Category india

Hinduism vs Hindutva: A battle of British colonial construct – Adit Kothari

VOI

Hindus in Hindustan

Hindutva is not ritualistic “Hinduism”, but when etymologically translated from Sanskrit, it simply is the essence of being Hindu—a civilisational consciousness rooted in land, memory, culture, and continuity. – Adit Kothari

The word “Hinduism” itself is not ancient. Neither is it native nor organic. The very suffix “ism” within the word “Hinduism” reeks of Western taxonomy, aiming to confine the civilisation within rigid, dogmatic lines, much like the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam. Such a framework is violently alien to Sanatan Dharma, which never sought reduction into a closed creed.

The Hindu civilisational experience is fluid, plural, evolving, contradictory, and unapologetically non-dogmatic. As Atal Bihari Vajpayee observed in his 1998 interview with Javed Akhtar, India’s secularism flows naturally from Hindu civilisation itself. Hindu thought binds no one to a single prophet, a single book, or a compulsory theology. One may be astika or nastika, devotional or sceptical, ritualistic or philosophical, and still remain within the civilisational fold. There is no concept of blasphemy, apostasy, or enforced belief.

“Hinduism” was not born in Kashi or Kanchipuram. It was midwifed in colonial census offices and missionary tracts. European orientalists and British administrators required a neat category to govern, classify, and evangelise. In doing so, they lumped together diverse Indic traditions—vedic, tantric, bhakti, folk—under a single label, often distorting them to fit monotheistic templates. The term gained currency only in the early 19th century. By freezing Sanatan Dharma into “Hinduism”, colonialism hollowed out its essence, morphing it to fit within their monotheistic template.

Hindutva, contrary to hysterical propaganda, does not destroy this civilisational ethos, but it vociferously exposes the artificiality of the colonial box it was forced into. Hindutva is not ritualistic “Hinduism”, but when etymologically translated from Sanskrit, it simply is the essence of being Hindu—a civilisational consciousness rooted in land, memory, culture, and continuity. It encompasses all Indic traditions, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, bound by culture, history, and geography, not narrow dogma. One does not need to pray to Ram to be Hindu. One does not even need to believe in God. One only needs to belong, to a civilisational inheritance that predates and outlives religious dogma.

This is precisely why Hindutva terrifies the pseudo-liberal establishment. Pseudo-liberals peddle the lie that Hindutva endangers “Hinduism”. This is inverted propaganda from a deracinated elite, conditioned by Macaulay’s education system. In truth, Hindutva is the purest secularism India has ever known. Unlike Western secularism’s hostile separation of state and faith, or India’s pseudo-secularism that panders to Muslims while demonising the Hindu, Hindutva treats all born of this soil as heirs to a common civilisation. It demands loyalty to Bharat first, allowing diverse dharmas to flourish without privileging imported exclusivism. This is true pluralism: equal cultural dignity, not appeasement.

Colonialism weaponised “Hinduism” to divide. It was deliberately marketed as superstitious Paganism ripe for “civilising”. Reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, while alleviating genuine social evils, inadvertently reinforced colonial frameworks by engaging Hindu civilisation in Abrahamic terms. Ironically, this was made possible precisely because the Hindu was never a codified faith and therefore remained open to reform in a way dogmatic religions like Islam are not. Post-independence, Nehruvian secularism entrenched minorityism, alienating the majority, while left-leaning narratives painted any Hindu assertion as “communal”.

Hindutva is accused of being “majoritarian” by the very people who reduced Hindus to a religious minority within their own civilisation. They denied them cultural rights while enthusiastically funding, protecting, and politically mobilising every other faith identity.

India’s Anglophone elite, left-leaning intelligentsia conditioned by colonial education and Nehruvian secularism, loathe the term “Hindutva” not for any supposed majoritarianism—their go-to smear—but because it ruthlessly exposes their lingering colonial hangover. Hindutva asserts an unapologetic, indigenous civilisational identity tied to India as a civilisational land, history, and ethos, shattering the superiority complex these elites inherited from Macaulay’s system. Conditioned to see India’s value system as backward or in need of Western “civilising”, they embraced abstract secularism, Muslim appeasement, and cultural alienation as badges of progress. Hindutva strips that facade, reclaiming agency for the rooted majority, highlighting their detachment from the masses, unease with confident Hindu assertion, and the hollowness of power built on post-colonial mimicry rather than authentic heritage. It forces uncomfortable self-reflection on their enduring mental colonisation, and that’s precisely why they hate it.

In Bengal, this conditioning runs deep. The Bengali intelligentsia, shaped by the Bengal Renaissance and later Marxist dominance under decades of Left Front rule, has long leaned leftward. They are often virulently anti-Hindutva, viewing it through a lens of colonial-era secularism and Soviet-inspired atheism. Calcutta’s elite, influenced by British education and communist hegemony post-1947, internalised narratives dismissing Hindu civilisational pride as retrograde.

This brings us to the [recent] spectacle. On January 11, 2026, at the prestigious Calcutta Club, the Calcutta Debating Circle in association with The Telegraph, hosts a debate on the motion “Hinduism Needs Protection From Hindutva.”

For the motion are relics like Mani Shankar Aiyar and Ashutosh, feral loudmouths like Mahua Moitra, and distorians like Ruchika Sharma peddling tired pseudo-secular tropes. Against the motion stand stalwarts like Swapan Dasgupta, J. Sai Deepak, Agnimitra Paul, and Sudhanshu Trivedi, who, unlike the flustered opposition, conduct themselves armed with logic and history.

The Left-leaning intelligentsia, long cocooned in culturally alienated narratives, are in for a total feast. For decades, they’ve parroted that Hindutva is “fascist” or “majoritarian,” ignoring how it liberates Dharma from colonial chains. This event will hopefully pierce that bubble, forcing confrontation with truths, that “Hinduism” is the real threat to authentic Dharma and Hindutva its saviour. Hopefully, by the end, even the most conditioned will glimpse the propaganda they’ve swallowed, emerging informed and even perhaps awakened.

The death knell of that construct has sounded. Hindutva is not a threat but a reclamation. Not destruction, but resurrection. And it is precisely this mirror, held up to enduring mental colonisation, that its critics find impossible to face. – News18, 10 January 2026

› Adit Kothari is a Calcuttan residing in London as a Pravasi Bharatiya, working to dismantle the plethora of false narratives and misinformation against India and Hindutva.

India rthat is Bharat

Without self-enquiry, rationalism is just another superstition – Acharya Prashant

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Self-enquiry in practice.

Without self-enquiry, rationalism turns outward-only. It scrutinizes religion, superstition, tradition, politics, and the beliefs of others, but it never pauses to examine the psychological centre doing the scrutinizing. The ego remains untouched, and rationality becomes its armour. – Acharya Prashant

Rationalism was meant to be a method, not an identity. It was to be the discipline of honest seeing, not another tribe of the like-minded. You question, you examine, you see clearly. You hold no belief sacred, no authority exempt, including your own. Every conclusion must justify itself, and if it cannot, you let it go: that is the original promise. From the Greek sceptics to the Enlightenment philosophers to the modern scientific temper, this is what rationalism has always claimed as its essence: the courage to ask, the willingness to discard, the refusal to bow before any idea simply because it is old or revered or comfortable.

This inheritance has served humanity well: superstition loosened its grip, the tyranny of priests and kings could be challenged, and questions forbidden for centuries could finally be asked. Science, medicine, law, and political freedom all owe something to this spirit of inquiry. The courage to question rather than blindly obey, to examine rather than merely accept: this is what allows the mind to mature and society to remain free.

None of this is an argument against rationalism as method. The method works. Peer review catches errors, replication weeds out fraud, falsification disciplines speculation. The institution of science corrects what the individual scientist cannot. But the method’s virtue does not automatically transfer to the practitioner. A system can be self-correcting while the people within it remain thoroughly self-deceived. It is this gap, between what rationalism promises and what the rationalist practices, that concerns us here. Yes, there are rationalists who already practice what this essay calls for: who hold conclusions lightly, who examine their own motivations, who do not need the identity of “rational person” to feel secure. This essay is not addressed to them. It is addressed to those who have made reason into a fortress rather than a discipline.

Somewhere along the way, the rationalist method itself became an identity. Rationalism stopped being something you do and became something you are. To call oneself rational became a badge, a tribe, a source of pride and belonging. And the moment rationalism became identity, it could no longer examine itself, for the ego does not question its own hiding places.

