Negationism, the concept

(Foreword to Prof. Em. Aruna Sinha's book *Itihās mė Nakārvād, Kyā, Kyõ aur Kaise?*, Ashir Publ., Delhi 2023) Negationism as a word is based on the French term négationnisme, coined by social scientist Henry Rousso in 1987. It means “denial of historical facts”, specifically of the Holocaust, but also of other genocides. Let us first explain the concept’s career in Europe. In France the term has mostly been directed against the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerres et d’Holocaustes (AAARGH, Association of Ancient Amateurs of Stories of Wars and Holocausts), a group around literary historian Robert Faurisson, including both rightist and leftist deniers of the Jewish Holocaust (1941-44) as well as of several other genocides with high visibility in French public opinion, notably Armenian (1915-18) and Cambodian (1975-78). Faurisson, a specialist of the many forged pseudo-ancient narratives produced during the Romantic period to give a country a glorious past depicted in an epic of its own, like Ossian for Scotland or the Ura Linda Book for Frisia, started his negationist career with the claim that the Diary of Anne Frank was -- you guessed it -- ²a forgery. Anne Frank was a Dutch-Jewish girl who absconded from the Nazis (that’s the period covered by her diary), then was caught and taken to Auschwitz, then in the sight of the Red Army’s advance evacuated westwards to Bergen-Belsen, and there died of typhus. In fact the standard version of what happened to Anne Frank’s family ought to have been welcomed by the Holocaust deniers, for none of them was gassed or otherwise killed: her father survived the war, staying in Auschwitz till the end, while his wife and two daughters died of disease. In fact this doesn't really prove anything extraordinary: it can perfectly be explained by the timing. This happened at the end of the war, when the Nazis were deliberately winding up their extermination project and concentrated on destroying the evidence (but negationists will keep that explanatory circumstance out of view), and when shortages of medicines and disinfectants because of logistics breakdowns made the outbreak of diseases uncontrollable. Faurisson wanted to take it a step further, though: he denied the veracity of the diary. It was the girl’s father who, after his return in 1945 to Amsterdam, had edited the diary before publishing it, and he had left out some passages he deemed inconvenient, especially about the sexual awakening of his pubescent daughter. Even so, this petty fault-finding left the girl’s report about the persecution of the Jews entirely unchallenged. This will remain a common scenario in the negationist movement: focusing on marginal elements that are convenient and obscuring what proves the genocide. This is not uncommon among polemicists defending any cause, but the grimness of the case makes it more serious here. Story of negationism It is also in France that negationism as a movement took off. In 1948 its pioneer Maurice Bardèche still accepted that a systematic extermination of the Jewish people by the German National-Socialist regime had taken place. He only contrasted it with false claims by the erstwhile French Résistance that the French people as such had also been earmarked for extermination. He himself had been a Résistance fighter, but had been arrested by the Germans to spend the rest of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp. There he had not seen those fabled gas chambers that everybody post-war talked about. Extrapolating from his own experience, he questioned the existence of gas chambers anywhere, and evolving from there, he ended up questioning the attempt at extermination of the Jews as such. When in 1961 the historian Raul Hilberg published the first scholarly study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, he countered it with arguments that were to become classics of Holocaust denial. Thus, he explained the disappearance of so many Jews from the population figures as the consequence of a large pre-war Jewish emigration to the Americas. But such a scenario would have left a large paper trail of visa proceedings, a peak in house sales in Germany and Poland, a peak in house purchases in the US or Argentina, etc. As a mere amateur in history, at a time when coming by these foreign documents was a lot harder than today, he may be forgiven for not finding them, but in the decades since, no one else has found them either, though the same argument has been endlessly repeated. “Liars” It is often said that the negationists are liars. While it is not unthinkable that some anti-Semite purposely fabricates arguments for the falsity of the Holocaust narrative in order to accuse the Jews of a false victimhood narrative thought up in order to “blackmail” the Gentiles, on the whole this is very unlikely. Given the enormous social and professional cost you can expect to pay if you out yourself as a negationist, no one will accept this burden for a belief he considers untrue. Only those with a heartfelt belief in the non-existence of an extermination plan are going to express that conviction in public. Far more than lies, it is wishful thinking that explains negationism. In particular, Germans and sympathizers with the German war generation (e.g. because most people take a liking to underdogs and losers), would prefer them not to be guilty of the Holocaust. Because of this bias, they become receptive to any argument that brings this version of the facts closer. Thus, the German-born Canadian Ernst Zündel based his negationist discourse on an unconcealed sympathy for the Nazis, as expressed in his co-authored book (with Eric Thomson) The Hitler We Loved and Why (2004). Some deniers closely study the historical facts (in knowledge of details they often trump the mainstream historians) thinking that this can only strengthen their argument, but then find that the facts turn out to support the case for the Holocaust. Thus, in the 1960s the British self-taught historian David Irving gained himself a reputation as a connoisseur of pertinent German primary sources, then started asserting a negationist view of the genocide in the 1990s (the high tide of Holocaust denial), but twenty years later his study of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s diary and other confidential sources threw up a privileged testimony of how the SS had organized that very genocide he had earlier denied. Once the most authoritative denier, at the end of his life he ended up providing the most compelling evidence (from the horse’s mouth) in favour of the Holocaust. Similarly his friend David Cole from California, whose critique of the sweeping use of Auschwitz as the proverbial extermination camp had angered many of his fellow Jews, nowadays lambasts the remaining negationists. He affirms the reality of two of the three pillars of the Holocaust, viz. the killings of Jews (on the same footing as partisans) by neck shot behind the frontline during the advances in Soviet territory in 1941-42, and the killing of some 3 million Polish Jews in temporary extermination camps like Treblinka and Majdanek in 1942-43. He only doubts the cinemagenic case of Auschwitz, which was started as a labour camp with Jewish slave labour (but also including Polish labourers who after hours went back to their families every day), and of which he fails to see proof that it shifted to an extermination regime, eventhough the death rate from various causes was high. At any rate, remaining a dissident, he estimates the death toll of the Jewish genocide "only" at 3.5 million deaths rather than the official estimate of 5.3 million (usually rounded off to 6 million). But more decisively, he corroborates that between 1941 and 1944, the Nazi elite corps of the SS conducted an intentional extermination of the Jewish people. Less quality, more quantity The ”creative” period of Holocaust negationism is definitively over, because the leading deniers who tried to give their case a veneer of scholarly evidence have either died (Faurisson, Zündel) or ended up affirming the intentional genocide after all (Cole, Irving, my recently-deceased Danish colleague-Orientalist Christian Lindtner). The deniers' last moment of glory was the negationist conference called in 2005 by Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Teheran. The elderly Faurisson reported on it in triumphal terms, but the triumph was only in terms of finally getting some governmental recognition, not of discovering any desired evidence that had always eluded them. This event could be seen as a passing of the baton from the scholars to the masses: not the rare and disappearing neo-Nazis in the West but the masses in the Muslim world, including the growing Muslim community in the West. In European schools, ever more history teachers feel compelled to skip the chapter on the Holocaust, for fear of their combative Muslim pupils. These think the narrative is “Jewish-concocted”, meant to blackmail the Europeans and justify their land grab from the Arabs. Note a difference: contrary to what the received wisdom makes the public believe, that old rightist negationism, though a problematic nuisance, wasn’t all that dangerous: it tried to live up to human-rights sensibilities by minimizing the massacre. It shared the premise that genocide is a bad thing, at least publicly (privately some deniers may have felt that "Hitler didn't kill enough of them"). The Nazis were presented as not all that bad because they had purportedly not committed a genocide, implying that they would have been bad if they "had really" been guilty of genocide. By contrast, among Palestinians and their sympathizers, the opinion is widespread that the Jewish people as such is guilty and therefore deserves the direst punishment, genocide not excluded. But on the other hand, the Palestinians are unlikely to be as effective as the Germans were, so their massacre is unlikely to go beyond stray acts of terrorism. Therefore, in a renewed form, Holocaust negationism is still with us, in a less sophisticated but more massive incarnation. But the Muslim world, already less hostile to Israel than in the past, is increasingly open to modern information, so the argument for the historical reality of the genocide is bound to percolate there as well. The end of Holocaust denial is certain, but it may still take some time to materialize. India What is the importance of all this for India? There was no "Holocaust" in India, with the stated goal of wholesale extermination. (Better to call it "Hindu-hatya" or some such newly-coined native term, more distinctive than a plagiarized term from elsewhere.) The Islamic scriptures didn't envisage the physical annihilation of the unbelievers, only their acceptance of Islam or at least of a serf status under Islam's supremacy. Violence came in when the Pagans resisted this "invitation" to join Islam. Only rarely did it take the character of a genocide, latterly in East Bengal 1971, where more than two million Hindus were slaughtered. But what the Islamic massacres of Hindus lacked in intensity, they made up for in quantity. The Holocaust lasted for less than four years and was confined to occupied Poland and the conquered part of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the massacres of Hindus started in 712 AD, covered a whole Subcontinent, and it is unlikely that we have seen the last of them. Hindu polemicists bandy about the number 80 million for the Hindus killed between the years 1000 and 1525: Mahmoud Ghaznavi's invasions and the end of the Sultanate. This comes from historian Prof. KS Lal, who published this estimate in 1979. Though Lal was scrupulous in calculating it, such grim research findings obviously need further verification, which hasn't been tried ever since. After all, investigating the crimes of Islam has become taboo. But today the intellectual atmosphere seems to have cleared up sufficiently to make this type of research possible again. Though the Nazi massacres in Central Europe and the Islamic massacres in the Subcontinent are different in nature, the attempts to deny them are very similar. They use the same techniques, such as highlighting marginal non-representative facts and obscuring representative facts; or when not feasible to deny events, then putting a spin on the motive behind them. That is why, unlike "Holocaust", "negationism" remains a term that can perfectly be transferred to India But the deniers in India also have a trump card that Holocaust deniers can only dream of: the establishment supports them. Even Hindu Nationalist governments have not been effective, and generally not even seriously motivated, to change the narrative. That is why in India, negationism remains a problem to deal with.
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A "union of states"

