Tag indian history

Why are Indian historians in denial mode? – David Frawley

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Indus Script

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

›This article originally appeared in Swarajya Magazine. 

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

Mohenjo-daro Graphic

 

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

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Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fantasy Called Chanakya by Devdutt Pattanaik

Max Müller to Doniger to Orsini: The West sends Trojan horses to India – Abhijit Majumder

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Trojan Horse

The West repeatedly sends academic Trojan horses who would erase and distort Indian history, attack self-esteem, construct divisive narratives, and collude with India’s own sell-out intelligentsia to project credibility. – Abhijit Majumder

India is the imperialist’s unfinished project. Few lands that have been touched by Christian or Islamic imperialists have managed to remain largely unconverted and geopolitically intact. In a little over 100 years since 1900, the centuries-old fluid indigenous faiths in the entire African continent, for instance, dwindled from 76 per cent of the population to just 8 per cent, having been replaced by the two hardcoded religions.

Bharat, or what remains of it after Pakistan and Bangladesh were created, still has not given in. Sanatan Dharma is still the way of life for more than 75 per cent of Indians, and in spite of the best efforts of invaders and colonialists, its nationalism and civilisational self is rising again, its economy rapidly growing, its military gaining muscle.

The mere presence of Bharat—with its staggering size, diversity, and potential—has unnerved the West enough across ages to repeatedly send academic Trojan horses who would erase and distort history, attack self-esteem, construct divisive narratives, and collude with India’s own sell-out intelligentsia to project credibility.

The controversy around Francesca Orsini, Hindi scholar from London-based SOAS, is a continuation of that. A white woman specialising in an Indian language may fascinate us, but a look into her political activism in academic guise begins to reveal a different story.

She accuses the very language she teaches, Hindi, of political usurpation of other languages. She has a problem with Indian nationalism. In 2020, she introduced a resolution in the Seattle City Council against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

While India is not obligated to host those arriving to spread intellectual poison, Orsini was deported recently after landing in Delhi for gross violation of visa conditions during her previous visits. Orsini is a rather mediocre entrant in the galaxy of Western radicals who have got into the study of Indology, history, Sanskrit and other languages only to undermine Bharat.

German philologist Friedrich Max Müller, hired by the British colonialists in 1847, came with a mission to bury the Vedas, which he described in a letter to his wife as “the root of their religion, and to show them what that root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years”. He also wrote: “The ancient religion of India is doomed, and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”

Then there was James Mill, a Scottish historian and economist whose work, The History of British India (1817), divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. In his book, Mill extensively describes Hindus as “uncivilised”, “barbaric”, “savage”, and “rude”. This gentleman wrote with astonishing confidence on India without once stepping on this land and no knowledge whatsoever of Indian languages.

The more recent gift horses from the West to India like Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, and Audrey Truschke employ a more sophisticated packaging but are no less venomous. Doniger uses psychoanalytic quackery to introduce a homosexual angle to the relationship between Ramkrishna Paramhansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda; Pollock blames the Sanskrit language for the Holocaust; and Truschke swoons over the genocidal Mughal Aurangzeb.

India’s intellectual tradition is among the most welcoming mindscapes in the world. Bharat has continuously assimilated knowledge and made “outsiders” its own. Even in the modern era, it has been enriched by foreigners from Sister Nivedita to David Frawley, Michael Danino to Koenraad Elst, Francois Gautier to Maria Wirth. These scholars have taken a dharmic approach. They did not approach Indic knowledge with the mission to debase it.

But ultimately, Indians will have to take a major part of the blame for not taking up their own knowledge universe seriously, neglecting languages like Sanskrit, writing their own history, and leaving a vast vacuum for the likes of Orsini to fill.

Unless Bharat begins to take its own story seriously, vultures will come to feast. – News18, 25 October 2025

› Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist and editor-in-chief at Earshot Media, New Delhi. He is the author of the book, ‘India’s New Right’. 

George Orwell Quote

 

How the West has sustained an anti-India bias on Kashmir till today – Claude Arpi

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Maj. William Brown

Despite Raja Hari Singh having signed the Instrument of Accession and joined India, Maj. William Brown of the Gilgit Scouts refused to acknowledge the orders of the Maharaja, and on November 1, 1947, he handed over the entire area of Gilgit-Baltistan to Pakistan. – Claude Arpi

On May 4, during an interactive session at the Arctic Circle India Forum 2025, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke of broader geopolitical upheavals affecting the world, in particular Europe, which “must display some sensitivity and mutuality of interest for deeper ties with India”.

Answering a question on India’s expectations from Europe, Jaishankar said, “When we look out at the world, we look for partners; we do not look for preachers, particularly preachers who do not practice at home and preach abroad.”

This sharp answer came after the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, urged both India and Pakistan to exercise restraint.

Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, formerly a Prime Minister of Estonia, was obviously ill-informed about the situation in Kashmir (and along the India-Pakistan border).

The attitude of certain Western countries (as well as the UN General Secretary) represents a great danger for India today; it has been so in the past.

The Kashmir Issue

A few years ago, while researching in the Nehru papers, I came across a “Top Secret” note written in the early 1950s by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, then secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Affairs; it was entitled “Background to the Kashmir Issue: Facts of the Case”; it made fascinating reading.

It started with a historical dateline: “Invasion of the state by tribesmen and Pakistan nationals through or from Pakistan territory on October 20, 1947; the ruler’s offer of accession of the state to India supported by the National Conference, a predominantly Muslim though non-communal political organisation, on October 26, 1947; acceptance of the accession by the British Governor-General of India on October 27, 1947; under this accession, the state became an integral part of India.”

Unfortunately, in a separate note, Lord Mountbatten, the Governor General of India, mentioned a plebiscite which would “take place at a future date when law and order had been restored and the soil of the state cleared of the invader”, then “the people of the state were given the right to decide whether they should remain in India or not.”

It was an unnecessary addition, but Mountbatten wanted to show British (so-called) legendary fairness.

Anyway, the conditions were clear and in two parts: first, the Pakistani troops or irregulars should withdraw from the Indian territory that they occupied, and later a plebiscite could be envisaged.

Bajpai’s note also observed: “Pakistan, not content with assisting the invader, has itself become an invader, and its army is still occupying a large part of the soil of Kashmir, thus committing a continuing breach of international law.”

The Gift of Gilgit

Worse was to come; Maj. William Brown, a British officer, illegally offered Gilgit to Pakistan. The British paramountcy had lapsed on August 1, 1947, and Gilgit had reverted to the Maharaja’s control. Lt. Col. Roger Bacon, the British political agent, handed his charge to Brig. Ghansara Singh, the new governor appointed by Maharaja Hari Singh, while Maj. Brown remained in charge of the Gilgit Scouts.

Despite Hari Singh having signed the Instrument of Accession and joined India, Maj. Brown refused to acknowledge the orders of the Maharaja under the pretext that some leaders of the Frontier Districts Province (Gilgit-Baltistan) wanted to join Pakistan.

On November 1, 1947, he handed over the entire area to Pakistan, in all probability ordered by the British generals.

An interesting announcement appeared in the 1948 London Gazette mentioning that the King “has been graciously pleased … to give orders for … appointments to the Most Exalted Order of the British Empire.…” The list included “Brown, Major (acting) William Alexander, Special List (ex-Indian Army)”. Brown was knighted for having served the Empire.

