India needs to truly understand its own legacy of education – Hindol Sengupta

July 29, 2026July 29, 2026VOI

The crisis of modern civilization is not a shortage of knowledge but a surfeit of information divorced from wisdom—societies that have multiplied their instruments of power without cultivating any corresponding growth in the spirit that must wield them. – Prof. Hindol Sengupta

Few civilizations have theorised education as searchingly as India’s, and few single verses compress that theorizing as tightly as the eleventh mantra of the Isha Upanishad: vidyām cavidyām ca yas tad vedobhayam saha, avidyayā mrtyum tirtva vidyayamrtam asnute—he who knows both vidaya and avidyā together, crosses over death through avidyā and attains immortality through vidyā. That closing phrase, vidyaya’mrtam asnute—by knowledge one attains immortality—has functioned for over two millennia not as a slogan but as a standing definition of what education is for. It is worth asking what that definition actually claims, and how India’s philosophers, ancient and modern, elaborated it into a coherent idea of education very different from the instrumental one now dominant across the world.

The Upanishadic claim

The Isha Upanishad’s verse is startling because it refuses to let vidya stand alone. Avidya here does not simply mean ignorance in the pejorative sense; in context it denotes the practical, ritual, and worldly knowledge—action in the phenomenal world—that must be mastered and then transcended, while vidya denotes knowledge of the Self, the unconditioned ground of being. The verse insists that both are necessary and must be held together: avidya carries one across death (mortality, finitude, the cycle of cause and effect), and vidya alone confers amrta—deathlessness, the immortal. Education, on this reading, is not the accumulation of facts but a passage: a movement from the world of doing to the ground of being, in which the worldly is not despised but used as a bridge to be crossed, not clung to.

This is the deep structure beneath the more famous Upanishadic formula sa vidyayā ya vimuktaye—that alone is knowledge which liberates. Learning that does not liberate, in this view, is merely information; it may be useful, even necessary, but it is not, in the full sense, vidyā.

This is a demanding claim, and Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta pressed it further: ignorance (avidyā, here in its more familiar negative sense of nescience) is not a lack of data about the world but a misapprehension of the nature of the Self—the superimposition of the finite ego upon the infinite Brahman. Education in the Advaitic sense is therefore jnana yoga, the discipline of discrimination (viveka) between the real and the apparent, disciplined by shravana (hearing), manana (reflection), and nididhyasana (sustained meditation). The teacher’s task is not to fill the student but to remove a covering—to let what is already there be recognized. It is an idea of education built on the conviction that the deepest truths are not acquired from outside but uncovered from within, guided rather than installed.

Radhakrishnan’s ideas

It is Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher-president and one of India’s foremost interpreters of the Upanishads to the modern world, who translated this ancient claim into a working philosophy of education for a democratic and scientific age. For Radhakrishnan, the crisis of modern civilization was not a shortage of knowledge but a surfeit of information divorced from wisdom—societies that had multiplied their instruments of power without cultivating any corresponding growth in the spirit that must wield them. He held that the purpose of education could never be reduced to vocational training or the transmission of technique, though these have their place; its higher purpose was the awakening of the whole person—intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual—toward what he called, echoing the Upanishads, an integral vision of reality. Radhakrishnan’s own chairmanship of the University Education Commission (1948-49) put this conviction into institutional form: he argued that a university’s task was to produce not merely trained specialists but educated human beings capable of self-governance, ethical discrimination, and disinterested pursuit of truth—a vision he rooted explicitly in the Upanishadic distinction between the immediate, useful knowledge of avidyā and the higher self-knowledge of vidyā, insisting that a civilization neglects the second at its peril. Education, for him, was ultimately the cultivation of the capacity to see the universal in the particular—the same movement the Isha Upanishad describes as crossing from mortality to the deathless.

Vivekananda’s reflections

Swami Vivekananda gave this idea its most quotable modern form: education is not information stuffed into the brain, but the manifestation of the perfection already existing in every human being. This is a direct descendant of the Advaitic premise—if the Self is already whole, already divine, then the teacher’s role is not to add something foreign but to draw out what is innate, through discipline, concentration, and character-building. Vivekananda’s emphasis on shraddha (faith in oneself), on physical and moral strength alongside intellectual training, and on service to others as inseparable from self-realization, extended the Upanishadic idea into a program for national regeneration—education as the means by which a colonized and demoralized people could recover their own dignity and capacity.

The ‘integral freedom’ of Sri Aurobindo and Tagore

Sri Aurobindo’s idea of “integral education” pushed the same logic toward the evolutionary future: the aim was not the reproduction of existing knowledge but the development of faculties—physical, vital, mental, and spiritual—so that the individual could become an instrument of a higher consciousness struggling to emerge in human history. Learning, in his ashram at Pondicherry, was to proceed from the child’s own nature outward, never imposed from without—a pedagogical translation of the Upanishadic insistence that vidyā is uncovered, not installed.

Rabindranath Tagore, working at almost the same historical moment at Santiniketan, gave the idea its most beloved poetic expression—his prayer for a world “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,” where knowledge is free and the mind is led “into ever-widening thought and action.” Tagore’s objection to colonial schooling was precisely that it produced avidyā without vidyā: competent clerks without free minds. His forest-school pedagogy, conducted under open skies, close to nature and to the arts, aimed to restore the wholeness that examination-driven instruction fragmented.

Dharmapal and his discovery of the indigenous

If the philosophers above worked mainly at the level of theory, Dharampal’s historical research supplied the empirical ground beneath the claim that India possessed, until colonial disruption, an education of extraordinary depth and reach. In The Beautiful Tree (1983), assembling British colonial surveys from the early nineteenth century—including reports by William Adam in Bengal and Bihar and district-level data collected for Governor Munro in the Madras Presidency—Dharampal showed that indigenous schooling before colonial rule was far more widespread across caste lines than the colonial administrators themselves had expected, embedded in local community life and sustained without state compulsion. His broader point was not nostalgic antiquarianism but a challenge to the very idea, inherited from colonial and later nationalist historiography, that Indian civilization required an external, imported model of schooling to become literate or rational. What that older system dismantled by colonial policy had transmitted was precisely the union the Isha Upanishad demands: practical, livelihood-oriented avidyā—arithmetic, craft, agriculture, local administration—taught alongside the moral and metaphysical formation that a village school, often attached to a temple or under a local teacher, considered inseparable from literacy itself. Dharampal’s work restores to the philosophical argument a historical dimension: the vidyā–avidyā synthesis was not merely a metaphysical ideal confined to ashrams and Upanishadic seminars, but had once been, however imperfectly, a lived social reality across India, dismantled rather than absent.

What unites Shankara’s viveka, Radhakrishnan’s integral personality, Vivekananda’s manifested perfection, Aurobindo’s evolving consciousness, Tagore’s fearless mind, and Dharampal’s recovered village school is the Upanishadic insistence that education is measured not by what is added to a person but by what is freed within one—and, Dharampal would add, by how deeply it is rooted in a community’s own soil. Vidyā, rightly pursued, does not simply inform but transforms, carrying the learner, as the Isha Upanishad says, beyond mortality itself. In an age that increasingly measures education by employability metrics and standardised scores, this is a demanding and unfashionable claim. It is also, India’s philosophers would insist, the only claim education can make that justifies calling it education at all. – The Sunday Guardian, 26 July 2026

› Prof. Hindol Sengupta is an award-winning historian and author of 13 books. He is professor of international relations at O.P. Jindal Global University, NCR.

Vivekananda Quote

Why the liberal world order, built on science and reason, was doomed to fail – Pranav Sharma

July 22, 2026July 24, 2026VOI

Liberal internationalism, armed with the scientific method, imagined that democracy, free markets, and rational governance could be exported like a validated scientific theory—its value presumed universal, its implementation a technical matter. The spectacular failures of this vision, from the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, are often diagnosed as policy miscalculations or a simple failure to account for the brute realities of nationalism and power politics. – Pranav Sharma

The liberal order did not simply make miscalculations. It rested on a deeper conviction that was flawed from the start: the belief that scientific reason, applied with sufficient rigour to human affairs, would bend history toward peace.

That conviction deserves an autopsy of its own. To understand why the liberal order is unravelling, it helps to understand what its architects thought they were building, and why they trusted science to hold it together.

The myth of the neutral method

There is a general tendency in the story we like to tell ourselves about science. It is set in a pristine, sterile laboratory or a remote observatory somewhere away from human settlements, where a dispassionate mind—devoid of feeble human passions, guided by reason and evidence alone—peels back the layers of illusion to reveal universal truths. We picture the methodical transformation of chaos into coherence, of profound civilisational ignorance into enlightenment. This narrative, as immaculate and compelling as any myth, is perhaps best captured by the iconic photograph from the Apollo 8 mission, Earthrise. Our planet, a delicate swirl of blue and white, hangs in the silent, black expanse. It is an image of sublime objective reality, a portrait of ourselves delivered by the most advanced application of our scientific knowledge.

The Age of Discovery that propelled the scientific revolution, meticulous work of the botanist classifying new species or the cartographer charting an unfamiliar coastline was inseparable from the imperial project it served. The world was mastered not just with guns and ledgers, but with taxonomies and sextants. To imagine science as a dispassionate pursuit of universal truths, observing the political order from a neutral distance, is to indulge a narrative as mythic as any creation story. Science is not outside the ambit of power. It is entangled with the architectures of power, identity, and historical contingency that it purports merely to describe.

Not policy failure, but an epistemic one

However, this critique does not go far enough. The failure was not merely political; it was epistemic. It was a failure born of a worldview that treats complex human societies as if they were variables in a vast geopolitical experiment. The technocratic confidence that a nation’s political and cultural life could be engineered with the same precision as a microchip does not reflect the rigour of science so much as its domestication within the logic of managerialism. In that translation, science stops being a restless mode of inquiry and becomes a fetish, a talisman wielded by a managerial elite to legitimise intervention under the banner of evidence-based policy.

Realism, of course, has always stood as the cynical corrective, reminding us of the tragic chorus of power politics and security dilemmas. The structural realist elegantly models an anarchic world where states, like billiard balls, career across the global baize according to immutable, impersonal laws of power. It is a particularly seductive, clean, and predictive model. Yet it occludes more than it reveals, for states are not inert billiard balls; they are incandescent assemblages of identity, memory, desire, arrogance, and trauma. Their behaviour is shaped not just by rational calculations of interest, but by their ghosts of history and the affective, often irrational, intensities of belonging. A discipline that aspires to the predictive economy of physics keeps discovering that its objects refuse to behave like matter. Here lies the essential tension.

Why nationalism beats the model

Science, in its ideal form, seeks truths that are universal. Nationalism, by contrast, thrives on the singular, the irreducible, and the mythic. A nation, after all, is an imagined community, a social construction whose power lies not in its empirical validity but in its capacity to weave individuals into a narrative far larger than themselves. It is, in this sense, a kind of anti-science—not because it rejects facts, but because it privileges myth over measurement and memory over data. It reveals a profound and uncomfortable truth: science cannot fix the human condition because the human condition is not a technical problem to be solved. It is a predicament to be narrated, endured, and perpetually contested.

This is why the liberal wager keeps losing. The liberals assumed that as societies grew wealthier, better informed, and more rationally governed, the particularist passions would recede. The opposite has occurred. The nationalist turn in the United States, the populist surge across Europe, the authoritarian consolidation from Moscow to Beijing, none of these are deviations from a modernising trend that better data would have predicted and better policy could have averted. They are evidence that the model itself was wrong about what moves people.

The liberal faith ran deeper still. The belief that scientific advancement would lead inexorably to moral and political enlightenment is a secular eschatology, a story of salvation without gods. History mocks such linear narratives. The 20th century stands as a monument to this paradox. The same scientific rationality that allowed us to map the human genome also gave us the bureaucratic precision to engineer genocide. The space race, a triumphant symbol of ideological and scientific supremacy, was haunted by the shadow of mutually assured destruction. It became the epitome of logical insanity, where survival depended on the promise of total annihilation. The nuclear revolution did not make war obsolete; it reconfigured its calculus from a contest of conquest to one of existential deterrence. Progress and catastrophe are not opposites in this story. They are produced by the same machinery.

