India Quotes - page 63
But the viewers were not told where Romila Thapar stands, they were led to believe that this was a neutral observer who had been asked for an objective explanation. The same thing has happened a number of times in both Time Magazine and Newsweek: Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar and their comrades get quoted as if they are non-partisan authorities. Though anti-Communist in their general reporting, when it comes to India, these papers (unknowingly?) present the Marxists' viewpoint as objective in-depth background information.
Koenraad Elst
Father Hermanns is particularly angry with a publication titled The Adivasis - So-Called by G.S. Ghurye, the great social scientist who had mapped the nasal indexes and skull indexes of all the communities in India. Speaking with authority, Ghurye rejects the motivated notion of "adivasi”: as the article's title eloquently says, the so-called adivasis are not more adivasi than the targeted non- adivasis. Nearly all Indians are sons of the soil, and no one in India has any more right to call himself a true native than the next man. The pure race is a myth, a myth that has become frowned upon thanks to Hitler's terrible use of this myth. But in India, inter- ested quarters continue to use this myth of "racial integrity”. Father Hermanns calls it an "aboriginal claim”, though it is in fact a West- ern notion attributed and taught to the tribals by the missionaries, because this myth has been serving them so well for over a century now.
Koenraad Elst
So, every decade the Muslim percentage in the Subcontinent increases by more than 1%, with the rate of increase itself increasing. In India, the rate of increase in the Muslim percentage is considerable, though lower than the subcontinental total, but is rising faster due to the differential in the use of birth control and the increasing Muslim immigration. In Hindutva circles, this remarkable demographic differential is interpreted as the result of Muslim "demographic aggression".
Koenraad Elst
The balance-sheet is that some branches of the IE family have no memory of any migration, some have vague memories of their own immigration into their historical habitat, the Iranian branch has a distinct memory of migration from India to Iran, and only the Indian branch has a record of emigration of others from its own habitat.
Koenraad Elst
Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves "secularists”. Check the editorials of Syed Shahabuddin's monthly Muslim India, or the Jamaat-i-Islami weekly Radiance: they brandish "secularism” in every issue... Other Milli (i.e. of the Muslim nation) resolutions include a call for separate electorates (MPs elected by joint electorates are denounced as "lackeys of the Hindus”) and the creation of autonomous states in Muslim-majority areas.
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
One of the most painful aspects of Muslim demographic warfare is the open attempt by Muslims to grab non-Muslim girls to use them for their own demographic ambitions, meanwhile also inflicting a good dose of humiliation on the accursed kafirs. In Bangladesh and in Muslim-majority areas inside India, this often takes the form of simply kidnapping girls, or of threatening their families to marry them out to Muslims. In the open market-place of the West and of westernized circles in India, it takes the form of normal courtship, with the limitation that in case of a Muslim girl befriending a non-Muslim, family pressure is used on her, or physical threats on him or on both, to stop the affair; since the same is much less likely to happen in the reverse case, the net result is a considerable traffic of non-Muslim girls into Muslim households.
Koenraad Elst
The debate on the Aryan Invasion Theory is not logically affected by the political motives of its participants, though these motives are sometimes palpable through the rhetoric used. Mapping these motives as a matter of history of ideas (and not as a way to decide the AIT question itself by means of political association) allows us to point out the following: on the pro-AIT side, justification of European colonialism, illustration of the racist worldview, delegitimation of Hinduism as India's native religion by missionaries of foreign religions, Indian Marxist attempts to delegitimize Indian nationalism, and several separatisms in India seeking to bolster the case against Indian unity; and on the anti-AIT side, Indian nationalism seeking to make India's civilisational unity more robust, and to score a point against the aforementioned "anti-national forces”.
Koenraad Elst
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
These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the "facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities...
Koenraad Elst
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 (or inter-communal negotiations, or a political settlement) 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.
Koenraad Elst
But he does mention the legend of Manu Vaivasvata saving his company from the flood and sailing up the rivers of India to settle high and dry in Saptasindhu. Clearly, the origins of Vedic civilization are related to the post-Glacial flood, probably the single biggest migration trigger in human history.
Koenraad Elst
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 (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003). 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.
Koenraad Elst
Perhaps he doesn't realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically "intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as "Hindu communalist propaganda”.
Koenraad Elst
These riot vultures do a lot of damage to India, among other reasons because they are so eagerly believed abroad.... Since approximately the Stone Age, Engineer has been travelling to riot spots in India (butchering of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh somehow doesn't interest him as much) with prefabricated riot reports invariably showing the same ingredients: Hindu pre-planning, Muslim victimhood, anti-Muslim complicity of the police and some local politicians. With the "facts” of the matter fixed beforehand, the main purpose of his visits is to note down some local names in order to give his reports more credibility. ... Undeniably, Asghar Ali Engineer remains a formidable master of disinformation. This makes him an excellent representative of Indian secularism and of the anti-temple campaign in particular.
Koenraad Elst
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.
Koenraad Elst
Recently, China has rediscovered its identity, witness the numerous Confucius Institutes. China has less complexes about its identity than India, which wouldn't dream of naming its cultural representation after one of its ancient sages. At the same time, it has a far more historical view of decolonization: somehow there are no Chinese intellectuals imagining that the colonial Opium Wars are still going on.
Koenraad Elst
Unfortunately for all of them, the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) and the Allahabad High Court (2010) reconfirmed the old consensus: of course, a Hindu temple had stood at the site and had been forced to make way for the mosque. So, all these Leftist efforts to impose a rewritten version of history had been in vain. Moreover, in her recent book Rama and Ayodhya, Meenakshi Jain has documented what a sorry figure these supposed "experts” have cut when they were questioned in court during the Ayodhya proceedings. One after another was forced to admit that he didn't really know, that he hadn't been to the site though pontificating on its archaeology, that is was all just a hypothesis. So, those were the people who had been cited as authority by all the politicians, journalists and India-watchers. If the truth of their politically motivated deception is given proper publicity, their game will be over. (Ch. 16)
Koenraad Elst
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!” (Ch 18)
Koenraad Elst
This way, Godse (born 1910) exacted ‘punishment' for Gandhi's alleged pro-Muslim policies. These were particularly his acceptance in June 1947 of the plan to partition India into a secular state, retaining the name India and a Muslim state called Pakistan; and more immediately his fast, earlier in January 1948, on behalf of the safety of the Delhi Muslims threatened by angry Hindu refugees pouring in from Pakistan, and in support of Pakistan's demand that India pay them ₹550 million as their share from the treasury of British India. Under protest, the Indian Government had given in to the latter demand because of Gandhi's pressure, and in spite of the presence of Pakistani invasion troops on Indian territory in Kashmir. Surely this was the first time in history that a country deliberately financed its battlefield opponent, and not everyone was pleased with this display of Gandhian values.
Koenraad Elst
When Europeans first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is described in scripture... Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists... Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that accompanied their Christianization. (Ch. 30)
Koenraad Elst
