem would not have existed if secularist politicians and intellectuals had called the disputed building a non- mosque and an effective Hindu temple. Because that is what it is : a building containing idols is by definition not a mosque, and a building not used for namaz is in effect not a mosque. But a building where Hindus come to worship idols, is called a temple or Mandir... The reason why most of the common Hindus could be mobilized for the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, is not that the Hindus have become so fanatical. On the contrary, it is because they perceive that the building of the Mandir and the relocating of the existing structure is a very reasonable and justifiable project. They all know that Muslim rulers have brought immense suffering over the Hindu population for destroyed, no fanatic needs to tell them that. And they have heard that the disputed place is in use as a temple since 1949, that it is functionally not a mosque at all, so the rule that any other community's place of worship should be respected just doesn't apply. They do not see why anyone should object to their replacing the existing structure with proper Hindu temple architecture. They consider it an entirely internal affair of the Hindu community, and they perceive the attempts to stop them as yet another aggression against Hinduism by its enemies."

"This effort is shared with other Indian intellectuals, e.g. with Claude Alvares who shows how “attempts were made to destroy non-Western technologies”, and until recently if not today, “even the idea that other cultures may have had thriving technologies was calculatingly destroyed."

"Given the widely acknowledged importance of the Ayodhya conflict, one would have expected at least some of the well-funded Western academics to embark on their own investigation of the issue rather than parroting the slogans emanating from Delhi’s Jama Masjid and JNU. Their behaviour in the Ayodhya debate provides an interesting case study in the tendency of establishment institutions and settled academics to genuflect before ideological authorities overruling proper scholarly procedure in favour of the political fashion of the day."

"The notion that the Aryans had come from outside was unknown to the indigenous oral and scriptural traditions, and no traces of any foreign memories have been found in spite of a determined search. At the textual level too, the much-sought-for evidence of any Aryan invasion remains unfindable."

"If we want to know about Hindu nationalist involvement in the Aryan invasion debate, the Indian Marxist school and its Western spokesmen cannot help us. Their treatment of the topic is typically shrill in language and unconcerned about concealing their bias. Even when kept scholarly in tone, it is invariably very poor on primary data."

"The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. That, at least, seems to be a fair description of learned publications advertising themselves as “objective” studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties."

"It is when I loot at Catholicism in India that I start to understand the sharp aversion of many non-Catholics and ex-Catholics. This is still the militant Church of old, arrogant and aggressive. One such show of arrogance and aggression is the Church's media campaign to blacken any Hindu assertiveness, including attempts to brand Hindutva organizations as "fascist."

"The findings have uncovered the material remains of historical facts, and these facts were public knowledge for centuries, viz. that a Hindu temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque. Before and after 1989, the Hindu nationalists have simply stood by this public knowledge, while the secularist lobby led the Muslims into disbelieving their own chronicles and denying the facts."

"I was scheduled to do a debate with Prof. Chetan Bhatt.... But when he heard that the other panellist would be me, a known critic of the whole notion of secularism, he told the organizers that something had come up and he couldn't be there. ... how scared the secularists must be of facing an actual dissident. Perhaps it is that decades of unchallenged hegemony have made them weak."

"Perhaps Sinha’s allegations of “fabrication” are a projection of his very own conduct?... So, Rajesh Sinha, well on his way to becoming an “eminent historian”, is wrong. I don’t know whether he is deluded or deliberately lying, both are ailments common among his tribe.... So let us finally bypass all the querulous claims by our zealous secularist and see for ourselves what Ibn Battuta himself says."

"Intellectually, these Nehruvian historians and pressmen stand thoroughly discredited. But they have power positions in the media and in the education and research establishments, so they still manage to black out criticism and alternative opinions.... They know they have been beaten at the intellectual level, but they use their power over the public arena to ensure that these challengers remain in the margins."

"If ever the need arises, I will not have much difficulty in proving that 'Indian Marxists captured the institutes of learning' , that they 'enjoy the support of academics in the West', and that a great many among the latter are 'fed with falsehoods' . It is also a matter of common knowledge as well as personal experience that both groups are trying to shut off any voices deemed pro-Hindu... from many public forums."

"The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. How else should we call the practice of seemingly learned publications advertising themselves as "objective" studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties? ... The VHP scholars have pointed out 4 cases of attempted fraud by their opponents ."

"Indians in Southeast-Asia were never known as 'Hindu', but the Arabs, Turks, Mongolians and other northern and western foreigners adopted the Persian name as their own word for 'India' and 'Indians', e.g. Arabic Hind, Turkish Hindistan. Xuan Zang ... notes in so many words that the name Xin-du 1 or, as he corrects it, Yin-du, is used outside India but is unknown within the country, because the natives call it Aryadesh or Brahmarashtra."

"My job was not to survey other people's opinions about the Hindu movement. That would have been an interesting exercise, especially if it is called by its name, viz. a survey of outsider opinions, and not falsely presented as a study of the Hindu movement itself. By contrast, I endeavoured to get beyond the secondary--source and mainly hostile-source "research" that has so disastrously filled up this field of study, and focus on the primary sources instead."

"For South Asia, the authors’ data, based on many surveys and sources beside the official census reports, confirm the picture given by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj in their detailed study Religious Demography of India . In every state in India without exception, including the economically and educationally most advanced, the Muslim growth rate is far above replacement level and far above the figures for the Hindu majority and for other minorities."