The 21st-century stress test

We now find ourselves in a new century, facing a fresh wave of disruptions. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and cyber warfare are not merely new tools; they are forces that defy our traditional categories, blurring the lines between civilian and military, public and private, human and machine. The US-China contest over advanced computing is not a conventional arms race that arms-control templates can manage; the technology is dual-use by nature, diffuse in ownership, and faster-moving than any treaty cycle. They reveal, with terrifying clarity, the inadequacy of political frameworks forged in the post-war, post-colonial age to grapple with transnational risks that recognise no borders.

Most humbling of all is the predicament of climate change. Here is the ultimate, planet-sized irony: the most profound existential threat of our time is a direct byproduct of the very industrial rationality that promised to liberate humanity from the fickle tyranny of nature. The Anthropocene is not merely a new geological epoch; it is a testament to the unintended consequences of Enlightenment ambition. The relentless quest to master nature has, in the end, destabilised the planetary systems upon which all human life depends. This is not, to be clear, a failure of the scientific method itself. It is the catastrophic failure of the narrative that framed science as a tool of unambiguous and unending human progress, the same narrative that underwrote the liberal order’s confidence in its own trajectory. The algorithm that optimises a global supply chain can equally be turned to systems of targeted surveillance, reducing individuals to predictable data points in a model of consumption and control.

Living with what science cannot do

What, then, is the proper place of science in the grand drama of nation-state and international relations? It can be neither saviour nor scapegoat. It is a contingent, historically situated practice. Science can explain the world, but it cannot redeem it. Its truths are provisional, its applications ambivalent. To grasp its place in national or global politics is to resist the seduction of both technocratic triumphalism and reactionary scepticism, and to hold instead a critical sensibility that recognises science as at once a form of knowledge and a site of power.

The realist reminders remain true as far as they go: the world is anarchic, power matters, and ideals often shatter against the wall of strategic necessity. But the deeper lesson is that realism, like liberalism, is just another story. It is a framework that imposes a semblance of order on a world that is fundamentally resistant to coherence. Science belongs to the same narrative economy. It offers not only explanations but orientation, a way of locating ourselves in a vast and indifferent universe. That is a real service. It is not the same as a guarantee.

The order now being mourned was built on the opposite assumption: that reason, sufficiently advanced, would deliver a destination. As a lengthening line of former believers concede that the destination was never reached, the temptation will be to locate the policy error that cost us the arrival. There was no such error, because there was no such destination. The question was never whether science could fix the human condition. It was how we live with the knowledge that it cannot. That is the tragic wisdom modernity keeps trying to forget. Our greatest achievements are inseparable from our deepest vulnerabilities. Our task, then, is not to seek salvation in the laboratory, but to bear witness to this paradox—to trace, with unflinching eyes, the fragile and often unsettling threads that bind knowledge to power, hope to despair, and progress to its profound and enduring discontents. – The Print, 14 June 2026

› Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan.

Why India doesn’t fit the Woke script – Yuvraj Pokharna

July 18, 2026VOI

Woke, Woker, Wokest

If you ask five people to define Wokeism, it’s likely that each will provide a unique interpretation based on their personal understanding. In a significant research paper called The Scholarly Definition of Wokeism: Why American Universities Enforce Belief without Clarifying the Doctrine, American military scientist, philosopher, and metaphysical architect Jeffrey Camlin wisely points out that Wokeism is a strict moral belief system that stifles questioning and turns conversations into ways to enforce beliefs through guilt and fear of losing reputation. The definition offered is not based on polemic opposition but on structural necessity.

The word ‘woke’ is a quintessential example of a Western term—a misfit and incongruous in the Bharatiya context and conscience—advertently superimposed and forced into our lexicon just like myriad others. Speaking in brevity, the term ‘woke’ originates in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), meaning to be alert or aware, particularly of social injustices. It first appeared in the 1938 song Scottsboro Boys by Lead Belly, urging Black Americans to stay woke to racial injustices, referencing the wrongful convictions of nine Black teenagers in Alabama. In the 1960s, activists like the Black Panthers used ‘stay woke’ to encourage vigilance against systemic racism. It gained prominence during the mid-2010s in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This phrase was supposedly a call to awareness of social injustices, especially those related to race in the American context.

‘Wokeness’ emerged as a noun in the mid-2010s to describe the state of being woke or the collective ideology of social justice awareness. It was meant to encapsulate progressive values like diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and advocacy for marginalised groups in the US. However, over time, it became distorted and transformed into ‘wokeism’, which is viewed as an ideology opposing merit, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, and even the aboriginals, who are considered the flag-bearers of the indigenous cultural legacy of the native land. President Donald Trump has expressed disdain for the term ‘woke’, arguing it’s vague and overused. In 2023, he stated, “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke’. It’s just a term they use; half the people cant even define it; they don’t know what it is.”

The MO of Wokeism is rather simple—fracture the society into countless isolated blocks and turn them against each other through either exaggerated and outright fictitious claims of oppression or by instilling a sense of perpetual victimhood within some of them. Celebrated American commentator Michelle Malkin has authoritatively commented, “Liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it, and ignore it within their ranks.” The same hypocrisy, if not more, is palpably visible in the context of Indian activists and politicians! The result is an unending and multi-layered chaos that has no certain objective. And by doing so, Wokism protects and empowers those whom it claims to fight—the ultra-rich global elite.

The modus operandi, thus, is simple: divert people’s attention from the real socio-economic issues and turn the masses against themselves to provide a protective cover to the globalist masters who wish to pull the strings of the world from behind the curtains. Wokeism, however, doesn’t stand with every section of society. After fragmenting the people’s collective into numerous pieces, it works to turn some of them against the others. It sides with those whom it sees as more conducive to its agenda in a particular country or region.

There are absolutely no objective morals or convictions behind the way Wokeism operates. While Wokes may claim to side with the minorities or less empowered sections of society, the facts suggest the opposite. If they were truly the champions of minorities, they wouldn’t have opposed the peaceful Hindu minorities in White Christian majority countries while defending the illegal Muslim infiltrators in those same places.

Today’s Woke tyranny has left many scholars in their fields in a precarious situation: a liberal utopia where the mere suggestion of biological sex is met with labelling as a transphobe. J.K. Rowling, world-renowned for the Harry Potter series, received criticism from LGBTQ activists because Dumbledore isn’t openly gay in the new Fantastic Beasts film. Is the movie really the zenith of the gay community’s oppression? The greatest perils to the LGBTQ community, as per the Wokes, appear to be diversity in a fictional film rather than Islamic states targeting gays with brutal public executions and decapitations.

The Woke, more often than not, align themselves with individuals they find convenient. They make viable attempts to weaken, negate, and cancel those who are not deemed worthy enough for their cause by creating further schisms within their ranks through paid narratives and campaigns such as #DismantlingGlobalHindutva. The same Wokes are very eager to dismantle the indigenous way of life in India, which is Hindutva, even as they claim to stand for the rights of the natives in New Zealand.

Apart from tactfully nudging society towards a state of eternal chaos, the Wokes have another agenda—replacing traditional collectives such as the family with politically motivated groups. But why? This, once again, serves the interests of their globalist overlords. How? To put it simply, collective living involves the sharing of resources among individuals. For example, a family of four shares one house.

But if all four individuals were to live separately, that would suddenly increase the demand for houses by three to four times. Then again, the houses don’t come in isolation. Along with them come all the other necessary amenities that an individual requires for proper living. The breakup of the family suddenly expands the market base by many times. That is exactly what the globalists want, and the Wokes are trying to achieve it through their concentrated anti-family propaganda.

After having wreaked havoc in its place of origin—the United States and western Europe—the hydra of Wokism has turned its heads towards a new market: India. However, unlike in the West, the Wokes find it challenging to run their business in Bharat. Why? Unlike the West, the multifaceted and diverse nature of Indian society makes it challenging to make generalisations and, consequently, to promote simplistic narratives. In the West, it is very convenient to brand the family and the church as evil. But in a society like India, which has no organised church in the same sense as the West, defining evil becomes extremely difficult. In a society like ours where homosexuals never face any kind of discrimination based on religious dogma, it becomes a complex task for the Wokes to apply their template. They do try, but the attempts are laughable and clearly hypocritical. While in the West, Wokes may still maintain some pretence of activism or concern for the weak; in the Bhartiya context, this veil comes off the moment they open their mouths. Their failure is primarily due to their cluelessness about how to apply their Woke template, which was perfected for Western society, in the Bharatiya context.

To understand the situation better, let’s take a look at some examples from recent memory to exhibit how, time and again, the Wokes have embarrassingly exposed themselves in India. In 2020, the Indian government implemented new agricultural reforms aimed at transforming Indian agriculture into a competitive industry. However, the movement gained momentum when over 3,00,000 farmers reportedly marched to New Delhi to protest against these reforms. While the farmers may have had legitimate concerns and their grievances needed to be heard, some of the most articulate left-leaning Wokes, such as Greta Thunberg, and even the oblivious artist Rihanna, weighed in on the Indian farm imbroglio, pledging support to the farmer protests.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the alleged climate activist, the flagbearer of the global Woke commune, who’s barely an adult with an IQ understandably equivalent to Delhi’s temperature, Greta Thunberg, was unaware that the reforms help combat the climate apocalypse that she claims to fight by minimising the worst annual carbon emissions across the globe through stubble burning, which also leads to significant health problems like asthma and cancer.

Rihanna, a fully monetised celebrity and a pure product of capitalism, denied the benefits of the same to millions of farmers in India, pushing them to espouse a system of agriculture that was not just mediaeval in method and practice but was first introduced in the mediaeval period itself. The hypocrisy is unreal and uncanny! However, despite strong arguments and enough support from some of the most celebrated economists from around the world, the Indian government later repealed the farm reform laws as a mark of respect for the dissent of the farmers and the people.

Another amusing instance of Woke hypocrisy is the case in 2021 when Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau. Defenders of Woke culture contended that the arrest of the 24-year-old was due to his Muslim identity. So, as per the dimwit Wokes, the son of one of the most influential Indians in the last 150 years was being marginalised. Ironically, these same individuals remained silent over the brutal murder of a Dalit man named Nagaraju, who had married a Muslim woman.

One such example of abject absurdity stems from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s female activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai who herself is an iconic victim of Islamic violence and its forceful nature. In her book I Am Malala, she writes, “Wearing a burqa is like walking inside a big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through, and on hot days it’s like an oven.” However, Malala, acknowledged globally for her intrepidness, reverses her stance by neglecting to acknowledge the real-life struggles faced by Indian Muslim women. She came all in for the Muslim girls in Karnataka, claiming they were denied entry into a government school because they were wearing a hijab, despite it being evident that Islamists were using the students as weapons to disrupt and fuel anarchy in India. Such celebrity activism reeks of hypocrisy, if not inanity. Ironically, she gratefully accepted the Nobel Prize from Norway, which has for many years banned burqas and hijabs in educational institutions.

The Woke community and rent-a-cause activists, who otherwise claim to stand for the rights of underprivileged classes, conveniently specialise in whitewashing realities and downplaying the brutal injustices faced by the Hindu community due to their unapologetic, unabated, and perpetual hate for Hinduism. To summarise, the Woke utopia wilfully ignores the murder of Nagaraju, a Dalit man, out of fear of being labelled as Islamophobic. However, it intimidates people into silence and dismisses anyone who deviates from the narrow Woke path. And this is what identity politics does to you.

Clearly, mediocre minds would rather celebrate the public inanity of the incurable nincompoops than ponder over the nuanced argument of an expert that would go over their heads anyway. The Woke utopia has begun to silence all voices except its own, justifying all evil committed by its members’ clique. It brings people together by segregating them into smaller and smaller groups, where only a handful of privileged, spoilt individuals with no credibility and numbers agree among themselves. The Woke utopia is engaging in a much larger international arena and seeping into the Indian diaspora through foreign media, celebrities, and OTT platforms. We must be careful. – Firstpost, 12 July 2026

› Yuvraj Pokharna is a Surat-based educator, columnist, and social activist who keeps a eye on contemporary issues including Social Media, Education, Politics, Hindutva, Bharat (India) and Government Policies. He is the author of the book Hindutva For Gen Z, from which the above article has been excerpted.