At the time, the entire hierarchy of the Indian and Pakistan Army were still British. In Pakistan, Sir Frank Messervy was commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army in 1947-48, and Sir Douglas Gracey served in 1948-51; while in India, the commander-in-chief was Sir Robert Lockhart (1947-48) and later Sir Roy Bucher (1948), and let us not forget that Sir Claude Auchinleck (later elevated to Field Marshal) served as the supreme commander (India and Pakistan) from August to November 1947.

Who can believe that all these senior generals were kept in the dark by a junior officer like Maj. Brown?

The Western influence or manipulation continued in the following years and decades; the Americans soon entered the scene too.

India and the Western Powers

After China invaded northern India in 1962, Delhi decided to ask for the help of the Western nations, particularly the United States. The latter was only too happy to offer it and thus gain leverage over India, which until that time had been “neutral and non-aligned”.

Seeing northern India invaded by Chinese troops, it seemed logical that the United States would come to India’s aid, but it turned out differently.

Soon after the ceasefire declared by the Chinese on November 22, 1962, and instead of helping India, Great Britain and the United States decided that the time had come to resolve the Kashmir dispute between their Pakistani ally and India, now begging for help.

Two days after the ceasefire, Averell Harriman, the US Under Secretary of State, and Duncan Sandys, the British Commonwealth Secretary, visited the two capitals of the subcontinent to persuade the “warring brothers” that it was time to bury the hatchet and find a solution to the fifteen-year-old Kashmir question. Harriman and Sandys signed a joint communiqué and asked the two countries to resume negotiations.

India’s invasion by China was forgotten.

Delhi, in a position of extreme weakness, had doubts about the possibility of obtaining positive results from negotiations conducted under such circumstances, but Nehru did not refuse the “offer”.

On December 22, 1962, he wrote to the provincial chief ministers: “I have to speak to you briefly on the Indo-Pakistan question, and particularly on Kashmir. In four days, Sardar Swaran Singh [the Minister of External Affairs] will lead a delegation to Pakistan to discuss these problems. We realise that this is not the right time to have a conference like this, as the Pakistani press has vitiated the atmosphere with insults and attacks directed against India. Nevertheless, we have agreed to go and will do our best to arrive at a reasonable solution.”

The two delegations ultimately held a series of six meetings; nothing came of them. The first negotiations took place in Rawalpindi; Swaran Singh and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, limited themselves to a historical presentation of the problem and the reiteration of their respective points of view. During the talks, India reaffirmed that it wanted to explore all possibilities to resolve the issue, as it wanted to live in peace with Pakistan, which insisted that the UN resolutions of August 1948 and January 1949 must be implemented as soon as possible (without them vacating the occupied part of Hari Singh’s kingdom).

The negotiations got off on a bad start: just before they began, the Pakistani government announced that it had reached an agreement in principle with China on its border issue. Just a month after the end of the Sino-Indian War, Pakistan was prepared to give China a piece of territory that India considered its own. What a slap in the face for India! Were the Western powers aware of the secret negotiations between Pakistan and China? Probably.

It is indeed surprising that Pakistan, an ally of the United States and the Western world, chose this moment to make this announcement. It was proof that Pakistan expected nothing from the talks with Delhi.

Negotiations on Kashmir continued between January 16 and 19, 1963, in Delhi and February 8 and 11 in Karachi, of course without any tangible results. Pakistan wanted a plebiscite, but India insisted on the prior demilitarisation of the regions occupied by Pakistan.

Talks took place in Calcutta between March 12 and 14. India proposed some readjustments of the Line of Control, but these were rejected by Pakistan.

During the fifth round of talks held in Karachi between April 22 and 25, India protested that Pakistan had ceded part of Kashmiri territory to China; there was no longer any chance of finding a negotiated solution to the Kashmir issue.

During the sixth and final round of talks, India clarified that it had no intention of replacing a democratically elected government with an international organisation that it believed had no knowledge of local issues. India therefore rejected the proposals.

Retrospectively, 63 years later, it is not surprising that in an interview with Sky News, when the interviewer Yalda Hakim questioned him about Pakistan’s long history of backing, supporting and training terrorist organisations, Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif admitted, “Well, we have been doing this dirty work for the United States for about three decades, you know, and the West, including Britain.”

India should indeed beware of some Western powers. – Firstpost, 10 May 2025

› Claude Arpi is Distinguished Fellow, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi. He is the director of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture at Auroville.

Kashmir Map

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India’s Pakistan conundrum – Claude Arpi

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Attari-Wagha Border

India’s ‘dharmic genes’ have made it more generous towards a deceitful Pakistan without any receprocity. History can’t be rewritten, but one should perhaps learn from it. – Claude Arpi 

It has been argued that “Bharat has become a victim of its own innate dharmic nature—and, of course, democratic laws.”

This is a historical fact.

The Simla Agreement of 1972, repudiated by Pakistan after Delhi denounced the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, provided for the return of Pakistani prisoners of war. Unfortunately, India’s ‘dharmic’ genes accepted to release more than 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, against very little compensation. The Indian leadership probably thought that it was unethical (or adharmic) to keep so many Pakistani nationals in custody.

There are many more examples of the “dharmic” nature of the Indian leadership. We shall mention three here; if India had listened to saner elements, the situation would have been different on the borders today. It can, of course, be argued that it was plain stupidity, not ‘dharma’, which guided the Delhi establishment at that time.

Take Lahore

Lt. Gen Nathu Singh Rathore was one of the most remarkable officers of the Indian Army post-independence. When offered the post of first Indian Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, he refused and told the defence minister that Gen. K.M. Cariappa would do a better job than him.

But Gen. Nathu always spoke frankly, sometimes too frankly for the politicians in Delhi. At the end of 1947, he thought of taking Lahore to force the raiders and their Pakistani supporters to leave Kashmir and return to their bases. The general decided to speak to Nehru; his biographer wrote: “When he reached the prime minister’s house, he found him sitting on the lawn, talking to some ministers and civilian officials. Presently, Nehru got up and went inside. The others present there asked Nathu Singh for his views on the best way to deal with the crisis in Kashmir. Nathu Singh replied that if he had his way, he would use the minimum troops to hold the passes and, with maximum force, attack and capture Lahore. This would force Pakistan to withdraw and vacate all occupied territory in Jammu and Kashmir.”

The biographer continues: “The civilians were impressed by the logic of this argument, and when Nehru returned, they told him that the general had a good plan to throw out the invaders. When Nehru asked him to repeat what he had said, Nathu Singh demurred, saying that he would rather not, since he knew it would not find favour. But Nehru insisted, and Nathu repeated what he had told the others.”

But Nehru was horrified and became angry: “How can a responsible senior officer think of such a foolhardy scheme? It could cause an international crisis.”

Incidentally, in 1965, a similar plan was approved by Lal Bahadur Shastri, then prime minister, and the threat to Lahore probably saved Kashmir.

After the Pahalgam massacre, it is worth remembering this. Had the Indian Army advanced on Lahore in 1947, there would be no Kashmir issue today. But would the British have allowed it? This is another question.

Occupy Chumbi Valley

In October 1950, after the Chinese had captured Chamdo, the capital of Eastern Tibet, and were ready to advance towards Lhasa, Harishwar Dayal, an extremely bright ICS officer posted as Political Officer (PO) in Sikkim (looking after Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan), wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi about the Chinese advances on the Tibetan plateau.