"We have to agree that it is a type of nationalism, though as such it really is only the most conspicuous tendency within a broader movement vaguely known as Hindu revivalism. Some Hindu thinkers usually classified with Hindu nationalism, such as Ram Swarup and Girilal Jain, explicitly questioned nationalism as the right paradigm for the concerns of Hinduism in the 20th century. ... Hindu nationalism entirely falls outside the category vaguely designated as "authoritarian nationalism."

"We don’t get to see that clear contrast between Harappan and Vedic which most scholars have taken for granted. What we see is on the one hand plenty of elements which are simply in common between the Vedic and Harappan cultures, and on the other certain late-Vedic innovations which constitute a departure from the common IE heritage but which are perfectly explainable through internal developments, particularly in proto-scientific knowledge and material control of the environment.... this continuity may also be symptomatic for a profounder continuity pertaining to fundamental cultural traits."

"Macaulay's policy was implemented and became a resounding success. The pre-Macaulayan vernacular system of education was destroyed, even though British surveys had found it more effective and more democratic than the then-existing education system in Britain. The rivalling educationist party, the so-called Orientalists, had proposed a Sanskrit-based system of education, in which Indian graduates would not have been as estranged from their mother civilization as they became through English education, and in which they could have selectively adopted the useful elements of Western modernity, more or less the way Japan modernized itself."

"While there is solid evidence that the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, rubble of which was used in the Masjid’s construction, this fact has been denounced as “Hindu chauvinist propaganda”, and an entirely fictional claim was upheld that the Masjid had been built on an uncontroversial site, so that there was of course no trace of evidence for a preceding temple demolition. Indian Marxists could reasonably have taken the position that while the temple demolition was a historical fact, this was no reason for a counter-demolition today. However, inebriated by their power position, they went farther and denied the temple destruction altogether, against the evidence, thinking they could get away with it. As usual, they could count on their Western contacts to cover them: to my knowledge, not a single Western academic has critically examined the Indian Marxist claim that the historical temple demolition at the Babri Masjid site was Hindu chauvinist fiction. All of those who have actually written about the Ayodhya affair, have acted as amplifiers to the Indian Marxist propaganda, explicitly or implicitly defaming those Indian colleagues who stuck to the evidence that a Hindu temple at the controversial site had indeed been destroyed."

"The shift from India to Europe as the preferred Urheimat was formally due to new linguistic insights.. but it was coincidentally also well-tuned to new political concerns. Apart from rising nationalism which explains the scramble among scholars to grab the Urheimat status for their own country, the main factor was European colonialism, then at its apogee. It seemed natural that the continent whose manifest destiny was the domination of the world, had also brought forth its own proto-historic Indo-European culture and language. Conversely, it seemed illogical that a backward country like India, badly in need of the White Man's civilising mission, could have brought forth the superior European culture.... In the same period, race theories conquered the intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark-haired Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned Indians. The linguistic "aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for."

"One of the more disturbing and sterile approaches which Hansen has borrowed from his secularist sources, is the tendency to psychologize, and to bury hard facts under a cloud of psychobabble: "construct", "identities built around a threatening other", "domesticating public spaces", "myth of Hindu effeminacy".... The book contains some of the familiar tricks known from the M.J. Akbar school of Hindutva‑smearing, e.g. just as MJ Akbar once cleverly described Veer Savarkar as "a co-accused in the Mahatma murder trial" without mentioning that Savarkar was fully acquitted and not even indicted again in the appeals trial, we find Prof. Hansen casting suspicion on L.K. Advani by describing him as "indicted in a massive corruption scandal in 1996" without mentioning that the investigation cleared him completely of the charges ."

"As a political framework, secularism requires that all citizens are equal before the law regardless of their religious affiliation. That is a definitional minimum. An Indian secularist would therefore first of all be found on the barricades in the struggle for a common civil code, against the existing legal apartheid between Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. But the only major party to demand the enactment of a common civil code, as mandated by the Constitution, happens to be the BJP. On election eve, the others run to the Shahi Imam to pledge their firm commitment to the preservation of the Shari'a for Muslims. In the West and in the Muslim world, the upholding of religion-based communal legislation is rightly called anti-secularist. I have often discussed this point with Indian secularists. Their usual argument is that, you see, India is a peculiar case, the uniform civil code issue has been "hijacked" by the Hindus, and for now the country needs these separate civil codes. I am not convinced, but even if we concede that India is better off with the present system, that still doesn't make it secular. The opponents of the common civil code, the upholders of discrimination against the Hindus in education and temple management, the defenders of a special status for states with non-Hindu majorities -- they should have the courage of their conviction and call themselves "anti-secular."

"The above are cases where the attempts to suppress evidence have failed. It is quite probable that other attempts have succeeded. There may well be documents containing pertinent information, particularly about the site’s history during the Sultanate period , which have escaped the notice of Prof. Harsh Narain because they had been removed in time from the places where they could normally be found. Such documents would mostly be in Persian and available only in the libraries of Muslim institutions. In some of these, Prof. Harsh Narain has effectively been denied access as soon as his involvement in the Ayodhya argument became known. How many pieces of pertinent material have been concealed, removed, destroyed or altered is anybody’s guess."

"I am aware that the following verdict is extremely unpopular among both politicians and intellectuals, but they should learn to face facts at last. The division of guilt for India's Hindu-Muslim conflict is extremely uneven. Hinduism may be guilty of social inequality, superstition and other evils, but intolerance of differences in religion is not one of them. It is unambiguously Islam which has brought religious persecution to India. It is Islam and Islam alone which has caused the Hindu-Muslim conflict with its many millions of mortal victims. Even when individual Hindus strike at Muslims... they are merely playing a part in a drama which Islam alone has inflicted on India..."