Koenraad Elst

Back in 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India condemned animal rights activist who have sought to protect cows from the butcher’s knife:   “I feel really angry at the way some people have opened shops in the name of cow protection. I have seen that some people commit anti-social activities through the night, but act as cow [...]

It was once prophesised that fascism or at least various forms of totalitarianism would sneak back by camouflaging themselves as an indefinable ‘freedom’. Now under this ‘freedom’ western academics and their willing collaborators in India’s universities, media and political chattering class were able to crush anything remotely smacking of India’s civilisational genius as reactionary Hindutva [...]

Now that everybody had had his say on the “Rajiv Malhotra plagiarism affair”, we can better discern the larger context that explains the different forces at work here. Plagiarism The trigger was the discovery that seven passages in Malhotra’s work, mainly in his book Indra’s Net, had been lifted verbatim from unacknowledged work by others, [...]

As a member of the Dutch-speaking Belgian Yoga Federation, I received a copy of the booklet the Government of India issued for the United Nations’ first-ever Yoga Day. It falls on 21 June, Summer Solstice, a day of mixed feelings: it is the longest day, alright, but it is also the start of the sun’s [...]

The concept of monotheism is taken to mean belief in just one god, deity, the creator. This is contrasted with polytheism which belief in many gods, as well as atheism which is denial of such a supernatural being. But is it just so simple? Has this monotheist narrative now spilled over into what we would [...]

The united minorities are waging a no-holds-barred campaign against Narendra Modi or against whomever is or can be pictured as a pro-Hindu power-wielder. One of their lines of attack is the blackening of the ruling party, the BJP, in the eyes of public opinion and of the world. An impression is being created that the [...]

From a lecture by former JNU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kapil Kapoor before the Indore-based India Inspires Foundation, I have to relate a particularly relevant part, viz. about our Indian “intellectuals”. Any mistakes in my rendering are of course mine. These intellectuals are to be distinguished from Hinduism’s traditional men of knowledge, or Rishi-s. The Rishi-s were [...]

(Speech given at the Dharma Civilization Foundation’s Strategic Retreat, SVYASA, Jigani/Bengaluru, 5-7 February 2015) A knife is sharpened by shaving away all the superfluous material that makes it dull. A sharp knife is a live case of “less is more”: less material means more sharpness. At an action-oriented “strategic retreat”, our knife should be sharpened [...]

Both Sita Ram Goel and Vamadeva Shastri (David Frawley) have written a book called How I Became a Hindu. I could never write such a book because I have deliberately made a choice not to identify myself as Hindu. In this article I will explain “why I am not a Hindu”. Leaving Christianity Before starting [...]

Numerous British and more largely Western neo-Pagans seek contact with Hinduism. They recognize a similarity, both positively and negatively, both in their own religion’s characteristics and in the misfortunes that have befallen it. The extermination in summer 2014 of all the Yezidis (Kurdish Pagans) on whom the Islamic State could lay its hands has reminded [...]