A "union of states"

 (First Post, 12 Feb 2022)

According to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, “India is described in the Indian Constitution as a union of states and not a nation. One cannot rule over the people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed. It is a partnership, not a kingdom.” Let’s see about that.

The terms “union” and “state” (in the Hindi text: rājyon kā saṅgh) are quite vague, especially for a juridical document: both can have several interpretations. A "union" can mean a federation, which is a sovereign state dividing itself in autonomous provinces; or a confederacy, a permanent alliance of sovereign states; and everything in between, with history often showing an evolution from the one to the other. Thus, Switzerland is effectively a federation but called itself at its founding Confederatio Helvetica. An effective confederacy at present is the political structure of the Eurasian landmass's western subcontinent, the European Union. As the Brexit has demonstrated, though to much surprise, a member state of the EU retains its sovereignty, including the defining right to secede. By contrast, the Indian Republic does not confer on its lower political units this right of secession.

A "state" usually means a sovereign country, but it can also mean a province within a country. It is very common for this class of words not to have a fixed meaning in regard of its dimension of sovereignty, e.g. "land" in German means a province, in Dutch a sovereign country, and in English it has no political meaning, merely signifying any non-maritime region. When appearing in a legal text, such words first require a definition. From the wording in India's Constitution, one can deduce that here the word “state” (rājya) means the political level below full sovereignty.

 

 

Trivially, today's Indian Republic is geographically the sum total of its states. Yet historically it is not correct to imply that India has come about by uniting pre-existing states, as "union of states" might suggest. It came into being as a successor-state to British India. Yes, much of its present territory consisted of theoretically independent states before the Transfer of Power in 1947,  the Princely States. But these did not negotiate with British India as equal partners who then decided to merge. Instead, by signing the Instrument of Accession, they gave up their (already theoretical) sovereignty to be absorbed into the Republic.

 

For better understanding, consider the contrast with the European Union. The EU consists of sovereign member states with their own political history, mostly with active nationalist movements that went as far as to foment war against each other. It took the horrors of two World Wars and the common fear of the Soviet Bloc to make them water down their sovereignty step by negotiated step in a common ever-closer union. Each state retained the right to veto common decisions, so that these required a consensus. In India, by contrast, in vital matters the centre can overrule the states.

 

A great advantage of having a united federation of semi-autonomous states rather than a conglomerate of sovereign states is that it dedramatizes what would otherwise become a cause for war: the redrawing of boundaries between the states. The reorganization of the Northeast into the "Seven Sisters", the creation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s or the Panjabi Suba in the 1960s, or the more recent bifurcation of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, are the stuff that elsewhere wars are fought over. Yet under the umbrella of India, they became mere administrative procedures. Though pooh-poohed by Rahul Gandhi, the existence of a national level above the affected states is highly beneficial.

 

One thing Eurasia's southern and western subcontinents have in common is that in their founding statements they avoid the term "nation" to refer to themselves. In Europe this would be a denial of history, where nationalist passions and considerable blood-letting were needed for the unification of Italy and Germany, the independence and unification of the Yugoslav states followed later by this federation's disintegration, etc. The project of countering these old nationalisms with a new EU nationalism has only lived in a small Rightist fringe; the “nation” counts as but a relic from history. In India, by contrast, the idea of defining the Subcontinent's population as a nation has been alive in the Freedom movement, which was influenced by the contemporaneous European nationalisms, most explicitly through VD Savarkar's translation of Italian nationalist thinker Giuseppe Mazzini.

