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Arun Shourie

119 quotes

“Then we have our seedy Leftists busy abusing each other. And finally we have the liberals - busy rearranging furniture on the deck of theTitanic, nay busy holding seminars about rearranging furniture on the deck of the Titanic.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To rely on these fellows to save us from the impending fascist avalanche is to rely on superannuated buffaloes to see us across a minefield.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus silence retards reform. If large numbers were writing and talking about the communalism of these leaders, for instance, the reformers within these communities would not be as isolated, indeed as beleaguered as they are today. Worst of all not speaking the whole truth becomes a habit. Concealing one’s convictions, glossing over the evidence, deception, become almost an ingredient of public discourse.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out ; where our tradition are not examined and reassessed and where as a consequence there is no dialogue.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About the book banning of Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam through Hadis. quoted from Koenraad Elst. Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society. 1991. Ch. 12.
“Clearly, what our newsmen call 'hard-liners' have been vindicated.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the State has been successfully bent by Sikh and Muslim communalists over the last decade, double-standards, I would say in some cases duplicity have been the hallmark of the media's treatment of events and issues.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every single Muslim historian of medieval India lists temples which the rulers he is writing about has destroyed and the mosques he has built instead. (429)”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Upon going through the text the reader will notice how completely contrary to the facts are the cliches which are bandied about in public discourse in India, and which as a consequence so many have by now internalised.... (x)”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A moment's reflection will show that India's case is not at par with the ones we have been considering. For those instances are of the most recent times - those nations were "imagined", those traditions were "invented" just a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. By contrast India has been seen as one and its people have had a common way of life for thousands of years. It is not just that its history is that old.... It is a continuous history. (9)”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not an enforced amnesia but an unsparing memory - that is what will build a nation.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every sentence a lie. ... And have you ever heard the BBC refer to Nawaz Sharif as a "fundamentalist," a "fanatic"? But what would it have called Advani if he had made a statement of that kind with "Hindu" substituted for "Muslims"?”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope the reader will not just read through the examples but will also ask why it is that such material is not placed before our students. After all it is not difficult to come by, and, as the reader will agree after going through it, it has the most direct bearing on our denationalization. Yet, even though he may have considerable interest in our current problems, even though he may have been following closely the public discourse on such problems, in all probability the reader would not have come across the material. Why is this so?”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of “secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a “secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Catholic Bishops Conference of India is the hightest body engaged in attempts to coordinate the work of different Catholic churches in India and to engage in dialogue with other religions. ... To celebrate the 50th anniversary... the CBCI convened a meeting in January 1994.... And it was an important gathering: it was only the second time in fifty years and the first time in twenty five years that such a comprehensive review was being undertaken... The organizers were so kind as to ask me to give the Hindu perception of the work of Christian missionaries in India.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And on the basis of criteria of this kind tribals were hacked off from Hindu society. One has but to read the descriptions of Animism which were relied upon to notice that they could well be describing a variety of Hindus.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The organisers had invited Arun Shourie to give the Hindu assessment of the work of missionaries in India. Arun Shourie addressed the Archbishops, Bishops and others on 5 January 1994. ... The organisers asked Arun Shourie to write a paper based on his talk.... As the controversy snowballed... [they] invited several senior churchmen to discuss Missionaries in India on a public platform with Arun Shourie.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shourie, Arun. Arun Shourie and his Christian Critic. (1995)