When the questioner himself is never questioned, rationalism quietly shifts its role. It stops being an instrument of truth and becomes an instrument of the ego. What was meant to liberate becomes a fortress; what was meant to clarify becomes a tribal flag. The very capacity that could have set you free becomes a new bondage, subtler and therefore more dangerous than the old.

The Outward Gaze

Without self-enquiry, rationalism turns outward-only. It scrutinizes religion, superstition, tradition, politics, and the beliefs of others, but it never pauses to examine the psychological centre doing the scrutinizing. The ego remains untouched, and rationality becomes its armour.

Watch the rationalist in action. He will tell you precisely why the pilgrim is wasting his time at the temple, but he cannot tell you why he himself spent three hours last night arguing with strangers on the internet. He will explain the cognitive biases that make people believe in astrology, yet he has never once examined the compulsion that makes him need to correct them. He writes essays on why people cling to tradition. Still, he cannot see that his own identity as “the one who sees through tradition” is just as clung to, just as defended, just as psychologically necessary to him as any ritual is to the devotee.

Pause and ask: What were you really protecting in that argument? Truth, or self-image? What did you get from being right? What did you fear would happen if you were seen as wrong? If nobody applauded your correctness, would the compulsion still be there?

This is the fatal flaw. Reason directed only outward is not complete reason; it is half-reason, and half-reason is often more dangerous than no reason at all, because it comes with the illusion of completeness.

The religious believer at least knows he believes. The rationalist who has made reason into identity does not know he believes; he thinks he merely sees. And so his beliefs operate unchecked, unexamined, all the more powerful for being invisible to himself.

Here, rationalism becomes belief in reason, not the use of reason. The distinction is crucial. The use of reason is alive, flexible, self-correcting; it holds conclusions lightly, knowing that new evidence or deeper insight may require revision. It is comfortable with uncertainty, because it does not need conclusions to provide identity. It can say, “I do not know,” without feeling diminished.

Belief in reason is something else entirely. It is reason frozen into dogma, producing certainty rather than clarity, positions rather than understanding, debates rather than insight. The believer in reason has made rationality into a flag, and he will defend that flag as fiercely as any religious zealot defends his scripture. His positions are not held because they are true but because they are his; his arguments are not aimed at understanding but at victory. His rationalism has become, in everything but name, a faith.

This is why so many rationalist spaces feel like battlegrounds, not laboratories. The atmosphere is not shared inquiry but competing certainties. People do not come to learn; they come to win. They do not listen to understand; they listen to rebut. The form is rational, but the substance is tribal.

The Psychology Beneath the Logic

Such rationalism is often loud, combative, and moralistic; it seeks victory, not truth. The vocabulary has changed: we now speak of “evidence-based” and “peer-reviewed” instead of “revealed” and “ordained.” But the psychological posture is identical.

It replaces gods with data, scriptures with graphs, priests with experts. The structure remains the same; only the vocabulary has been updated.

Rationalism without self-enquiry cannot see its own motivations. Fear, insecurity, superiority, the need to be right: these operate freely beneath the language of logic. The rationalist believes he is defending truth, but he does not see that he is defending himself. He believes he is exposing others’ irrationality, but he does not see the irrationality of his own emotional investment in being the one who exposes.

Reason is then used to justify psychological compulsions rather than dissolve them. The ego learns to speak in syllogisms; it marshals data the way a lawyer marshals precedents, not to find truth but to win the case. And the case is always the same: I am right, I am rational, I am superior to those who are not.

This is why the most aggressive rationalists so often resemble the fundamentalists they oppose. The content differs: God versus no God, scripture versus science, tradition versus progress. But the structure is the same. Both need certainty, both need enemies, both cannot tolerate ambiguity, and both derive identity from their conclusions. In this condition, rationalism becomes collective prejudice in modern dress.It calls itself progressive, but it is deeply conformist; any community that prides itself on rational thinking quickly develops orthodoxies as rigid as any religious sect.

In certain Western rationalist circles, approved conclusions function as membership tests. Deviate, even carefully and with evidence, and you are not refuted but reclassified: you become a denialist, a bigot, someone who has “revealed their true colors.” The argument is not answered; the arguer is diagnosed. Among several Indian rationalists, the pattern mirrors. One must hold the correct contempt for all religion and the “correct” suspicion of all tradition. Suggest that an ancient text contains genuine philosophical insight, and you risk being treated as a communal apologist; question whether one particular civilizational model is the only path to human flourishing, and you become intellectually untouchable.In both cases, the permitted conclusions are known in advance, and argument no longer exists to discover truth but to police boundaries. This is not reason at work; it is the ego defending its shelter, now speaking the language of rationality.

It calls itself free, but it is bound to identity, group approval, and intellectual fashion. The rationalist who prides himself on thinking independently often thinks exactly what his intellectual community thinks. He reads the same sources, reaches the same conclusions, expresses the same outrage, and dismisses the same enemies. He has not escaped the herd; he has joined a different herd, one that flatters itself as a gathering of independent minds.

This is not the failure of rationalism; it is the predictable outcome of rationalism that refuses to examine the rationalist. When the ego is never questioned, it will use any tool, including reason, to do what the ego always does: seek security, belong to a group, feel superior, and avoid the terror of standing alone.

The Inward Turn

True rationality is inseparable from self-enquiry.

This is what separates genuine reason from its counterfeit. The moment reason turns inward and asks, “Why do I need this conclusion? What does this belief give me psychologically?”, rationalism regains its original power.The question is not merely “Is this true?” but “Why do I want it to be true? What fear would arise if it were false? What image of myself depends on this position? What would remain of me if I surrendered this certainty?”

Try it now. Pick a position you hold dear, one you have defended publicly, one that feels obviously correct. Ask: what do I get from holding this? Not what is true about it, but what does it give me? Watch what arises. If the mind rushes to justify the position, that rush is the answer. If irritation arises at the question itself, that irritation is the answer. Self-enquiry does not require you to abandon your conclusions; it only asks you to see who is clinging to them, and why.

This is the questioning the ego cannot survive. It can survive any external argument; it can change positions, update beliefs, switch tribes, and remain fundamentally intact. What it cannot survive is being seen. The moment awareness turns on the one who argues, the game is exposed: the certainties are revealed as defences, the positions as props for identity. The rationalism that seemed so solid turns out to be a house built on the shifting sand of psychological need.

This is why self-enquiry is so rare, and why it is so essential. The rationalist who has never asked, “What am I really doing when I argue?”, who has never noticed the pleasure in being right, the fear of being wrong, the satisfaction of superiority, has never used reason fully. He has used reason the way a child uses a stick: to hit things, defend territory, feel powerful. He has not yet used reason the way a surgeon uses a scalpel: to cut through illusion, beginning with his own.

When self-enquiry accompanies rationalism, everything changes. Positions become lighter and can be revised without trauma. Disagreement becomes information rather than attack. Uncertainty becomes tolerable, even interesting, because identity no longer depends on knowing. The rationalist stops performing and starts inquiring, stops defending and starts seeing, stops winning and starts learning.

This is reason restored to its original purpose: not a weapon for victory but a light for seeing. And that light must fall on the one who holds it, not only on the objects he chooses to examine.

Without that inward turn, rationalism is not liberation; it is merely a sophisticated cage.

The bars are elegant, the locks are logical, and the prisoner is convinced he is free because he can critique the cages of others. But he remains inside, for he has never questioned the one who built the cage, who maintains the cage, who is terrified of life outside the cage. His cage has a sign on it that says “No Cage,” and he believes the sign.

This is the final irony: the one who prides himself on questioning becomes the one who cannot be questioned. The identity of “questioner” becomes the most protected possession of all.

Liberation is not a change of content; it is freedom from the need to cling to any content. The liberated mind can hold positions without being held by them, can use reason without being used by the ego’s need for reason, can think without needing thought to tell it who it is.

This liberation is not achieved by abandoning rationalism; it is achieved by completing it, by turning the light that has illuminated so much of the external world, finally, uncompromisingly, on the one who holds the light.

The question is not whether you can question religion, tradition, politics, or superstition; you have already demonstrated that capacity. The question is whether you can question the questioner. Can you ask, with genuine not-knowing: What am I defending? What am I afraid of? Who would I be if I could no longer call myself rational?

You have spent years examining everything except the examiner. That exemption is the source of your bondage. The rationalist who cannot examine his own rationalism is no different from the believer who cannot examine his own belief; both are prisoners, and one is simply more articulate about the prison walls.