 

Indians have debated whether they form a nation, and if so, what kind of nation. The Nehruvians claimed India was a new nation, with Mahatma Gandhi as "father of the nation", and in need of "nation-building". This is in complete denial of history, when a sense of Indianness existed for millennia. So Gandhi himself had considered India an ancient nation with himself as its grateful son. The Muslim League applied the Ottoman division into millets, "nations", meaning religious communities treated as political units. The Left mostly preferred a fragmented India and invoked the European equation of nation with national language, e.g. the Bengali nation. Prakash Ambedkar thought that the attributes of nationhood apply to the castes: "Every caste a nation."

The present Sangh Parivar effectively espouses Gandhi's view (the asli Gandhi, not the naqli Gandhi who triggered this debate) that India is an ancient nation which includes every Indian. Nowadays it downplays its original Hindu identity and emphatically calls itself nationalist, forever intoning the mantra “unity”. But in an earlier stage, under MS Golwalkar, it taught that only Hindus (in the broad sense) form the nation, while the Muslims and Christians are mere guests. The reason was that only Hindus could boast of a civilizational continuity, whereas Christians and Muslims had historically rejected the culture they found here, or from which they converted, explicitly wanting to replace it with their own.

 

The main problem with asserting an Indian nationhood, as per Rahul Gandhi, is its diversity. This is a false problem, merely a higher magnitude of what every country has to deal with. Moreover, it is part of the genius of Hindu civilization that it can deal exceptionnally well with diversity. While there is always room for improvement, the present federal structure takes care rather well of the needs of its diverse demographics. All the way from Brussels, I dare say that in terms of a political structure doing justice to its own motto of "Unity in diversity", the European Union had better learn some lessons from the Indian Republic.

 

 

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. Negationism in India, and in De Morgen

 

 

1.      Negationism in India, and in De Morgen

 

(Doorbraak, 5 April 2020; translation of koenraadelst.blogspot.com 14 Dec. 2020; I do plenty of writing in Dutch, and once in a while correct the gross and massive disinformation about India.)

On March 25, 2020, the Flemish daily De Morgen (DM) published a double page on "How India is rewriting history", contributed by Delhi correspondent Aletta André, and prominently mentioned my name. Let's take the opportunity to educate an ignorant audience about some basic facts, because India is a domain where disinformation has been leading the way for too long.

 

One-sidedness

An introductory general observation, which cannot have escaped the editorial board’s notice, is the completely one-sidedness of the article. There is a debate about historiography in India, and a newspaper can do its readers a service by reporting on it, preferably objectively. However, this piece is not a report on a debate, but a loudspeaker for one of the two warring parties within that debate. Any attempt to create even the appearance of impartiality is missing here. This is allowed, but as a reader you had better realize it.

Another observation is that this kind of article on Hindu nationalist history rewriting is a regular feature, which I have seen popping up many times since 1988; but that this one is original in that it for the first time leaves unmentioned the temple/mosque dispute in Ayodhya. There, the Babar Mosque stood on the site of the ruined temple of Rama's birth, which all parties involved knew or admitted to have existed, until the Communist "eminent historians" in the late 1980s argued without reason that there had never been a temple there. Almost immediately, they were joined by utterly ignorant foreign Indologists and India-watchers in the media.

Those who held to the time-honored consensus, or presented new evidence for the temple, were told by the Alettas of that time (like me now, and for that matter, then as well) that “his sources are in question”, or other excuses to ignore his evidence. But the evidence continued to pile up and was taken seriously by the Court. It ordered an archaeological investigation of the site, and the temple remains were finally revealed. The 'eminent historians' were allowed to come and explain their allegations on the witness stand, and one by one they imploded: “I am not an archaeologist”, “I have never been to Ayodhya”, “I signed that statement because my colleagues also did”.

In 2019, after 69 years of judicial process, the Supreme Court finally assigned the disputed site to the Hindus so that they can rebuild the Rama Birth Temple. The Eminences do not want to be reminded of their foul play in the lost historical debate about Ayodhya, and the friendly media are still playing their game: that debate has suddenly disappeared into oblivion, also in this DM article. For all those years it served as an illustration to throbbing articles like this on "history rewriting", and it indeed illustrates that scientific (slandered as "Hindu-nationalist") historiography requires a rewriting of the now dominant version.

 

Aurangzeb

The story begins anecdotally with the successful agitation by Hindus for the renaming of Aurangzeb Marg (street). As a historian, I am not a fan of the erasure of old names either; but on the other hand, now that there is so much pressure to erase the name Cyriel Verschaeve, who was merely wrong-headed but killed no one himself [a once-famous Flemish poet, with streets named after him, who in old age had recruited Flemish young men for the German Eastern Front troops in World War II, and whose name is now being scrapped from streets’ nomenclature], and now ally but “war criminal” Marshall Foch [French World War I leader, after whom the central square of my home town and WW1 hotspot Leuven was named, but now held responsible for fanatically wasting many thousands of young lives] has disappeared from the streets of Leuven, why not the name of Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb, who has killed thousands?

Well, it is just one reason to put the spotlight on historian Prof. Audrey Truschke work on this Aurangzeb. I have already given my thoughts on it in writing (see chapters 13 and 18 of my book Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars, 2019). She had no other answer than to block me on Twitter. "There is only evidence for a handful of destroyed temples under Aurangzeb", as Aletta André quotes Audrey Truschke? Not at all.

Firstly, there is the continued accumulation of archaeological evidence. With the regularity of a clock, the Archaeological Survey of India finds remains of temples in mosques. Under the rule of the Congress party, the excavators were forbidden to say a word about it, but now it is spoken about openly, as it should in a democracy. (Same phenomenon for terrorism: if the police used to track down a terror network, they were stopped or sabotaged from above, while now they can go their own way; so that India has become measurably a lot safer.)

Secondly, the Aurangzeb court records themselves are the best evidence of the tens of thousands of temple destructions. These contain both the destruction orders and the reports of their implementation. Most of the documentary evidence about Islamic iconoclasm, from the Chachnama on the Arab conquest of Sindh in 712 onwards, is indeed of Muslim origin and is quite open about the Muslim eradication of "idolatry". Often visible remains of the destroyed temples were built into the new mosques to demonstrate the triumph of idolatry. It is only since the 20th century that some Muslims under modern-Western influence have become somewhat embarrassed about their own religious fanaticism, so that they began to minimize or deny their own iconoclasm -- a negationist trend of which the presently-discussed article is an offshoot.