“In the bookshops in the Muslim areas of our cities—for instance in the bookshops around the Jama Masjid in Delhi— the collections of fatwas fill shelves after shelves. They are put together with great care, the sort of care one associates with sacred literature. The pages are well laid out. The calligraphy is often a work of art. The volumes are beautifully bound— ever so often with gilded embossing on the covers.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a word, fatwas are the shariah in action.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For all these reasons one would expect a host of studies on fatwas. But then one would reckon without our intellectuals. It is yet more proof of the fact that our intellectuals have seceded from our country; that there is hardly a study in either English or Urdu on the fatwas.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we study the discourses of the Buddha or what Gandhiji has to say on, say, fasting, the content is all about looking within, about self-purification. But even when they deal with purely religious subjects the fatwas are all about the form to which the believer must adhere. They resemble instructions a drill sergeant gives to cadets for a parade.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the face of all this those who continue to assert, ‘Shariah has safeguarded the rights of women like no other system of law has,’ do so only because of their confidence that no one but them has read the texts of shariah.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And yet we must believe, on pain of being communal, that no system of law has guaranteed as many rights to women as shariah, that no religion is as solicitous of them as Islam. ... The argument can fool no one but the determined apologist.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is not just the shariah as enforced by the fatwas. As our governments have not acted upon the directive of the Constitution to enact a Uniform Civil Code, that is the law of secular India enforced by our courts!”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not the occasion but the ulema’s assessment of women per se which is of interest, for it pervades the fatwas through and through. ‘For the Quran says,’ declare the ulema of Deoband settling a matter to which we shall soon turn, ‘the husband is the master.’ .... And among these kafirs there are gradations, Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan declares: one hard kind of basic kufr is Christianity; worse than it is Magianism; worse than that is idolatry; worse than that is Wahabiyat; and worse than all these and more wicked is Deobandiyat...”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so on indefinitely. The effect of all this will be obvious: when you take a problem to them, the ulema can facilitate your way or thwart it by invoking one authority rather than the other. Simultaneously they, joined this time by the apologist, will insist that we, in particular the non-Muslims, must never cease to believe that the shariah is a clear and definite code, that it is a divinely ordained, and therefore an eternal and unchanging code!”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two features would by now be obvious: (1) far from being a clear and definite code, the shariah is ambiguous; (2) it is ambiguous on the entire spectrum of issues. Two operational consequences follow: (1) this ambiguity is one of the bases for the unrivalled power of the ulema; (2) the ulema therefore sabotage every effort to codify the shariah as zealously as they fight back every effort to replace it by a modern code common to all.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is why Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan is only being true to the Faith when, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, he says that the glory of Islam consists in having science bend to it, not in its bending to science. What holds for science holds a fortiori for mere historical ‘facts’—of whether there have been a hundred Caliphs or twelve.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is an institution the Indian history course of which covers only the period from the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi to 1947, the geography course of which focuses on the Arabian peninsula, an institution of and for India?”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Predictably, in Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan’s reckoning the Shias are not Muslims at all. Their ‘mosques’ are not mosques—and remember, as Mir Baqi and his descendants, the mutwallis of the mosque were Shias, the ‘Babri masjid’ was a Shia mosque.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Bangladesh, with the gallop towards Islamization, the rapid spread of Tablighi Jamaat, the ever-widening reach and influence of fundamentalist organizations like the Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Hizb-ut-Tauhid, Shariah Committees sprang up in several parts of the country. Fatwas became ever more frequent. They were often issued by the local mullahs in rural areas, and ever so often the victims were women who had in fact been victims of violence, rape and the rest....”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To put the blame on Muslim journalism and leadership is in a sense to beg the question. After all, why do Muslims prize this kind of journalism, why do they follow such leaders? The answer is in the psychology which the ulema and their fatwas have drilled into them.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The condescension, the picture which is drawn of Hindus and other non-believers, their being clubbed with animals and vermin—any text doing this in the case of Muslims would call forth howls of denunciation. From the secularists as much as from Muslims.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is not one instance, not one single, solitary instance in which Ambedkar participated in any activity connected with the struggle to free the country. Quite the contrary- at every possible turn he opposed the campaigns of the national movement, at every setback to the movement he was among those cheering for failure.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Did India ever stand in need of reformers? Do you read the history of India? Who was Ramanuja? Who was Shankara? Who was Nanak? Who was Chaitanya? Who was Kabir? Who was Dadu? Who were all these great preachers, one following the other, a galaxy of stars of the first magnitude?”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The legacy of Narayan Guru is a society elevated, in accord, the lower castes educated and full of dignity and a feeling of self-worth. The legacy of Ambedkar is a bunch screaming at everyone, a bunch always demanding and denouncing, a bunch mired in self-pity and hatred, a society at war with itself. The legacy of Narayan Guru is a country rejuvenated. The legacy of Ambedkar is a country with a deepened sense of shame in its entire past. And thereby further disabled.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Arun Shourie, Worshipping False Gods, also quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743
