Let's Combat Communalism

 Dr. Koenraad Elst

What follows is a comment on "Koenraad Elst--Sangh Parivar's Apologist", a review of my book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism (Rupa, Delhi 2001), by Ayub Khan in Communalism Watch, 13 March 2003. It is not normally done for an author to write a rebuttal of a review of his book. Since he himself has had his say for hundreds of pages in the book itself, he should leave the review pages of the papers to his critics. They don't usually get more than one or two pages of space from their editors to develop their opinions, so they are already at a disadvantage. Then again, in a brief text it is possible to write more insults and lies than could be answered convincingly in a whole book. Moreover, in many cases far more people read the reviews or the resultant polemic than the book that is their object. That is why in exceptional cases, an author may feel pressured to write a rebuttal. I will try to do justice to the Mr. Khan's effort and reproduce it in full, interspersed with my own comments.

1. Am I a Sangh Parivar apologist?

Ayub Khan's review was published in Communalism Combat. Naive readers might understand this as "combat against communalism", but its effective editorial line lends itself better to the description: "combative (anti-Hindu) communalism". Its editor, Mrs. Teesta Setalwad, is a convert from secular Hinduism to Islam, and she has the typical zeal of the convert. She was repeatedly caught in the act of lying during the secularist attempts to exploit the Gujarat riots of spring 2002. She even went on record thinking up a justification for the Muslim arson attack on the women's wagon of a pilgrims' train in Godhra, killing 58 innocent Hindus. A Muslim girl whom she had paraded as her crown witness in her culpabilization of the Gujarati Hindus, came out to accuse her of kidnapping and of coercing her to give false testimony in court. Of course, the poor girl stood no chance against Mrs. Setalwad's well-financed media machine, so she was convicted of perjury (which she at any rate committed, but more likely when initially toeing the Setalwad-dictated line than when recanting), but Mrs. Setalwad's insulted-royalty conduct during the whole controversy clearly revealed just what type of character gets attracted by the secularist hate industry. In these circumstances, I take it as a point of honour to find myself the target of criticism in her paper.

Ayub Khan opens his attack on me in a very predictable manner: "In the past decade Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst has emerged as the most prominent advocate of Sangh Parivar in the West."

Anyone who has read my book BJP vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence (1997) will be surprised to see me described as an "advocate of the Sangh Parivar". The book under review, too, contains a lot of critical observations of the Sangh, as Ayub Khan ought to have noticed. In fact, even some of my observations which secularists might consider favourable to the Sangh, are properly meant as criticisms. Ayub Khan reveals his own outlook of political activist rather than intellectual observer by brushing aside the actual contents of these criticisms, so inconvenient to the case he is making.

But then it is true that I haven't repeated the hysterical discourse so common in journalistic and academic writings on Hindu nationalism and the Sangh Parivar. Thus, before the BJP came to power in 1998, I had never written that the BJP would build gas chambers for Muslims or dump them into the ocean, which clearly put me outside the consensus of the experts. I suppose that in a world of partisan scholarship, where the party-line is scrupulously followed by activists and camp-followers alike, any attempt to remain objective must come across as counter-partisan, meaning partisan activism for the opposite side.

Ayub Khan continues: "Elst's commitment to the Sangh Parivar can be gauged from the fact that he unabashedly defended it even as the fires of Gujarat were still raging last year. (See Elst's 'Dr. Hathaway's Patronizing Conclusions' published at Rediff.com)."

Actually, the correct reference is: "US thinker gives unthinking support to anti-India demands. A reply to Robert Hathaway", 30 August and 3 September 2002, Rediff on the Net; included in Ramesh Rao & Koenraad Elst: Gujarat after Godhra: Real Violence, Selective Outrage, Har-Anand, Delhi 2003. It was written months after "the fires of Gujarat" of March 2002 had stopped raging.

In my reaction to Dr. Hathaway's patronizing sermon on Hindu society, which in his opinion needs supervision by Americans to protect it against its own vicious inhumanity, I have merely pointed out the exaggerated, partisan and plainly false points in his attack on the BJP government of Gujarat. Like most American India-watchers, Dr. Hathaway throws all norms of research to the wind as soon as it comes to Hindu activism, for rather than critically assessing his sources of information, he has merely lapped up all the rumours spread by unscrupled "secularists" such as Arundhati Roy and Ayub Khan's employer Teesta Setalwad. Thus, Communalism Combat and its numerous parrots have been alleging that "more than 2,000 Muslims have been killed" in the post-Godhra riots, but in the meantime the UPA (anti-BJP) Central Government's Home Ministry has officially confirmed the death toll as 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus.

Here is Ayub Khan's clinching argument for my Hindutva affiliation: "Such is his importance in Hindutva circles that L.K.Advani quoted him at length while deposing before the Liberhans Commission investigation the demolition of Babri Masjid."

Rest assured that in Hindutva circles, many people count as far more important than I. If I was the one to be quoted, it is simply because I happened to be the one who had written about the question of the exact authorship of the Ayodhya demolition. That was in reaction to the surrealistic but highly significant behaviour of the Indian media after the Demolition. Even though the film footage clearly shows Advani helplessly breaking down in tears when the ordinary activists took control and started the Demolition, and all eyewitnesses confirmed this (as I know from interviewing many of them), the media in unison blamed Advani and the wider Sangh leadership. Instead of doing their job and earning laurels with the scoop of the year by finding out and revealing just which mid-level Sangh activist masterminded the Demolition against the designs of the leadership, the Indian media and their parrots abroad chose the politically motivated option of doing maximum damage to Advani by accusing him. If the media and later also the academic India-watchers had done their job, Advani could have cited many commentators pointing their fingers away from him, but in the event I turned out to be the only one. No special merit, on the contrary: I only did what was normal, it's the others whose conduct was partisan to the point of being bizarre.