Why Indians should reject St. Thomas and Christianity – Koenraad Elst

July 13, 2026July 14, 2026VOI

Christians must acknowledge the historical fact that, from Bethlehem to Madras, most of their sacred sites are booty won in campaigns of fraud and destruction. – Dr. Koenraad Elst

India’s Christian Problem

In the West we don’t hear much about it, and even in India it doesn’t make many headlines, but Hindu society is faced with a Christian problem besides the better-known Muslim problem. One focus of this conflict is the history of Christian iconoclasm, which is not entirely finished, and which past history has crystallized into some hundreds of churches standing on the ruins of purposely demolished Hindu temples. This history of iconoclasm is not an accident: it is the logical outcome of Christian theology, particularly of its deep hostility towards non-Christian forms of worship.

Christian sacred places in Palestine

A book well worth reading for those engaged in controversies over sacred sites, in particular concerning Christian churches in South India, is Christians and the Holy Places by Joan Taylor, a historian from New Zealand. It shows that the places where Christians commemorate the birth and death of Jesus have nothing to do with Jesus, historically.

The Nativity Church in Bethlehem was built in the fourth century CE in forcible replacement of a Pagan place of worship, dedicated to the god Tammuz-Adonis. Until then, it had had no special significance for Christians, who considered pilgrimages to sacred places a Pagan practice anyway: you cannot concentrate in one place—hence, go on pilgrimage to—the Omnipresent. The concept of “sacred place” was introduced into Christianity by converts, especially at the time of Emperor Constantine’s switch to a pro-Christian state policy.

The Christian claim to Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace was a fraud from the beginning, as Cambridge historian Michael Arnheim has shown: through numerous contradictions and factual inaccuracies, the Gospel writers betray their intention to locate Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem at any cost, against all information available to them. The reason is that they had to make Jesus live up to an Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah was to be born there.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was built in forcible replacement of a temple of the goddess Venus, the personal initiative of Emperor Constantine. His mother had seen in a dream that Jesus had died at that particular place, though close scrutiny of the original Christian texts shows that they point to a place 200 metres to the south. Constantine had the Venus temple demolished and the ground searched, and yes, his experts duly found the cross on which Jesus had died. They somehow assumed that their forebears of 33 CE had a habit of leaving or even burying crucifixion crosses at the places where they had been used, quod non. The Christian claim to the site of the Holy Cross is based on the dream of a gullible but fanatical woman, and fortified with a faked excavation.

Remember the Ayodhya debate, where Hindu scholars were challenged to produce ever more solid proof of the traditions underlying the sacredness of the controversial site? Whatever proof they came up with was automatically, without any inspection, dismissed by the high priests of secularism as “myth” and “faked evidence”. It was alleged that there was a “lack of proof” for the assumption that Rama ever lived there. But in the case of the Christian sacred places, we do not just have lack of proof that the religion’s claim is true, but we have positive proof that its claim is untrue, and that it was historically part of a campaign of fraud and destruction.

The stories of the Nativity and Holy Cross sites were trend setters in a huge campaign of christianization of Pagan sacred sites. Joan Taylor also mentions how the Aphrodite temple in Ein Karim near Jerusalem was demolished and replaced with the Nativity Church of John the Baptist. In the same period, all over the Roman Empire, Pagan places of worship were demolished, sacred groves chopped down and idols smashed by Christian preachers who replaced them with Christian relics which they themselves posted or “discovered” there, like the twenty-odd “only real” instances of Jesus’s venerable foreskin.

Pagan symbols and characters were superficially christianized. For example, Saint George and the archangel Michael, both depicted as slaying a dragon, are nothing but Christian names for the Indo-European myth of the dragon-slayer—in the Vedic version: Indra slaying Vritra. The Pagan festivals of the winter solstice (Yuletide) and the spring equinox were deformed into the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. The Egyptian icon of the Mother Goddess Isis with her son Horus in her lap, very popular throughout the Roman Empire, was turned into the Madonna with the Babe Jesus. At the same time, devotees of the genuine Mother Goddess and enthusiasts of the genuine winter solstice festival were persecuted, their temples demolished or turned into churches.

This massive campaign of fraud and destruction was subsequently extended to the Germanic, Slavic and Baltic countries. Numerous ancient churches across Europe are so many Babri Masjids, containing or standing on the left-overs of so many Rama Janmabhoomi temples. Just after the christianization of Europe was completed with the forced conversion of Lithuania in the fifteenth century, the iconoclastic zeal was taken to America, and finally to Africa and Asia.

Christian impositions on India

India too has had its share of Christian iconoclasm. After the Portuguese settlement, hundreds of temples in and around the Portuguese-held territories were demolished, often to be replaced with Catholic churches. “Saint” Francis Xavier described with glee the joy he felt when he saw the Hindu idols smashed and temples demolished. Most sixteenth and seventeenth century churches in India contain the rubble of demolished Hindu temples. The French-held pockets witnessed some instances of Catholic fanaticism as well. Under British rule, Hindu places of worship in the population centres were generally left alone—some exceptions notwithstanding—but the tribal areas became the scene of culture murder by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. There are recent instances of desecration of tribal village shrines and sacred groves by Christians, assaults on Hindu processions both in the tribal belts and in the south, and attempts to turn the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari into a Virgin Mary shrine.

In South India, the myth of St. Thomas provided the background for a few instances of temple destruction at places falsely associated with his life and alleged martyrdom, especially the St. Thomas Church replacing the Mylapore Kapaleeswara Temple in Madras. In this case, the campaign of fraud is still continuing: till today, many Indian writers continue to claim historical validity for the long-refuted story of the apostle Thomas coming to India and getting killed by jealous Brahmins. The story is parallel to that of Jesus getting killed by the Jews, and it has indeed served as an argument in an elaborate Christian doctrine of anti-Brahminism which resembles Christian anti-Semitism to the detail. At any rate, it is a fraud.

From those Christian polemists insisting on the St. Thomas narrative’s historicity (I will be the first to welcome the unexpected demonstration of the historicity of traditions dismissed as “myths”), we may at least expect that they tell their prospective converts the whole of the story. They should not omit that it describes Thomas as Jesus’s twin brother—implying that Jesus was not God’s Only Begotten Son—and as an anti-social character who exhausted his royal protector’s patience by luring many women away from their families; and that it relates how Jesus was a slave-trader who was not even above selling his own brother.

Towards a full accounting and apology

For a proper way of digesting this dark episode of Christian iconoclasm, we suggest the following two steps. First of all, a full stop has to be put to the surreptitious forms of Christian iconoclasm which are continuing to this very day. It is nonsense to talk of dialogue and communal harmony as long as attempts are still being made to disrupt existing modes of worship.

Secondly, Hindus and Christians should take inspiration from the contemporary American attitude towards the horrible story of America’s christianization through culture murder and genocide. After all, the Christian conquests in India and in America are two sides of the same coin. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Pope awarded one half of the world—ultimately comprising areas from Brazil to Macao, including Africa and India—to Portugal, and the other half—including most of America and the Philippines—to Spain, on condition that they use their power to christianize the population. The Spanish campaign in America had juridically and theologically exactly the same status as its Portuguese counterpart in India. If the result was not as absolutely devastating in India as it was in America, this was merely due to different power equations: the Portuguese were less numerous than the Spanish, and the Indians were technologically and militarily more equal to the Europeans than the Native Americans were. The Church’s intentions behind Columbus’s discovery of America and Vasco da Gama’s landing in India were exactly the same.

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus‘s first meeting with the Pagans of the New World (1992), many Christian dignitaries have expressed their shame and regret at what has been done to the Native Americans by—or, as they prefer to put it, “in the name of”—Christianity. Even the Pope has publicly acknowledged at least a part of his Church’s guilt. Now that the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama‘s landing in India [has passed], Hindus should make sure that the Christians including the Pope do not forget to do some similar soul-searching and to offer similar apologies.

Like the Native Americans, Hindu society will not be satisfied with a few cheap words. As Hindu spokesman Arun Shourie writes:

“By an accounting [of the calumnies heaped upon India and Hinduism] I do not of course mean some declaration saying, ‘Sorry’. By an accounting I mean that the calumnies would be listed; the grounds on which they were based would be listed, and the Church would declare whether, in the light of what is known now, the grounds were justified or not; and the motives which impelled those calumnies would be exhumed.”

This is actually an application of the rules of confession, one of the Catholic sacraments: it is not enough to ask for absolution from your sins, you first have to confess what sins you have actually committed.

The Church now claims that it is no longer the aggressive Church Militant of the old days, that its whole outlook has profoundly changed. Shourie lists five criteria by which we will know whether these changes are genuine:

An honest accounting of the calumnies which the Church has heaped on India and Hinduism;

Informing Indian Christians and non-Christians about the findings of Bible scholarship;

Informing them about the impact of scientific progress on Church doctrine;

Acceptance that reality is multi-layered and that there are many ways of perceiving it;

Bringing the zeal for conversion in line with the recent declarations that salvation is possible through other religions as well.

I expect Church leaders to reply: “You cannot ask of the Indian Church to commit suicide like that!” But let us give them a chance.

Christian hostilities today

After the Church’s public self-criticism before the Native Americans, there is every reason [for Hindus] to take stock of what Christianity has done to India. But in this case, the Christians may need some insistent reminding: unlike in America, where they have had to face the facts of history, and where they have had to switch to a pro-Native stand under the aegis of Liberation Theology, the Christian Churches in India are still continuing on a course of self-righteous aggression against the native society and culture.

Seldom have I seen such viper-like mischievousness as in the most recent strategies of the Christian mission in India. It is a viper with two teeth. On the one side, there is the gentle penetration through social and educational services, now compounded with a rhetoric of “inculturation”: glib talk of “dialogue”, “sharing”, “common ground”, fraudulent donning of Hindu robes by Christian priests, all calculated to fool Hindus about the continuity of the Christian striving to destroy Hinduism and replace it with the cult of Jesus. This is not to deny that there are some Indian Christians who sincerely believe that the denomination game is outdated, that we should go “beyond the religions” and mix freely with non-Christians without trying to change their religious loyalties; but they do not represent official Church policy.

On the other side, there is a vicious attempt to delegitimize Hinduism as India’s native religion, and to mobilize the weaker sections of Hindu society against it with “blood and soil” slogans. Seeing how the nativist movement in the Americas is partly directed against Christianity because of its historical aggression against native society—in spite of Liberation Theology’s attempts to recuperate the movement—the Indian Church tries to take over this nativist tendency and forge it into a weapon against Hinduism. Christian involvement in the so-called Dalit (“oppressed”) and Adivasi (“aboriginal”) movements is an attempt to channel the nativist revival and perversely direct it against native society itself. It advertises its services as the guardian of the interests of the “true natives”—meaning the Scheduled Castes and Tribes—against native society, while labelling the upper castes as “Aryan invaders”, on the basis of an outdated theory postulating a migration in 1500 B.C.

To declare people “invaders” because of a supposed migration of some of their ancestors 3500 years ago is an unusual feat of political hate rhetoric in itself, but the point is that it follows a pattern of earlier rounds of Christian aggression. It is Cortes all over again: Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, could defeat the Aztecs, the ruling nation which had migrated from Utah three centuries earlier, by enlisting the support of nations subdued by the Aztecs, with himself posing as their liberator—of course, they were to regret their “liberation”. The attempt to divide the people of a country on an ethnic basis—whether it is a real ethnic distinction as in the case of Cortes’ Mexico, or a wilfully invented one as in the case of India—is an obvious act of hostility, unmistakably an element of warfare.

While in the post-colonial decades, Church rhetoric has markedly softened, its action on the ground has only become more aggressive. Shourie quotes intelligence reports on the role of missionaries in armed separatist movements in the North-East, and on their violations of the legal restrictions in Arunachal Pradesh on conversion by force or allurement. The World Council of Churches officially supports separatism in the tribal areas—and even among the Schedules Castes, another “indigenous nation”!—in pursuit of the long cherished project of carving out Christian-dominated independent states. In its 1989 Darwin Declaration, the WCC announces: “Indigenous peoples strive for and demand the full spectrum of autonomy available in the principle of self-determination, including the right to re-establish our own nation-states”. The churches and governments have an obligation to see [this] come to reality by providing the necessary means, without any restriction attached.” What sounds fair enough in the case of the Tibetans or the East-Timorese, is used in India as a step on the way to unrestricted exercise of clerical power, a formalization of the already existing trends in the Christian-dominated states of the Indian republic.

Therefore, “without any restriction”, Christians are teaching some sections of Hindu society hatred against other sections. You don’t normally try to create hostility between your friends, so the Church’s policy to pit sections of Hindu society against one another should be seen for what it is: an act of aggression, which warrants an active policy of self-defence and counter-attack. This counter-attack should take a proper form, adapted to the genius of Hinduism.