Also quoted by: Narayana Guru
“Secularists" are unnerved by the reaction Advani's rath has evoked among Hindus. But it is not the rath which evoked it. The "victories" in having Shah Bano reversed, in having Rushdie banned - "victories" which were loudly applauded by the "secularists"; the success in convincing political parties - which maps and lists - that Muslims would decide their fate in hundreds of constituencies; to say nothing of the "victories" of the violence in Punjab and Kashmir - the reaction is the cumulative result of these distortions in our polity.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In June–July 1998, progressives kicked up quite a racket. The government has packed the Indian Council of Historical Research with pro–Ram Mandir historians, they shouted. It has surreptitiously altered the aims and objectives of the Council, they shouted. As is their wont, they had sparked the commotion by giving wind to a concoction. As is their wont too, they were charging others with planning to do in some undefined future what they had themselves been actually doing for decades – that is, write history to a purpose.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And another thing: if an RSS publication publishes even an interview with me, that is further proof of my being communal; but so tough are the hymen of these progressives that, even when they contribute signed articles to publications of the Communist Party, their virginity remains intact!”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously, they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In regard to matter after critical matter – the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the freedom struggle – we find this trait – suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these ‘eminent historians’ to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, the control has to be undone.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so on – among the highest piles of rubble in the world of the sacred temples of another religion, among the highest piles of corpses of those venerated by another religion. Yet, in the reckoning of our eminent historians a policy of ‘Broad Toleration’! A policy of toleration guided by purely secular motivations!”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The situation thus is as follows: the ones who have dominated and controlled and terrorised public discourse for half a century in India are now bereft of facts, of arguments. The evidence is available to anyone who has access to their internal ‘dialogues’ – they are talking to narrower and narrower circles; and in these ever-shrinking circles, they are just repeating the old cliches, there is not a new idea, there is not a new fact. And that is predictable, as we have seen: regurgitating those nostrums of the theory is not just necessary, it is sufficient.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that ‘Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned.’”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The accompanying pages contain two columns: aushuddho – impurity, or error – and shuddho. One has just to glance through the changes to see the objective the progressives are trying to achieve through their ‘objective’, ‘rational’ approach to the writing of history.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus, not just whitewash, hogwash too.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first major criticism of the ‘left-liberal’ or ‘progressive’ historians was made by Arun Shourie with special reference to the state of the ICHR in their control.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial-age personalities, Eminent Victorians.”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Elst, K. Interview, Swarajya, May 2016)
“If you had been in India in late 1998-early 1999, and the English-language "national" newspapers had been your source of information about what was going on, you would have concluded that an extensive, well coordinated pogrom was on, that maniacal Hindu groups were going round raping nuns, attacking missionaries, burning down churches. (p 7)”
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“The contrast between the truth about the incidents and what they were made out to be should alert our newspapers and TV channels not to shoot off accounts without examining the facts. In particular, they must not go merely by the allegations of communalism-mongers.(13)”
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“Several groups have several reasons for manufacturing calumny - from money to idelogy to the crassest kind of politics. Many of these are well-organized, some, as we shall see, have well-knit, world-wide networks. And they have honed expertise in manufacturing atrocity-stories, in broadcasting them round the globe, and in putting their manufactures to profitable use. (13)”
Arun Shourie (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source