Koenraad Elst Quotes (1959-)

“Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”.”

“Still, the deliberate effort to lure people away from their ancestral religion is perhaps nowhere as serious in magnitude as in India, partly because the country puts no substantial hurdles in the way of internal and foreign missionaries, as opposed to most of its neighbours.”

“The Indian constitution and legislation are a major cause of religious tension precisely because they contain serious discriminations on the basis of religion.”

“But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden." Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy. (...)”

“For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history.”

“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.”

“So instead, she explained that the Hindu Right only wanted “formal equality” (understood as “justice to all, appeasement of none”) while the rest wanted “substantive equality”, a position she found far more sophisticated and just. But any law scholar would understand that the law is precisely about “formal” equality. In the real world, one man is rich and another poor, one is talented and another dumb, etc.; but at least in law, they are equal. The law cannot neutralize the inequalities given to men by nature; but the least it can do, is to make men at least “formally” equal. And that is the case in a Common Civil Code, which the BJP advocates and which she therefore considered a “threat to India’s secularism”. [...]”

“So let's get back to the more eventful Hindu-Muslim relationship. Having discussed the phenomena of street riots and mass terrorism sufficiently for now, let us focus on a third form of communal violence: targeted killings of specified individuals. Like with terrorism, the vast majority of victims in this category of violence have been Hindus. In the months and years after the Mumbai riots of January 1993, a number of Maharashtrian politicians belonging to the BJP and the Shiv Sena have been murdered, mostly by assailants who were never apprehended. In Kerala in the 1990s, dozens of ordinary Hindutva activists have been murdered by the Communists, the dominant party in that state. When I visited the Hindu Munnani office in Chennai in 1996, the building was really impressive, having just been rebuilt and redesigned after a bomb blast. Shortly after, it was destroyed once more in another bomb blast. In this series of attacks on the Hindu Munnani leadership, several activists were killed. And after the Gujarat carnage, the Gujarat Home Minister, Haren Pandya, was murdered by Muslims.”

“The mechanics of the presence or absence of status is as follows: the Indian Left jealously guards its power position in academe and decides who gets status within the Humanities, or who is blacklisted and kept out. Then the politicians select their sources of authority or their interlocutors by the status they “have” (i.e. which the Left has conferred on them), which is turn enhances their status. And then the India-watching circles abroad go by the status which individuals turn out to have acquired in India, and further increase their “eminence”... The focus on status is a long-standing practice of the Indian Left, and for a good reason. As Sita Ram Goel already remarked in his anti-Communist days, the Indian Communists made sure to create status for those loyal to them.... Indeed, the fabled Hindu moneybags will rather sponsor an enemy with status than a friend without it. The BJP will rather nominate a “secularist” with status than a proven Hindu loyalist without it. So, in the case of our Communist writer, they will honour him for his status, not realizing that this status has purposely been created for him by their declared enemies. And they will shun a pro-Hindu writer because he has no status, ignoring or disregarding the fact that he has been denied any avenue that might have led to status. The last thing they think of is to make an effort and create status for people who are perceived as belonging to the Hindu camp... This was but an extreme case of a general phenomenon: papers get easy acceptance from peers if they support the dominant view, but are held to far more demanding standards if they are at odds with it. In India, just imagine what it would take for a history paper with “communal” conclusions to be accepted by a Leftist-controlled review panel...”

“In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by the missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history”

“Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”.”

“It is entirely likely that the name Hindu Kush came about as a sarcastic twist on the older name Hindu Koh, viz. on the occasion of an actual mass-killing.”

“Once I had seen through the secularists, it was only logical that I would go and make my acquaintance with the people whom they always denounced with such holy indignation. Would those ugly Hindu monsters really be all that ugly? After reading the book History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, I sought out its author, and that's how I met Sita Ram Goel. Come to mention him, I found that in moral stature and depth of scholarship, he completely dwarfed the Stalinist "eminent historians" and other icons of "secularism". Which is why I cannot help frowning when I see Meera Nanda forget her limitations and berate a towering personality like Goel.”

“The Aryan Invasion Theory, along with the concomitant racialist understanding of the caste system as a kind of Apartheid system to preserve the Aryan's racial purity, was the alpha and omega of Savitri Devi's own worldview.”

“In the long run, Ram Swarup will probably prove to have been the most influential Hindu thinker in the second half of the 20th century. He has, at any rate, been a crucial influence on most other Hindu Revivalist authors of the last two decades.”

“According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.”