 

Modern standards of values

The attempt to whitewash Islam's role is a case of the cardinal sin against historiography: the projection of modern standards of values ​​onto a past in which they did not apply. (This includes e.g. the modern secularist inability to empathize with the seriousness of pre-modern people about their religion.) In modern propaganda, it is unfortunate to have to admit that your favorite religion has caused a lot of destruction and slaughter and the destruction of many important temples. That is exactly what Aletta thinks she can accuse the Hindus of: "violate history with their contemporary prejudices." No, when Muslim conquerors and their chroniclers speak of "thousands", which archaeology confirms, it is "doing violence to history" to say there were "only a few".

It is further said in this article that Aurangzeb "protected countless temples" (from whom?), Or that he "left thousands of other temples". Many important temples have indeed been destroyed, and the mosques in place are standing evidence of Aurangzeb's violent Islamization policy and as many rebuttals of Truschke's whitewash.

But de minimis non curat praetor [“an important man does not busy himself with trifles”], so the operation was not 100% impeccable, there were indeed some shrimps that managed to escape. By tricks or bribery, the Hindus were able to save even the eminent yet remote Jagannath Puri temple; for Truschke such are temples that Aurangzeb "left alone", but they actually were on his list of cultural property to be destroyed. Nonsensical though the whole argument may be, it is nonetheless useful to crime lawyers: "Yes, Your Honour, the facts have been proven, my client did indeed commit those murders. But! Still you will acquit him, because look at how many people he has left alive! "

Anyone who wants to fuss about the number of temple destructions can do so scientifically. Take the thousands of renowned cases of Islamic temple destruction and show that a different scenario applied there. In 1990, the book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by Sita Ram Goël was published, with a presentation of the Islamic doctrine of iconoclasm from Mohammed onwards, but above all with a still very incomplete list of 1862 destroyed temples. There are many more, and many more have been discovered in the last 30 years, but let's start with that list. A scientific statement is falsifiable, as Karl Popper taught us. Well, there you have 1,862 falsifiable statements: go for it, prove them wrong if you can. But in those 30 years, neither Truschke nor anyone else has been able to (or even dared to try to) disprove one of them.

 

Vagueness

Aletta André's other authority, Manu Pillai, tries to debunk the abundant evidence with two excuses well-known in India. One is that at the time there was "no generalization in terms of Hindus and Muslims", ​​so that there was vagueness about these identities. You have already had conflicting opinions, disputant doctores, with genuinely meant conclusions from multi-faceted sources that turn out to be wrong on closer examination; but this assertion of Pillai is really nonsense to which no source gives cause.

Indeed, there were sometimes temporary trans-religious alliances, as in the Crusades (e.g. between the Christian Templars and the Shiite Muslim Assassins, both enemies of the Caliphate) or the Reconquista, which nonetheless remain unmitigated examples of Holy War. Such vagueness has been common among Hindus with their tradition of pluralism; but there is no source of ambiguity about Hindu or Muslim on the part of the Muslim leaders. The Muslims were sometimes confused about the many different Hindu communities (that is how the Buddhists were called the "shaven Brahmins"), but they were all Pagans in any case, destined for slavery or hell. Or show me a Muslim who confuses a mosque with an idolatrous temple. As a great precedent justifying the aggression against the Hindus and Hinduism, the Prophet and his iconoclasm were again and again invoked, especially the destruction of the 360 ​​images of gods in the Kaaba, Mecca.

That basic fact of Islamic aggression against the infidels since Islam’s beginnings is systematically obscured by the Truschkes and Pillais, as it refutes their easy excuse that the conflict-centred description of the Muslim conquests "dates back to British colonial times". Again and again the Islamophile provincials try to put blinders on their audience so as not to see the foreign and precolonial dimension of Islamic imperialism.

 

 

 

"1,200 years of slavery"

Hence, there was nothing wrong with Narendra Modi's quoted reference to "1,200 years of slavery". The Islamic invasion did not take place all over India at the same time, in that sense the choice of "1200" is somewhat arbitrary, but his point was that colonization started not with the British but with the Islamic invasion. And that is absolutely correct.

The Caliphate, the Sultans and the Mughals severely oppressed the Hindus (e.g. win your lawsuit against your neighbour if you convert to Islam) and exploited them (toleration tax for unbelievers), literally trafficking millions as slaves, and always considered themselves as foreigners to India. Until the end of the Mughal Empire in 1857, the court and judicial language was Persian, and numerous Muslim administrators (contrasting with the Britons sent to India) did not speak any native language. The only difference is that, in addition to their exploitation, the British also imported a number of valuable novelties, which cannot be said of the Arabs, Afghans and Turks. Furthermore, the post-colonial Britons have accepted that their former colonization of India is called by its proper name, while the Muslims make great scandal if you characterize the sultanates as colonial regimes.

Furthermore, Pillai is very selective in his historical evidence. Knowledgeable disinformers won’t allow themselves to be caught in explicit lies, they mislead their audience by, for example, keeping some facts out of the picture, or by misrepresenting actual facts. The cited temporary alliance of Emperor Aliya Rama Raya of Vijayanagar with Sultan Adil Shah in 1558 may seem a compelling example of multicultural cosiness to naive people, but it does not exactly constitute an argument in the real world for the symbiosis of Hindu and Muslim, quite the contrary.

Because what was the sequel? Rama Raya included two Muslim units in his army, exemplarily multicultural. But in 1565, an alliance of sultans attacked him, and they fought at Talikota. He was winning the battle, but then the consciences of the two Muslim generals began to gnaw. They defected, captured Rama Raya and beheaded him. That is what can happen, especially to a Heathen.

A similar case where an untypical blur between Hindu and Muslim proved fatal was the crucial break-in from the fringes of India to the heartland in 1191-92: King Jayachandra of Kanauj sought to settle his feud with King Prthiviraj Chauhan of Delhi by inviting the aid of Sultan Mohammed Ghori. This Ghori lost to Chauhan at Tarain but was pardoned. He returned a year later, defeated Chauhan at Tarain and beheaded him; and a little later it was also Jayachandra's turn. He may have been Ghori’s ally for a while, but to Muslims he was primarily a Pagan. In the following two years, the greatest iconoclasm in history took place in the Ganges plain, in which, among other things, the Buddhist universities (both buildings and scholars) were razed to the ground. The lack of clarity between Hindu and Muslim that Pillai tries to talk us into, the neglect of their intrinsic hostility, is what led to the catastrophes of Tarain and Talikota in real history.