Begin there. That is the only beginning worth the name. Refuse, and you remain what you have always been: an ego armed with arguments, a prisoner who has memorised every book on liberation but never bothered to look at his own chains. – The Pioneer, 24 january 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a teacher, author, and founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation. 
Self Enquiry Cartoon

Makar Sankranti: When did we first celebrate Surya? – Raj Vedam

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Surya

Makar Sankranti would have coincided with the Winter Solstice approximately in 143 BCE. By simulation in planetarium software, we find that anywhere from 400 BCE to the opening centuries of the Common Era, the Winter Solstice date would have coincided with the Sun rising approximately in Makar Rashi. Based on synchrony of the solstice with Makar Sankranti, we propose the festival to have been celebrated since 400 BCE. – Dr. Raj Vedam

The widespread celebration of the Makar Sankranti festival and its many regional variations hint at great antiquity. In this article, we will take a journey through time, weaving together history, astronomy, calendars, seasons, agriculture and common customs, to find connections and understand the antiquity of the festival, and as an outcome, we will examine three different synchronisms for Makar Sankranti.

We first discuss points of astronomical significance, to appreciate the antiquity of the festival.

1. As the Earth rotates on its 23.5 degree tilted axis from west to east, it would appear that celestial bodies that rise in the eastern horizon set in the western horizon, except for the stars closer to the celestial North (South) Pole that would appear to circle it.

2. Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun while tilted at 23.5 degrees gives the phenomenon of seasons, due to the changing amounts of sunlight in each hemisphere, in each quarter segment of the revolution.

3. The visible stars are so distant from our solar system that they appear to be fixed with respect to the Earth’s revolution. As the Earth makes progress in its revolution each day, it would appear that the familiar constellations also change in the sky. Thus the constellations that appear in the night sky in a given month will repeat in a year’s time (ignoring the slow effect of precession, discussed in point 7). The situation is analogous to looking outside a train window on a circular track—the same scenery will appear at the same point on the circular track.

4. Due to Earth’s tilt at 23.5 degrees, from an Earth-bound observation point, it would appear that the sunrise is offset by a small amount daily, and reaches a southernmost point—the Winter Solstice, and reverses course, and reaches a northernmost point, the Summer Solstice. Ancient Indians recognised the six-month southern journey of the Sun as Dakshinayana, and the 6-month northern journey as the auspicious Uttarayana. The epic Mahabharata, recounts Bhishma who could control the time of his death, and lay on a bed of arrows, waiting for the start of Uttarayana, for more than 92 days (Nilesh Nilakanth Oak, When Did the Mahabharata War Happen?), hinting ancient observance of the Winter Solstice occurrence.

5. Indian astronomical work divided the sky into twenty-seven Nakshatras that each occupies 13 and 1/3 degree segments, approximately the distance travelled by the Moon in a 24 hour period against the fixed stars. Each Nakshatra was identified by the principal stars in that segment of the sky. The Nakshatra model forms part of the earliest corpus of Indian works on astronomy, dating to the Vedic era.

6. In addition to the twenty-seven Nakshatras, ancient Indians also divided the sky into 12 equal parts of thirty degrees each, called the Rashis. While there have been some Western assertions that ancient Indians borrowed the Rashi model from Babylon, Subhash Kak shows otherwise in his book, Astronomical Code of the Rgveda, about the Vedic origin of the Rashis evolving from the twelve Adityas.

7. Due to the gravitational effects of Sun and Moon (and to a lesser extent, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn), the Earth wobbles on its axis, and completes a non-uniform cycle in about 25,771 years, referred to as Precession of Equinox. Due to this wobble, the celestial North Pole (and South Pole) appears to change over time, and the Rashis appear to drift slowly over the years. More than 2500 years ago, ancient Indians had observed and measured the wobble at a degree for every 100 years. This translates to a measure of 36,000 years, a figure repeated by Hipparchus around 150 BCE. One of the best estimates of precession was made by Bhaskara II of Ujjain in the 12th century, to 25,461 years, and not improved upon till modern times. It is very interesting that ancient Indians had noted a time when Abhijit (the star Vega) was once the pole star, and also a time when it was no longer the pole star. Abhijit was at the celestial North Pole approximately 14,000 years ago. Around 7000 years ago, it would have appeared to have “fallen” in the sky, as noted by Dr. P. V. Vartak (Scientific Dating of Ramayana and the Vedas), calling out a reference to a passage in the Mahabharata.

We now define Makar Sankranti as the date when from an Earth-bound observation point, the Sun enters the Makar Rashi, also called Capricorn.

Ancient Indians noted the Winter Solstice as the start of the auspicious Uttarayana. At some point in the past, Uttarayana coincided with Makar Sankranti, and constitutes our first point of synchrony. We can determine the time period when the two coincided by considering the effects of precession. Prior to that, it is instructive to note how ancient Indians and Europeans recorded the passage of time.

Subhash Kak notes that even before Vedanga Jyotish, ancient Indians’ 27 Nakshatra and 12 Rashi system used a luni-solar calendar where every 5 years, an additional month called Adhika Masa was added, synchronising the lunar and solar years. Ancient Indians also estimated the tropical year, defined as the period when the Sun enters the same seasonal point—say, a solstice point.

Aryabhata and Bhaskara II had estimated the tropical year at 365 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds, the same figure as estimated in the ancient Indian text, Surya Siddhanta. The modern figure for the tropical year is approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds.

In the Western system, Julius Caesar instituted the Julian calendar in 46 BCE, dividing the year of 365 days to 12 months, and adding a day every 4th year, thus averaging to 365 days, 6 hours—a figure less accurate than the Surya Siddhanta. Due to this approximation, this calendar accumulated errors over the years, causing a “slip” in the dates of the equinoxes and solstices. The modern Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582, introduced a correction, where if a year is integer-divisible by 4, it is considered a leap year, except for those centurial years that are integer-divisible by 100, and with further overruling exception to those centurial years that are integer-divisible by 400, which were considered as leap years. With the modern Gregorian calendar, the equinoxes and solstices occur on approximately the same date each year, and considering precession, has an error of about 1 day every 7700 years.

Considering the first synchrony, the Winter Solstice today coincides with the Dhanus Sankranti—one Rashi away from Makar. This slip has happened due to the precession noted earlier.

Assuming a uniform precession rate of 25,771 years for a full circle of 360 degrees, each degree is about 71.5861 years. Rounding the figures and noting that each Rashi occupies 30 degrees, we multiply 72 by 30 to get 2160—the approximate number of years in the past, when due to precession, Makar Sankranti would have coincided with the Winter Solstice approximately in 143 BCE. By simulation in planetarium software, we find that anywhere from 400 BCE to the opening centuries of the Common Era, the Winter Solstice date would have coincided with the Sun rising approximately in Makar Rashi. Based on synchrony of the solstice with Makar Sankranti, we propose the festival to have been celebrated since 400 BCE.

Sesame Laddus

Sesame harvest

Our second dating of the antiquity of the Makar Sankranti festival is by considering the synchrony of Makar Sankranti with the sesame / til / gingelly crop harvest. We notice an India-wide common aspect of celebrating Makar Sankranti—the widespread use of til in traditional sweet preparation. Til is a drought-resistant Rabi crop in India, planted currently around mid-November and harvested in April, before the monsoons, taking about 90 to 120 days to grow. Paleo-botonical records suggest an antiquity of at least 3000 BCE for the multi-crop cultivation of til in Rakhigarh sites and a few centuries later for domestic rice, and a trade with Mesopotamia and Egypt in til in 2000 BCE. Up to the medieval period, Indian farmers encoded agricultural wisdom with references to Nakshatras to help time their planting and reaping activities. It is fascinating to investigate a period of time when Makar Sankranti coincided with the harvest of the til crop, say in southern India, and was therefore used in celebratory sweet preparation.

Contrary to popular thought, the seasons do not change with precession. The Milankovitch cycles predict long-term climate changes due to precession, Obliquity and tilt cycles of the Earth, but these do not impact the periodical seasons (might make seasons more or less severe, though!). However, if we peg our measurement of time to a Nakshatra/Rashi, that observation can change over time due to precession. Thus an observation that “rainy season starts in Ashada Masa” can change over time due to precession.