“I have it on good authority that Kabir's thought is Hindu through and through. The fable that Kabir brought a synthesis between Islam and Hinduism, does not survive a comparison between his works and the Quran. That Kabir was a simple weaver who produced lofty poetry just like that, is another fable for children of socialists : Kabir was well-read and knew his classics. There are hardly any Muslims in the Kabirpanth, and it is only the Hindus who venerate him. The simplest proof that his contribution to Indian culture was un-Islamic, is that he was persecuted for his Kafir ideas by the Muslim ruler Sikandar Lodi.”

“In the case of their purely concocted grand theory of pre-Muslim persecution of Buddhism by Hindus, we see our leftist historians throw all standards of source criticism to the wind. Such is their eagerness to uphold this convenient hypothesis, and their care not to endanger what little supportive testimony there is. After all, from the millennia of pre-Muslim religious pluralism in India, there are not even five testimonies of such persecution, so these few should be scrupulously kept away from criticism....The allegation is simply repeated, and amplified, in all secularist history-books.....Incidentally, Hsuen Tsang's statement that his patron, king Harsha, worshipped both Buddha and the Hindu goods, is always carefully kept out of secularists' invocations of Hsuen Tsang's authority, as it is one more blow to the myth of Hindu-Buddhist struggle.”

“Even Pushyamitra Shunga, of whom it is unreliably said by a very non-contemporary source that he had Buddhist monks killed, allowed Buddhist universities to flourish in his kingdom. Even he is not described to have demolished temples on the occasion of his political take-over, his alleged acts of persecution are ascribed by his detractors to purely sectarian fanaticism. ... In the case of their purely concocted grand theory of pre-Muslim persecution of Buddhism by Hindus, we see our leftist historians throw all standards of source criticism to the wind. Such is their eagerness to uphold this convenient hypothesis, and their care not to endanger what little supportive testimony there is. After all, from the millennia of pre-Muslim religious pluralism in India, there are not even five testimonies of such persecution, so these few should be scrupulously kept away from criticism. Therefore, the fact that the very first testimony of Pushyamitra Shunga's alleged persecution of the Buddhists dates from three centuries after the facts, is not treated as a ground for some caution with this evidence. Nor is any alternative interpretation of his alleged behaviour (e.g. that his anger was not directed against Buddhism but against the corruption that was overtaking the monasteries) being explored, the way all kinds of mitigating explanations are invented for the Islamic crimes. The allegation is simply repeated, and amplified, in all secularist history-books.”

“Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict.”

“The RSS was not founded as a vehicle of some deep "identitarian" strategy, but as a simple vigilante group protecting Nagpur Hindus against Muslim rioters in the post-Khilafat tension.”

“Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire's enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese "religions" were not based on prophetic "revelations" but on a purely human contemplation of reality.”

“Arun Shourie was sacked as Indian Express editor, apparently under government pressure, after revealing that, in October 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh had aborted his own compromise arrangement on Ayodhya under pressure from Imam Bukhari, prominent member of the BMAC.”

“Not that an isolated occasion of saying the truth automatically leads to the disappearance of falsehood. Dharampal's famous book The Beautiful Tree completely demolished the myth that the Brahmins kept all the education for their own caste, and that Shudras were kept in darkness and illiteracy. Yet, the myth is still repeated... It is not enough to unearth the truth, it also has to be broadcast, and nobody should get away with pretending it isn't there.”

“The most recent and comprehensive update on the Aryan Invasion Theory debate is given by Koenraad Elst.”

“Elst had much better command of political and social issues in India than I ever gained, unmatched by any western writer and researched in great detail. Elst is a thorough scholar and supremely rational in all that he does. His work on the Ayodhya movement was definitive.”

“On the eve of his departure, Koenraad Elst asked me if I would publish a book on Ayodhya which he planned to write on his return to Belgium, I did not take him seriously. I did not know at that time that the thirty one years old Belgian we had met was a prodigy, and that he felt so deeply about Hindus having a good case but presenting it very badly. The script of his Ram Janmabhoomi Vs. Babri Masjid: A Case Study in Hindu Muslim Conflict, was dropped on my table by the postman exactly after a month. I could not stop after I started reading it. I took it to Ram Swarup the same evening. He read it during the night and rang me up next morning. Koenraad Elst's book, he said, should be published immediately.”

“It is difficult to take seriously an author who draw his historical evidence from newspaper reports and speak of the centuries when there were Muslim rulers in India as "a blood-soaked catastrophe".”

“Koenraad Elst, a Belgian Catholic of a radical anti-Muslim persuasion who tries to make himself useful as a 'fellow traveller' of the Hindu nationalist movement.”