Dayal quoted from a letter from Hugh Richardson, the Indian Head of the Mission in Lhasa dated June 15, 1949, who had then suggested that India might consider occupying Chumbi Valley up to Phari “in an extreme emergency” (meaning if China threatened to invade Tibet).

More than a year later, Dayal brought back the idea: “This suggestion was NOT favoured by the Government of India at the time. It was, however, proposed as a purely defensive measure and with NO aggressive intention. An attack on Sikkim or Bhutan would call for defensive military operations by the Government of India.”

China’s PLA planners today call this “active defence”.

Dayal explained his reasoning: “In such a situation, occupation of the Chumbi Valley might be a vital factor in defence. In former times it formed part of the territories of the rulers of Sikkim, from whom it was wrested by the Tibetans by force. It is now a thin wedge between Sikkim and Bhutan, and through it lie important routes to both these territories. Control of this region means control of both the Jelep La and Nathu La routes between Sikkim and Tibet as well as of the easiest routes into Western Bhutan, both from our side and from the Tibetan side.”

Dayal expressed his strategic views further: “It is a trough with high mountains to both east and west and thus offers good defensive possibilities. I would therefore suggest that the possibility of occupying the Chumbi Valley be included in any defensive military plans, though this step would NOT, of course, be taken unless we became involved in military operations in defence of our borders.”

Dayal had probably not realised that China was “friend” (or “brother”) of the leadership in Delhi; a few days earlier, the prime minister had already severely reprimanded the PO and Sumul Sinha, who had replaced Richardson in Lhasa, for not understanding that China was India’s friend.

What prompted Dayal to write this letter was probably his meeting with some of the members of the Himmat Singhji Committee, who would have asked him to put his views in writing in order to bring some pressure on the pacifists in South Block, who could only see the “wider perspectives”.

One can only wishfully dream of the implications an Indian advance in Chumbi would have had (no Siliguri Corridor, etc).

1971: Why not take Baltistan?

Another case: in August 1971, as the clouds were gathering over the Indo-Pakistan border, a young Ladakhi officer, Chewang Rinchen, joined again his old regiment, the Ladakh Scouts; he was asked to report with Colonel Udai Singh, his commanding officer, to his beloved Nubra Valley. Rinchen had already been awarded a Maha Vir Chakra in 1947 at the age of 17.

Rinchen confidently told his GOC that the Ladakhi Scouts and the Nubra Guards (known as the Nunnus they were later integrated into the Scouts) would do the “job” and repel the Pakistani forces.

The army base for the sector was located at Partapur in the Valley, and since 1960 an airfield had been opened at Thoise (till today the base camp for the operations on the Siachen Glacier).

The Nunnu was a good tactician; he always sought the cooperation of the local people, whether they were Buddhist, Muslim or Christian. He knew that most of the time, the troops had to depend upon local vegetables, meat and other supplies to survive.

While most of the commanders favoured a riverbed approach, Rinchen decided to cross over the mountains with his Dhal Force and follow the ridge. He argued that the enemy must be waiting with mines and machine gun nests near the river; he chose to capture Pt. 18,402, the highest Pakistan-occupied post, and then roll down to Chulunkha, the Pakistani base.

Soon after, on December 8, from the top of Pt. 18,402, Rinchen could see the entire valley from Turtok and Chulunkha in the east to the Indian Army headquarters at Partapur and the airfield at Thoise in the west. Rinchen’s tactics had paid off. He told his men, “Enjoy the Pakistani blankets and food”.

On December 9, advancing along the ridges, Rinchen and his men descended towards the Chulunkha defence complex, trying not to be seen by the enemy. Soon, Rinchen got a wireless message from Maj. Thapa informing him that Thapa’s team had managed to enter the enemy bunkers and a few Pakistani soldiers had been killed and a JCO captured.

On December 14 morning, soon after shelling started to destroy the roadblocks near the Turtok axis, the Dhal Force began its advance again.

At 10 pm, shelling was stopped, and the troops entered the Turtok village. Surprisingly, the village was absolutely silent.

The next phase of the operations was Tyakshi village, 6 km. from Turtok. It was concluded on December 14 in the evening. A few Pakistani soldiers were captured with arms and ammunition.

On December 17, Rinchen ordered his troops to get ready to launch an attack against Prahnu and Piun in Baltistan (Khapalu, the first large town in Baltistan, is located 28 miles away); it was never to happen.

In the afternoon, the Pakistani government agreed to a ceasefire. The Dhal Force was ordered to cease fire, greatly disappointing Chewang Rinchen’s men; they knew that in a few days they could liberate the entire Baltistan. Rinchen could not disobey orders from Delhi.

Had this been done, Pakistan would have lost its base for the Siachen Glacier operations, which were to start 13 years later.

Many such stories could be recounted, but history can’t be rewritten; but one should perhaps learn from history. – Firstpost, 27 April 2025

› Claude Arpi is Distinguished Fellow, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi. He is the director of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture at Auroville.

Kashmir Map

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The legend of St. Thomas in India is not factual – Koenraad Elst

VOI

St. Thomas the Apostle: There was no Cross or Bible in the 1st century. Both were adopted by Christians for use after the 3rd/4th century.

The belief that Thomas settled in South India came about as an honest mistake, the claim that he was martyred by Brahmins was always a deliberate lie. … If Indian bishops have any honour, they will themselves remove this false allegation of murder from their discourse and their monuments. Indeed, they will issue a historic declaration expressing their indebtedness to Hindu hospitality and pluralism and pledging to renounce their anti-Hindu animus. – Dr. Koenraad Elst

A predictable component of platitudinous speeches by secularist politicians is that “Christianity was brought to India by the apostle Thomas in the 1st century AD, even before it was brought to Europe”. The intended thrust of this claim is that, unlike Hinduism which was imposed by the “Aryan invaders”, Christianity is somehow an Indian religion, even though it is expressly stated that it “was brought to India” from outside. As a matter of detail, St. Paul reported on Christian communities living in Greece, Rome and Spain in the 40s AD, [1] while St. Thomas even according to his followers only came to India in 52 AD, so by all accounts, Christianity still reached Europe before India. [2] At any rate, its origins lay in West Asia, outside India. But this geographical primacy is not the main issue here. More importantly, there is nothing factual, nor secular, about the claim that Thomas ever came to India.

That claim is a stark instance of what secularists would denounce in other cases as a “myth”. By this, I don’t mean that it was concocted in a backroom conspiracy, then propagated by obliging mercenary scribes (the way many Hindus imagine the colonial origins of the “Aryan invasion myth” came into being). It came about in a fairly innocent manner, through a misunderstanding, a misreading of an apocryphal text, the miracle-laden hagiography Acts of Thomas. This is not the place to discuss the unflattering picture painted of Thomas in his own hagiography, which credits him with many anti-social acts. The point for now is that the text never mentions nor describes the subcontinent but merely has the apostle go from Palestine eastwards to a desert-like country where people are “Mazdei” [Zoroastrian] and have Persian names. This is definitely not lush and green Kerala. Not only is there no independent record of Thomas ever coming near India, but the only source claimed for this story, doesn’t even make this claim either.