Our clue is that traditionally, Makar Sankranti is considered as a harvest festival. In Tamil Nadu, there are two planting seasons for til—Thai Pattam (Jan/Feb) and Adi Pattam (July/August). Considering a 4-month growing period, the Adi Pattam crop harvest would coincide with December. Thus again, the date of about 400 BCE synchronizing the Winter Solstice, til harvest, and Makar Sankranti makes sense.

Makar Sankranti date

The final synchrony we examine is to ask the question, when did Makar Sankranti last coincide with January 13th or 14th (or 15th on a leap year)? By direct simulation on planetarium software, we find this date to be around 1500s CE. This period is startlingly, the exact period of the famous Kerala astronomer, Nilakantha Somayaji (1444-1544), author of Tantrasangrama, who would have been aware of the length of the tropical year and the effect of precession from works of Aryabhata, Bhaskara II as well as Surya Siddhanta, and might have computed the date accordingly. This date was probably left untouched since.

We have examined three synchronies regarding Makar Sankranti. The first, based on synchrony with the Winter Solstice gives a date of about 400 BCE. The second, based on a synchrony of til harvest in Tamil Nadu with Makar Sankranti also suggests 400 BCE. The third, based on a synchrony with the tropical calendar, gives a date of 1500s CE.

As we celebrate Makar Sankranti, we should also celebrate the strong traditions of astronomy and mathematics, indelibly tied with the shared experience of the nation, over thousands of years. – Swarajya, 13 January 2017

› Dr Raj Vedam is a co-founder of the think tank, Indian History Awareness and Research, and resides in Houston, Texas. His research interests include Engineering Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and the scientific validation of Indian History.

Arunachala Hill

Adolf Hitler’s views on Hindu cremation rituals in Benares – Roshni Chakrabarty

VOI

Adolf Hitler's Table Talk

Adolf Hitler’s views on cremation rituals in Benares reveals cultural arrogance and a deep colonial prejudice. We examine what his comment tells us about Nazi ideology and how a partisan power viewed non-European societies. – Roshni Chakrabarty

In the middle of World War II, while Europe was burning and Nazi Germany was deep into its campaign of genocide, Adolf Hitler spent many evenings talking.

These were not public speeches or radio broadcasts, but private monologues—rambling conversations over dinner with close aides, secretaries, and senior officials.

Decades later, some of these conversations would be published under the title Hitler’s Table Talk. And buried in those pages is an interesting passage about India, specifically about the cremation of bodies at Benares, now Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges.

The quote is jarring, offensive, and revealing. But before treating it as a historical curiosity or viral fact, it needs to be understood properly: who recorded it, how reliable it is, and what it actually tells us.

Quote comes from Hitler’s Table Talk (Tischgespräche im Fhrerhauptquartier), a collection of notes on what Hitler allegedly said, taken between 1941 and 1944.

About Hitler’s Table Talk

The text quoted above comes from Hitler’s Table Talk (Tischgespräche im Fhrerhauptquartier), a collection of notes on what Hitler allegedly said, taken between 1941 and 1944.

These notes were recorded by several people in Hitler’s inner circle, most notably Heinrich Heim and Henry Picker, and later edited and published after the war.

The English edition was prepared by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s. It presented the conversations as near-verbatim records of Hitler’s private views on politics, race, religion, culture, colonialism, and war.

However, historians have long debated the accuracy and reliability of Table Talk. It remains one of the most controversial historical sources of World War II—cited cautiously, debated fiercely, and used mainly to study ideology rather than facts.

The cited conversations were not tape-recorded. They were written down from memory or shorthand notes, sometimes hours later, then translated and edited across languages.

As a result, scholars generally treat the book as a valuable but imperfect historical source—useful for understanding Hitler’s mindset, but not always precise in wording.

The passage about Benares appears in this context: Hitler reacting to accounts he had read about Hindu cremation practices along the Ganges.

What the quotation actually says and why it matters

In the passage, Hitler expresses disgust at the idea of partially cremated bodies being placed in the river, mocks the notion of ritual purity, and claims that Western “hygiene experts” would have imposed harsh controls if they ruled India.

He contrasts this with British colonial rule, which he claims merely banned sati (widow immolation), and ends by suggesting Indians were “lucky” not to be ruled by Germany.

This is not an offhand comment but reflects several deeper ideas central to Nazi ideology.

First, it depicts racial and cultural hierarchy. Nazi thinking placed European civilisation, especially a mythologised German one, at the top, while non-European cultures were seen as primitive, irrational, or unhygienic.

Second, it shows colonial arrogance. Although Nazi Germany criticised British imperialism in public, Hitler admired the idea of ruthless colonial control. His comment imagines an even harsher regime than British rule, enforced through surveillance, punishment, and state power.

Third, it shows Hitler’s pseudo-scientific obsession with “hygiene”. The language of cleanliness, contamination, and disease runs through Nazi ideology. The same mindset that framed Jewish people as a “biological threat” is visible here in how religious practices are reduced to sanitation problems.

Benares, cremation and the colonial gaze

For centuries, Varanasi has been one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Cremation along the Ganges is not merely a method of disposing of the dead; it is a sacred ritual tied to beliefs about moksha, the release of the soul from the cycle of rebirth.

Colonial officials often misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented these practices. British administrators and missionaries frequently described them using the language of filth, superstition, and moral decay, while ignoring their religious meaning.

Hitler’s remark fits squarely into this colonial gaze, even though Germany never ruled India.

What makes the quote striking is not that it criticises a cultural practice, since many outsiders also did the same, but that it reveals how easily “hygiene” became a justification for authoritarian control.

How historians read this quotation today

Most historians do not cite Hitler’s Table Talk to learn about India. They cite it to understand Hitler himself.

The Benares passage is valuable because it shows how Nazi leaders viewed non-European societies, how colonial thinking influenced even regimes that opposed British power, and how cultural difference was reframed as a problem needing coercive “solutions”.

It is also a reminder that racism does not need direct rule to exist. Even without colonies, Nazi ideology imagined domination, control, and “correction” of other societies.

Why this quote still cirtculates

The passage on what Hitler said about Benaras often resurfaces on social media today for several reasons. It shocks, provokes outrage, and unsettles comfortable narratives that frame Hitler as interested only in Europe.

But stripped of context, it can also mislead. The quote does not describe Indian society accurately. It describes European prejudice, filtered through one of history’s most violent ideologies.

This is not a quote about India, but rather about how power talks about culture.

From colonial administrators to totalitarian regimes, history shows a repeated pattern: sacred practices are labelled “backward”, science is weaponised as morality, and control is justified in the name of order.

The Benares passage in Hitler’s Table Talk is a stark example of that mindset — one that helps explain not just Nazi thinking, but the broader dangers of cultural arrogance dressed up as rationality. – India Today, 9 January 2026

› Roshni Chakrabarty writes columns on education, environment, science and the  changemakers in history.

Manikarnika Ghat

When the RSS is indifferent to its media image – Koenraad Elst

VOI

RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat

This article was first published in Pragyata in 2017 and some of its observations are dated. However, the subject matter is still of interest to Hindus and the article is reposted here – Editor

On Friday  Nov. 3, 2017, 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 westernising. 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 westernisation.

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-baiting

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 especially 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”, even though 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 underway, 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 Hinduising or “saffronising” 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, subsidised schools can be Christian or Muslim, but not Hindu: in the latter case, either they get taken over by the state and secularised, or at best, they have to do without subsidies. Temples are nationalised and their income channelled 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 Article 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 brown trousers. It was the new uniform, for till recently the brown trousers would have been khaki shorts, even more a 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?

St. Valentine’s 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 westernising influences. One example of a pernicious influence was Valentine’s Day, taken straight from the existing western commercial pop culture. More ideologised people denounce it also as a “Christian” holiday. Valentine was a Roman Catholic 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 Februata (“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 characterise the modern West.

But in the documentary, in the interview with the RSS activist, we only see a humourless spoil-sport’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 symbolised by Valentine’s Day. Possibly it is not good enough to overrule modernisation, but that remains to be seen, and the traditionalist view deserves a proper hearing.

In the streets, the Dutch newcomer to India saw westernisation 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 McDonald’s. So, the final impression that the viewers will take home is that, in India at least, westernisation 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 for 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 civilised 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 K.B. Hedgewar, who had started out as a 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 organisation 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 air plane. 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 or for the first time came to power in the 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.

Postscript

The same impression could be had from Sona Datta‘s documentary about Hindu art and temple architecture, broadcast 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 ravaged by wars of religion”. But unlike in the recent past, this propaganda was not that obtrusive. – Pragyata, 15 November 2017

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgium author, linguist and historian.