Finally, according to Pillai, the written sources may contain exaggerations: the countless Muslim testimonies of massacres among Hindus "served to praise the sultans to heaven". It does not follow from this that they are false, without any further indication. But suppose that such flattering false attribution of agency has indeed happened: what does that say about the ideology that applied in their environment, namely Islam? Extermination of the disbelievers and their shrines is indeed glorious there, for it is a faithful imitation of the example of the Prophet.

 

Negationism

The word has surfaced: negationism [from French négationnisme]. Does that term, known from Holocaust denial, really apply, or is it just a rhetorical exaggeration? Indeed, in this minimizing discourse, we find some typical techniques used by Holocaust deniers. The above argument that Aurangzeb "had also saved a lot" is frequently found in denier literature: "Hitler could hardly have made work of the destruction of the Jews: see how many still there are, with their own state and all!"

Very typical is the frequent swapping of rule and exception. Holocaust deniers make the most of small successes over fringe events. For example, it is no longer claimed that Hitler refused to shake hands with the American athlete Jesse Owens during the Olympic Games because he was black. The negationists had always denied this urban legend, they say triumphantly. Possibly, but that little correction doesn't diminish the fact of the Holocaust.

For example, the favourable elements that Truschke can cite about Aurangzeb's personality are correct, e.g. that he was an ascetic and was very careful with public money (for example, he refused payment from the treasury and took his father Shah Jahan to task for having wasted money on prestige projects such as the construction of the Taj Mahal), but these do not detract from his campaigns against Hinduism. On the contrary, they come from the same basic motif, namely his piety: because it was moulded by Islam, it did not lead to charity or yoga or anything, but to jihad.

Also common is that most of them tell demonstrable untruth, but genuinely believe what they say. The difference is only in social acceptance. Holocaust deniers marginalize themselves, but they willingly make that sacrifice because they think it serves the truth. Something like Christian martyrs who would rather give their lives than convert to Islam or atheism with a knife to their throats: no doubt courageous and consistent, but also tragic because their “true faith” was a delusion that did not become the truth just because they gave their lives for it. There was simply no resurrection, no abolition of sin and of mortality through it, no virgin birth. The faith for which they make a heroic sacrifice remains no less a delusion.

This combination of truthfulness and delusion also explains why some negationists, after further study, still grow away from negationism, either from specific beliefs (for example, many have come back from their earlier denial of the mass murder in Babi Yar, Ukraine, under the influence of new evidence) or of Holocaust denial as such (e.g. my fellow Orientalist Christian Lindtner, an ex-denier). But, to reiterate, their apparent sincerity does not alter the fact that their negationist position was or is mistaken.

Jihad deniers, by contrast, bathe in social recognition and approval, both in India and internationally. Perhaps not from the numerical majority (most Europeans and most Hindus see through the Islamophile excuses) but because of the official circles in politics, education and the media. They flourish and are given all kinds of benefits, rewards and promotions. Most members of the vocal class are conformists and therefore gravitate towards these unfounded but approved opinions pro Islam, without realizing the true facts in this history dispute. However, the logical structure of their denial techniques is the same.

“Genocide”

But: although the denial of the crimes of Muslim conquerors and Nazis is the same, are the crimes involved therefore similar? In India there are some who speak of "Hindu genocide" or "the Hindu Holocaust". When the French-Indian journalist François Gautier founded a museum in Pune for the extermination struggle against Hinduism and the Hindu movement against it, there were voices that wanted to call it the Hindu Holocaust Museum. Eventually it was named the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum after the great freedom fighter, Shivaji Bhonsle (17th century), but at first that Holocaust reference was one of the contenders. My advice was also sought, and I strongly urged not to make that mistake.

In the first place, it is not very diplomatic to go against Jewish sensibilities with this. Although the term "Holocaust" first referred to the Armenian Genocide, it has gradually become a kind of property of the Jewish community, which would take it as very unpleasant if anyone else tried to make off with it. Beside the votaries of the state of Israel, the Hindu nationalists have almost no friends abroad, so they’d better respect them.

Secondly, the term once again draws attention to other people's experience, while the uniqueness of the Hindu experience still remains underexposed. There are indigenous terms, and it is now necessary to choose one as the default term and promote it. These include Hindū-vaṁśa-vicchédana or Hindū-saṁhāraṇa, "genocide of the Hindus". Since I also find that term imprecise, I will stick to the more general Hindū-hatya, "slaughter of the Hindus." That term follows an old pattern, e.g. the Śākya-hatya, the slaughter of the Śākyas, the ethnic group to which the then very aged Buddha belonged (by an illegitimate grandson of the Śākya state leader who was hurt in his honour, so not for doctrinal reasons). The term leaves undecided what exactly was the nature of that slaughter.

 

Millions dead

The massacre of Hindus, according to the Muslim chronicles themselves, has left easily more than six million dead; as well as millions of slaves, and all kinds of other forms of personal damage, and enormous (not indirect but very deliberate) cultural destruction. You even come close to the 5.3 to 5.7 million official deaths of the Jewish Holocaust if you consider the 20th century alone. At least two million people, mostly Hindus, were killed during the Partition of 1947 (and more in Bengal over the following years); official historiography minimizes those figures and presents them as essentially symmetrical, which is quite incorrect. The surviving Hindu-Sikh “migrants” were all true refugees who left their homeland only under duress or threat, while most of the Muslims who moved to Pakistan were genuine “migrants” (Mohajirs) to the Promised Land which they had carved out themselves and supported in very large majority in the ballot box. In 1971 the Pakistani army, with local accomplices, committed a massacre in East Bengal, with at least 80% victims in the Hindu minority, and the Muslim victims were also killed for anti-Hindu reasons: they still wore saris and no Muslim clothing, their language was not Arabized etc., so they were still considered half Hindu. The death toll, according to the government of the Bangladeshi state, was three million.

 

Holodomor

To say that a mass murder killed more than six million people feels like a kind of sacrilege to some. Note how conformist sources like Wikipedia regarding the Holodomor, Stalin's mass murder in Ukraine in 1932-33, which was of a similar magnitude (Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who publicly denied the Holodomor, privately estimated a 10 million dead), insist on keeping the death toll as low as possible. Well, I am not an expert on the Holodomor figures, I will leave them undecided for now, but Muslims have certainly killed more than six million Hindus. Historian K.S. Lal estimated more than 80 million between 1000 and 1526, all while acknowledging that demographic figures from the Middle Ages are inevitably inaccurate. He wrote this more than 40 years ago, and since then no further research has been done about it, because thematizing the crimes of Islam would be a very bad career move.

But for that death toll they had over thirteen centuries, from the Arab-Caliphal conquest of Sindh in 712 to the terrorism of recent years, and a very large country with a huge population. The mass murder of the Hindus was therefore much less intense than the Holocaust. Those who say the Holocaust was the worst crime in history are right in this respect, that it was unusually thorough. For example, Edith Stein was a Catholic nun of Jewish descent, but that could not save her: the Nazis made it clear that all born Jews were targeted, they could not escape their innate identity.