Why Christianity should be rejected

The Hindu response to Christian aggression should concentrate on consciousness-raising. Information should be widely disseminated on the two fundamental reasons why Christianity is totally unacceptable as an alternative to Hinduism.

The first is its historical record, with its destructive fanaticism as well as its opportunistic collaboration with whichever social force seemed most helpful to the Church’s expansion. Contrary to current propaganda, Christianity has historically supported feudalism, absolute kingship, slavery and apartheid, all properly justified with passages from the Bible. St. Peter and St. Paul gave a clear message to the oppressed of the world: “Slaves, accept with due submission the authority of your masters, not only if they are good and friendly, but even if they are harsh.” (1 Peter 2:18) And: “Slaves, be obedient to your earthly masters with devotion and simplicity, as if your obedience were directed to Christ Himself.”(Ephesians 6:5). Liberation Theology, far from constituting a break with the Church’s long-standing collaboration with the dominant powers, is merely the application of the same strategy to new circumstances: now that the masses constitute a decisive political force, now that social activism is a theme which ensures political and financial support from different quarters, the Church has decided to tap into this new source of power as well.

The other—and in my opinion the most important—fact about Christianity which ought to be the topic of an all-out education campaign, is the scientific certainty that its fundamental teachings are historically fraudulent, intellectually garbled, and psychologically morbid. Jesus was neither the son of a virgin mother nor the Only Begotten Son of God. Jesus’s perception of himself as the Messiah and the Son of God was a psychopathological condition, supported by hallucinations—especially the voice he heard during his baptism, the visions of the devil during his fast, the vision of Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor—and partly caused by his most ordinary but traumatic shame of having been conceived out of wedlock. Numerous manipulations—interpolation, omission, antedating, deliberate mistakes of translation and interpretation—of the textual basis of Christian doctrine by the evangelists and other Church Fathers have been discovered, analyzed and explained in their historical context by competent Bible scholars, most of them working at Christian institutes.

Now some Hindus will object that there must also be a bright side. I am well aware that Christian history has produced some important contributions to human progress in culture, art, philosophy. I have a rather positive opinion of some of the Christian classics, such as Thomas Aquinas‘s philosophy, or the Church’s social teachings—which are rather different from Liberation Theology—and I stand by my earlier suggestion that Hindu political ideologues would gain a lot from studying the works which inspired their natural European counterpart, the Christian Democrats. However, a closer analysis shows that the truly important elements in these contributions are ultimately of non-Christian origin.

The intellectually most attractive elements in Christian doctrine are bits of Hellenistic philosophy co-opted by the Church Fathers, without any prophetic or revelatory origins, apart from elements of Judaic tradition which predated Jesus and were in no way augmented or surpassed by his supposed teachings. The way Christianity incorporated them is often a superficial cover-up of the contradictions between mutually exclusive teachings. Thus, the Platonic notion of an immortal soul, which is part of Church doctrine, makes the central Christian message of the “resurrection of the body”—which originated in a Jewish tradition ignoring the notion of an afterlife—superfluous. If death does not really exist, if it is merely a step from this type of life to another type, why bother about bodily resurrection? And if we partake of the divine nature by sharing God’s immortality, where is the need for a saviour?

On the other hand, those contributions which set Christianity apart from the prevailing religious and intellectual atmosphere in the Greco-Roman world, are not always the most desirable. Thus, Christianity’s emphasis on the individual’s dependence on scriptural or Church authority has suffocated millions of people in their spiritual development and directly caused the persecution and killing of numerous freethinkers. Its contorted and repressive attitude towards human sexuality is notoriously responsible for untold amounts of psychological suffering. Add the negative attitude towards worldly pursuits including science; the sentimental fixation on a single historical person with his idiosyncratic behaviour, extolled moreover to a divine status—Jews and Muslims have a point when they consider this the ultimate in “idolatry”—the concomitant depreciation of all other types of human character—artist, warrior, householder, humorist, renouncer—in favour of the pathetic antisocial type which Jesus represented; and the morbid love of martyrdom. Our list of Christianity’s failures is not complete, but is sufficient to justify the evaluation on which millions of Christian-born people have come to agree: Christianity is not true.

Jesus was not God’s Only Begotten Son, and he was not the Saviour of mankind from its Original Sin. Historically, he was just one of the numerous antisocial preachers going around in troubled Palestine in the period of Roman rule. He believed the End was near—definitely a failed prophecy, unless we redefine “near”—and had a rather high opinion of himself and of his role in the impending catastrophe. We can feel compassion for this thoroughly unhappy man with his miserably unsuccessful life, but we should not compensate him for his failure by elevating him to a super-human status; let alone worshipping him as Saviour and Son of God. Whatever the worth of values which Christians claim as theirs, nothing at all is gained by making people believe in a falsehood like the faith in Jesus Christ.

Life after Christianity

Hindus with their conservative and pluralistic concern for the continuity of people in their respective faiths may wonder whether, for Christians, there is life after Christianity. Let me speak from my own experience. I have grown up in a Catholic family, gone to Catholic schools, and am a member of Catholic social organizations, so in a sociological sense I belong to the Catholic community. Moreover, I publish articles defending the Christians against the Islamic onslaught in foreign countries as well as against cultural aggression by Left-secularists in my own country. I also like to point to the worthwhile contributions of the Church tradition and of Christian thinkers and artists against the sweeping anti-Christian positions of some of my atheist and Hindu friends. Yet, like most of my friends from the same background, I have gradually discovered that Christianity is an illusory belief system, and without any outside intellectual or other pressures, my attachment to it has dissolved.

This step from belief in an irrational “revealed” doctrine towards truthfulness and the spirit of independent inquiry has not been a loss to me, nor to most people in the same situation that I know of. On the contrary, I have found that St. Paul’s dictum is fully valid: “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

For many thoughtful Westerners, the end of Christianity has not turned out to be the end of religion and morality, contrary to the predictions of our teachers. To be sure, there has been a profound change in public morality, which is partly a liberation from repressive prejudice, but partly also a real decline in moral sensitivity and responsibility, as demonstrated by the rising crime rate and the increasing number of broken families. Christianity claims to be the solution to this problem—hence the call for a “second evangelization”—but to quite an extent it should accept the blame for this development. By identifying religiosity and morality with its own irrational belief system, Christianity has made many people who outgrew this belief system throw out the annexes of moral responsibility and spiritual striving as well. Now, people are needing some time to discover for themselves that religion and morality still make sense after the demise of Christianity.

Back to pre-Christian roots

Though the decline of Christianity in the West brings a few problems with it, that is no reason to reverse the process. Instead, we are reconstructing religion and morality for ourselves. One of the sources of the post-Christian religious revival, numerically still marginal but of great symbolic significance, is the rediscovery of ancestral Paganism. Intellectually, this movement still lacks solidity and consistency, and finds itself associated with a variety of social and political concerns stretching across the ideological spectrum: ethnic revivalism, nationalism, ecologism, feminism, communitarianism, anarchism. Part of the reason is that in European Paganism, unlike in Hinduism, there is no historical continuity, so that—except for the well-documented Greek traditions—there is ample room for guessing and fantasizing about the historical contents of ancient Paganism: an open invitation to romantics and theosophists to project their own pet ideas onto the mute screen of the ancient religion. Perhaps that is why the most consistent neo-Pagan movement arose in Iceland, where the memory of ancient Paganism was best preserved.

When Pope John-Paul II visited Iceland, he was received by Christian dignitaries, but the first one to address him was the country’s senior most religious leader, Sveinbjšrn Beinteinsson (1924-93). Originally a farmer, Beinteinsson gained fame across northern Europe as a traditional singer and songwriter—what the English call, with a term from the Celtic part of their cultural ancestry, a bard—and in 1972 he founded the Asatruarfelagid, the “society for the Ase religion”, which was officially registered as a religion on 3 May 1973. As “the whole people’s invocator”[8] of the reconstituted ancestral religion, he spoke with mild irony to the Pope, about these “new fashions in religion”—meaning Christianity—which his tradition had seen arriving in Iceland.

The Icelandic example is being followed in other Germanic countries including North America. Celtic-based revivals are flourishing in Celtic countries or countries with a Celtic past—France, where some 40 different neo-Druid societies of divergent quality co-exist, England and Belgium—Slavic and Baltic countries have their own variety, with Russia and Lithuania being particularly fertile grounds for neo-Paganism. In the former Soviet provinces of Tajikistan and Ossetia, there is a revival of Zoroastrianism, while forms of Shamanism are resurfacing from Kyrgyzstan to Hungary. In North America, these movements are partly absorbing those circles which were flirting earlier with Native American spirituality (Sweat Lodge Ceremony). They now accept that the Native Americans themselves don’t appreciate this type of imitation and prefer European-descended people to rediscover their own Pagan heritage. While evangelists are working hard to christianize tribals in the interiors of Latin America, many christianized Native Americans are returning to their ancestral traditions. In Brazil, supposedly the world’s largest Catholic country, the black and mulatto populations are taking to the elaborately polytheistic Candomble cult, with the sympathy of growing sections of the European-descended people, who view this cult of African origin as the emerging national religion.

Most of these neo-Pagan groups are still too obviously immature, groping in the dark created by the Christian destruction of their historical roots; it is interesting to watch some of them adapt their own rituals and doctrines to new scholarly findings about their chosen religious ancestry. We shall have to see how this line of response to the post-Christian vacuum develops; but already, its very existence poses a powerful symbolic challenge to Christianity.

Meanwhile, the biggest actual challenge to Christianity in the West is the appeal of Oriental religions. Now long past the stage of beatnik experimentation with Zen Buddhism and hippie affectations of Indian lore, the Western daughter-schools of Asian schools of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are gaining in authenticity and respectability as well as in attendance numbers. Some people formally convert and declare themselves followers of these religions; many more just practise the techniques they’ve learned and try to live according to the teachings, all while insisting on their individual non-attachment to any organized religion. Thus, in Germany—at least among natives, as opposed to the prolific Muslim immigrants—Buddhism is the fastest growing religion with some 300,000 practitioners. Even more far-reaching is the gradual penetration of small bits and pieces of Oriental heritage: most sportsmen as well as pregnant women preparing for birth now learn some elementary yogic breath control (pranayama) techniques, while even among Christian monks and nuns there is a substantial percentage who defy the Pope’s warnings and practise non-Christian forms of meditation.

Part of Christianity’s appeal among Indian tribals and fishermen is the—waning, but still palpable—prestige of the West. They should realize that the West is gradually opening up to the traditions of India and China, even while the elites of these countries are still spitting on their own heritage and pursuing westernization. Indians living in the middle of these traditions should have no problem finding a worthwhile alternative to Christianity. Even Dalits with a grudge against Hinduism should have no problem in rejecting the eager invitations of Christianity and Islam, and in following their leader Dr. Ambedkar onto the path of the Buddha. In time, closer study of the Buddha’s teachings may well reveal to them that, just as Jesus was a Jew, the Buddha was a Hindu.

Christianity against Paganism

It is interesting to see how the mild and harmless people who run the leftovers of the once powerful churches in Europe suddenly show a streak of fanaticism when confronted with signs of life in the long-buried corpse of Paganism. In Iceland, the established Lutheran Church has intervened to stop the ongoing construction of a Pagan temple halfway; the government complied with the pressure and temporarily halted the construction work. In contemporary polemical publications from the Christian side, we see a boom in attacks on what is loosely called the New Age Movement, meaning the mixed bag of feminist neo-witchcraft, ecologist philosophy (“deep ecology”), astrology, Pagan revivalism, Taoist health techniques and Hindu-Buddhist meditation. The Pope himself has condemned yoga, and in January 1995, his derogatory utterances on Buddhism provoked an anti-Pope agitation during his visit to Sri Lanka.

By contrast, the Church leadership strongly opposes any serious criticism of Islam. In India’s Hindu-Muslim conflict, the Christian media with their world-wide impact have thrown their weight completely behind the Islamic aggressor. The reason for this uneven treatment of Paganism—in the broadest sense—and Islam is not merely the relative closeness of Islam as a fellow monotheist religion, nor just the fear which Islam inspires. Churchmen have the (correct) impression that the Pagan alternative, though softer and weaker than Islam in a confrontational sense, ultimately has a stronger appeal to the educated Western mind. They calculate that the better-educated mankind of the next century will typically go the way of today’s European intellectuals, rather than the way of today’s Black Muslims or Christian Dalits.