Hindus protest celebration of St. Valentines's Day.

What Mahmud of Ghazni did must not be forgotten – Reshmi Dasgupta

VOI 1 Comment

Somnath temple converted to mosque ca 1931.

What happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. – Reshmi Dasgupta

From January 6 to 9, 1026, the army of Mahmud of Ghazni lay siege to the wondrous temple of Somnath near the port city of Veraval. The defenders of the fortified shrine eventually could not repel the troops of the Central Asian invader and Somnath was captured. It was Mahmud’s 16th raid on India and loot was not the only target. Contemporary sources mention that Hindu merchants offered more money if he spared the idol; he refused and struck the first blow.

For that act, Mahmud earned the title “Butshikan” or idol-breaker, from an admiring Islamic world and his renown for the desecration of Somnath and other major Hindu temples in India persisted for centuries. Sultan Sikandar Shah earned the same Butshikan title in the 14th century for destroying temples in Kashmir in pursuance of the precepts of the Sufi preacher Mir Mohammad Hamadani. Even 600 years later, Aurangzeb appreciated Mahmud’s Islamic fervour.

It is inevitable that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commemoration of the 1000th anniversary of the first destruction (as opposed to the misleading word “sacking” commonly used for the violent actions of Mahmud of Ghazni) of the Somnath temple will be countered with supposed “proof” of either “Arab” heroism or Hindu perfidy or both. It is now almost an article of faith among certain sections in India and abroad that Mahmud was more maligned than malevolent.

As has been often pointed out in recent times, the assertions of the high priestess of the secular camp Romila Thapar on the destruction of Somnath lack basis in actual facts even if delivered with withering condescension in impeccable upper class accented English. But there are plenty of willing believers in Thapar’s argument that Mahmud was not communal—merely venal—and that his destruction of the magnificent Shiva lingam at Somnath was incidental.

Indeed, the PM calling the repeated rebuilding of Somnath after each brutal destruction and plunder a symbol of the “unbreakable courage of countless children of Bharat Mata who protected our culture and civilisation” will be met with predictable counters. First, that “Arabs”—mainly traders who had settled in the area and married local women—died protecting Somnath from Mahmud’s marauders. Second, that there were many Hindus in Mahmud’s army.

There were indeed Hindus in Mahmud’s army, including battalion commanders, and he used them with varying effectiveness in campaigns on the subcontinent and even further north in Central Asia. But the phenomenon of mercenaries—soldiers of fortune who fight for the best paymaster—is well known. The presence of Hindus in his army cannot be taken to mean Mahmud was “secular” or that his actions were not intended to attack and diminish India’s majority faith.

There is no dependable account of Arabs dying while defending Somnath, but they could well have been miffed by their co-religionists from Ghazni disturbing their livelihoods. Arabs had all been Islamised by then although earlier traders and sailors may have adhered to pre-Islamic faiths including Christianity. So, it would be a stretch to imagine they would risk irking Allah by actually fighting alongside local Hindus kafirs to save Somnath from his holy warriors.

The Veraval Inscriptions (so named for the ancient port town next to the Somnath, which had a bustling mercantile trading business) dated to about 250 years after Mahmud’s destruction of the great Shiva lingam, highlight the dynamic between the two communities in the last millennium. The bilingual inscriptions from the reign of the Vaghela king Arjundev, records an agreement for the financing of the upkeep of a mosque at Somnath Patan built by a resident of Hormuz.

Curiously, the longer Sanskrit inscription lists the Hindu king and hierarchy but mendaciously describes the lord of the mosque as Vishwanatha and Shunyarupa and even calls Prophet Mohammed a “prabodhak” or preceptor. The Muslim shipowner donor from Hormuz Nuruddin Firoz is called a “dharmabandhav” of Sri Chhada who seems to be the mosque’s chief administrator. But in the shorter Arabic notation, there is no attempt to Indianise Allah or his Prophet.

The twin inscriptions seem to indicate that Hindu rulers bore no lasting animus against all Muslims—especially the Arab and Persian merchants from the Gulf—for the depredations of the Turkic invader from Ghazni 200 years before, and allowed them to set up mosques near the temple. But one sentence of the Arabic inscription points to the thinking of the Muslims even if they attempted to couch their initial outreach to the Hindus with seemingly syncretic gestures.

The Arabic inscription expresses the hope that Somnath will one day become a city of Islam, and that infidels and idols will eventually be banished from it. Why did the officials of the Vaghelas (the last Hindu kingdom of the region) allow that explicit expression of intent to pass unchallenged? Could they not read Arabic? Or were they persuaded, as indeed are some academics reading it 750 years later, that it was a “pro forma” statement and did not constitute a threat?In the event, though Somnath was revered enough for the 11th century Chalukya ruler Bhima I to rebuild it after Ghazni’s desecration, local inhabitants naively seemed to have borne no permanent suspicion of Muslims as the Veraval inscriptions two and a half centuries later seems to confirm. But a mere 35 years after those twin plaques were incised, the army of Delhi’s Sultan Alauddin Khilji under Ulugh Khan pillaged and destroyed Somnath yet again.

And that deed was approvingly chronicled by no less than the much-admired (even today) Persian poet Amir Khusro. In Khazain-ul-Futuh (Treasures of Victory), he gleefully wrote in 1310 (after Khilji’s armies attacked again in 1304 and annexed all of Gujarat):

“So the temple of Somnath was made to bow towards the Holy Mecca; and as the temple lowered its head and jumped into the sea, you may say that the building first said its prayers and then had a bath.”

He also added:

“It seemed as if the tongue of the imperial sword explained the meaning of the text: ‘So he (Abraham) broke them (the idols) into pieces except the chief of them, that haply they may return to it.’ A pagan country, the Mecca of the Infidels, now became the Medina of Islam. The followers of Abraham now acted as guides in place of the Brahman leaders. The robust-hearted true believers rigorously broke all idols and temples wherever they found them.”

Khusro also dispelled doubts about the intent of the Arabic Veraval inscription:

“Owing to the war, ‘takbir,’ and ‘shahadat’ was heard on every side; even the idols by their breaking affirmed the existence of God. In this ancient land of infidelity, the call to prayers rose so high that it was heard in Baghdad and Madain while the Khutba resounded in the dome of Abraham and over the water of Zamzam. The sword of Islam purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.”

That Khusro described Somnath as the “Mecca of Infidels” underlines its primacy as a Hindu centre of worship, reiterating its pride of place as the first of the 12 Jyotirlingas listed in the Shiva Purana. So it is not surprising that every Muslim ruler thereafter who wanted to assert his religious cred and supremacy attacked Somnath, from Muzaffar Shah to Mahmud Begada to Aurangzeb. But it was restored, rebuilt, reconsecrated faithfully by Hindu rulers each time.

What is glossed over by apologists is that Somnath was not considerately left to resume worship. It was converted into a mosque by several Islamic attackers and then reconstructed repeatedly as a temple by Hindu monarchs. It was turned into a domed mosque by Aurangzeb in 1665. And the final rebuild happened in 1951, thanks to the determined efforts of Sardar Patel, KM Munshi and Dr Rajendra Prasad in the teeth of opposition from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 1783, the formidable Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar had another Shiva temple constructed 200 metres from the original site of Somnath, whose added dome and minaret can be seen in late 19th century photographs now in the British Library. She had done the same three years earlier in Varanasi where the original Kashi Vishwanath temple had been mostly destroyed (only one wall left standing) and rebuilt as “Gyanvapi” mosque, also on Aurangzeb’s orders.

So, what happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. That it is standing proudly again is indeed a testament to the quiet determination and faith of the children of Bharat Mata, as PM Modi said. – News18, 7 January 2026

›  Reshmi Dasgupta is a freelance writer formerly with the Times of India Group. 
Somnath Temple

Somnath: A thousand years of unbroken faith – Narendra Modi

VOI 1 Comment

Narendra Modi at the Somnath Temple.

If the Somnath Temple, which was attacked a thousand years ago and faced continuous attacks thereon, could rise again and again, then we can surely restore our great nation to the glory it embodied a thousand years ago before the invasions. – PM Narendra Modi

Somnath … hearing this word instils a sense of pride in our hearts and minds. It is the eternal proclamation of India’s soul. This majestic temple is situated on the western coast of India in Gujarat, at a place called Prabhas Patan. The Dwadasha Jyotirling Stotram mentions the 12 Jyotirlings across India. The stotram begins with “सौराष्ट्रे सोमनाथं च…” symbolising the civilisational and spiritual importance of Somnath as the first Jyotirling.