This is what justifies the term genocide: merely belonging to the Jewish birth-group was sufficient for extermination. The Hindus, on the other hand, always had the option of escape through conversion, except in acute conflict situations. They were not prisoners of their biology. Islam does not decree to physically exterminate the Heathens, only to wage jihad against them until they submit. There may be plenty of deaths during that jihad, but that is not the end in itself, only collateral damage to the goal set by the Quran, namely world domination.

I am not going to venture into a more precise estimate of the death toll. Like Audrey Truschke, I studied Sanskrit and Persian, but for years I have lost interest in the specifics of Islamic history, I only discuss Islam when current events require me to do so. After all, the general picture of the ideological roots of Islamic crimes is perfectly clear, the only remaining thing to do now is to make the right policy decisions regarding Islam. So I am not going to deal with the reporting of massacres and iconoclasm any further, fortunately there is a new generation of scholars in India ready to do that work.

So much for the subject of negationism, which De Morgen exemplifies here.

 

“Increasingly radical”

Representing the contemporary context of that "rewriting" of history also requires some rectifications. The article’s subtitle addresses an "increasingly radical Hindu nationalism". Ever since that movement caught my attention in 1989, I have never seen it described in the world media other than as "increasingly powerful" and "increasingly radical"; this is how press correspondents justify the space they claim from their editor-in-chief for the subject. That was true even at the movement’s lowest point in 2009, after the BJP’s second consecutive election defeat, when its enemies in India danced on its corpse and even predicted the impending end of Hinduism: a "post-Hindu India", their openly advertised goal.

The primary fact in India's religious conflict is that Hinduism is fighting for its survival in its only homeland, while the "minorities" (in fact the Indian branch of powerful and wealthy multinationals) are only angling for additional conquests. In addition, Hinduism is steadily declining, also numerically, mainly because, unlike its challengers, it has no strategy and no ideological backbone, and especially no political leadership. It remains to be seen whether there is any radicalization against this background.  

The Hindu nationalist party BJP (Indian People's Party) has never been more powerful than after its election victory in 2019, at least in a strict party-political sense. But more radical? Only liars and their ignorant parrots can say that. Compare the party program in the years after 1951 with that of today, and you see the opposite. At the time, for example, there was talk of a "Hindu state" as the target. In marginal circles belonging to the mass organization RSS (National Volunteer Corps, which spawned the BJP) you can still hear this, but not with their leaders, and the party discarded that ideal during its 1980 refounding. Today, even the term "Hindu" is being questioned: "Every Indian is a Hindu", claims the RSS chairman, Mohan Bhagwat.

The BJP is still a nationalist party, and almost only Hindus vote for it, but programmatically it is certainly no longer a Hindu party. There are a number of discriminations against Hindus in the Constitution. You read that right: there are a number of legal privileges for the minorities and disadvantages for the Hindus. This mainly concerns the right to founding and managing their own schools and places of worship, two sectors crucial for a religion’s flourishing. Those of the minorities are independent and inviolable, those of the Hindus can be nationalized at any time and plundered by bureaucrats. That is why a number of Hindu sects have approached the court with varying degrees of success to have themselves recognized as a non-Hindu minority -- a race to the exit that is non-existent among minorities.

In India, citizens are not equal before the law according to religion (so it is not, as claimed here, a "secular state"), and it is the majority that is disadvantaged. A majority that allows itself to be minorized: it is bitter reality in the largest democracy in the world, but it is something that you cannot get explained abroad. Incidentally, that explains my own involvement in this tangle: a Fleming was needed to understand how a majority can be disadvantaged and allow that to continue. [Explanation: within Belgium, the Flemish are linguistically the majority but have always been, and in a few respects still are, second-class citizens, and this is partly due to their non-assertive nature.]

This is all the more curious because other societies with legally established inequality give a kind of justification for this that does not apply in India. In the US, blacks enjoy the privilege of "affirmative action"; it is debatable whether this is a just and effective response to the historical oppression of blacks -- but no one disputes the very fact of that oppression. Well, in India the Hindus have never oppressed the Muslims (nor the Christians), just the opposite. So here you get the absurd situation where the majority pays "compensation" for their own oppression to the offender community.

 

Ideologically lost

The Modi government has not taken any initiative to rectify this inequality, especially enshrined in Articles 25-30 of the Constitution. (It has, however, overruled Article 370 that gave privileges to the state of Kashmir, but the terms the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” formally do not appear in the laws underlying that controversy.) One of its MPs introduced a bill to that effect in 2018, but the government has not supported it nor mobilized a public opinion basis for it, and nothing has come of it. The reason is that the BJP has been so brainwashed by decades of "secularist" propaganda that it barely remembers its pro-Hindu origins and is ideologically lost. Former party chairman LK Advani showed himself to be an ideological babe in the wood by stating that "a party needs no ideology, only the offer of good governance", the long-standing mistake that governance can be ideologically neutral.

The history rewriting and the underlying Hindu radicalization that prompted Aletta André to write this article is simply non-existent. This also applies in the field of historiography. At the end of the first Modi administration in 2019, education minister Prakash Jadevkar was asked by some politically conscious people in his constituency what he had done about the grotesque distortion of history in the textbooks, and he proudly declared that he had not changed a letter in it. So he militantly chose the anti-Hindu camp, an example of how BJP leaders today have no higher (albeit futile) ambition in life than a pat on the shoulder from their enemies. The history rewriting and the underlying Hindu radicalization that prompted her to write this article is simply non-existent.

 

How history was rewritten

The Hindu mentality has not only been conditioned into an inferiority complex by "1,200 years of slavery", it is especially after independence that there has been a systematic undermining of Hindu self-respect and a progressive elimination of Hindu moves against it. That was mainly the work of the first Prime Minister (1947-64) Jawaharlal Nehru, a native Hindu who hated Hinduism (like the ex-Catholic popist-eaters here), his education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (Muslim fundamentalist), his daughter Prime Minister (1966- 77 and 1980-84) Indira Gandhi, her secretary PN Haksar and her education minister Nurul Hasan. The rewriting of history was a central item on their agenda.

It started with Nehru himself, who in his book The Discovery of India presents some strong examples of negationism. For example, he speaks of Mahmud Ghaznavi, who organized a series of raids in India around 1000, including temple destructions, and he claims: “Architecture interested Mahmud...” This refers to his conquest of the city of Mathura and the speech to his army when they entered the temple complex. around Krishna's birthplace. He praises it to heaven: "Here are magnificent temples as strong as the faith of the faithful. Surely it took an army of angels years to build it…” In his pretended silliness, Nehru ignores the blatant sarcasm of that speech, which culminated in the order to destroy all the temples. And so it happened. Later, the birth temple was rebuilt, but destroyed again by the aforementioned Aurangzeb, and replaced by a mosque. It still stands today, as one of the countless "silent witnesses" of Truschke's and Pillai's spectacular wrongness.

