Koenraad Elst on Sita Ram Goel

“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.”

“She associates Sita Ram Goel repeatedly with “Hindutva”. But to my knowledge, Goelji never ever applied the term "Hindutva" to his own thinking. Though a freedom fighter (i.e., in India, an activist in the anti-colonial freedom movement) in his youth, he often explicitly rejected the nationalist paradigm, especially in contexts where the Sangh Parivar was using it as a ploy to skirt around the difficult ideological issues... In our first conversation, in 1989, he derided the RSS-BJP as "the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history". And in our last, in 2003 (in the presence of Prof. Saradindu Mukherji and Dr. David Frawley), he gloomily said: "Hinduism will not survive unless this RSS-BJP movement perishes." And in between, he said things like: "The RSS is leading Hindu society into a trap." [...] By contrast, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel had the real scientist’s mind. They questioned. In particular, they questioned the beliefs which are so obtrusively propagated, those of Christianity and Islam.”

“Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva". The latter term was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, and though some contemporary RSS middle cadres try to push it as a synonym and replacement of "Hinduism", Savarkar himself had explicitly written that the two are not synonyms; in practical terms, "Hindutva" is a synonym of "Hindu nationalism", an ideology and behind that also a national sentiment, but not a religion in any usual sense of the word. "Hindutva" was the banner of the Hindu Mahasabha and was subsequently adopted by the RSS, organizations of which the said independent authors were never members nor camp-followers. Indeed, if Meera Nanda had taken the trouble of reading them, she would have known that there has never been a fiercer critic of the RSS than Sita Ram Goel, vide e.g. the book he edited: "Time for Stock-Taking", a collection of pro-Hindu anti-RSS papers (incidentally, I myself have also devoted a book, BJP vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence, and a book chapter in Decolonizing the Hindu Mind to criticism of the RSS Parivar). There is plenty of Hindu revivalism going on outside the RSS, and even before the RSS came into existence, but "secularists" always try to reduce the former to a ploy of the latter. This in application of the Marxist penchant for conspiracy theories, very handy explanatory models which eliminate reality as a factor of human perception and agency. Thus, when Hindus complain of factual problems such as missionary subversion or Muslim terrorism, it is always convenient to portray this spontaneous and truthful perception as an artefact of "RSS propaganda".”