However, we know of a Thomas of Cana [3] who led a group of Christian refugees from Iran in the 4th century, when the christianisation of the Roman empire caused the Iranians to see their Syriac-speaking Christian minority as a Roman fifth column. The name “Thomas Christians” may originally have referred to this 4th-century leader. [4]

Then again, those refugees may also have been “Thomas Christians” before their migration to India in the sense that their Christian community had been founded in Iran by the apostle Thomas [viz. Church of Fars]. That he lived and worked in some Iranian region is attested and likely, but in no case did he ever settle in India.

Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260/265 CE – 30 May 339 CE), Christianity's first historian, recorded that St. Thomas went to Parthia (Iran).

The Church Fathers Clement of Alexandra, Origen and Eusebius confirm explicitly that he settled in “Parthia”, a part of the Iranian world. From the 3rd century, we do note an increasing tendency among Christian authors to locate him in a place labelled “India”, as does the Acts of Thomas. But it must be borne in mind that this term was very vague, designating the whole region extending from Iran eastwards. [5] Remember that when Columbus had landed in America, which he thought was East Asia, he labelled the indigenous people “Indians”, meaning “Asians”. Afghanistan is one area that was Iranian-speaking and predominantly Mazdean [Zoroastrian] but often considered part of “India”. Moreover, in some periods of history it was even politically united with parts of “India” in the narrow sense. So, Afghanistan may well be the “Western India” where Pope Benedict placed St. Thomas in his controversial speech in September 2006, to the dismay of the South Indian bishops.

While the belief that Thomas settled in South India came about as an honest mistake, the claim that he was martyred by Brahmins was always a deliberate lie, playing upon a possible confusion between the consonants of the expression “be ruhme”, meaning “with a spear”, and those of “Brahma” (Semitic alphabets usually don’t specify vowels). That was the gratitude Hindus received in return for extending their hospitality to the Christian refugees: being blackened as the murderers of the refugees’ own hero. If the Indian bishops have any honour, they will themselves remove this false allegation from their discourse and their monuments, including the cathedral in Chennai built at the site of Thomas’s purported martyrdom (actually the site of a Shiva temple). Indeed, they will issue a historic declaration expressing their indebtedness to Hindu hospitality and pluralism and pledging to renounce their anti-Hindu animus.

Secularists keep on reminding us that there is no archaeological evidence for Rama’s travels, and from this they deduce the non sequitur that Rama never existed, indeed that “Rama’s story is only a myth”. But in Rama’s case, we at least do have a literary testimony, the Ramayana, which in the absence of material evidence may or may not be truthful, while in the case of Thomas’s alleged arrival in India, we don’t even have a literary account. The text cited in the story’s favour doesn’t even have him come to a region identifiable as South India. That is why Christian scholars outside India have no problem abandoning the myth of Thomas’s landing in Kerala and of his martyrdom in Tamil Nadu. I studied at the Catholic University of Louvain, and our Jesuit professor of religious history taught us that there is no data that could dignify the Thomas legend with the status of history.

This eliminates the last excuse the secularists might offer for repeating the Thomas legend, viz. that the historical truth would hurt the feelings of the Christian minority. It is clear enough that many Christians including the Pope have long given up the belief in Thomas’s Indian exploits, or (like the Church Fathers mentioned above) never believed in them in the first place. In contrast with European Christians today, Indian Christians live in a 17th century bubble, as if they are too puerile to stand in the daylight of solid historical fact. They remain in a twilight of legend and lies, at the command of ambitious “medieval” bishops who mislead them with the St. Thomas in India fable for purely selfish reasons. – Extracted from the foreword to The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1995.

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is an author and historian from Belgian who frequently visits India to lecture. He is a leading Voice of India author.

Notes

1. India’s political leaders are fond of telling their constituents and the nation that Christianity arrived in India before it arrived in Europe. This historical conceit is not true. Apostle Paul says in Romans 15:24 & 15:28 that he plans to visit Spain (which already had a Christian community). In Acts 19:21 he travels from Ephesus to Greece—Macedonia and Achaia—en route to Jerusalem, and then on to Rome. This took place in the 40s CE—some historians say he was writing after 44 CE. So even if it was true that Apostle Thomas landed in Kerala in 52 CE—the spurious date is of 19th century origin—Christianity would still have arrived in Europe a decade earlier. – IS

2. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru provides an excellent example of how some innocents abroad lap up lies sold by powerful organizations. “You may be surprised to learn,” he wrote his daughter, Indira, on April 12, 1932, “that Christianity came to India long before it went to England or Western Europe, and when even in Rome it was a despised and proscribed sect. Within a hundred years or so of the death of Jesus, Christian missionaries came to South India by sea. … They converted a large number of people.” (Glimpses of World History, OUP reprint, 1987, quoted by Sita Ram Goel in History of Hindu-Christian Encounters: AD 304 to 1996, Second Revised Edition, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1996.) – IS

3. Thomas of Cana, known variously as Thomas Cananius, Thomas of Jerusalem, Thomas the Merchant, and to Syrian Christians as Knai Thoma, led the first group of 72 Syrian Christian families to India in 345 AD. There is no record of Christian communities in India prior to this date, and the date 345 AD is also not verified.  Thomas of Cana and his companion Bishop Joseph of Edessa brought with them the tradition of St. Thomas the Apostle of the East. Later, Christian communities in Kerala would identify Knai Thoma with Mar Thoma—Thomas of Cana with Thomas the Apostle—and claim St. Thomas had arrived in Kerala in AD 52 and established the first Christian church at Musiris—the ancient port near present day Kodungallur—the main trading center of the day.

The Rev. Dr. G. Milne Rae of the Madras Christian College, in The Syrian Church in India, did not allow that St. Thomas came further east than Afghanistan (Gandhara). He told the Syrian Christians that they reasoned fallaciously about their identity and wove a fictitious story of their origin. Their claim that they were called “St. Thomas” Christians from the 1st century was also false.

The Christian monk and merchant trader Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria visited the Malabar coast in the 6th century and is the first writer to record the presence of Christian communities in India. The observation in his book Christian Topography (ca. 550 AD) is considered the first authentic record of Christians in India. – IS

4. Syrian Christians were called Nasranis (from Nazarean) or Nestorians (by Europeans) up to the 14th century. Bishop Giovanni dei Marignolli the Franciscan papal legate in Quilon invented the appellation “St. Thomas Christians” in 1348 to distinguish his Syrian Christian converts from the low-caste Hindu converts in his congregation. – IS

5. The oriental ubiquity of St. Thomas’s apostolate is explained by the fact that the geographical term “India” included, apart from the subcontinent of this name, the lands washed by the Indian Ocean as far as the China Sea in the east and the Arabian peninsula, Ethiopia, and the African coast in the west. Ancient writers used the designation “India” for all countries south and east of the Roman Empire’s frontiers. India included Ethiopia, Arabia Felix, Edessa in Syria (in the Latin version of the Syriac Diatessaron), Arachosia and Gandhara (Afghanistan and Pakistan), and many countries up to the China Sea. In the Acts of Thomas, the original key text to identify St. Thomas with India (which all other India references follow), historians agree that the term India refers to Parthia (Persia) and Gandhara (Afghanistan-Pakistan). The city of Andrapolis named in the Acts, where Judas Thomas and Abbanes landed in India, has been tentartively identified as Sandaruck (one of the ancient Alexandrias) in Balochistan. – IS

St. Thomas and Hindu assassin.