“Scholar Koenraad Elst was removed from RISA (Religions in South Asia) list by Vijay Prashad and Biju Mathew, seconded by Michael Witzel and Robert Zydenbos, and Wendy Doniger who controlled RISA did not come out in his support. He observed that people who clamour loudly for “freedom of expression” are very selective in their love of freedom. (Koenraad Elst, December 2, 2014,Banning Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus”) RISA is a unit within the American Academy of Religion which was formed in 1909 as Association of Biblical Instructors for scholars of Biblical studies to stimulate scholarship and teaching in Christianity. In 1933, this was changed to National Association of Biblical Instructors, which in 1963 became American Academy of Religion.”

“Such is his importance in Hindutva circles that L.K.Advani quoted him at length while deposing before the Liberhans Commission investigation the demolition of Babri Masjid.”

“One such admirer of the Hindu nationalism who has his other foot in Flemish nationalism in his native Belgium is Koenraad Elst. Elst is a protégé and intellectual heir of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel. His interest in New Age and neo-paganism brought him to India where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hindu revivalism which was later published as a popular book, Decolonising the Hindu Mind. In this book he advocates the tough line against Islam and Christianity favoured by the Swarup-Goel school. Even as he was advocating hard line Hindutva, Elst was sympathetic to the European Right: from 1992-95 he served as the co-editor of TeKoS, the journal of the Belgian New Right. [...] Elst claims that he has rejected the new right philosophy of de Benoist even though he admits that he occasionally attends their gatherings. Be that as it may, he remains deeply involved in anti-islamic causes. He is the regular contributor to The Brussels Journal, a right wing blog which the Belgian government has repeatedly charged for fomenting racism and violence. The Journal has connections with Vlaams Belang which opposes the purported islamicisation of Europe and demands deportation of immigrants who fail to assimilate into Belgian culture. Going by his essays posted on Brussels Journal, Elst is using the writings of his VOI mentors to peddle the worst kind of islamophobia imaginable.”

“Koenraad Elst... comes across as usual: objective and blunt. It might not exactly endear the followers of Hindutva to him, but what he says is too important to be ignored. Belgian Indologist Dr Koenraad Elst is a dangerous scholar. With a cruel pleasure the establishment media and mediocre scholars bracket him with crackpots like P N Oak and zealots like N S Rajaram. Interestingly, both the establishment Hindutva side (as far as that exists) as well as the newly emerging ‘Internet’ Hindutva types are not exactly comfortable with him. Nevertheless, when the dust settles, his books will stand as invaluable testimony and source to express the Hindutva side of things in the most honest manner possible. Blunt but honest... He has razor sharp academic rigour and an objectivity rarely seen today among the academics dealing with this particular issue... He is one person from the Hindu side who knows the webs getting woven, ammunition being forged and stereotypes being constructed within the academia that will have serious ramifications for the Hindutva movement.... By promoting this book among Hindus, discussing and debating it, we will be doing a great service to ourselves. We will equip ourselves to fight our battles better. If this book does not get the enthusiastic reception it deserves among us, then it is a sad commentary, not on the non-existing marketing skills of Elst, which he does not need, but on us — our inability to respect Saraswati.”

“Elst has done a lot of research on Ayodhya and endeavours to provide evidence to prove the Babri Masjid was indeed built on a site that once housed a Hindu temple. He has strongly challenged views of scholars like Richard Eaton who seek to secularise the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers. The standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious, designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic – no points lost if one is Hinduphobic. Elst provides the fodder to challenge this view... Both Elst and Frawley provide strong arguments to support the ‘Out of India’ theory that seeks to establish India as the true homeland of the Aryan race or Sanskrit language, claiming it gave civilisation to the world... Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead, Elst and Frawley keep drawing attention to injustice done by colonisers, goading Indians to rise up and fight, a violent tendency that is the hallmark of Western thought, often deemed as a masculine trait... Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes them as ‘prophets’ leading the enslaved – colonised – Indians back to the ‘Vedic Promised Land’.”

“But the alternative hypotheses do not stop there. For example, another old idea given a new life by modern scholarship is that Proto-Indo-European speakers originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European realm through a series of migrations. This “Out-of-India” hypothesis goes back to the work of German poet, critic and scholar Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), but has been recently revived mainly by Flemish Indologist Koenraad Elst and Indian author Shrikant Talageri.”

“Elst, as his substantial "underground" following knows, is a linguist, historian, political scientist, prolific writer, brilliant mind and a wonderful raconteur.”