It is also said:

सोमलिङ्गं नरो दृष्ट्वा सर्वपापैः प्रमुच्यते ।

लभते फलं मनोवाञ्छितं मृतः स्वर्गं समाश्रयेत्॥

It means: Just the sight of Somnath Shivling ensures that a person is freed of sins, achieves their righteous desires and attains heaven after death.

Tragically, this very Somnath, which drew the reverence and prayers of millions, was attacked by foreign invaders, whose agenda was demolition, not devotion.

The year 2026 is significant for the Somnath Temple. It has been 1,000 years since the first attack on this great shrine. It was in January of 1026 that Mahmud of Ghazni attacked this temple, seeking to destroy a great symbol of faith and civilisation, through a violent and barbaric invasion.

Yet, one thousand years later, the temple stands as glorious as ever because of numerous efforts to restore Somnath to its grandeur. One such milestone completes 75 years in 2026. It was during a ceremony on May 11th 1951, in the presence of the then President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, that the restored temple opened its doors to devotees.

The first invasion of Somnath a thousand years ago in 1026, the cruelty that was unleashed upon the people of the town and the devastation that was inflicted upon the shrine have been documented in great detail in various historical accounts. When you read them, the heart trembles. Each line carries the weight of grief, cruelty and a sorrow that refuses to fade with time.

Imagine the impact it had on Bharat and the morale of the people. After all, Somnath had great spiritual significance. It was also on the coast, giving strength to a society with great economic prowess, whose sea traders and seafarers carried tales of its grandeur far and wide.

Yet, I am proud to state unequivocally that the story of Somnath, a thousand years after the first attack, is not defined by destruction. It is defined by the unbreakable courage of crores of children of Bharat Mata.

The medieval barbarism that began a thousand years ago in 1026 went on to ‘inspire’ others to repeatedly attack Somnath. It was the start of an attempt to enslave our people and culture. But, each time the temple was attacked, we also had great men and women who stood up to defend it and even made the ultimate sacrifice. And every single time, generation after generation, the people of our great civilisation picked themselves up, rebuilt and rejuvenated the temple. It is our privilege to have been nurtured by the same soil that has nurtured greats like Ahilyabai Holkar, who made a noble attempt to ensure devotees can pray at Somnath.

In the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda visited Somnath and that experience moved him. He expressed his feelings during a lecture in Chennai in 1897 when he said:

“Some of these old temples of Southern India and those like Somnath of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom, will give you a keener insight into the history of the race than any amount of books.

“Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind, that is the national life-current. Follow it and it leads to glory. Give it up and you die; death will be the only result, annihilation, the only effect, the moment you step beyond that life current.”

The sacred duty of rebuilding the Somnath Temple after independence came to the able hands of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A visit during Diwali time in 1947 moved him so much that he announced that the temple will be rebuilt there. Finally, on May 11th 1951, a grand temple in Somnath opened its doors to devotees and Dr. Rajendra Prasad was present there. The great Sardar Sahib was not alive to see this historic day, but the fulfilment of his dream stood tall before the nation.

The then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was not too enthused with this development. He did not want the Honourable President as well as Ministers to associate with this special event. He said that this event created a bad impression of India. But Dr. Rajendra Prasad stood firm and the rest is history. No mention of Somnath is complete without recalling the efforts of K.M. Munshi, who supported Sardar Patel very effectively. His works on Somnath, including the book, Somanatha: The Shrine Eternal, are extremely informative and educative.

Indeed, as the title of Munshiji’s book conveys, we are a civilisation that carries a sense of conviction about the eternity of spirit and of ideas. We firmly believe that that which is eternal is indestructible, as outlined in the famous Gita verse “नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि….” There can be no better example of our civilisation’s indomitable spirit than Somnath, which stands gloriously, overcoming odds and struggles.

It is this same spirit that is visible in our nation, one of the brightest spots of global growth, having overcome centuries of invasions and colonial loot. It is our value systems and the determination of our people that have made India the centre of global attention today. The world is seeing India with hope and optimism.

They want to invest in our innovative youngsters. Our art, culture, music and several festivals are going global. Yoga and Ayurveda are making a worldwide impact, boosting healthy living. Solutions to some of the most pressing global challenges are coming from India.

Since time immemorial, Somnath has brought together people from different walks of life. Centuries ago, Kalikal Sarvagna Hemchandracharya, a respected Jain monk, came to Somnath. It is said that after praying there, he recited a verse, “भवबीजाङ्करजनना रागाद्या: क्षयमुपगता यस्य।”. It means: “Salutations to That One in whom the seeds of worldly becoming are destroyed, in whom passion and all afflictions have withered away.” Today, Somnath holds the same ability to awaken something profound within the mind and soul.

A thousand years after the first attack in 1026, the sea at Somnath still roars with the same intensity as it did back then. The waves that wash the shores of Somnath tell a story. No matter what, just like the waves, it kept rising again and again.

The aggressors of the past are now dust in the wind, their names synonymous with destruction. They are footnotes in the annals of history, while Somnath stands bright, radiating far beyond the horizon, reminding us of the eternal spirit that remained undiminished by the attack of 1026. Somnath is a song of hope that tells us that while hate and fanaticism may have the power to destroy for a moment, faith and conviction in the power of goodness have the power to create for eternity.

If the Somnath Temple, which was attacked a thousand years ago and faced continuous attacks thereon, could rise again and again, then we can surely restore our great nation to the glory it embodied a thousand years ago before the invasions. With the blessings of Shree Somnath Mahadev, we move forward with a renewed resolve to build a Viksit Bharat, where civilisational wisdom guides us to work for the welfare of the whole world.

Jai Somnath! – The New Indian Express, 5 January 2026

› Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India and Chairman of the Shri Somnath Temple Trust.

Ruins of Somnath as viewed in 1869

Why are Indian historians in denial mode? – David Frawley

VOI

Indus Script

It is time for deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India. … Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Dr. David Frawley

India today is a strange country in that, uniquely among the nations of the world, it seems to be afraid of its own history.

If we study current historical accounts, particularly by India’s academic Left, the most important fact about the history of India is that there is no real history of India. This is because such scholars are unable to see the existence of any cohesive entity called India before 1947.

India as a real country in their view is attributed mainly to Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers after independence on a region that, though previously under the umbrella of British rule, was otherwise lacking in unity, continuity or perhaps even civilisational depth.

Such historians are happy to negate the history of their own country. Their accounts of India’s history are largely denials of any enduring country, civilisation or culture worthy of the name. Their history of India is one of foreign invasions, temporary or vanished empires, internal social divisions and conflicts, and a disparate and confused cultural diversity. They regard India as a melting pot or conglomeration of widely separated peoples and cultures coming together by the accident of geography that hardly constitutes any united country or national identity.

Unfortunately, such Indian historians, particularly with political alliances with Left historians in UK and US, are introducing their anti-India ideas into Western academia, which still does not understand India’s very different civilisational model.

Such studies forget that national identity is cultural, not simply political. India did not become a British state under British rule or an Islamic state under Muslim rule. The older Indian/Bharatiya culture continued.

These anti-India views are easily countered by a number of historical facts.

The first is that outside people and countries have long recognised a civilisation called India.

After Alexander the Great came to India in the fourth century BCE, the Greek historian Megasthenes wrote a book on the region called Indika, in which he noted an existing tradition in the country of 153 kings going back over 6,400 years. The Greeks overall lauded the civilisation of India.

Buddhist pilgrims in the ancient and medieval period, particularly from China, honoured India and its great culture during their travels. India’s cultural influence spread to Indonesia and Indochina in the East and into Central Asia, extending on a religious level to China and Japan.

The ancient Romans lost much of their wealth in a one-sided trade with India and the Europeans long sought the riches of India. Columbus, of course, found America by chance while looking for a more direct sea route to India.

Second, India, like many countries, has more than one name. The Indian Constitution says the “India that is Bharat”. Bharat is the main ancient name for the region going back to King Bharat, an ancient ruler long before Rama, Krishna or Buddha.

The Bharatas were the main people of the ancient Rig Veda, who ruled from the Sarasvati region. They eventually split into several groups, one of which, the Kurus, became dominant in late ancient times, as the main people of the Mahabharata.