Islam’s money and muscle power may look impressive, certainly capable of doing some real damage to targeted countries and societies, but Islam has no chance of becoming the religion of a science-based, space-conquering world society. Exclusivist revelations have no appeal among educated people, especially after they have acquainted themselves with the Vedantic or Buddhist philosophies. That is why the churches are investing huge resources in the battle for Asia’s mind, where they face their most formidable enemy. That is why they are so active in India: not only is India’s atmosphere of religious freedom more hospitable to them than the conditions of Islamic countries, or even of non-Islamic countries where proselytization is prohibited—countries as divergent as China, Myanmar, Israel, and, at least formally, Nepal—but they also know and fear the intrinsic superiority of the Indian religion.

The role of disputed places of worship

In the present struggle to death which Christianity is waging against Hinduism, is it any use for Hindus to rake up disputes over usurped places of worship? Or, as Christians who have the preservation of their churches in mind, are wont to ask: isn’t one Babri Masjid problem enough?

The Hindu response should be in proportion to the seriousness of the matter. Within the hierarchy of Hindu sacred places, I don’t think that any of the most important ones has been usurped by Christianity, the Mylapore Shiva temple being—with due respect—of secondary rank; though I admit that this is all relative. Of course, the Church itself is welcome to make a move and offer the stolen places of worship back. In fact, until the Church voluntarily offers to give some of its illegitimate property back, there is every reason to be skeptical about its protestations of a “new spirit of dialogue”. However, in my opinion, it may be wasteful and strategically counterproductive to start clamouring for the return of stolen places of worship.

Hindu society should be more ambitious. A place of worship may be an important focus for mobilization and consciousness-raising—vide Ayodhya—but it is hardly important in itself. Better to go for the big one: attract the worshippers, and they will bring the places of worship along with them. Not the places but the offerers of worship are to be liberated from Christianity.

The fate of Hindu sacred sites at the hands of Christian missionaries, as a piece of significant historical information, may have a certain auxiliary role to play in this process of consciousness-raising. Their ruins are witnesses to the antireligious and destructive edge of a Church which now advertises itself in India as the bringer of progress and social justice. A formal “liberation of sacred sites” need not be put on the agenda, but the Hindus have every right to insist on a mental and verbal breakthrough: Christians must acknowledge the historical fact that, from Bethlehem to Madras, most of their sacred sites are booty won in campaigns of fraud and destruction. Since their theology urges a sense of sinfulness and guilt anyway, they should not find it too difficult to make such a confession.

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is an Orientalist from Belgian who frequently visits India to lecture. This article is extracted from Ishwar Sharan’s book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Fourth Edition 2019, Voice of India, New Delhi.

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

July 1, 2026VOI

Trump, Xi, Modi

India with its slow and steady rise, two steps forward, one step back, is the quintessential tortoise to the Chinese and American hares. But both China and America know who won the race – Minhaz Merchant

No nation has risen from an impoverished European colony to a major global power. India’s rise has been as unexpected for China and the West as it is unsettling.

Other global powers rose through either colonialism (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal), invasion (America, Canada, Australia) or communism (China, Soviet Union).

India’s rise—chaotic and incomplete but unstoppable—is different: no colonial conquest, no extraterritorial invasion, no communist dictatorship.

If India can become the world’s third largest economy by 2030 (which it will) and the world’s fourth largest military (which it already is), then the means other major powers adopted in their rise stand thoroughly discredited.

That is why India’s rise will be a “resisted” rise. The rise of other great powers was an “assisted” rise. The British Empire, for example, passed the baton willingly to the United States. The Soviet Union helped China rise.

Washington and Beijing have now arrived at a temporary modus vivendi. They will not let their competition lead to confrontation. On Taiwan it might have but US President Donald Trump has signalled it won’t. He paused $14 billion arms sales to Taiwan days after his summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. In return Xi has pledged an uninterrupted supply of critical minerals to the US.

That doesn’t mean the world’s two largest economies don’t have friction points. Last week, Beijing expelled Vivian Wang, a New York Times correspondent based in China because the newspaper interviewed the President of Taiwan, even though Wang was not involved in the interview. The US instantly reciprocated by expelling a senior Chinese journalist from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

Beijing has placed a limit of 100 on the number of US journalists allowed to report from within China. The US has placed a similar limit on Chinese journalists based in the US. Trade between the two countries continues to fall. It has plunged from $690 billion in 2022 to $414 billion in 2025.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 30, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned: “There is rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup and the expansion of its military activities in the region and beyond. No state, including China, can impose its hegemony and hold the security or prosperity of our nation and our allies in question.”

Hegseth then offered an olive branch to Beijing: “President Trump and this administration seek a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China.”

Hegseth acknowledged India’s growing military power: “A powerful India, acting in its own self-interest, advances our shared goal of maintaining a balance of power across the region. India is modernizing its military to carry its share of the security burden, particularly in the Indian Ocean. It’s building out the heavy industrial and logistics capacity to sustain high-end military operations. We’ve also committed to pursuing co-production with India to advance capabilities like Javelin anti-tank guided munitions, real tangible steps to improve the collective readiness of our forces.”

Decline and fall

Despite their rhetoric, Trump’s America and Xi’s China are both declining superpowers. The US economy grew by a paltry annualised 1.6 per cent in the January-March 2026 quarter. China’s economy is sputtering. Consumption has plummeted. Oversupply of manufactured goods has forced Chinese companies to slash prices. Many have gone bankrupt, including dozens of electric vehicle (EV) makers.

It takes decades for the decline of major powers to manifest itself. For example, the decline of colonial Britain and France was slow at first. But after their failed joint attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, the ability of London and Paris to influence global affairs fell sharply.

Could the Iran war be America’s Suez moment? It is exactly 70 years since Washington prevented Britain and France from seizing the Suez Canal in 1956. US global power has since been unrivalled, with the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. China’s tiny economy was not yet a threat to Washington’s global hegemony.

As Washington and Beijing evaluate the rise and fall of nations across geographies over the next 25 years, they see a toothless Europe, fragmented Asia-Pacific, economically stressed Latin America, and war-torn Middle East.

India stands out in splendid isolation. Third largest economy soon. Fourth largest military already. Stable democracy with a noisy Opposition, an activist media, a strong judiciary and an economy growing at an average annual rate of 6.5 per cent, despite trade and war disruptions.

And yet. India confounds the West and China. Its bureaucracy is opaque. Regulations are onerous. Rote education stifles innovation. Corruption at state and municipal levels is endemic. Poverty is declining but millions of Indians are still destitute.

Can such a country ever rise to the stature of a major global power? Students of history recall the abject poverty of China in the 1980s and the 1990s and the famines of the 1960s and 1970s that killed millions of Chinese during Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. They also recall the Great Depression of 1929-39 in the US when the stock market fell by 75 per cent and several American traders committed suicide by jumping off Wall Street’s skyscrapers.

Much can happen in the next 25 years. What is certain is that Europe will continue to atrophy. America will begin a gentle decline. China will age, shrink and grow old before it grows rich.

› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.

Why are we afraid of an ancient ‘Dancing Girl’ figurine? – Utpal Kumar

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026VOI

It’s time we learnt to look at the “Dancing Girl” without the borrowed gaze of Victorian morality, colonial prejudice and Islamist discomfort. … The real controversy is not about a Mohenjo-daro figurine. It is about whether Indians can see their civilisation through their own eyes. – Utpal Kumar

Historian Upinder Singh makes a striking observation in her book, Ancient India: “If the second-century BCE Chanda Yakshi were magically transported from Bharhut to 21st-century Delhi and brought to life, she would smile in disbelief. She would also be told to cover up.”

That fate has finally caught up with Mohenjo-daro’s iconic “Dancing Girl”.

In a recent Class IX NCERT textbook, the bronze figurine’s nude torso was digitally covered up. Following criticism, the original image was restored. Curiously, the Class VI textbook continues to carry the uncensored image. Apparently, NCERT believes 14-year-olds are more vulnerable to moral corruption than 11-year-olds.

The episode is more than a bureaucratic blunder. It reveals something deeper: how colonial assumptions, Victorian morality and Islamist sensibilities continue to shape how Indians view their own civilisation.

The first problem begins with the name itself: “Dancing Girl”. Why “dancing”? Just because she appears to be dancing? Or, is it because she is nude? If posture alone is the criterion, countless Yakshis adorning temples and viharas across the country would qualify as “dancing girls”.

The iconic figurine was discovered by British archaeologist Ernest Mackay during excavations at the ancient Indus Valley site of Mohenjo-daro, in present-day Sindh, Pakistan, in 1926. It was, however, John Marshall who called it the “Dancing Girl”, as it gave “a vivid impression of the young aboriginal nautch girl” in a “half-impudent posture”.

No evidence was found, or indeed given, to support the claim. The interpretation rests entirely on the conjecture of the British archaeologist whose Victorian sensibilities refused to see a nude woman as anything other than a “dancing girl”. And, like good subjects of a colony, we accepted it as gospel truth. Even a century later, Marshall’s conjecture survives as accepted fact.

Just imagine: had literary traditions not survived, many Yakshis found on numerous ancient Hindu and Jain temples and Buddhist viharas too might have been reduced to “nautch girls” by modern interpreters. Imagine, further, that human civilisation as we know it today ceases to exist almost instantly without any trace of literature and, 2,000 years from now, extraterrestrials excavate sites across the subcontinent. They would find countless statues of a man in well-tailored Western attire holding a book, pointing a finger in a particular direction. They might conclude that he belonged to the ruling elite or an upper caste. The man, of course, turns out to be Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

Absurd? Certainly. But not entirely different from the logic used to label a 4,500-year-old Harappan figurine a “Dancing Girl”.

The second lesson is even more revealing.

The “Dancing Girl” embodies the fundamental difference between Bharat and Pakistan. It is a compelling symbol illustrating why Bharat remains a liberal democracy rooted in dharma, while Pakistan became a den of global jihad with the aspiration of becoming a citadel of political Islam.

History is instructive. When Pakistan emerged from a combination of Islamist fervour, British treachery and the Congress leadership’s rush for power and privilege, its leadership laid claim to the Harappan civilisation. After all, most Indus Valley sites excavated till then lay within Pakistan’s borders, making them the rightful custodians of the Harappan legacy.

Bharat refused, and a compromise was reached whereby Harappan artefacts were equally divided between the two nations. Pakistan was given the option of choosing either the famous “Priest King” or the iconic “Dancing Girl”. Pakistan reportedly chose the “Priest King”. The reason was simple. While the newly-carved Islamic nation was uncomfortable claiming a nude female figure as a national symbol, the narrative around the “Priest King” suited the sensibilities of Pakistan, which was to be dominated by priests (ulema) and kings (the military).

Anyway, the Pakistani claim over Harappa was, and has always been, bogus. A country that finds its civilisational anchor not in Harappa but in Islam and has no problem officially calling Mohammad bin Qasim, the Arab general who first attacked Sindh in 712 AD, the “first citizen of Pakistan”, could have nothing but distaste for the pre-Islamic roots of the land. It has embraced the Islamist conquerors over the civilisation that once flowered along the banks of the Indus. But then this is hardly surprising. As V.S. Naipaul observes in Beyond Belief: “To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account, only the sands of Arabia are sacred.”

Against this backdrop, what is harder to understand is why Bharat increasingly seems eager to make the same choice. The NCERT episode is troubling not because an iconic statue was tampered with, but because it reflects an inability to view our past through our own civilisational lens.

Altered Dancing Girl

This brings us to the central issue: nudity.

For the Victorian mind, nudity was a moral problem. For political Islam, it remains an existential dilemma. For civilisational Bharat, however, it was neither. This does not mean Bharat celebrated unrestrained sensuality. Nor does it mean every form of desire was equally valued. What it means is that the civilisation recognised multiple legitimate pursuits of life. The notions of Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha were not contradictions; they were complementary aims.

This explains why even highly ascetic traditions such as Jainism found space for Yakshinis in their literature and temple structures. In Ancient India, Prof. Upinder Singh writes: “In Jainism, devotion to a goddess cannot lead to enlightenment, but it can help in attaining worldly goals such as prosperity, power and even victory in philosophical debates. So, although they were not the main focus of worship, goddesses did have a strong presence, endowing the austere atmosphere of Jaina temples with beauty and warmth.”