Anil Seal: ‘Congress high command demanded Partition, not Jinnah’ – Udit Hinduja

VOI

Dr. Anil Seal

“If you did not have Partition, you would have to give the Muslim-majority provinces a degree of provincial autonomy.” – Dr. Anil Seal.

In a tightly packed conference room at the India International Center, the blame for India’s Partition in 1947 was placed firmly in the hands of the Indian National Congress.

“It was Congress who said they wanted Partition,” said Anil Seal, founder of the Cambridge School of Indian History, at a speaker session Between the Crown & Congress: Rethinking the Politics of Late Colonial India on 24 February, co-hosted by Caucus: The Discussion Forum, Hindu College. “Why? If you did not have Partition, you would have to give the Muslim-majority provinces a degree of provincial autonomy.”

The silence in the room was palpable after Seal’s declaration. He was met with stares and frowns from the audience, some of whom asked whether Muhammad Ali Jinnah was at least partly to blame.  

Holding court at the centre of a long table, Seal started off with a solemn, passionate speech on the cruel rise of imperialism in India, before transitioning to the national movements that were inherited from it. 

“Every country has to have an enemy,” said Seal. “Jinnah didn’t even know the Quran. I remember as a child, him coming to our house saying he had a bad day and needed a glass of whiskey.” 

Imperialism and politics

Anil Seal, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, initially downplayed the impact of imperialism before proceeding to analyse its mechanisms.

He claimed there was one thing in common between the apologists and critics of imperialism—they both exaggerate its omnipotence. 

“Imperialism’s power to do bad, we’ve all heard about. Steal, rob, loot, rape—yes,” said Seal. “But to fundamentally reshape society—no.”  

He went on to explain how the British Empire, formed for “profit, power and prestige”, thrived in India. 

“The rule or dominance of the alien few over the indigenous many depends on the collaboration with people in whose interests it is to work with the British Raj,” said Seal. 

He was referring to princely states, prominent businessmen and landowners of the time, who decided to align with the British for their self-interest. 

Even neutrality, the keeping quiet of the many, helped solidify Britain’s chokehold on the Indian subcontinent.   

“If all of you, during the freedom movement, stood together and I said “spit”, you could have drowned the 3,000 British ruling India in a sea of phlegm,” said Seal, soliciting laughs from the audience. 

“There are more British running Cambridge University’s student body of 12,000 today than those governing colonial India in the 1900s,” he said, underscoring this point. 

Hindu College students, many of whom were Indian Administrative Services (IAS) aspirants, furiously took down notes as Seal expounded on just how the British maintained the neutrality of India’s population. 

First, they kept places localised and unconnected. “They didn’t rock the boat,” said Seal. “They left people sitting on their own thrones, whipping their own dogs.” 

And finally, to extract power and profit, the British could not govern a hundred different localities. Instead, they strengthened the chain of command from the district level, through provinces all the way back to their homeland. 

“That is why the British built all these roads, railways and telegraphs. Not for the benefit of the people, but to strengthen the centralised state,” said Seal,  emphatically slapping the table to drive home his point. 

Partition propaganda 

The British Empire’s decline, spread over nearly half a century, was caused by both international forces and internal pressure. 

During this time, pushback from national movements picked up, and India’s political movement employed a dual strategy, according to Seal.

“Agitation and constitutionalism are often put as choices. But they were two tactical sides to the same coin,” he said, before adding that non-cooperation, civil disobedience and the “Quit India” movement were not opposing forces to constitutional politics.

However, according to Seal, Indian politics until Independence and even after, have not been mass movements.

“The idea that Britain was driven out of India by mass movements is wrong,” he commented. “We are still waiting for a mass movement that energises the base of the pyramid.”

His focus shifted briefly to contemporary India, where he commented that even the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and INDIA are a khichdi (mixture) of many different elements. To him, the broader an alliance’s base, the weaker its ideology becomes.

But it was the big question of the night—who was responsible for the Partition—that elicited an emotional response from Seal. He questioned whether the horrors, bloodshed, loss of lives and property could have been avoided.

“I am going against all the present things you are fed in films, propaganda,” said Seal. He also joked with the audience that they all may have to accompany him to jail for being “anti-national”.

“It was not what Jinnah had spent his life fighting for,” said Seal, absolving Jinnah of responsibility for the Partition. “It wasn’t even the Brits in the end game.”

According to him, Britain was bankrupt at this time. “Mountbatten was ready to lay anything on the table, including his wife, to get out of India quickly.”

It was the Congress high command who demanded Partition, afraid of the power from Muslim-dominated states that would challenge the central government, he insisted.

“The great prize for which every nationalist movement has been fighting is to inherit the one real legacy of imperial rule—the mechanism of a centralised state,” said Seal, arguing that this is what the Congress wanted, and what the BJP is striving for today.

He said it suits India’s political and national narrative to blame the Partition on Jinnah, which has fueled animosity toward Pakistan to this day.

“Change it. Challenge it. Look at the truth”, said Seal. – The Print, 3 March 2025

› Udit Hinduja is a journalist in New Delhi.

Nehru, Mountbatten, and Jinnah sign deed of Partition of India in 1947.

Sita Ram Goel: A wronged man redeemed by history – Makarand R. Paranjape

VOI

Sita Ram Goel

Goel defined the three main threats to Sanatana Dharma—political Islamism, proselytising Christianity, and anti-national Marxist-Leninism. It has taken over 40 years, without adequate credit, for his ideas to be mainstreamed. – Makarand R. Paranjape

1 – The wronged man who turned right

On October 16, 2024 India ought to be marking the 103rd birth anniversary of one of our greatest, but still least recognised, post-independence intellectuals. The one who almost single-handedly created an enormous and powerful body of work against the “history men” and “eminent historians.” But he was not even recognised as a historian. Indeed, he was never a part of the academy. He carried out his lonely crusade from outside the safety and comforts of well-funded and influential institutions. The establishment tried to erase him by what has famously come to be called “strangling by silence”.

Who was he? His name is Sita Ram Goel. It may ring a bell in the minds of some, but his huge and impressive body of work remains mostly unknown among the thinking and reading public. Today, this name is bandied about freely in right-wing circles. There are even courses being taught on him. Suddenly, we notice many champions and followers of his line of thinking. But none of them, as far as I know, has engaged with his work in depth. Most of the secondary material is informative and ideological, characterised by borrowed plumes and virtue signalling. The only volume I know on his work that makes a worthwhile contribution has not even been edited by an Indian. It is the work of the redoubtable and indefatigable Koenraad Elst. Who has also been strangulated by silence.

Indeed, “right-wing” India, despite being in power for over 15 years at the Centre and much longer in several states, is yet to produce scholars who, far from matching Goel’s competence or persistence, have even bothered to engage seriously with his oeuvre. Despite massive government, institutional, and private funding. In the meanwhile, we must be content with fiery, even incendiary, expositions such as appear frequently on web platforms like the Dharma Dispatch.

Goel was born in a Vaishnava Bania Agarwal community in the Chhara village of present-day Haryana. His own family tradition was based on the Granth Sahib of Sant Garibdas (1717-1778). But by the time he was 22, he says, “I had become a Marxist and a militant atheist. I had come to believe that Hindu scriptures should be burnt in a bonfire if India was to be saved.” He also became an Arya Samaji and, then, Gandhian before turning seriously to Marxism. Living in Calcutta, where his father worked in the jute business, such an attraction and affinity was natural.

