Koenraad Elst Quotes

So: as of 2011, after many decades of being the official and much-funded hypothesis, the Aryan Invasion Theory has still not been confirmed by even a single piece of archaeological evidence.

I started reading the works of Pandurang Vaman Kane, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhakumud Mookerji, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, S.L. Bhyrappa, R. Nagaswamy, Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Kapil Kapoor, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant G. Talageri, Meenakshi Jain and Sandeep Balakrishna, apart from the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. This was, of course, in addition to the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and other civilisational icons.

The RSS attitude of spurning the intellect and denouncing the intellectuals has worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy: since they left the intellectual field entirely to their enemies, the available intellectuals would not be “of any use to the nation”, meaning not sympathizing to the RSS programme. The political Hindu movement has paid a heavy price for this silly anti-intellectual prejudice.

Gandhi was one such bad parent who rewarded the ill-behaved and punished the well-behaved. He was harsh on the polemical but non-violent Swami Shraddhananda, and kind to the Swami’s murderer, about whom he stated in public: ‘Abdul Rashid is my brother.’ In settling his succession, he spurned his loyal and obedient friend Sardar Patel, and favoured the conceited and un-Gandhian Anglo-secularist Jawaharlal Nehru. His dealings with Suhrawardy were also read by the Muslim agitators as a sign of deference to Muslim aggression, an encouragement to continue on the chosen path of provocation and violence.

Pandit Lekh Ram’s Risâla-i-Jihâd was the object of a lawsuit, in which Muslims demanded that the book be banned. After several rounds in court, they lost definitively in 1896. But the matter did not end there, for Lekh Ram was murdered in March 1897. Some Muslims, including Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1838-1908, pretender to prophethood and founder of the Ahmadiya sect of Islam),16 openly applauded the murder: “Mirza Ghulam Ahmad published a tract in which he thanked God for the fulfillment of his prophecy that Lekh Ram would die a violent death. … Individuals reported receiving threatening letters, and mysterious notices appeared on the wall throughout the province. ‘All Hindus are warned to remember the Islamic prophets and believe in them; otherwise they will be murdered like Lekh Ram.

V.D. Savarkar disagreed with those Hindus who expected much from the recognition of the common origin of Hindus and Indian Muslims: “Some well-meaning but simple-minded Hindus amuse themselves with the thought … that inasmuch as the majority of Indian Moslems also are in fact allied to us by race and language … they could easily be persuaded to acknowledge this homogeneity and even blood relation with the Hindus and merge themselves into a common National Being if but we only remind them of these affinities and appeal to them in their name. … As if the Moslems do not know it all!! The fact is that the Moslems know of these affinities all but too well: the only difference [is] that while the Hindus love these affinities which bind the Hindu to a Hindu…—the Moslems hate the very mention of them and are trying to eradicate the very memory of it all.

But foreign should not be defined in geographical terms. Then it would have no meaning except territorial or tribal patriotism. To me that alone is foreign which is foreign to truth, foreign to Atman.

politicized character of Hindutva-watching leads to unabashed manipulations of the semantics of established terminology.

Pre-Islamic India was renowned for its universities. Great centres of learning like Nalanda, Vaishali, Sarnath, Vikramashila, Takshashila and many more—they attracted students from all over Asia and the world. Following the Islamic invasion of India, all these universities were destroyed. In the centuries following, not a single university was established by any Muslim ruler. This was a Dark Age darker than the one that overtook Europe.”294

It is right to look for someone’s “real” intentions after his ostensible intentions have been shown to be incompatible with the actual data of his situation and behaviour. But simply disregarding his explicit reasons so as to impose your own alternative explanation without giving him a fair hearing is not acceptable.

There is no doubt in my mind that in the majority of quarrels the Hindus come out second best. But my own experience confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward. I have noticed this in railway trains, on public roads, and in the quarrels which I had the privilege of settling. Need the Hindu blame the Mussalman for his cowardice? Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies. ‘They say that in Saharanpur the Mussalmans looted houses, broke open safes and, in one case, a Hindu woman’s modesty was outraged. Whose fault was this? Mussalmans can offer no defence for the execrable conduct, it is true. But I, as a Hindu, am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice than I am angry at the Mussalman bullying. Why did not the owners of the houses looted die in the attempt to defend their possessions? Where were the relatives of the outraged sister at the time of the outrage? Have they no account to render of themselves? My non-violence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice.’10

Nathuram’s reply was: ‘Please, see to it that mercy is not imposed on me. I want to show that through me, Gandhiji’s non-violence is being hanged.’ Taken aback by this reply, Ambedkar, who had never thought highly of Gandhiji’s eccentric ideas, actually praised Godse.

The one difference between Godse and the so-called secularists in India is that Godse swore by genuinely secular and democratic principles, so that ‘all Indians should enjoy equal rights and complete equality on the basis of democracy’ and no special privileges on the basis of communal identity, such as weightage in parliamentary representation for the Muslims.

the conservative Ulema opposed the Pakistan project (because they aimed at controlling the whole rather than a part of India) but supported most other communal demands of the League, thus strengthening further the communal outlook which underlay the Pakistan demand. Welcomed by the Congress as ‘nationalist Muslims’, they helped Gandhi and Nehru in suppressing all articulate Hindu voices in the Congress.

Aurobindo had no patience with such contrived views. Strength and other martial virtues are by no means un-Hindu and borrowings from the colonial scale of values. It is precisely the colonial view that Hindus are effeminate, passive bystanders when their country was overrun by one invader after another, naturally meek people who stand in need of the virile leadership of the colonizer. The straight fact is that India’s history is replete with martial feats and heroism as much as Britain’s is, and that Hindu literature, likewise, glorifies bravery and victory.

Ambedkar envisaged Partition as a complete territorial separation of Hindus and Muslims, implying an exchange of population between truncated India and Pakistan. He had worked this out in detail, with blueprints for the transfer of pension rights and property rights. It is quite likely that the implementation of his plan for an orderly division, with an orderly exchange of population, would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By contrast, Gandhi’s and Nehru’s refusal of this exchange, effectively sacrificing the Hindus in Pakistan to the dogma of Hindu-Muslim unity, made them responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

preparedness to fight the aggressor generally prevents violence; and that even if the violence cannot be avoided, it is at least better to defend yourself than to surrender to aggression.

No Muslim leader is known to have explicitly accepted the prospect of a purely democratic polity in a united India without any special privileges for the Muslims.

When Pakistan reciprocated Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s peacenik bus trip to Lahore with a military invasion of the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir in 1999, the Indian Army was not allowed to cross the Line of Control and strike at the invaders’ bases and supply lines in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This raised the death toll among Indian soldiers, the typical Gandhian price for a pose of saintliness,

In Nehruvian ‘secularism’, superficiality of thought is compensated for by thoroughness in dishonesty.

Even at a distance of decades, people invoking Gandhi’s name still evade the hard questions raised by Godse in his speech.

The burden of proof definitely lies with those who persist in repeating the rumour, and until they discharge it, we must hold them guilty of slander.

The personal practice of virtues was always deemed different from the hard action that politics sometimes necessitates.