The whitewashing of Muslim rule accelerated under Nehru's daughter Indira. In a power struggle within the Congress party, she needed the support of the Communists, who in return demanded and gained control over culture and especially education. Their first priority was to establish a curriculum that would "promote integration between Hindus and Muslims" ​​by obliterating any memory of historical conflict and oppression. As if in Germany, in order to spare everyone, they were to delete all references to the crimes of the Nazi regime. A then education bureaucrat told me how, at the first announcement of that policy, he protested that a history book should simply report the facts; he was promptly promoted away.

In 2002, competent minister MM Joshi made a clumsy attempt at a correction, but it was without consequence. The situation since then has been that Indian youth has been presented with a very streamlined rewritten version of history. The current government has done nothing about it and is not making any moves. It has filled the relevant administration with incompetent RSS-BJP gerontocrats whom it wanted to thank for their services rendered to the organization, and who have neither the expertise nor the dynamism to change the game. Aletta André's outrage over a "history rewriting" (actually a rectification of the Communist rewritten history, a glasnost) is simply devoid of a real-world object.

 

Conclusion

Most India watchers live in a fantasy world, with India as a secular state (which it is not) threatened by an increasingly monstrous Hindu nationalism. To keep the flame burning, they regularly tell a scare story to keep the blushing virgins in a state of alarm and hatred against resisting Hinduism. In doing so, they are making a good career move, becoming spokesmen for a confluence of interests between the Islamic internationale, the missionary lobby and cultural Marxism, each of which has declared war on Hinduism for its own reasons. If, on the other hand, they were to show a realistic, let alone a favorable image of militant Hinduism, then some degree of exclusion awaits them. So the eternal return of articles on the alleged cunning of the Hindu Chauvinists will be with us for some time.

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Western TV about the RSS

(Pragyata, 15 November 2017)

On Friday 3 November, the Flemish broadcaster VRT Canvas, in its programme Terzake ("To the point"), presented a Dutch documentary from the series De Westerlingen ("The Westerners"), in which young Dutchmen meet youngsters in countries across the world to explore the differences in culture. In the past, the impression was that all cultural differences were on the way out because the non-Westerners were simply Westernizing. Now, it has become clear that some differences are here to stay, and that even in non-Muslim countries, there is a tough resistance against too much Westernization.

This time around, we were taken to India where a Dutch youngster called Nicolaas was meeting young Hindu Nationalists. According to the announcement on the TV station's website: "In India extremist associations acquire ever more influence. Nicolaas Veul meets activist young Hindu Nationalists in the holy city of Allahabad. He goes around with Divya, Ritesh and Vikrant. They fight for a Hindu India, and against influences from outside."


Hindu fascism?

At the outset, in the car on the way to an event of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha ("National Volunteer Corps", RSS), he was quickly briefed by an Indian Secularist about the Hindu Nationalists. These were said to be "increasingly powerful", to be issuing for use in schools "textbooks rewritten in a pro-Hindu sense", and  to be "openly linked with the Nazis".

This was a nice summary of the power equation in the reporting on India worldwide and in all the different segments of the media: all press correspondents in and "experts" on India look at Indian society and esp. the communal conflict through the glasses that a handful of Secularists have put on their noses, reproducing the latter's anti-Hindu bias and disinformation. For the average viewer, every topic in the ensuing meetings came under the cloud of these initial "revelations", eventhough nothing in the RSS performance effectively filmed confirmed or illustrated any of them.

Since the 1980s, I have never heard the term "Hindu Nationalists" without the addition that they are "emerging" or "increasingly powerful". They should have been all-powerful by now. The only (partial) exception was the few years after the 2009 elections, when the BJP had been defeated even worse than in 2004, so that supporters of the socialist-casteist parties, including partisan experts like Christophe Jaffrelot, concluded that Hindu Nationalism was on the way out. However, instead of building on the existing power equation to push Hindutva deeper into oblivion, the Secularist Congress wasted its chance because it got too wrapped up in driving corruption to unprecedented levels, too much for the electorate to stomach. Once the next electoral campaign got under way, even the Secularists soon conceded that a BJP victory was becoming inevitable.

However, contrary to what the observers all think or say, the present BJP government under Narendra Modi, while numerically strong, is ideologically extremely weak. It is not in any way Hinduizing or "saffronizing" the polity or the education system. It is continuing the Congressite-Leftist anti-Hindu policies mandated by the Constitution, or at best looking the other way but not changing the Constitution to put a definitive stop to such policies. Thus, subsidized schools can be Christian or Muslim, but not Hindu: in the latter case, either they get taken over by the state and secularized, or at best, they have to do without subsidies. Temples are nationalized and their income channeled to non-Hindu purposes, a treatment against which the law protects churches and mosques. And this is no less the case in BJP-ruled states, where the Government could have chosen not to avail of the opportunities given to it by the Constitution.

Nowhere in this documentary would you pick up any hint to the main communal reality in India: the anti-majority discrimination. It is admittedly hard to explain to outsiders, and therefore easy to conceal or deny, but Hindus are indeed second-class citizens in their native country. I am aware that right now, many non-Indian readers will refuse to believe me, but it is really like that. Anywhere is the world you can download the text of the Indian Constitution, so please verify for yourself, starting with Art.25-30.

So, what did you get to see? Many people in the city were on the streets converging on an open ground where a meeting of a local RSS unit (shakha, "branch") with physical and ideological training was about to take place. They were wearing (or in the case of newcomers, buying) the RSS outfit with white shirt and black cap and trousers. It was the new uniform, for till recently the black trousers would have been brown knickers, even more colonial-style. Their military style was highlighted, though everyone could see for himself that all the "weapons training" they did was with sticks, rather harmless in the age of the Kalashnikov. Naturally, there was no hint that an endless series of murders of RSS men has been committed by Kerala Communists, Khalistanis in Panjab, and others. The RSS youngsters also did not bring it up, or if they did, that part was not shown. The persistent suggestion was that they were the perpetrators of violence, not its victims, though no such violence was actually shown.

When interviewing these RSS activists, Nicolaas repeatedly remarked that this or that guy was actually impeccably friendly and quite nice. Not at all how we would picture the fascists announced initially by the Secularist. Then what was wrong with them?