Elst’s eponymous opening chapter, “India’s Only Communalist,” eloquently spells out the extraordinarily uncompromising and exceedingly courageous challenge that Goel posed to what was akin to India’s prevailing state religion—Nehruvian secularism. Goel called it a “perversion of India’s political parlance”, in fact, nothing short of rashtradroha, or treason. In that sense, he was India’s only true communalist. For everyone else, RSS and VHP included, were tying themselves into knots to prove how truly secular they were—and still are.

It was Goel who spelled out clearly that what went by the name of secularism was actually what Elst has termed negationism. The denial of the life-and-death civilisational, religious, spiritual—and, yes, secular— conflict between a conquering Islam and a resistant Hindu society. Nehruvian secularism, to Goel, was not only an attempt to whitewash this horrifying history of Islamic conquest, vandalism, plunder, conversion, and genocide, but it was also the continuous appeasement of a Muslim minority in India till it held the Indian state and the Hindu majority to ransom.

Despite his early commitment, Goel’s disillusionment with the Communist Party of India (CPI) was triggered by their support of the Muslim League in its demand for a Muslim state of Pakistan. Goel himself, along with his family, narrowly missed the murderous Muslim mob fury of Direct Action Day during the great Calcutta killings of August 16, 1946. Independence came exactly a year later, with Goel on the verge of joining CPI. But the Communists took a belligerent stance against the Indian government, calling for an armed revolution. Consequently, Nehru banned the CPI in 1948. In the meanwhile, Goel’s intellectual mentor and the major influence on his life, Ram Swarup, himself a rising intellectual, weaned him forever from Communism.

Goel soon turned 180 degrees into one of India’s prominent anti-Communists, actively working for the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia. Several of his early works warned of the dangers of Communism, both the Soviet kind and, closer home, of Red China under Mao Zedong. Ram Swarup fired the first salvos, publishing the pamphlet Let Us Fight the Communist Menace in 1948, following it up Russian Imperialism: How to Stop It (1950). Then it was Sita Ram Goel’s turn. His amazingly prolific output in the 1950s include: World Conquest in Instalments (1952); The China Debate: Whom Shall We Believe? (1953); Mind Murder in Mao-land (1953); China is Red with Peasants’ Blood (1953); Red Brother or Yellow Slave? (1953); Communist Party of China: a Study in Treason (1953); Conquest of China by Mao Tse-tung (1954); Netaji and the CPI (1955); and CPI Conspire for Civil War (1955).

The Communist threat, looming large after the occupation of Tibet, materialised in China’s invasion of India in 1962.

The war lasted barely a month. Chinese troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the McMahon Line on October 20. After capturing an area the size of Switzerland, some 43,000 square kilometres in Aksai Chin, they declared a ceasefire on November 21. Nehru was a broken man. He died less than two years later, on May 27, 1964, his dreams of a united Asian front against global capitalism shattered. The border standoff still continues with over 20,000 Indian and 80,000 Chinese troops massed on either side, with periodic skirmishes and casualties.

Goel was proven right; Nehru was wrong. Yet, during the Chinese aggression against India, quite ironically, established Leftists and highly placed bureaucrats, including P.N. Haksar, Nurul Hasan, I.K. Gujral, called for Goel’s arrest. During the 1950s, Goel wrote over 35 books, of which 18 were in Hindi. He also translated six books. He stood for elections from the Khajuraho constituency as an independent candidate in the 1957 Lok Sabha elections—but lost. He then embarked upon a publishing programme upon the suggestion of Eknath Ranade of RSS. However, according to Elst, RSS refused to sell or promote his books after the initial encouragement.

In 1957, Goel moved to Delhi, taking up employment with the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU) started by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. But Goel’s attack on Communists, both of the Chinese and Soviet Union varieties, had made him many enemies.

Goel, instead, trained his guns on Nehru, whose deep Communist sympathies and miscalculations had cost India so dear. He had been criticising Nehru in a series in the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, under the pseudonym Ekaki (Alone). In 1963, he published these with the provocative title, In Defence of Comrade Krishna Menon. Why? Because V.K. Krishna Menon, as defence minister, had not only presided over India’s debacle but had also been an avowed Communist and Nehru favourite. In supposedly defending him, Goel traced the malaise back to Nehru himself, as a confirmed Fabian Socialist and consistent supporter of Leftist regimes across the world. As a result of this open attack, Goel lost his job in the state-funded ICU.

Jobless and free to pursue his own interests full-time, Goel went into publishing himself. In 1963, he started Biblia Impex, a book publication, distribution and import-export business. Apart from his own and Ram Swarup’s books, he also published Dharampal’s Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century and The Beautiful Tree. Later, in 1981, Goel also founded Voice of India (VOI), a non-profit publishing house, dedicated to the defence of Hindu society. VOI still continues with his grandson, Aditya Goel, at its helm. It has published over hundred titles in the ideological defence of Hindu society. – Open Magazine, 11 October 2024

Dhwaja

2 – The unsung scholar extraordinaire

The threat of Communism’s taking over India receded after the hugely unpopular Chinese invasion. The Communist Party of India itself split into two, one section affiliated with the Soviet Union, and the other with Maoist China. Sita Ram Goel now turned his attention to the Hindu-Muslim fault line that had divided India for centuries. It was an unhealing wound that needed the nation’s urgent attention. Instead, we were in constant denial, eager to erase the fact that Hindu society had endured an existential threat under two waves of colonialism, Islamist and Western.

Hindu secularists and Leftists tried almost obsessively to blur the theological and civilisational line between the invading and colonising Islamic empires and Hindu society. They come up with all kinds of artifices and subterfuges, including mile-jule sanskriti, Ganga-Jamuni tahzeeb, aman ki asha, and so on. Commenting on Sita Ram Goel’s work, Koenraad Elst explains this almost suicidal folly: “Contrary to the fog-blowing of the secularists and their loudspeakers in Western academe, who always try to blur the lines between Hinduism and Islam, a line laid out ever so clearly by Islamic doctrine, Goel firmly stuck to the facts: Islam had waged a declared war against infidelism in India since its first naval invasion in AD 636 and continuing to the present.”

This line so openly and clearly drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims by both the precepts and practice of Islam through the ages confronts us in every conflict situation. It turned into a bloody conflagration during and after the Partition. It still simmers as an incarnadine boundary between India and its Muslim neighbours. The latter born, as we are never tired of repeating, of the same stock as the Hindus. It was Goel who first enunciated with the greatest clarity that India had been subjected to two waves of colonialism, Western, and prior to that, Islamic. His classic exposition of the latter, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (Voice of India, 1994), should be compulsory reading in every course on post-colonialism. Instead, it is erased altogether.

That is why Goel focused his energies on the breaking-India efforts of the two Abrahamic and adversarial faiths which, to him, were the greatest threats to Hindu society, Islam and Christianity. Not as religions per se but as religious and political ideologies. Christianity worked against the native populace through the well-organised and funded enterprise of conversion. The difficulty with Islam was much deeper and historical. The unresolved conflict between a conquering Islam and a resistant Hindu society led not only to India’s Partition on religious lines, but also to continuing violence, riots, appeasement, and separatism within the country.