The Indic tradition rarely sought to erase what it disapproved of. It sought to contextualise, rank and transcend. Vatsyayana, whose authorship of the Kamasutra never came between his acceptance in the Sanatana tradition as a Rishi, understood this perfectly. He argued that Kama, like food, is necessary for life. Its excesses should be guarded against, but its existence cannot be denied. For him, Kama, “like food, is a means for the body’s sustenance. It is also a fruit of Dharma and Artha. Its shortcomings should be taken into account, but will one not eat food because there are beggars who need it, or not sow seeds because beasts may eat the crop?”

That insight captures the essence of the Indic worldview: restraint without puritanism, freedom without licence, and acceptance without celebration.

The real controversy, therefore, is not about a Mohenjo-daro figurine. It is about whether Indians can see their civilisation through their own eyes. Exactly a hundred years ago, the “Dancing Girl” was discovered. And for a century, we accepted the colonial categorisation of the Harappan figurine by calling her a nautch girl. Today, we are willing to clothe her to satisfy our “modern” sensibilities. In the process, both Bharat’s history and its civilisational understanding get compromised.

It’s time we learnt to look at the “Dancing Girl” without the borrowed gaze of Victorian morality, colonial prejudice and Islamist discomfort. – Firstpost, 18 June 2026

› Utpal Kumar is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’.

The Problem of Islamism – Sita Ram Goel

June 18, 2026VOI

What we mean by Islamism is a self-righteous psychology and a closed cultural attitude which make it impossible for Muslim converts to coexist peacefully and with dignity with other people. – Sita Ram Goel

The most malevolent of these residues is Islamism, the residue of the Muslim invasion of India spread over several centuries. Its basic tenets are ultimately derived from the teachings of Islam which has so far succeeded in sealing itself off from every shade of empiricism, rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, the hallmarks of Hindu as well as modern Western culture. But in the context of India where Islam failed in its mission of lasting conquest and total conversion, these tenets have acquired a singularly sinister and subversive character.

Let it be clear that the reference here is not at all to our Muslim brethren who are our own flesh and blood, except for that microscopic minority which takes pride in the purity of its Arab, Persian or Turkish descent.[1] Instead of being the proponents of Islamism, the Muslims of India are its victims whom it is trying to use as vehicles of its poisonous virulence. The vast majority of Indian Muslims were converted to Islam by force or allurements. But the conversion did not help them socially or culturally as their status today in India’s Muslim society should amply prove. The Muslims of India, therefore, have to be freed from rather than accused of Islamism.

What we mean by Islamism is a self-righteous psychology and a closed cultural attitude which make it impossible for its converts to coexist peacefully and with dignity with other people. There are many Hindus who share several tenets of Islamism. On the other hand, there are many Muslims who are frightened by Islamism and who would gladly join the mainstream of Indian nationalism if they are freed from the whiphand which a minority of theologians, politicians and hooligans has come to wield in their community.

Those who want to know Islamism first-hand and in full measure are referred to Shaikh Sir Mohammed Iqbal’s two long poems which he wrote quite early in his career, and which earned for him the title of Allama among the adherents of this cult. These are the Shikwa and the Jawab-i-Shikwah which Mr. Khushwant Singh has recently published in an English translation.

The Shikwa ends by summing up that “naghma hindi hai tau kya, lai tau hijazi hai miri”, that is, “no matter if my idiom is Indian, my spirit is that of Hijaz”. Hijaz is that part of Arabia in which Mecca and Medina are situated.

The Jawab-i-Shikwah ends on a still more strident note. Allah announces to the Allama His supreme message for mankind in the following words: “kî wafã tûne muhammad se tau ham tere hain”, that is, “if you are faithful to Muhammad, I shall be faithful to you.”

Now, there are many Muslims in India who have never heard the name of Iqbal or listened to his muse. And there are many Hindus whose admiration for Iqbal is immeasurable. No, Islamism does not refer to any particular section of Indian society. It refers to that intellectual-or unintellectual-attitude which awards the monopoly of truth and virtue to a particular prophet, and consigns all knowledge to the pages of a particular book.

Taking our cue from Allama Iqbal and his lesser cohorts like Altaf Hussain Hali, we can safely summarise the credo of Islamism in the following five fundamentals:

1. That Indian society before the advent of Islam was living in utter spiritual, moral and cultural darkness (jahiliya) like pre-Islamic Arabia;

2. That Islam brought to India the only true religion, the only authentic moral values, the only humane culture, and the only progressive social order;

3. That this civilizing mission of Islam in India could not be completed, as in many other lands of Asia and Africa, due to the intervention of the wily British who cheated Islam of its empire in India, mostly by means of fraud;

4. That while the creation of Pakistan has been a triumph and consolidation of the power of Islam, west of the Ravi and east of the Hooghly, the conquest of India by Islam remains an unfinished task;

5. That Islam has a right to use all means, including force, to convert this Dãrul-harb of an India into a Dãrul-Islam, so that a Hakûmat-i-Ilãhiyah could liquidate all traces of jãhilîya and impose the law and culture of Islam.

There are many Hindus like the late Pandit Sunderlal who fully accept the first two fundamentals of Islamism. It is a different matter that their logic fails them at this stage and they do not proceed to the next three fundamentals which follow irrevocably. And there have been many Muslims like the late Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Justice M.C. Chagla who rejects these fundamentals as repugnant.

Having thus outlined its version of past Indian history, and the apocalypse towards which future Indian history should be forced to travel, Islamism has evolved a strategy in which the Muslims of India are envisaged as a base and an arsenal. Some salient features of this strategy can be outlined as follows:

1. The Muslims of India, particularly the Muslim intelligentsia, should be sealed off from every shade of rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, and an army of mullahs and maulvis trained in the tenets of Islam should be let loose to brainwash and keep them along the right track;

2. Every Muslim who does not accept Islamism or dares criticize it or stands for the mainstream of Indian nationalism, away from and above religious differences, should be denounced as a renegade and a legitimate victim for murderous Muslim mobs;

3. The Muslims should be encouraged to air as many grievances as can be invented, and try to pass off as a down-trodden minority, oppressed, exploited and treated as second class citizens by the “brute” Hindu majority;

4. These contrived grievances of the Muslims should be used to convert the Muslim community into a compact vote-bank which can function as a balancing factor in as many electoral constituencies as possible, and which can blackmail all non-Islamist political parties to accommodate Muslim candidates or include the maximum measure of concessions to the Muslim community in their election manifestos;

5. The Muslims should be made to agitate for India’s support to all international Islamic causes, right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate, so that their attention is kept constantly diverted from demands of their own economic, social and cultural condition;

6. The Muslims should be progressively persuaded and prepared to stage street riots on the slightest pretext, be it a stray pig, or music before a mosque, or Urdu, or the minority character of the Aligarh Muslim University, or a purely personal fracas between toughs belonging to two communities, or the bombing of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by an Austrian adventurer, or the hanging of Z.A. Bhutto by President Zia of Pakistan, or the capture of the Kaaba by some disgruntled faction in Saudi Arabian politics, or some other similar event in the Islamic world at large;

7. The frequent riots should be used to frighten the Muslims who should then be coaxed to create, consolidate and extend exclusive Muslim enclaves which can be stocked with arms and ammunition, imported or otherwise.

The seven-fold strategy is aimed at the Muslims in India who are to be brainwashed, blackmailed, frightened and forced into the fold of Islamism. Another side of the same strategy has been worked out to neutralise, paralyse and blacken or pamper different sections of Hindu society so that the road is cleared for the forward march of Islamism. Some salient features of this secondary strategy can be outlined as follows:

1. The concept of Secularism which is enshrined in the Constitution of India and which has become the most sacred slogan for all our political parties should be distorted, misinterpreted and misused to the maximum to block out the least little expression of Hindu culture in the state apparatus and public life of India;

2. The terms “communal” and “communalism” which have become terms of abuse in India’s political parlance, should be carefully cultivated and more and more mystified to malign all those organisations, institutions and parties which do not serve Islamism, directly and/or indirectly;

3. The accusation of being fascists and anti-secularists should be hurled at all those individuals and organisations who question the exclusive claims of Islam and its culture, who know and tell the truth about Islamic scripture and history, and who see through the Muslim game of grievances;

4. All praise and support should be extended to those Hindus who go out of their way to champion Islamic causes, national and international, and who see in Islam and its culture those higher values which Islamism claims for them;

5. All available platforms should be used to defeat and frustrate the emergence of a genuine and positive Indian nationalism by always harping on India’s multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-language, multi-national, and multi-cultural character.

Islamism did make some headway among the Muslims in Independent India mostly because the dominant section of Hindu intelligentsia partronised it for various reasons. The Congress politicians patronised it because they found out very soon that they were in a minority among the Hindus, and that they could survive in power only by combining a solid Muslim vote with whatever Hindu vote they could get. The Socialists went out of their way to patronise it partly because they harbour an anti-Hindu animus and partly in the hope of securing Muslim vote-a hope which has not as yet come anywhere near fulfilment. The Gandhians partronised it because they no more remembered that their great master, Mahatma Gandhi, was a Hindu with a profound faith in Sanãtana Dharma, and because they misunderstood his doctrine of non-violence towards all people, including the Muslims of India, as an endorsement of Islam. The Communists patronised it because they saw in it a powerful ally in their campaign against Hindu society which they viewed as their main enemy. The self-alienated Hindu intellectuals patronised it out of sheer animus towards Hindu society and culture which they were out to damn on any pretext. Extending patronage to Islamism thus became a pastime for all those who wanted to pass off as large-hearted liberals, progressives and secularists.

But in the absence of local resources and international patronage, the progress of Islamism in India was rather slow. Pakistan, which was its only patron abroad, could not provide much help beyond some hysteria in its mass media and propaganda in international political forums. The several wars which India was forced to fight with Pakistan to the disadvantage of the latter, also inhibited Islamism in India from acquiring the requisite degree of self-confidence.

The use of oil as a political weapon by Islamic countries and the influx of petro-dollars in plenty from several Arab countries, particularly Libya and Saudi Arabia, since the early 1970s, has given to Islamism in India a new glow of self-confidence in one sudden sweep. This influx of Arab money is a natural and inevitable phenomenon because, in the last analysis, Islamism is only another name for Arab imperialism which had, at one stage of its history, pillaged and populated with its own progeny many foreign lands and which even today keeps many non-Arab nations spiritually enslaved.

Islamism in India is now busy employing to the maximum advantage the Arab money which is pouring in through many channels and in increasing quantities. Some of these uses are very obvious to the eye. A few salient features of the new scenario can be listed as follows:

1. The rapid rise of a powerful press, mostly in Indian languages, and many publishing houses to propagate Islamism;

2. The generous funding of old and the founding of many new maktabs, madrasas and institutes for teaching Islam and training missionaries who are then employed at high salaries for purifying the faith of the Muslim flock and seeking new pastures for converts to Islam;

3. Buying of land and real estate all around in urban and rural areas by individual Muslims and Islamic institutions and organisations at whatever prices available;

4. Manufacturing and storing of arms in mosques, Muslim homes and localities and training of Muslim toughs;

5. Holding of frequent conferences, national and international, and taking out demonstrations in support of every Islamic cause;

6. Financing Muslim politics and inducing Muslim politicians to infiltrate and ingratiate themselves in every political party, and function from every public platform;

7. Bribing secularist Hindu intellectuals, scribes public workers and politicians, and buying them up for supporting Islamism, denigrating Hindu culture, and character-assassinating those who oppose Islamism;

8. Using the lure of money for winning converts to Islam from the weaker sections of Hindu society, particularly the Harijans.

The strategy is nothing new. The self-same strategy had been used by the Muslim League for the carving out of Pakistan. Only the aid and abetment which the British provided at one time have been replaced by the aid and abetment from Arab countries. And in the matter of a mere decade, Islamism in India has assumed the same menacing proportions as it had on the eve of Partition. The parallel should make us pause. – Extracted from Hindu Society Under Seige, 1996

Footnotes

1. See K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims: Who Are They, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1990.