Valentine Day

The real topic of this documentary series was the culture clash and the native resistance against Westernization. And indeed, these young people refused to absorb the flood of Westernizing influences. One example of a pernicious influence was Valentine, taken straight from the existing Western commercial pop culture. More ideologized people denounce it also as a "Christian" holiday. Valentine was a Roman priest who performed tabooed weddings, and when martyred and sainted, the Church gave him a day in the Saints' calendar, 14 February, coinciding with the pre-Christian fertility feast presided over by the goddess Juno Februa ("clean, purifying") of 13-15 February. It took a thousand years, to the age of the troubadours and courtly love, before he graduated to patron-saint of romanticism.

As such, commerce catapulted him to the fore, and made the saint's day into an occasion pious Christians would frown upon: the feast of sentimentalism and getting carried away with infatuation. Since the late 18th century, there is a whole literature, and later movies, about youngsters following their hearts and overcoming the resistance of their unfeeling narrow-minded parents. This is now re-enacted in India, where commerce and the Secularist-promoted fondness of all things Western is spreading the highly artificial celebration of Valentine's Day. This has become the symbol of Western decadence, in which the pursuit of emotional kicks takes precedence over long-term institution building, marriage and the resulting children's well-being. Nicolaas's Indian interlocutor wants to spare his country the breakdown of family life that has come to characterize the modern West.

But in the documentary, in the interview with the RSS activist, we only see a humourless spoilsport's jaundiced rant against a day of innocent fun. The Dutch lad just doesn't see that there is another side to it, and that the Hindu critique of Valentine has its legitimacy. This RSS fellow was voicing a very positive viewpoint, one in favour of the precious fabric of traditional social values, of the time-tested mos maiorum ("ancestral custom"), which is being undermined by modernist influences symbolized by Valentine's Day. Possibly it is not good enough to overrule modernization, but that remains to be seen, and the traditionalist view deserves a proper hearing.

In the streets, the Dutch newcomer to India saw Westernization all over the place. Western fashion, neon lights, shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, young couples kissing in public. Even an RSS spokesman admitted he sometimes goes to the Mc Donalds. So, the final impression that the viewers will take home is that, in India at least, Westernization is unstoppable. It is not uncontested, true, but the nativists, though not convincingly put down as "fascists" anymore, are not very competent and are at any rate unable to stop it.


Communication

But then, come to think of it, the RSS fellow didn't have the required communication skills to overturn an anti-Hindu bias instilled in the Western public since decades. And by "anti-Hindu", I do not mean the kind of grim animus seen in the Missionaries or the Secularists, but a background conditioning: Nicolaas has no quarrel with the Hindus as such, and he is probably not even aware of his implicit anti-Hindu bias, but like most Westerners with an interest in India, he has innocently absorbed the partisan view of India fostered by the really hostile people.

It is unrealistic to expect this one fleeting television conversation to change a bias built up over decades. Still, the RSS spokesman could have defended his position better. On the other hand, his peaceful and civilized but weak argumentation was a logical illustration of a deliberate policy pursued since the 1920s. It was in line with the old RSS's boy-scout mentality of disdain for all communication ("do well and don't look back"). Founder KB Hedgewar, who had started out as member of a revolutionary wing of the Freedom Movement, with secretive and purely oral communication to avoid discovery by the police, installed in his new organization a hostility to any concern for outside approval, and to the media and their narrative. A consequence today is that RSS spokesmen are gravely lacking in communication skills. On average, they have a far better case than their clumsy performance in interviews and TV debates would suggest.

Twice the RSS refused a media presence. I was somewhat surprised to see this. In the early nineties, when I went around to RSS/BJP centres to interview Hindu Nationalist leaders, there was still plenty of distrust for outsiders, and communication was largely excluded. I knew then that I was exceptionally privileged to be allowed access, as a result of my lone pro-Hindu conclusions in my book on the Ayodhya temple/mosque conflict. But then private TV stations conquered India, gaining entry in the remotest villages, and finally the internet made communication unavoidable, even for the RSS. I had thought that this seclusion had by now become a thing of the past, but the RSS appears to have retained some of it. 

The result is that RSS spokesmen, while not at all the "fascists" of Secularist mythology, come across as village bumpkins. In this case, an interviewed RSS man suffered from a lack of serious historical knowledge, or of a chauvinist type of gullibility. He explained that India has invented plastic surgery and, as proven by the Ramayana, the airplane. This story has two related drawbacks: as far as evidence can tell, it is not true; and it is bad publicity, for while it may make a handful of gullible folk admire Hindu culture, it turns Hinduism into a superstitious laughing-stock for many more. When the Dutchman brought up homosexuality, the RSS man said: "That doesn't exist in our country." Just like it didn't exist in the Soviet Union ("a symptom of bourgeois decadence") nor in Africa according to Robert Mugabe ("they may be gay in America, but they will be sad people in Zimbabwe"). Again, even those Westerners who condemn odd sexual behaviour will laugh at these clumsy attempts to make it stop at your country's border. This way the RSS tendency is particularly weak in the prime precondition for communication, viz. seeing things also through the eyes of your interlocutor.

Grim

Today, the image of Hinduism is less grim than when Hindu Nationalism realistically coveted power of for the first time came to power (1990s). One reason is reality: all the grim Doomsday predictions about the Hindu Nationalists "throwing all Muslims into the Indian Ocean" and "turning the clock back regarding Dalit emancipation", failed to come true. Recently, Narendra Modi has conducted a very successful foreign policy, and the Western powers can only dream of the economic growth figures India takes for granted. Less importantly but tellingly, the Hindu parents are making progress in the California textbook affair, where some negative portrayals of Hindu culture will be amended, contrasting with the total defeat inflicted on the Hindus in 2006. The anti-Hindu lobby in American academe, largely consisting of NRIs and Indologists, has lost considerable steam.

(The same impression could be had from Sona Datta's documentary about Hindu art and temple architecture, a few days later. Over-all quite informative as well as full of awe for Hindu brilliance, it nonetheless started out with familiar secularist lies about pluralist Moghuls who "built their magnificent mosques next to Hindu temples" and presided over a peaceful and tolerant empire "when Europe was savaged by wars of religion". But unlike in the recent past, this propaganda was not that obtrusive.)

And so, this Dutch young man approached the RSS men with an open mind, in spite of the hateful briefing he had initially received from a secularist. He had good things to say about the nativists he met. But he also carried his prejudices with him, less against the "Hindu" than against the "Nationalist" element, and less intense than 10 or 25 years ago, but still palpable. Conclusion: the power equation on the publicity front is still favourable to the secularists but not unfathomably desperate for the Hindus anymore.

(Still visible till 3 December 2017: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnu/a-z/terzake-docu/2017/terzake-docu-s2017a84/) (Dutch subtitles but all the talking is in Hindi or English)

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