Koenraad Elst on Leadership

"I never use the word nationalism, certainly not as a model for Hindus to adopt. Nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns. It leads to misconceptions."

"In Europe, with its centuries of struggle against Christian hegemony, nobody minds that the ruling party in Germany is called Christlich-Demokratische Union.... But in India, any hint of a "Hindu" party upholding "Hindu values" is declared intolerable by judges and journalists,-- and by the leaders of the very party concerned."

"This raises the issue of a possible settlement with the Muslims, and the terms in which such a settlement should be formulated. But note that no secularist opinion leader in India nor any Western observer has highlighted these offers, let alone given them his explicit support. Their preference is with the most obscurantist and militant tendency in the Muslim community."

"The Indian leader who came closest to implementing Mussolini's programme was Indira Gandhi with her abolition of Maharaja privileges, her nationalization of the banks, and her formally legal instauration of dictatorship in 1975... For the Fascist's daughter Sonia Manio, joining Indira Gandhi's regime must have felt like coming home except for the issue of natalism, all these points apply in ample measure to the Congress of the 1970s."

"Imagine the shrieks and howls in the secularists media in case of such a clear rejection of Islam's pretences, and you will understand why Hindu leaders shy away from it. But let then pause and think: is not braving the pandemonium of secularist indignation preferable to censoring the truth about Hindu society's mortal enemy? The European humanists who attacked the power position of Christianity, were very clear about their objective: Ecrasez l'Infame!"

"The Ayodhya conflict offers a good examples of the absurd standards applied by reporters. A Hindu sacred site, back in use as a Hindu temple after centuries of Muslim occupation, is claimed by Muslim leaders, who also insist on continuing the occupation of two other sacred sites in Mathura and Kashi . Claiming the right to occupy other communities' sacred sites: if this is not fanatical, I don't know what is. Yet, the whole world press is one the side of the Muslims, and decries a Hindu plan to build proper temple architecture on the Ram Janmabhoomi site in Ayodhya as fanatical. These are not just double standards, but inverted standards."

"The extreme ignorance and gullibility of the foreign press provides the negationists with a strategic cover. Most English-knowing Indians believe that the Western intelligentsia is more objective and competent, and they keep on believing this even in domains where the West is completely ignorant and incomponent. So the negationists feel supported in the back by an outside world which they can manipulate but which many in India still consider as a standard of truth. If the Hindu leadership had taken the trouble of studying the mental determinants of India's political configuration, it would have blown this cover away by spreading first-hand information to the foreign media, and educating them about the Stalinist-Islamic grip on the Indian establishment... And so, Western India-watchers go on licking the boots of the aggressor, and keep on twisting contemporary news in the media, and to a lesser extent even historical facts in academic publications, to the advantage of the Muslim side. They have not invented the Indian brand of negationism, but they are amplifying and fortifying it."

"But in 1989-92, that option was thwarted by the offensive of Babri ultras, and by this I don’t mean the warriors for Islam but the conformistic intellectuals shrieking and howling that the contentious building was the last bastion of “secularism”, a matter of high principle, of life and death. Under their fierce calls for “hard secularism”, no administrator dared to reduce the controversy to its true and manageable proportions anymore. Not the Congress, not the various left-populist parties, and not the BJP either. They were all paralysed and consequently bought time all while taking sides against the weaker party, the pro-temple movement with its vacillating and politically incompetent leadership."

"If half the length of the paragraph about a conference of traditional religious leaders in Mumbai is actually about "Nazi and neo-Nazi groups" , it is likewise quite fair and appropriate to question the author's motives. ...The claim about a non-monotheistic international may be embryonically correct, though it partly stems from a projection by Marxist circles of their own working-style onto other movements. ... If so, we should wish this effort at cultural decolonization all the best. ...Nothing evil has been decided or planned there, unless Ms. Nanda wants us to believe that the rejection of Christian proselytism is somehow evil. ... Those elders could have told Ms. Nanda a thing or two about the destructive role of the Bible-toting and Doomsday-predicting and Pagan-slandering missionaries in their respective societies. ...It remains a scandal that men of such merit are smeared with insinuations of Nazi links. And it will not do to plead that the explicit slander sentence: "The Elders are Nazis", is missing."