Decolonizing the Hindu mind Quotes

“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.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“Nothing determines the BJP position as predictably as the fear of being associated with anything of which the secularist establishment disapproves.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“The RSS was helpless because of the ideological power equation. Socialist secularism was the dominant ideology, while Hindu nationalism counted as politically incorrect. Those who swore by socialist secularism could afford to kick its alleged opponents around at will.
The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-1947, when they informed the British government(a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim league by propagating economic and often secular-sounding arguments for Partition, once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that "China's chairman is also India's chairman" and accused India of having started the war with China. But, they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses. Even worse(at least from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint) then the treatment which the Hindu nationalists received, was their own record as policy-makers.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Aruna's husband Asaf Ali was seemingly a freedom fighter but unbeknownst to his comrades, he was in fact a British agent inside the Congress Working Committee, which was collectively imprisoned on the first day the agitation started. When the British left, they forgot a few files by mistake, and one of them revealed Ali's espionage. Ali, already sent to Washington as India's first ambassador there, was recalled and sidelines as Governor of Orissa, though M.K. Gandhi intervened to spare him an overt fall from grace.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“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.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“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.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“Too busy to think:
A first perusal of the literature of the organized Hindutva movement, particularly of the Sangh Parivar, the 'RSS family' including the BJP, will leave the reader with the impression of an unusual intellectual poverty. First of all, relative to the age and membership of this family of organizations, its literary output is quite small. Secondly, what little is available is often very elementary and repetitive.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“BN Jog, a contemporary RSS author argues that even after the 1937 elections, though often mentioned as proof that the Muslim electorate was largely 'secular' because of the poor results for the Muslim league, had already disproven the Congress claim: most Muslim votes had gone to other Muslim-dominated parties, chiefly the Unionist party of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Panjab and the Krishak Praja party of Fazlul Haq in Bengal. Even the supposedly defeated Muslim League had won 108 of the 492 Muslim-reserved seats in 1937, against 26 for Congress. So, Jog concludes, the Muslim vote was largely motivated by sectional interests rather than by commitment to the national struggle.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“The Hindutva view of Islam is characterized by a progressive softening from V.D. Savarkar through M.S. Golwalkar down to the present BJP. And even Savarkar was not uniformly the hawk he is always made out to be. In general, the organized Hindutva movement has never produced a very sophisticated discourse on Islam, merely a few sweeping generalisations whether in a hostile or a flattering sense. In the founding statements of the RSS, there is no trace of a fundamental critique of Islam, nor is there any in the books and speeches of its leaders.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Aurobindo's (and most Hindus') attitude of tolerance regarding Islam is conceived as the condescending tolerance of an adult for the juvenile follies of a teenager, not the respect due to an equal.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Partition in 1947 left the Christian community financially poor and economically insecure, because many of their Hindu and Sikh landlords had fled the country. Severe floods devastated the Punjab(Pak) in 1950, 54, 55 and 59 destroying the homes of thousands of Christians. In order to be eligible to receive relief goods, thousands of nominal Protestants became members of the Roman Catholic Church.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“The Pope could not go and make his statement in Teheran or Beijing. as long as Islam and Communism(and in some countries, Buddhism) prevent Christian proselytizing in their domains, the conversion of Asia essentially means the conversion of India, which may then function as a base for further expansion once the rest of Asia becomes more accommodating.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“But, look at it from the Hindu angle: Hindus had the good grace to give asylum to the Christian refugees in AD 345, allowing them to maintain their separate identity in full freedom for seven centuries, and now the thanks they get for it is that visitors of the Saint Thome cathedral are told about fanatical Brahmins murdering the noble founder of Indian Christianity. And then the secularist establishment makes it worse by blocking the public's access to the scholarly vire and continuing to instil the blood-libel legend. It is highly significant for the power equation in India that this state of affairs is possible at all.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Nehru stuck to his Communist sympathies even when the Communists insulted him as Prime Minister with their unbridled scatology. Nehru was too British and too bourgeois to opt for a fully authoritarian socialism, but like many European Leftists he supported just such regimes when it comes to foreign policy. Thus Nehru's absolute refusal to support the Tibetans even at a diplomatic level when they were overrun by the Chinese army(a Far-Eastern Munich) cannot just be attributed to circumstances or the influence of his collaborators; his handover of Tibet to Communist China was quite consistent with his own political convictions.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Modern history teaches that organization and numerical strength cannot prevent movements from failing if they don't develop a good analysis of the situation they are facing.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“While the Muslim vanguard had its party, the Muslim league, and tis thought centre, Aligarh Muslim University, most politically active Hindus were members of the pluralist Indian national Congress, and the newly founded(1916) Benares Hindu university never played a role comparable to that of AMU for the Muslim community. Quite apart from formal organizations, the Muslims showed a much stronger communal solidarity, whereas the Hindus were fragmented on caste, sect, class and ideological lines.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“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.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“Apart from its stated objective, the DRS was part of Patel's strategy against Nehru. Patel even intended to throw Nehru out of Congress, which is why Nehru asked his lieutenants Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Acharya Kripalani to leave Congress and prepare a new party, the Democratic Front which was dissolved again when Patel suddenly died in December 1950 and Nehru's position in Congress became unassailable.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“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”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“In 1949, Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel decided to found a think-tank specifically devoted to monitoring Communism, the Democratic Research Service, which was formally started in November 1950. It was sponsored by the industrialist Birla family, and initially led by Morarji Desai, who passed the job on to Minoo Masani. It was as secretary of the DRS that Ram Swarup prepared a History of the Communist Party of India, which Masani published in his own name. A lot of bad blood developed between them, and Ram Swarup quit the DRS to join Sita Ram Goel in Calcutta.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“When the CPI defended the Partition Scheme with contrived socio-economic arguments, Ram Swarup objected that the Partition would only benefit the haves among the Muslims, not the have-nots.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“In 1944, Ram Swarup started the "Changers' Club", alluding to Karl Marx's dictum that philosophers have interpreted the world instead of changing it.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“One of the grossest misconceptions about the Hindu movement, is that it is an artificial creation of political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena. In reality, there is a substratum of Hindu activist tendencies in many corners of Hindu society, often in unorganized form and mostly lacking in intellectual articulation. To this widespread Hindu unrest about the uncertain future of Hindu culture, a discursive expression has been given by a small but growing group of independent writers.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Nehru never made a secret of his deadly hostility to the Hindu nationalists. Once he told Mookerjee: "We will crush you!"(Mookerjee , always more polite than Nehru, replied: "We will crush this crushing mentality.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“The relation between the SS's Hindutva and its Mafia Character is one of inverse proportionality: on a number of occasions, the SS called off Hindu nationalist agitations in exchange for money. The Shiv Sena(SS) support to the Indira Gandhi's Emergency dictatorship should be seen in the same light; it was the only "communal" organisation not to be banned.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“politicized character of Hindutva-watching leads to unabashed manipulations of the semantics of established terminology.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

“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.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism