Koenraad Elst on Life

"People have to make choices in life, and in their decisions there will always be a dark side available for foul mouths to pick on."

"But the solution is not to “get around these stubborn, disturbing facts” of astronomy by smugly dismissing them as testimonia non grata. Nor to declare dogmatically that “we know that it can't be correct”."

"The negationist stand against the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple was an extreme example of how the Humanities often serve to provide a scholarly veneer to theses that arise purely from political motives."

"The site is venerated as Ram’s birthplace, and therefore deserves protection by a state that calls itself secular, not because something happened there hundreds of years ago, but because this belief is alive right now."

"The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history."

"As recently also pointed out by Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara and Mr. Rajiv Malhotra, Western Hinduism experts are, with only little hyperbole, the only academic specialists who actively work for their own field of study to die."

"To sum up, the presently-discussed thesis by Audrey Truschke comes to add to the numbers of what formally look like studies in history, but effectively are meant as strikes in the ongoing battle against self-respecting Hinduism."

"In writing about India, it is all too common to starkly ignore the Hindu voice. .... The only Hinduism which they like is museum Hinduism; any Hinduism that displays a will to survive is treated with the same horror that would be aroused if a mummy were to show signs of life."

"The atmosphere at the conference was frankly hostile. It was up to people from the audience to protest and oblige the chairperson to allow me to read out my paper. When it was my turn, I was heckled somewhat by the Leftist crowd, especially by a well-known Indo-American Communist academic, who was rolling his eyes like a madman and making obscene gestures until an elderly American lady sitting next to him told him to behave. At the end, Mathew came to collect a copy of my text , called me a "liar, and told his buddies that they needed to write a scholarly rebuttal. Which is still being awaited today."

"After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken... In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy-land where hard facts don’t count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science."

"Certain scholars are just too attached to the stigmatizing power of the term 'racism' to drop it when it proves inaccurate. Confusing scholarship with a political crusade, they openly announce that they will go on using the term even when they themselves realize it is inaccurate... In serious discipline, such unabashed subordination of scholarly standards... to a political agenda would simply disqualify Chakrabarty as a scholar, but in Hindutva studies, his attitude is the rule rather than the exception."

"When we compare the literature on the Shoah, the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis, with that on the mass killing of Hindus during and after the Partition of India, we find that the former is of immense magnitude, filling while libraries at specialized institutes, the latter quite the opposite. ... By contrast, literature on Partition is marginal and can hardly fill a single bookshelf. Scholarly studies on the genocidal waves characterising the unequal coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal are extremely few, as are those on the Partition massacres in Punjab in 1947."

"This was reckless, for if the political choice for the preservation of the mosque were based on the historical non-existence of the medieval temple at the site, then the eventual discovery of such a temple would justify a contrario the replacement of the mosque with a restored temple. At least in theory, but the Marxists were confident that their opponents would never get the chance to press this point. Under the prevailing power equation, they expected to get away with a plain denial of history rather than a mere insistence on divorcing history from politics."

"This refusal to distinguish between the stealing of a sculpture and the attempt to finish off a religion is typical of the wilful superficiality and studied silliness that constitutes so much of Indian secularist discourse. Till today, Hindu-Muslim riots are typically started by Muslims. If Hindus restrain themselves, the riot remains small and is not reported in the international media. Only if Hindus mobilize does it become a newsworthy riot, and those are the cases where the victims on the Muslim side can be numerous. This way, a false impression is created of Muslims living in constant persecution by an overbearing Hindu majority. A proper perspective is given by comparing with the situation in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where all Hindu-Muslim violence without exception has Muslims as perpetrators and Hindus as victims, because the fearful Hindu minority wouldn’t dare to act against the Muslims, not even in retaliation. Moreover, for every instance of violent Hindu reaction in India, there are a dozen where the Hindus control their anger."

"Similar is also the way the French-speaking Belgians and the Indian Muslims have managed to confirm their privileges through legislation and the creation of institutions. Thus, the bolts in the Belgian Constitution to “protect” the numerical minority and prevent the majority from ever acting like a majority, or the notion of “secularism” and the Article 30 protecting only minority institutions in the Indian Constitution. For the majority, there are institutions rewarding pro-minority opinions, such as the King Baudouin Foundation c.q. the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.... A difference is of course the nature of the opponent:... Islam is intrinsically anti-Pagan and hence anti-Hindu. The Indian Muslims have killed a few million Hindus within living memory, whereas the occasion when the French killed a handful of Flemish lies centuries in the past. Or to revert that: the Hindus are being tested a lot harder than the Flemish for their patience with the other community."

"To be sure, the usual suspects are bound to oppose this civilizational viewpoint. With their studied superficiality, the secularists view India as a hodge-podge of “communities”, of which a very recent one, concocted by the “Orientalists”, is Hinduism. Just as I finish this article, my attention is drawn to a French magazine celebrating the appointment of an Indian secularist historian to the Collège de France with an interview. There, he speaks out against the very notion of a Hindu civilization. The whole is not real, only the fragments are. The notion of an over-arching civilizational unity and long-term continuity may be obvious in China, and get applause there, but in India it is “communal!"