The decisive shift in Goel’s intellectual career occurred in 1981 when he retired from his mainline book business and created the non-profit Voice of India publishing platform. His aim, as stated in an early book from that period, Hindu Society Under Siege (1981), was to define the three main threats to Sanatana Dharma—political Islamism, proselytising Christianity, and anti-national Marxist-Leninism. As Elst puts it, “The avowed objective of each of these three world-conquering movements, with their massive resources, is diagnosed as the replacement of Hinduism by their own ideology, or in effect: the destruction of Hinduism” (ibid). It has taken over 40 years, without adequate credit, for his ideas to be mainstreamed. But today they have become commonplace, on the minds and tongues of most right-wing or Hindutva intellectuals and activists. Only a few of them say them or think them through as well as he did. Worse, very few of them acknowledge—or even read—Goel’s works.

What is, however, noteworthy is how different Goel was from these latter-day crusaders in one important aspect. Though he believed that Mahatma Gandhi had misunderstood and underestimated the threat of political Islamism, Goel never denounced him as a British stooge, charlatan, father of Pakistan, let alone a paedophile. Nor, in fact, did he advocate a Savarkarite Hindutva. Goel’s position remained firmly liberal, rational, democratic, and spiritual. He never preached hatred toward or between communities, nor did he wish to demonise any group of citizens because of their religion or ethnicity. Instead, he was interested in truth-seeking and truth-telling, holding the state and the political class accountable to the first principles of the republic, not playing havoc with the future of the nation with appeasement, favouritism, or identity politics.

Readers, especially those who are quick to typecast the right-wing, would be surprised to know that he had quite a few run-ins with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates, though he was sympathetic, overall, to their role in Hindu character-building and nationalism. Though he wrote often for Organiser and Panchajanya, he often found the RSS outlook narrow-minded, not to speak of muddled. He accused them of confusion and double-speak, using the same tired and dishonest cliches about secularism and national integration which falsified both history and ground reality. Unlike them, Goel had the guts to call a spade a spade.

His astonishing output during this phase, which lasted right till the end of his days, borders on the incredible; he was an intellectual giant and his was a giant’s labour. It is not possible to engage seriously with his enormous output in these two pages, let alone do justice to it. Suffice it to say that there is enough published material by him to support several PhDs. Here is a list, drawn up by Elst, of his major writings. It does not include essays or chapters published in books edited by others or, indeed, the first Hindi translation of Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, published in instalments in Panchajanya. I have already mentioned some of his works earlier, but a more detailed listing is salutary: Hindu Society Under Siege (1981, revised 1992); Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1982); How I Became a Hindu (1982, enlarged 1993); Defence of Hindu Society (1983, revised 1987); The Emerging National Vision (1983); History of Heroic Hindu Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders (1984); Perversion of India’s Political Parlance (1984); Saikyularizm, Rashtradroha ka Dusra Nam (1985); Papacy, Its Doctrine and History (1986); Preface to The Calcutta Quran Petition by Chandmal Chopra (a collection of texts alleging a causal connection between communal violence and the contents of the Quran; 1986, enlarged 1987, and again 1999); Muslim Separatism, Causes and Consequences (1987); Foreword to Catholic Ashrams, Adapting and Adopting Hindu Dharma (a collection of polemical writings on Christian inculturation; 1988, enlarged 1994 with new subtitle: “Sannyasins or Swindlers?”); History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989, enlarged 1996); Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them (1990 vol 1; 1991 vol 2, enlarged 1993); Genesis and Growth of Nehruism (1993); Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression (1994); Time for Stock-Taking (1997), a collection of articles critical of RSS and BJP; Preface to the reprint of Mathilda Joslyn Gage: Woman, Church and State (1997, ca. 1880), an early feminist critique of Christianity; Preface to Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998), a reprint of the official report on the missionaries’ methods of subversion and conversion (1955).

Though polemical, even provocative and pugilistic, each of these books is thoroughly researched and comprehensively argued. Very unlike today’s TV debaters and other credit-hogging activists who pretend that they have come up with “original” ideas and arguments which are already found in plenty of Goel’s writings. Without reading Goel or citing him, they repeat these ideas and arguments in a much worse and less persuasive manner. Indeed, the idea of the intellectual Kshatriya itself originates in Goel, though others now appropriate it as if they pioneered it. Thus, they end up doing injustice to Goel and a disservice to the cause that they profess to champion—performing the same U-turn manoeuvre that they condemn in others.

Mainstream academics and media, of course, continue completely to ignore Goel’s work. But Hindu organisations too, far from engaging with his massive output, also neglect to give him adequate credit. One might wonder why. In my view, the answer is simple. No one has Goel’s intellectual calibre, stamina, or capacity. In the prevailing anti-intellectual climate, politics, slogan-shouting, and ideological posturing become much easier to friend and foe alike. The skills required for reading, writing, research, exposition, analysis, and argument are sorely lacking in Indian society. Goel is a victim of this glaring deficit.

Moreover, during the heyday of his intellectual activism, there was no internet, Wikipedia, or Google Baba. Indians were so brainwashed by sarva dharma samabhava—regarding all religions equally—that they understood neither the basic texts or the intent of the two imperialistic Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Islam. Goel acquainted a large body of naïve and mistaken members of the public with the historically verifiable theology and teleology of these proselytising faiths. Which was to exterminate Sanatana Dharma, as they had other Pagan traditions that they had encountered. Also, the naked admission of global conquest and dominance.

A posthumous Padma Award for Sita Ram Ji? That is the least we can do to honour the memory and legacy of this scholar extraordinaire. – Open Magazine, 25 October 2024

› Makarand R. Paranjape is an author, poet, a former director at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and former professor of English at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

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New evidence suggests Harappan civilisation is 7,000 to 8,000 years old – Dheeraj Bengrut

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Rakhigarhi Archaelogical Site, Haryana.

The evidence found in the third phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi in Haryana shows that the culture dates back 7,000 to 8,000 years.- Prof. Prabhodh Shirwalkar

Researchers from Deccan College Pune along with the central Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) have established that human remains discovered at an ancient site of Rakhigarhi—a village in the Hisar district of Haryana—date back around 8,000 years. The discovery has been made during the third phase of excavations carried out by the ASI along with various teams across the country, including researchers from Deccan College Pune.

The first phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi was carried out by Dr Amarendra Nath of the Indian Archaeology Department from 1997 to 2000 during which evidence of the North Harappan culture dating back to 2500 BC was found. The second phase of excavations at Rakhi Garhi was carried out by professor Vasant Shinde from Deccan College Pune from 2006 to 2013 during which Shinde’s team collected evidence and conducted DNA tests to establish that this culture could be over 4,000 years’ old. Over the past two years, the ASI and Deccan College Pune have jointly carried out the third phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi through a team led by ASI joint director Sanjay Kumar Manjul and Deccan College Pune assistant professor Prabhodh Shirwalkar.

Shirwalkar said, “There are three parts to the Harappan culture; East Harappan, Middle Harappan, and North Harappan (Modern). The earlier two excavations found evidence of the Middle and Modern Harappan cultures dating back around 4,000 years. But now, the evidence found in the third phase of excavations shows that the culture dates back 7,000 to 8,000 years. The final report of the work is being prepared by our team.”