Modern historians can more easily deny history to the name India than to Bharat and so ignore the other name of the country.

Third, India has probably the oldest, largest and most continuous literature of any civilisation. The Vedas with their many thousands of pages dwarf anything from the Middle East, Egypt or Greece of the ancient period.

Geography is an important topic in these texts. The Vedas speak of a land of seven rivers, Sapta Sindhu, extending to the ocean, of which the Sarasvati River was the most important. The Persians in their oldest Zend-Avesta remember the area as Hapta Hindu. Sindhu, Hindu and India are related terms.

The Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas outline a sacred geography of India/Bharat from Kailas in the north to Lanka in the south, Assam in the east to beyond the Indus in the west. Buddhist and Jain texts do the same, showing a common culture and geography.

Around this sacred geography, Indians built numerous temples and recognised numerous sacred sites, revealing this vast region and its cultural unity.

Along with these sacred sites are numerous festivals and pilgrimages. We see this in modern India, which has the largest tradition of pilgrimage in the world, notably the massive Kumbha Melas that bring in tens of millions of pilgrims. Pilgrims throughout India visit these sites, with South Indians commonly travelling as far as the Himalayan temples of the north. Festivals like Diwali are elaborately celebrated throughout the country.

Ancient Indian literature contains a calendar system still widely followed, the Panchanga. Indian calendars extend from historical time of thousands of years to cosmic time of billions of years.

Fourth, extensive new evidence of archaeology upholds the cultural continuity of the region. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims that in the Haryana/Kurukshetra/Sarasvati river area there is evidence of a continual development of agriculture and civilisation from 8000 BCE, extending through the Harappan urban era. This area hosts Rakhigarhi, the largest Harappan site, more extensive than Mohenjodaro or Harappa.

The Harappan Civilization—also called the Indus Valley or Saraswati Civilisation—is the largest and most uniform urban civilisation of the ancient world in the third millennium BCE. It ended with the drying up of the Sarasvati River around 1900 BCE, which the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has verified. The Vedas refer to the different stages of the Sarasvati river from an ocean-going stream to drying up in the desert, showing they resided on the river long before its termination.

Consistent with their negative line of thought, Leftist historians ignore this information or accuse archaeologists of political bias in their findings.

Lastly, but equally important, the independence movement drew inspiration from the older history of India/Bharat, with such revered figures as Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo seeking to revive the ancient culture. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s mantra was Ram and his idea of India was Ram Rajya.

Not surprisingly, most of these independence leaders have been ignored by the same group of historians, who have made Nehru tower over them, with some afforded diminished roles and others forgotten altogether.

The Congress party, the main support for such historians, has since named every major institution or initiative in India possible after the three members of the Nehru family who became prime ministers. They have little regard for other Congress prime ministers like P.V. Narasimha Rao, whom they have also almost erased from history.

Yet at the same time today, India’s great culture and civilisation through Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance is once more influencing the entire world—expanding in spite of this historical denigration.

It is time for these deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India, because it is not a mere political formation but a vast spiritual culture.

Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Vedanet, 30 June 2016

›This article originally appeared in Swarajya Magazine. 

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a Vedacharya and includes in his unusual wide scope of studies Ayurveda, Yoga, Vedic astrology, and Indian History.

Mohenjo-daro Graphic

 

Chanakya: Why Devdutt Pattanaik’s pseudo-history falls apart – Prosenjit Nath

VOI

Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for the modern political fantasist Devdutt Pattanaik. – Dr. Prosenjit Nath

I read Devdutt Pattanaik’s article “A fantasy called Chanakya” in The New Indian Express (9 Nov. 2025). Had Chanakya himself been alive, Pattanaik’s fantasies would have survived about as long as the kusa grass Chanakya famously uprooted when he vowed to destroy the Nandas. Beneath the polished prose and familiar rhetoric lies an old ideological trick: confuse the reader with multiple names, shout “interpolation” often enough, wrap it all in modern caste politics, and hope a historical figure vanishes.

But history does not work that way. The moment one actually looks at primary sources, Pattanaik’s thesis collapses flat.

Let us begin precisely where he does not want readers to look: the Arthaśāstra itself. The text explicitly identifies its author in unmistakable terms: “विष्णुगुप्तेन आर्यकौटिल्येन च सम्पादितम्”—compiled by Viśnugupta, the noble Kautilya. And again: “समाप्तं कौटिलीयम् अर्थशास्त्रम्”—here ends the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya.

Pattanaik’s sleight of hand rests on manufacturing two doubts. First that since the author is called “Kautilya”, Chanakya must be fictional. Second, that if the Arthaśāstra can be pushed centuries later, Chanakya cannot belong to the Mauryan age or guide Chandragupta Maurya. Both doubts evaporate the moment chronology is taken seriously.

Ashoka’s edicts from the 3rd century BCE describe an empire run through mahamatras, welfare officials, judicial ethics, administrative surveillance, animal-protection days, and moral governance—all core elements laid out systematically in the Arthaśāstra. The Mauryan state cannot be built on a Kautilyan framework if that framework supposedly did not exist until 500 CE. The empire itself is the evidence. Kautilya must predate Ashoka, exactly as tradition maintains—at least the late 4th century BCE.

Then comes the Spitzer Manuscript, the oldest known Sanskrit manuscript (1st–2nd century CE), which contains unmistakable references to the Arthaśāstra. Its discovery location is devastating for Pattanaik’s narrative: a Buddhist monastery in Kizil, Xinjiang—thousands of kilometres from any imagined “Brahmin power structure”. Why would Buddhist monks preserve and study a supposedly late “Brahminical propaganda text”? They would not, unless the text was already ancient, authoritative, and indispensable. This single fact shatters the claim that Kautilya was invented centuries later.

But the knockout punch arrives with the Kāmandakīya Nītiśāra (4th century CE), authored by the Buddhist scholar Kāmandaki. He explicitly and admiringly states that Viśnugupta/Kautilya—the author of the Arthaśāstra—was the very strategist who overthrew the Nandas and established Chandragupta Maurya. This is not a Hindu text, nor a Brahminical self-glorification exercise. A Buddhist intellectual, with no incentive to mythologise a Brahmin minister, identifies Kautilya and Chanakya as the same revolutionary statesman. That is the missing bridge Pattanaik refuses to acknowledge.

The convergence does not stop there. Buddhist sources such as the Mahāvaṃsa and Divyāvadāna describe Chandragupta’s Brahmin mentor. Jain texts like the Nisītha-Cūrṇi and Hemacandra’s Pariśiṣṭaparvan narrate the same overthrow of the Nandas by Chanakya for Chandragupta. Gupta-era dramas like Mudrārākṣasa assume the identity of Kautilya and Chanakya is already common knowledge. Kashmiri traditions such as the Tantrākhyāyikā immortalise Chanakya as the archetype of political genius. Across Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and regional traditions—often rivals, sometimes hostile—the same man performs the same acts under different names. That is not myth-making; it is historical convergence, the strongest form of evidence when dealing with antiquity.

Pattanaik makes much of multiple names, as if this were suspicious. It is not. In the ancient world, it was normal. Confucius was also Kong Qiu, Kongzi, and Zhongni. In India, Viśnugupta is the personal name, Kautilya the gotra or scholastic name, and Chanakya the patronymic. One man. Many names. Total consistency. Claiming otherwise is like arguing that Zhongni disproves Confucius.

The remaining tactics are equally flimsy. References to “China” and Roman dināra are used to push the Arthaśāstra centuries forward. Yet scholars like K.P. Jayaswal showed long ago that “Cina” refers to the Sina/Shina Himalayan region near Gilgit, not Han China—hence terms like kauseya and cinapatta, which are not Chinese words. Later interpolations do exist, just as they do in Homer, Euclid, or the Pentateuch. No serious scholar claims interpolations prove the author never existed. Pattanaik deploys this argument selectively because he needs the text to be late to sever it from Chanakya.

Finally, the caste obsession collapses entirely. The earliest sources identifying Chanakya as a Brahmin are Buddhist and Jain traditions—historically critical of Brahmin authority. If “Brahmins invented Chanakya”, why do rival traditions independently preserve the same identity centuries earlier? Because they were transmitting historical memory, not manufacturing propaganda.

To be clear: Chanakya, Kautilya, and Viśnugupta are not three different people. They are three traditional names for one historical genius—the architect of the Mauryan Empire. When multiple competing traditions over two millennia remember the same man overthrowing the same dynasty for the same emperor, coincidence becomes absurd. History, in this case, is unanimous.

