Koenraad Elst quotes - page 9
![The official guru of the RSS is the Saffron flag [...] "it represents the tradition and history of the Hindus"[...] The flag's saffron colour evokes fire, the medium of sacrifice, and thereby encapsulates the whole Vedic religion. (Koenraad Elst)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/02/koenraad-elst-colour-fire-1005702.webp)
Where words lose their meaning, people are about to lose their freedom...By this standard, India is in some real danger, for the elite does use some Newspeak frequently... Thus demanding a Civil Code common to all citizens... counts as anti-secular... When Kashmiri Hindus have to flee their homes after reading open threats in the Urdu papers and seeing relatives butchered, they are called "migrants"; but when Bangladeshi Muslims terrorize their Hindu neighbours and then migrate from their Islamic state to India in search of job opportunities, they are called "refugees". This type of inversion of word meanings is part of a wider mind-set of mendaciousness expressed through more ordinary lies, often of breathtaking effrontery. Thus only in the Orwellian world of Indian secularism is it possible to denounce as "vicious hate propaganda" the VHP's factual observation that the Christian missionaries aim for the complete conversion of India...
Koenraad Elst
Numerous Hindus have been killed by Christian separatists in Nagaland and Mizoram, while the outside world believes that it is the meek Christians who are threatened and persecuted in India by the ugly fanatical Hindus because all the media coverage has been given to the killing of a few Christians in Orissa.
Koenraad Elst
Considering that blood is a priceless influencer of people's sympathies, riot reporting is a favourite hunting ground for aspiring moulders of public opinion. ... the English-language papers which determine the international impression of India's communal situation have specialized in the anti-Hindu variety, at least in the 1980s and early 90s.
Koenraad Elst
So, the missionaries' rendering of the alleged RSS view of history is hardly incriminating, except that their own whitewash of these violent invasions incriminates them as moral accomplices to aggression and war crimes... the whole "glaring parallel" exists onnly in the eye of the missionary beholder.
Koenraad Elst
It is in this context that in 1940, Savarkar launched his slogan: "Hinduize all politics, militarize Hindudom.” This slogan is nowadays often quoted out of context to impute to Savarkar a fascist-like fascination with "war for war's sake”. But it meant nothing of the kind. He wanted Hindus to get military experience for a specific purpose, viz. that after the war, England would find a vast number of combat-ready Indian troops before her...
Koenraad Elst
Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship. With academic, institutional and media power, a new academic-journalistic consensus has been manufactured denying the well-established history of temple demolition by Islamic iconoclasm to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site; at least among people with prestige and influence but no firsthand knowledge of the issue. But the facts will remain the facts, and their ongoing suppression is bound to give way as new generations of scholars take a fresh look at the data.
Koenraad Elst
A good side-effect of the Ayodhya dispute has been the increased awareness about the ongoing debate over Indian history-writing. The "eminent historians” have been complaining that the writers of evidence-based history are polluting the stream of history scholarship. Those who are too remote from the available sources or not intellectually equipped or simply too lazy to verify these claims may well be taken in by this allegation. Those who care to inquire, however, are bound to find that it the other way around: it is the "eminent historians” who have polluted the channels of history teaching with their systematic distortions.
Koenraad Elst
At any rate, the BMAC's frontal display of contempt for logic and rational method has not pitted any secularist against the BMAC position. For them no allegations of replacing historical knowledge with myth or "faith”; which adds further illustration to our view that the whole rhetoric of historicity vs. faith was never anything else than a dispersionary tactic to put the Hindus on the defensive.
Koenraad Elst
Tellingly, they do not mention the outcome of the debate, but reiterate the ludicrous demand they made while attending the debate as BMAC advocates, viz. that they be considered "independent historians” qualified to pronounce scientific judgment in a debate between their employers and their enemies... Of course, the government representative dismissed this demand as ridiculous. Yet, the BMAC has continued to call them "the independent historians”, and they themselves have continued to demand that the VHP submit its case to "independent arbitration”, i.e. by their own kind. These two telling details of the Ayodhya debate story have, of course, been withheld from the reader in the booklet published by the BMAC team, and in all subsequent publications by the anti-temple party.
Koenraad Elst
The physical danger in writing against the temple is imaginary; by contrast, it is dangerous to uphold rather than oppose Hindu activist positions. It is a fact that throughout the 1990s, many office-bearers of the RSS, the BJP and their Tamil affiliate Hindu Munnani have been murdered; but that was more because of the demolition and other political matters than because of any statements on the historical background of the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. At one point, the publishinghouse Voice of India, which has published the Vishva Hindu Parishad's statement and several other writings on the Ayodhya evidence, has had to seek police protection for a few days, but the threats had to do with "insults to the Prophet” and not with the Ayodhya evidence.
Koenraad Elst
Of course, this collection of contemporary, often politically motivated articles and statements does not have any proof value. At best, some of the names under the articles could constitute an "argument of authority”, but even that is diluted by their juxtaposition with political agitators and plain cranks. More than an argumentation, this presentation of many conflicting opinions is a dispersionary tactic to keep the opposing party busy with refuting the weirdest viewpoints.
Koenraad Elst
The political equation behind all this intrigue is rarely understood by non-Indians. Thus, it requires quite a historical excursus to explain why declared Marxists like Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar are making common cause with Islamic fundamentalism in its struggle against Hindu pluralism.
Koenraad Elst
It may be remarked here in passing that Prof. Thapar also demonstrates her very weak grip on religious issues with her little excursus on the occasional Muslim interpretation (rendered more plausible by the imprecision of the Arabic script in transcribing Indian words) of Somanâtha as "Somanât”, and hence of the temple as a place where the Arabian Goddess Manât was worshipped. In spite of her own position, she actually hits the nail on the head in her rendering of what she describes as Turco-Persian myth-making: "The link with Manat added to the acclaim for Mahmud. Not only was he the prize iconoclast in breaking Hindu idols, but in destroying Manat he had carried out what were said to be the very orders of the Prophet.”.
Koenraad Elst
Irfan Habib is also counting on the readers' forgetfulness concerning one of the central findings in the ASI report: there was a very large temple, the foundations of which far exceed the circumference of the Babri mosque. He wants us to believe that the pillar-bases were actually the floor of the Babri Masjid, but a large part of the foundations was located outside the confines of the mosque and hence cannot possibly be confused with the mosque floor, except by a highly prejudiced mind.
Koenraad Elst
