I was raised as a Roman Catholic in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, which was for centuries a Catholic frontline region against Protestant Holland and Masonic-secularist France, and a top-ranking provider of missionaries. One of my uncles is a missionary in Brazil, another was a parish priest in Antwerp until his death. We were [...]
June 4, 2013
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
How to deal with clever Christian missionaries During the ongoing commemoration in 2007 of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire (1807) was used by Christian missionary circles as an occasion for Hindu-bashing through the theme of caste oppression as a still-existing form of slavery. Hindu polemicists typically react by highlighting the [...]
May 10, 2013
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
Dr Koenraad Elst puts forward his view there is no mention of Reincarnation in the Rig Veda. We will follow this up in part 2 to see if if it is mentioned : No rebirth in the Rg-Veda In my article about Sati, I had written that Sati dates back to the time when the [...]
April 4, 2013
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights, Archives
The Rg-Vedic reference to Sati The Rg-Veda contains a famous passage mentioning Sati – and preventing it. To a widow who is with her husband on his funeral pyre, the text says: rise up, abandon this dead man and re-join the living (10:18:8). The Vedic testimony proves two things: (1) Sati already existed, and (2) [...]
March 13, 2013
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
The UPA Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, is but the umpteenth to repeat in public the notion of “Hindu terrorism” and to apply it to the RSS and BJP. Predictably, the RSS and BJP react furiously. They say they have nothing to do with Hindu terrorism, and that the lone Hindu terrorist Nathuram Godse, the [...]
January 24, 2013
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
On 14 November 2012, Prof. Deepak Sarma posted an article on Huffington Post, titled “White Hindu converts: mimicry or mockery?” In that blog, he defines Hindus in America as an ethnic group animated by a memory of the colonized condition. It should, he argues, mistrust attempts by white Americans to convert to their religion. These [...]
December 5, 2012
Dr Koenraad Elst
Hinduphobia, News updates
Being different The debate about Rajiv Malhotra’s book Being Different was very instructive. At the end, Malhotra ably put his critics in their place, but first they had their say. I was appalled by the bad manners of Brian Pennington against the invited responder, Rajiv Malhotra: he wondered aloud, after a long diatribe which I [...]
November 22, 2012
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
One hears it all too often: ‘Hindus are cowards, they only deserve what they are suffering.’ Mahatma Gandhi said it clearly enough: ‘The Muslim is a bully, the Hindu a coward.’ But Hindus are by no means cowards. Hindus as such have their problems, but lack of bravery is not one of them. [...]
October 23, 2012
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights, History
Hinduism, by contrast, is losing constantly. It is fragmented along caste and ethnic lines (worsened by the “secularist” regime) but also along ideological lines, chiefly secular against Hindu activist. It is divided against itself. There is a Hindu nationalist movement, but it is warped by the “Western” nationalist viewpoint and deliberately unable to wage [...]
September 7, 2012
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights
There are some signs of light, some local Hindu gains, but over all, the evolution is not good. Just look at the demographic gains of Christianity and Islam, and the confused and weak stand of the Hindu’s main political representative, the BJP. [...]
September 2, 2012
Dr Koenraad Elst
Analysis/Insights