The Problem of Christianism – Sita Ram Goel

June 16, 2026August 25, 2026VOI

It is impossible for me to reconcile myself to the idea of conversion after the style that goes on in India and elsewhere today. It is an error which is perhaps the greatest impediment to the world’s progress toward peace. Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or godly man? – M.K. Gandhi

The British rule in India crystallised two residues—Christianism and Macaulayism.

Certain strains of Macaulayism developed what is euphemistically described as a “revolutionary temper” in the later stages of the British rule and joined hands with Communism after the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The whole of Communism, which is also hostile to Hindu society and culture, is not Macaulayism. Yet, if Macaulayism had not prepared the ideological ground, Communism could not have made the strides it did in this country.

We shall analyse Christianism first. It was the first to make itself felt forcefully at the onset of the British rule in India.

We, however, wish to make it clear at the very outset that Christianism in India does not refer to the Christians in this country. They are our own people who at a certain stage of our history went over to a foreign faith in an atmosphere created and exploited by Christianism. But although they have renounced their ancestral faith, they have, by and large, not shown any marked hostility towards Hindu society and culture. Nor have they so far served as vehicles of Christianism except in certain areas of the Northeast, notably Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. Christianism in India is centered in the numerous Christian missions operating all over the country, particularly in the so-called tribal belts.

The eight fundamentals of Christianism in India may be summarised as follows:

1. That the Hindus have never had a Saviour whose historicity can be ascertained, with the possible exception of the Buddha;

2. That Jesus Christ whose historicity cannot be questioned has superseded all earlier Saviours of Hinduism—if they were Saviours at all and not disciples of Lucifer—and rendered superfluous all subsequent Hindu saints and sages;

3. That St. Thomas, an apostle of Jesus himself, was specially chosen by the Church to win India for his Master’s message;

4. That St. Thomas could not complete his mission in India because he met an untimely martyrdom at the hands of some Hindu, most probably Brahmin, heathens; [1]

5. That the converts made by St. Thomas, the first century Christians of the South, establish beyond doubt that Christianity is an ancient Indian religion and not a Western import as alleged by the Hindus;

6. That it is the sacred task of the Christian Church to complete the mission of St. Thomas and see to it that India becomes a Christian country, once and for all;

7. That if there is any thing good and wholesome in Hindu religion, it is not because Hindu saints and sages ever made any direct or conscious contact with Truth but because they merely stumbled upon some of it in the workings of Universal Nature which was preparing itself over a long time for the advent of Jesus Christ;

8. That no Hindu, even if he follows the Ten Commandments in letter and spirit and lives by the Sermon on the Mount, can ever hope to escape eternal hell-fire unless he has been baptised in a Christian church and administered the Christian sacraments.

These tenets have their source in the Christian religion which also, like Islam, is an extremely exclusive religion. [2] Christianity too claims for itself a monopoly of truth and virtue, swears by the only true God, the only true Saviour or the only Son of the only true God, the only true Revelation, the only true way of worship, and so on. It too has to its discredit a long and unrelieved record of wanton destruction of ancient religions and cultures and a large-scale killing of heathens. The annals of Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and America, particularly Central and South America, provide harrowing details of this destruction and bloodshed.

We in this country do not associate Christianity with misdeeds similar to those of Islam because the British invaders who finally succeeded in capturing power in India did not allow the Christian crusaders to use state power, directly and in an uninhibited manner. They had perhaps become wiser by a reading of Muslim history in India and did not allow their religion to interfere with the business of building a stable empire. A more tenable explanation of this British refusal to patronise Christianity beyond the point of no return is the Renaissance in Europe which had considerably discredited this creed in its own homeland by the time British arms were triumphant in India.

But we did have a taste of the intrinsic spirit of Christian aggression in our first encounter with the missionaries who swarmed towards our shores in the wake of Western victories from the 16th century onwards. When the Portuguese seized Goa and adjoining territories the Catholic Church lost no time in setting up an Inquisition for the benefit of native converts who were likely to recant or relax in their faith. Francis Xavier, whom the Catholic Church hails as the Patron Saint of the East, expressed a deep satisfaction at the sight of six thousand dead Muslims whom the Portuguese had slaughtered. He also made forcible conversions, demolished Hindu temples, smashed Hindu idols, and inaugurated that anti-Brahmanism which has by now become the sine qua non of all progressive thought and politics in India.

The triumphal march of British arms in India in the second half of the 18th century convinced the Christian missionaries that British victories were due not to a superiority in the art of warfare but to the superiority of the Christian creed by which the British generals and soldiers swore. They immediately started pouring venom on Hindu religion, culture and society. No lie was vile enough in the service of Christian “truth”. No fraud was foul enough in the service of Christian “virtue”.

An example will serve to illustrate the spiteful spirit of the Christian missionaries at that time. They spread a canard in India and abroad that many Hindus voluntarily rushed under the wheels of the great chariot during the annual rathayatra at Puri, and got themselves crushed to death in order to attain salvation. The great chariot, according to them, was always accompanied by droves of dancing girls who sang lascivious songs and made obscene gestures towards crowds on both sides of the broad street. The “great” William Wilberforce, who ruled the circle of Christian crusaders in Britain and who adamantly advocated the Christianization of India by an unstinted use of state power, demanded immediately that the temple of Jagannath be demolished to stop this “devil-dance” for good. The British Commissioner of Puri at that time saved the situation by writing a long letter to a liberal British MP in which he stated that he along with many other British civilians in the district had been a regular witness of the rathayatra for twenty years but had never witnessed a single victim under the wheels nor found anything immodest in the songs and symbolic gestures of the dancing girls. The English word “Juggernaut”, which according to the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary means “any relentless destroying force”, is a living witness to the inventive imagination of the early Christian missionaries.

This campaign of calumny against everything Hindu continued till late in the 19th century. Swami Vivekanada was referring to this crude campaign when he cried with anguish in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago that “if we Hindus dig out all the dirt from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and throw it in your faces, it will be but a speck compared to what your missionaries have done to our religion and culture”.

Had not the Hindus come out in defence of their religion and culture, this missionary mischief would have multiplied by leaps and bounds. The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj were the earliest expressions of this Hindu spirit of resistance. A notable contribution was made by the Theosophical Society whose founder, Madame Blavatsky, exposed the spiritual and moral claims of Christianity and whose chief apostle in India, Mrs. Annie Besant, inspired no small pride in the Hindu heritage. The Ramakrishna Mission also came to the rescue at a later stage. Mahatma Gandhi gave no quarter to Christian theology or to Jesus Christ as the only Son of God and Saviour of mankind. He had his own charming method of recommending Sermon on the Mount while showing compassion for the victims of the missionaries whom he described as “rice Christians”. [3]

Perhaps the main reason for the weakening of this malicious and mendacious campaign was the collapse of Christianity in its own homeland, the Western countries. The West had taken a decisive turn towards the scientific spirit. Meanwhile, the message of Hindu spirituality had also spread to the centres of learning in the West. The exponents of Hindu religion and culture like Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Raman Maharshi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswami and Mahatma Gandhi were demonstrating by their words and deeds the profound promise which Hindu Dharma held for mankind. The missionaries had to change their methods.

The core of Christianism in India, however, remains intact. They now know that the fortress of Hindu society cannot be seized by a frontal assault. They are, therefore, busy in the backyards and have hidden themselves behind the smoke-screens of several theologies. Some of these covert methods can be listed as follows:

1. Training of more and more native missionaries in their far-flung, well-equipped and fabulously financed seminaries so that missionary work looks no more like an undertaking manned mostly by foreigners;

2. Hinduising the outer accoutrements of Christian priests, liturgy and sacraments in order to convince the Hindus that Christianity is not an imported creed, and that Christianism is not out to corrode Hindu culture;

3. Directing their powerful press and publishing houses not to attack Hindu religion and culture openly but to develop a scholarly and comparative critique of Hindu religion, culture and society, always to the ultimate disadvantage of the latter;

4. To establish and extend educational institutions which at least immunise the upper class Hindu children and youth against whatever Hindu ways still survive in their homes, wherever they do not succeed in attracting them towards Christianity;

5. To build and expand hospitals and undertake other social work in order to attract an all-round respect for the Christian spirit of social service, and neutralise as narrow bigotry any questioning of their missionary motives;

6. To open orphanages and homes for the handicapped where proselytization can proceed safely and unnoticed;

7. To concentrate on Hindu tribals who are removed from the main centres of Hindu population, so that there is no untoward publicity;

8. To take out promising candidates for conversion on prolonged tours of Western countries in order to impress upon them the wonders worked by Christian culture and civilization;

9. To encourage well-to-do and willing Christians in the West to adopt boys and girls from poor Indian families, send them to missionary schools and colleges, and provide them with monetary assistance till they are converted;

10. To finance and promote political campaigns for separate states, inside or outside the Union of India, in those areas where the Christian population has attained majority or dominance.

There are plenty of methods which the missionaries employ to harangue and/or hoodwink the unsuspecting Hindus. Some of these methods are pretty crude, especially those employed by the American missionaries who aim a loud and simplistic promise, “you also can be saved” or a sweet scolding, “don’t you want to save yourself?” through big advertisements in daily newspapers, regular radio broadcasts and door to door pedlars of salvation. The other methods are sophisticated and disguised as “Indian theology”. [4]

But what looms large at the back of all these methods is the mammoth finance which flows in freely from the coffers of the Christian churches and communities in Europe and America. An idea of the magnitude of this finance can be got from a recent incident which was widely reported in the daily press. An imaginative and enterprising but poor South Indian palmed off on a Christian missionary a lot of faked literary and archaeological evidence about the adventures of St. Thomas in South India against a cash payment of fifteen lakh rupees—a paltry sum in the total budget of the mission concerned. And there are hundreds of such missions in India.

The Statesman dated 17 August 1981 has published an interesting news item from Aachen in West Germany: The Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Mother Teresa, has asked her supporters to suspend charity donations, reports UNI-DPA. The German Section of the International Association of Friends of Mother Teresa which donated six million marks in 1980 is to be disbanded at the end of this year in response to the plea. Mother Teresa who won the prize in 1979 after years of work aiding the poorest of the poor called for a temporary halt to contributions “until we have used up what we have”. “I will then ask you again,” the founder of the Missionaries of Charity said in a circular. Excessive support of a single charity leading to the needs of thousands of others being forgotten was probably behind the request.”

Six million West German marks amount to approximately two and a half crores of rupees. The amounts contributed by other sections of the International Association of Friends of Mothers Teresa are most likely to total up to many times this sum. Mother Teresa is not in a position to use all the money that has already been given to her. So the torrent has been halted temporarily. It will start pouring again as soon as she gives the signal. And hers is only one of the “thousands of other charities”. One can well imagine the staggering finance at the disposal of Christianism in India.

The free flow of this Western wealth enables the missionaries to live in and have at their disposal palatial mansions in which their missions and seminaries are housed. Their vow of poverty never comes in the way of their having modern sanitation facilities, kitchens, communications and transport. They can travel not only over the length and breadth of this country but to the ends of the earth to attend conferences, congregations, seminars and symposia. Everywhere they go they can stay in similar sumptuous style. It is but human if the superiority of their style of living gets confused with the superiority of the Christian creed.

Recently some missionaries, particularly in the Catholic missions, have started talking a new language—the language of radicalism and revolution. It is not unoften that this language comes most easily to those who do not have to share the woes and wants of people with whom they commiserate. They make the best of both the worlds. Our Communist leaders are an excellent example of such synthetic radicalism.

The West has lost its fascination for the faith. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find men and women in the West who would take the holy orders and become wedded to vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. But the West does not mind parting with plenty of cash which its prosperity can spare with ease. Christianity is, therefore, making a bold bid to establish a safer haven in the East while the going is good.

India provides a particularly soft target. The Christian missions are welcome to open their purse strings in the Islamic and Communist countries of Asia. But the missions there are barred from winning new converts. Hindu India, drowned in poverty and suffering from cultural self-forgetfulness, is the only country in Asia which provides the quid pro quo. [5] – Extracted from Hindu Society Under Seige, 1996

Footnotes

1 See Ishwar Sharan, Myth of St. Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1991.

2 See Sita Ram Goel, Papacy: Its Doctrine and History, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1986.

3 See Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1989.

4 See Catholic Ashrams: Adopting and Adapting Hindu Dharma, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1988.

5 See Ram Swarup, Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1987.

Consciousness, the key to Indic thought – Michel Danino

June 11, 2026June 11, 2026VOI

Concious Man

The brain is merely one of the many possible channels giving expression to a very limited range of consciousness; it cannot be, in this perspective, a generator of consciousness. – Prof. Michel Danino

It is only if the cosmos is indeed a symbolic place where all has meaning that Swami Vivekananda’s profound thought becomes understandable: “One atom in this universe cannot move without dragging the whole world along with it. … Though an atom is invisible, unthinkable, yet in it are the whole power and potency of the universe.” Or Sri Aurobindo: “The stone lying inert upon the sands which is kicked away in an idle moment, has been producing its effect upon the hemispheres.” These are not some anticipated laws of modern physics, but statements of the interconnectedness of all things, bridging microcosm and macrocosm.