Devdutt Pattanaik’s article is not courageous scholarship. It is ideological provocation dressed up as history—a soggy biscuit of pseudo-academia that dissolves the moment primary sources are allowed to speak. And they speak loudly: Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for modern political fantasies. – News18, 1 January 2026

› Prosenjit Nath is a technocrat, political analyst, and author. He writes on national, geopolitical, and social issues.

A Fantasy Called Chanakya by Devdutt Pattanaik

Cost of Moral Evasion: How antisemitism and indophobic terror share the same justifications – Raja Muneeb

VOI

Navy lieutenant Vinay Narwal, killed in the terror attack at Pahalgam, and his wife Himanshi were on their honeymoon.

The ideological architecture that excuses, contextualises, or sanitizes violence against Jews is strikingly similar to the one that has, for decades, normalised Islamist terrorism against India. In Western discourse, Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks … are too often framed through the language of grievance, insurgency, or regional complexity rather than named plainly for what they are: pure acts of ideologically driven terrorism targeting Indians. – Raja Muneeb

The attack on the Jewish community celebrating the Hannukah festival at Bondi Beach, Sydney, that was carried out by a father and son duo, leaving thirteen people dead and around two dozen injured, did not erupt from a vacuum. It was not an inexplicable act of sudden madness, nor can it be responsibly explained away as an isolated incident disconnected from broader ideological currents. Rather, it represents the most violent endpoint of a long, cumulative process, one in which antisemitism has been normalised, laundered through the language of activism, legitimised within Western societies through their educational and media ecosystems, and amplified by social media into a moral permission structure for violence against Jews anywhere in the world.

This is not a result of a botched-up immigration policy, ethnic assimilation, or any particular faith as such. It is an argument about ideas, wherein certain forms of hatred that once were universally recognised as toxic and unacceptable have now been repackaged as political virtue, and how radical Islamist actors exploit this permissive environment to move from grievance to justification and from justification to terror.

For years now, Western societies have struggled to draw a clear line between legitimate criticism of Israeli state policy and the resurrection of classic antisemitic tropes. That line has not merely blurred but, in many spaces, has been deliberately erased. On university campuses, slogans like “River to the Sea,” once associated with violent movements, now fashionably coexist with calls for “intifada”, chants that erase Israel’s right to exist, and rhetoric that frames Jews globally as legitimate targets. This behaviour has been defended as expressions of resistance rather than being recognised as incitement to violence. What was once a fringe discourse has now been absorbed into student politics, activist coalitions, media debates, and academic forums, often without serious scrutiny of its historical and ideological baggage.

This all matters because language shapes the moral boundaries of a society. When violence is framed as resistance, when terror is contextualised rather than condemned, and when antisemitism is recast as anti-imperial critique, the social taboo against targeting Jews weakens. The effect is cumulative. Each protest slogan, each academic paper that romanticises revolutionary violence, each media commentary that explains rather than confronts antisemitic aggression, contributes to an environment in which hatred becomes ordinary and outrage selective.

Western journalism has not been immune to this shift. Sections of the media ecosystem, particularly opinion columns, activist journalism, and certain digital platforms, have increasingly adopted the framing vocabulary of ideological movements rather than maintaining analytical distance from them. Violence against Jews is too often narrated through a prism of provocation, grievance, or geopolitical abstraction, while violence against others is treated as morally self-evident atrocity. This asymmetry does not merely distort public understanding; it signals to radical actors that some victims matter less than others.

Academia, too, has largely played an adverse role. In parts of the humanities and social sciences, post-colonial frameworks have hardened into ideological orthodoxy. Complex conflicts are flattened into binaries of oppressor and oppressed, and entire populations are assigned collective moral identities. Within this schema, Jews are frequently stripped of historical vulnerability and recast as extensions of Western power, regardless of geography or individual circumstance. Once a group is dehumanised at the level of theory, it becomes easier for others to dehumanise it in practice.

Social media then completes the circuit. Algorithms reward outrage, grievance, and absolutism. Videos of protests, selectively edited conflict footage, and emotionally charged narratives circulate without context, accelerating radicalisation far faster than traditional ideological pipelines ever could. For individuals already predisposed to grievance, particularly those exposed to Islamist narratives that frame global politics as a civilisational war, this digital ecosystem offers constant validation. Violence is no longer unthinkable; it is rehearsed rhetorically long before it is physically enacted.

This is where radical Islamist ideology truly enters the picture. Groups and networks that traffic in political Islam have long understood the value of narrative convergence. They do not need to create antisemitism from scratch; they merely need to tap into existing discursive currents and redirect them toward action. When Western spaces legitimise the language of “intifada” without acknowledging its violent history, Islamist radicals misconstrue it as an endorsement. When journalists contextualise antisemitic attacks as expressions of anger, extremists hear absolution. When campuses treat calls for the erasure of Israel as protected speech divorced from consequence, radicals see an opportunity.

The Bondi Beach attack, viewed through this lens, is not simply an act of personal extremism. It is the terminal point of a broader ideological supply chain, one that begins with intellectual indulgence, passes through activist normalisation, is accelerated by social media, and is ultimately weaponised by those who believe violence is not only justified but righteous.

It is time now for Western societies to confront an uncomfortable truth: tolerance for intolerance does not remain neutral. When antisemitism is selectively excused, it does not stay rhetorical. It metastasizes into violence and terrorism. The failure to enforce moral clarity, especially within the institutions that shape young minds and public discourse, creates a permissive environment in which radical actors operate with confidence rather than fear of reprisal.

This does not require suppressing debate or criticism of governments. It requires intellectual honesty. It requires recognising that calls for violent uprising are not metaphors, that historical hatreds do not become benign when wrapped in progressive language, and that terrorism does not emerge spontaneously; it is meticulously cultivated.

Violence against Jews anywhere in the world is not a foreign problem imported from distant conflicts. It is a mirror reflecting back the ideas we tolerate, the language we excuse, and the silences we mistake for neutrality.

This same ecosystem of legitimized violence does not stop at Europe or Australia, nor is it confined to antisemitism alone. The ideological architecture that excuses, contextualises, or sanitizes violence against Jews is strikingly similar to the one that has, for decades, normalised Islamist terrorism against India. In Western discourse, Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks, from Mumbai in 2008 to Pahalgam in 2025, are too often framed through the language of grievance, insurgency, or regional complexity rather than named plainly for what they are: pure acts of ideologically driven terrorism targeting Indians.

The moral evasions are familiar. Just as antisemitic violence is frequently absorbed into debates about “resistance”, jihadist attacks against Indians are softened through narratives of political dispute, human rights asymmetry, or historical and religious resentment. The result is the same: reluctance to draw clear moral lines leads to an intellectual environment in which terror becomes explicable before it is condemned.

This parallel runs deeper than rhetoric. Islamist networks operating from Pakistan have long relied on the same narrative permissiveness cultivated in Western academic, journalistic, and activist spaces. Kashmir, like Israel, is often presented not as a complex political issue but as a moral abstraction, a symbol onto which revolutionary fantasies are projected. Indians, like Jews, are frequently stripped of civilian status in these narratives, recast instead as extensions of a state or ideology deemed illegitimate, and then subjected to brutal killings, as was the case in the Pahalgam terror attack.

This moral equivalence, where democracies defending territorial integrity are equated with terror groups that target civilians, ultimately functions as an enabler. It reassures extremists that their violence will be debated rather than universally rejected, contextualised rather than criminalised. In that sense, the ideological ecosystem that lowers the threshold for attacking Jews in Bondi is the same one that has, for years, provided intellectual oxygen to those who bomb trains in Mumbai, massacre pilgrims in Kashmir, or radicalize young men across borders.

Until Western societies confront this shared architecture of excuse-making, this habit of mistaking explanation for absolution, the cycle of so-called legitimised terror will continue to find new targets in different geographies with familiar justifications.

If the West wishes to prevent future terror attacks, it must look beyond the individual attacker and interrogate the ecosystem that made such violence imaginable, defensible, and ultimately executable. The cost of failing to do so is not abstract. It is measured time and again in blood, in severely broken public trust, and in the quiet erosion of the moral red lines that once defined the West as a civilised society. – Firstpost, 18 Decemeber 2025

› Raja Muneeb is an independent journalist and columnist. 

Campus Hate Cartoon