Shirwalkar said that the research on this will continue for many more months. “Human DNA has remained the same for 8,000 years which we have found during our research. When human traps were found here, they were thoroughly tested. Scientists have drawn conclusions based on this. A large burial ground was found here and it had human traps as well as animal traps,” Shirwalkar said.

The ASI is actively involved in excavations at the Rakhigarhi archaeological site, and the primary goal of these excavations, according to Ajay Yadav, additional director-general of the ASI, is to make the site accessible to the public. This involves exposing and conserving the structural remains for future viewing and providing amenities for visitors.

About utensils of various metals including gold and silver found during the excavation, Shirwalkar said that old silver and copper ornaments, too, have been found. “The most beautiful are the clay pots. A dinner set from that period has been found,” Shirwalkar said.

“We think that the words bedroom and kitchen are of recent origin. Whereas in Rakhigarhi, an even larger settlement of the largest ancient houses ever was found underground. A courtyard and a drainage system were also found in it. There were two to six- bedroom houses that were also available at that time. The clothing fashion of the people of that time is also known. A colourful worn piece of cloth, a shawl and skirt were also found,” he said.

“This research has found strong evidence that the Harappan civilisation is 7,000 to 8,000 years old. Scientists from the Department of Archaeology of India and Deccan College have worked together on the project. It is agreed that there was human habitation or civilisation in our country 8,000 years ago. The evidence shows that the people of that time were as advanced as they are today,” said Shirwalkar.

Earlier this year, union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had highlighted Rakhigarhi in her budget speech of 2023, emphasising on the development of five iconic sites of archaeological significance, including Rakhigarhi, with on-site museums. The plan is to showcase the antiquities uncovered at Rakhigarhi, now considered the largest Harappan site spanning 350 acres, in an under-construction museum near the site. The museum is estimated to be worth ₹23 crores. – Hindustan Times, 23 December 2022

› Dheeraj Bengrut is a senior correspondent at the Hindustan Times in Pune.

Rakhigarhi Archaeological Site

Dating Indian history all over again – Nanditha Krishna

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Logo of the Asiatic Society of Bengal depicting Sir William Jones (1905).

Today, science gives us advantages that William Jones lacked. But sadly, some accounts of Indian history are still stuck in outdated methods of dating – Dr. Nanditha Krishna

In 1650, Irish theologian James Ussher claimed that the world was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BCE. Ussher based his calculation on a correlation of the Christian holy writ and West Asian and Mediterranean histories.

Tragically, his unscientific dating became a basis for dating Indian history—and, for some, continues even today.

In 1783, William Jones was appointed judge at Fort William in Bengal. He studied Sanskrit, the Vedas and ancient Hindu laws. He was captivated by Indian culture and founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He proposed a relationship between European and Indo-Aryan languages, now known as the Indo-European languages. He suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had a common root and postulated a proto-Indo-European language uniting Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Celtic.

Jones, a follower of Ussher, believed that “the foundation of the Indian empire (sic) was about 3,800 years” before 1790 CE, that is, between Ussher’s date of 4004 BCE and the Great Flood that Jones believed took place in 2350 BCE. He dated the Rig Veda unscientifically to 1500-1000 BCE and proposed an Aryan invasion of India, an idea that lacked any evidence.

For a long time, the West supposed India jumped from the Stone Age to the Buddha, whose date became very important for ancient Indian history. Eastern Buddhist tradition in China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea dated Siddhartha between his birth in 1026 BCE and his death in 949 BCE.

In 1821, John Davy chose the Sinhalese date of Buddha’s Nirvana as 543 BCE, when the Sinhalese system of reckoning time begins. This gave time between Jones’s date for the Vedas (1500 BCE) and the Buddha; hence it was “chosen”. Mahavira was never properly dated and was regarded merely as Buddha’s contemporary.

Alexander’s foray into Punjab in 326 BCE turned up yet another date. Jones decided that Sandrocottus, mentioned by Megasthenes as Seleucus Nicator’s Greek ambassador to Pataliputra, was Chandragupta Maurya. Why not Chandragupta I or II of the Gupta dynasty? They too ruled from Pataliputra. But that did not suit the British dating of the Vedic period, the Buddha and later Ashoka.

Jones decided that Megasthenes had visited Chandragupta Maurya’s empire, founded in 322 BCE. But we know of Chandragupta’s life only from Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, where there are no Greeks or Megasthenes, and which was written over a thousand years later.

It is only with Ashoka’s inscriptions that scientific methodology entered Indian archaeology. James Prinsep worked at the Calcutta mint in 1819 and stayed for a while in Benares. He interpreted the three stages of Indian numismatics as punch-marked, die-struck and cast coins. But his greatest contribution was deciphering the Brahmi script.

Edicts from all over India were sent to him. The edicts mentioned a King Devanampiyadasi who filled Indian rocks and pillars with messages of dharma. Prinsep initially assumed him to be Sri Lankan.

The identification of Devanampiyadasi and Ashoka as the same person was established by the Maski and Gujarra inscriptions, which used both the names Devanampiyadasi and Ashokaraja. In his inscriptions, Ashoka also mentions Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexanderas as receivers of his message of dharma. But they lived beyond India. The names on this list, though intriguing, were ignored in the dating process.

In the early 20th century, the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were discovered by Indian archaeologists Daya Ram Sahni and Rakhal Das Banerji. Overnight, Indian civilisation went back in time from the 6th century to 3300-1300 BCE, and to 2600-1900 BCE in the ‘mature Harappan’ phase. It was spread over an area larger than the contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations.

It extended from Balochistan in the west to western Uttar Pradesh in the east, from Afghanistan in the north to Maharashtra in the south. Later, agriculture was found to have emerged in 7000 BCE in Balochistan. The dating was based on archaeology, and not 4004 BCE.

It was declared as pre-Vedic and Dravidian, but when was Vedic and what was Dravidian? It remains an enigma.

In the 19th century, the river Sarasvati, described in the Rig Veda as a ‘mighty’ one flowing from the hills to the sea, was identified with the Ghaggar-Hakra river system that now ends in the Thar desert. ISRO observed from satellite pictures that most Indus civilisation sites from Haryana and Rajasthan to Gujarat lay along its course. When the monsoons diminished, the river dried up some 4,000 years ago and the Harappan civilisation declined.

Now archaeology was used to delineate Indian history. New discoveries cropped up all over India: Arikamedu and Poompuhar in the south, Dwarka under the sea off the coast of Gujarat and so on. Mahabharata was identified with painted greyware sites dating to 1200 BCE. So the Vedas had to be much older.

Yet, students are still taught dates that are calculated from 4004 BCE. Their textbooks say that the Aryans came to India in 1500 BCE, the date of the Vedas, that the writing of the Mahabharata dates back to 500 BCE, that Chandragupta Maurya met Alexander and so on.

No effort has been made to study the dating system of Indian kings as mentioned in their inscriptions or their chronology lists. This too needs archaeological corroboration. The Buddha died in Kushinagara. His remains could be scientifically tested to find out the exact date of his death.

Today, science gives us advantages that William Jones lacked. But sadly, some accounts of history are still stuck in outdated methods of dating. – The New Indian Express, 29 September 2024

› Dr. Nanditha Krishna is an author, historian, and environmentalist based in Chennai

Ashoka's Maski inscription with 'Buddha' word in Brahmi script, 3rd century BCE.