This should sound reassuring: we are not mere insignificant specks of dust in the universe, after all; we are potentially as vast as it is, relate to it, and can comprehend it. But what is the mechanism that accounts for this mysterious connection? In Indic thought, it is surprisingly simple, and embodies the third master idea we trace in our journey: “All creatures, those that move and those that do not move, are impelled by Consciousness,” as the Aitariya Upanishad puts it. In more current language, the distinction between animate or inanimate matter vanishes; both are impelled by consciousness, from the atom to that stone on the beach, from our planet to the swirling galaxies.

Vedic, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist philosophies have had endless discussions on the origin, nature and functioning of consciousness, for which they have used many terms depending on its particular aspect: chetana, chaitanya, chit, samvid, brahman and many more in the Vedic schools (and Jainism for the first two at least), vijñana in Buddhism: it is all that is, it is existence itself, it is what sustains the cosmos and what makes it—and us—tick. It is, in any case, vastly greater and more ancient than the human mind, and much more so than our brain. In fact, the brain is merely one of the many possible channels giving expression to a very limited range of consciousness; it cannot be, in this perspective, a generator of consciousness.

How far does this neat principle take us? As far as we wish, since consciousness is what makes knowledge possible: only the like can know the like. Knowledge by identity is indeed a central method as well as outcome of any advanced yoga or meditation technique, and would be impossible if both knower and known did not share the same substance of consciousness. As a result, if one knows the supreme consciousness, one knows all, as several Upanishads put it (yasmin vijñate sarvamevam vijñatam bhavati).

But there are more mundane consequences. If a repugnance to killing other creatures gained currency early on in Indic belief systems, it is because of the realisation that animals are potentially as conscious or sentient as we are. From Ashoka’s turn to vegetarianism or injunctions of medical treatment of animals to Kautilya’s designated forest areas free from hunting, or the Jains’ extreme care not to harm even the smallest insect, we find in literature and history remarkably advanced ecological concepts and practices.

Are these universal values? In Genesis (9:3), the Judaic god decrees that all creatures are to be at man’s service: “Every creature that lives and moves will be food for you; as I gave the green plants, I have given you everything.” In effect, orthodox Christianity regarded animals and plants as soulless, as testified by the writings of Christian saints such as Augustine or Thomas Aquinas; only later did a few popes appear to depart from this stand. Blacks and Native Americans were seen—again with a few notable exceptions—as being closer to animals than to Whites, a convenient way to legitimise racism and the slave trade. Whatever abuses casteism may have produced, attempts to equate them with racism are misguided, as the concept of race, and therefore superior and inferior races, has been alien to Indian belief and social systems—inequality and discrimination stemmed from other considerations. The respected Indian anthropologist André Béteille once wrote, “The idea of race dies hard in the popular imagination. That is understandable. What is neither understandable nor excusable is the attempt by the United Nations to revive and expand the idea of race, ostensibly to combat the many forms of social and political discrimination prevalent in the world. … By treating caste discrimination as a form of racial discrimination and, by implication, caste as a form of race, the U.N. is turning its back on established scientific opinion.”

In other words, allowing Indian society to be read through the prism of concepts rooted either in the Bible or in racist nineteenth-century European anthropology is a dangerous exercise. Despite everything, saints and spiritual figures from the lowest castes have been accepted just as others, as a glance at India’s immense Bhakti literature (among other sources) will show. At the cultural and spiritual levels, India has more or less lived up to her high principles. One wishes this were true of the social level, but that is another story.

At the religious level, the pantheistic element of Indic religion is rooted in the same concept of interconnectedness: if the whole cosmos is imbued with consciousness, all of it is sacred, potentially at least. Hence a wide array of modes of worship that were dismissed as “pagan,” “heathen,” if not “barbarian,” by a large section of colonial Indology: the worship of planets and stars, of cardinal directions, of Mount Meru as the “axis” of the universe—reflected in Indian classical architecture—of natural phenomena, of plants and animals and all other components of nature. – The New Indian Express, 6 August 2018

› Prof. Michel Danino is a French-born Indian author and scholar of ancient India.

Audrey Truschke: In defence of a clickbait historian – Utpal Kumar

June 2, 2026VOI

From Aurangzeb to the Pashupati seal, Audrey Truschke has inadvertently exposed the intellectual hollowness of Left-‘liberal’ historiography – Utpal Kumar

At the very outset, I must make a confession. I like Audrey Truschke. Not because I agree with her. Quite the opposite. I like her because few ‘historians’ in recent years have done more to expose the intellectual frailties, ideological biases and selective morality of contemporary Left-‘liberal’ historiography than she has.

In her relentless attempts to sanitise Aurangzeb, delegitimise Hindutva and challenge civilisational narratives associated with Bharat, Truschke has inadvertently become the perfect case study of what happens when ideology trumps scholarship. She represents a new clique of historians that is least interested in understanding the past and is determined to weaponise history to win politico-ideological battles.

Take her defence of Aurangzeb, for instance. One of her favourite arguments is that the Mughal emperor employed a large number of Hindus in his administration. And that’s why he was secular. To bolster her position, she claims that Aurangzeb employed more Hindus than Akbar. The implication is obvious: a ruler who employed Hindus could not have been anti-Hindu.

Empires, after all, do not recruit administrators and generals out of affection. They recruit them out of necessity. Aurangzeb employed Hindus such as Raja Jai Singh and Raja Jaswant Singh because they were militarily capable and politically useful. He needed Hindu warriors to fight Hindu adversaries, most notably the Marathas. And when they were not battling Marathas, these Hindu generals were useful in fighting difficult frontier campaigns such as Afghanistan. This was imperial pragmatism, not secular idealism. Even the British did the same to safeguard the Raj. The absurdity of the argument can be gauged from the fact that if the mere employment of members of a community is sufficient proof of affection for that community, then Hitler could be projected as a benefactor of Jews. After all, the Nazis had scores of Jews serving them.

Yet, this kind of reductionism has become a hallmark of Leftist historiography. More so of the Truschke-ian manual of history writing.

She has repeatedly claimed that Hindutva was inspired by Nazism and that its early proponents, especially those from the RSS, admired Hitler. To support this claim, she cites We, Or Our Nationhood Defined. Truschke claims M.S. Golwalkar wrote this book in 1939, even when the second RSS Sarsanghchalak had expressly said in May 1963 that it was an abridged translation of a Marathi text, Rashtra Mimansa, written by Babarao Savarkar.

Here again, the one thing that’s sacrificed is nuanced history. In 1939, when We, Or Our Nationhood Defined was published, the world did not possess the knowledge of Nazi atrocities that later generations would acquire. The Holocaust, as it is understood today, had not yet entered global consciousness. Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked documents how influential Western institutions, including The New York Times, frequently downplayed the sinister nature of the Nazi regime. Holocaust-related stories were marginalised, buried deep within newspapers and denied the prominence their significance demanded.

Rindsberg writes, “In the six years of the war, The New York Times printed Holocaust-related stories on its front page exactly six times. Never once in the more than 18,000 Times issues during the war was a Holocaust story a lead article for the day. And, accordingly, never once has The New York Times officially apologised for the way that it covered—or did not cover—the Holocaust.”

If one is to apply contemporary moral standards retrospectively, then many revered Western institutions would stand equally accused. The very institutions Truschke often seeks legitimacy from. But then, by now we know Truschke’s history is bereft of nuances. It is more tabloid, clickbait history.

This week, one encountered another manifestation of Truschke-ian history when the professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University claimed that the famous Pashupati seal of the Saraswati (Harappa) civilisation has nothing to do with Pashupati (Shiva). Yes, you heard it right.

The controversy began after the Ministry of Culture shared the image of what is commonly believed (even among “eminent historians” led by Romila Thapar and A.L. Basham) to be the Pashupati seal, describing it as evidence of Bharat’s “civilisational continuity” and an early depiction of Shiva worship. Truschke took to social media, her new tool to push historical boundaries, to say that the figure should not be identified as Shiva and may instead reflect a broader “Lord of Animals” motif seen across ancient Eurasian cultures. The image was “more likely adapted from proto-Elamite iconography”, she wrote on X.

Given the ludicrousness of the claim, it does not even make sense to argue with her that recent scientific and archaeological findings mostly vindicate what Bharat’s long literary tradition has always maintained: that if there was ever any migration, it was westward, not otherwise. (Even the Satapatha Brahmana, which our “eminent historians” pompously quote, talks about an eastward journey within Bharat, and not from outside.) Given her preconceived notion of history, it does not make sense to waste time discussing with her how the supposedly illiterate, barbarian Aryans could compose such refined literature as the Vedas. How else can one react when one realises that she and her ilk are talking about Aryans invading (migrating into) the subcontinent and composing Vedic literature on the banks of the mighty Saraswati around 1500 BC when modern scientific and archaeological findings point to the river drying up around 1900 BC?

Given Truschke’s ideology-dictated state of mind, it defies logic to argue to her that most Harappan sites have been unearthed along the dried course of Saraswati. It would be too much to expect from her to appreciate that language is often the stickiest thing to let go of—even for those who have converted to another religion (look at Iran and Bangladesh); yet, the rich, urbane and sophisticated Harappans not only abandoned their own language but also willingly adopted that of their invaders. It would be even more difficult for her to understand that the words found in the 14th-century BC Mittani records (which our “eminent historians” claim were left when Aryans were still in Central Asia had not yet reached the subcontinent) are closer to the language used in later Vedic literature. Had the Mittanis been part of a pre-Rig Vedic phase, they would have shown similarities with that, rather than later Vedic language.

So, how should one react when Truschke comes up with such historical inventions?

First and foremost, it must be realised that she is an integral part of the larger Leftist historiography that innately believes Bharat is a doomed scenario. Any interpretation strengthening civilisational continuity within the Indic ecosystem must be subjected to scrutiny. Every possibility must be questioned. Every claim must be problematised. Every tradition must be treated with suspicion.

Truschke is a pop version of the “eminent historians”, pursuing clickbait historiography. Her difference from, say, Romila Thapar is tactical. The modus operandi is simple: The likes of Romila Thapar would claim that there existed Pashupati seals and connect them with proto-Shiva, and then, strategically, Truschke—and our own Ruchika Sharma—would be let loose to make such wild Eurasian claims. This makes the otherwise ludicrous Leftist claims of the likes of Thapar suddenly appear moderate. What was previously seen as controversial acquires an aura of reasonableness simply because something even more provocative has entered the conversation.

So, next time a Truschke or a Sharma makes an outrageous claim, don’t get outraged. Clickbait historians thrive on outcry. The best way to belittle the Leftist line of historiography is to come up with a new, longer line of nationalist historiography. Individual efforts have been made in that direction. What’s missing is the institutional approach. Till that’s done, keep exposing the likes of Romila Thapar and keep ignoring the pop distorians such as Truschke.

Bharat still awaits the institutionalisation of its history written from its own perspective. This cannot be Left to “eminent historians”. Far less their tabloid, clickbait versions. – Firstpost, 30 May 2026

› Utpal Kumar is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’.

Historian Graffiti Cartoon

VOICE OF INDIA

History Politics Science Religion

Category world

India needs to truly understand its own legacy of education – Hindol Sengupta

Why the liberal world order, built on science and reason, was doomed to fail – Pranav Sharma

Why India doesn’t fit the Woke script – Yuvraj Pokharna

Why Indians should reject St. Thomas and Christianity – Koenraad Elst

India’s rise discredits China and the West – Minhaz Merchant

Why are we afraid of an ancient ‘Dancing Girl’ figurine? – Utpal Kumar

The Problem of Christianism – Sita Ram Goel

Consciousness, the key to Indic thought – Michel Danino

Audrey Truschke: In defence of a clickbait historian – Utpal Kumar

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: