Voice of India Quotes

“Our only weapon is truth.”

“Wikipedia: Voice of India”

“An informative and a must-visit site for every Hindu who wishes to rediscover his roots and dharma.”

“[Pirbhai is at his best when he sums up Voice of India thinking as devising an ideology] “rationally akin to the Enlightenment without falling prey to materialism”.”

“Conversely, banning this book would send a signal that the present establishment will do what it can to prevent Hinduism from rising up, from regaining self-confidence, from facing the challenge of hostile ideologies.”

“The militants of VOI are adamantly opposed to the idea that all religions deserve equal respect. Even paying lip-service to this ideal, as RSS and BJP do, appears like an unbearable betrayal of the Hindu cause to them.”

“Voice of India through Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Koenraad Elst provided the main intellectual defense of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement starting thirty years ago. Their contributions were very important in sustaining it.”

“What counts as “extreme” and “controversial” in India is Voice of India’s criticism of religions. There is nothing “Right-wing” about that; if anything, it should rather be called Left-wing, but it is principally just a scholarly pursuit.”

“One final reason for being confident is that because of the work of Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Rajiv Malhotra the corpus is now reaching a critical mass. So, that we can think that within few years we will have a library for India and a library of India.”

“This book is also a tribute to all those scholars who have served, and are still serving, as benefactors of the nation, foremost among them being the Voice of India family of scholars who will ever remain the intellectual focal point for exercises in rejuvenation of the innermost spirit of India.”

“It is remarkable that all the writers who have published contributions to Hindu thought in the Voice of India series, are not members of any RSS front. The same thing counts for the scholars (except two) who have compiled the VHP evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. Thought develops independently. But social and political movements may, or may not, provide intellectuals with a platform and a network to broadcast their ideas.”

“While Voice of India had a controversial reputation, I found nothing irrational, much less extreme about their ideas or publications... Their criticisms of Islam were on par with the criticisms of the Catholic Church and of Christianity done by such Western thinkers as Voltaire or Thomas Jefferson. In fact they went far beyond such mere rational or historical criticisms of other religions and brought in a profound spiritual and yogic view as well.”

“In 1982, Ram Swarup (1920–1998) established Voice of India, a publishing house that over the next decades published a great deal of literature critical of Christianity in India. Though he shared Gandhi’s conception of religion and repeated many of Gandhi’s general criticisms of Christian proselytization, Swarup did so with more bombast and sarcasm than the frank but generally civil Mahatma. In addition, while Gandhi regularly criticized Christians’ obsession with conversion, he frequently spoke admirably of Christ and of Christian ethics. Swarup would have none of it...”

“Ram Swarup is one of those rare souls whose vision exceeds that of those around them, whose mind is so clear it can bring clarity to others. For us, the editorial staff at Hinduism Today, his writings were a treat - always bold, incisive, unapologetic, targeting strategic issues with uncanny precision. Our personal meetings with him and with his friend and student Sita Ram Goel were always a delight. His passionate intellect was incandescent and it was working in service to his deeper spirituality. If we could but hear him and heed him, our future would be as strong as our past.”

“The epochal 1980s up to the fall of the Babri Masjid and later is also notable for a resurgence that’s truly breathtaking: there was a sudden public interest in such obscure and “boring” disciplines as archeology and linguistics. For the first time since independence, the Leftists were being challenged on their own turf, especially in history. Sita Ram Goel’s Voice of India alone published... groundbreaking works, still definitive classics in their own right. ... the quality and quantity of work produced by Voice of India during this period in this genre remains comparably unsurpassed. These works provided the solid and indisputable raw material for Hindu activist and other organisations working on the ground and in other realms.”

“In sharp contrast with the repetitive-nationalistic and Indocentric approach of Golwalkar and the RSS, Goel and Shourie (and Ram Swarup before them) have developed a historical and philosophical critique of Christianity and Islam that has universal validity. It is part of continuum with Western and other foreign critiques of the said religions. .... Of course, the approach pioneered by Ram Swarup is “hard-line” in the sense that it is not susceptible to change under the impact of changing political configurations. The BJP and RSS may decide one day that they need to build bridges with padres and mullahs, but that doesn’t alter the truth status of the latter’s belief systems. The Voice of India approach is unflinching in the same sense in which logic is sharper than diplomacy, or uprightness is tougher than compromise, or a diamond is hardier than mud.”

“The importance of Sitaram Goel's and Ram Swarup's work can hardly be over-estimated. There is no doubt that future textbooks on comparative religion as well as those on Indian political and intellectual history will devote crucial chapters to their analysis. They are the first to give a first-hand Pagan reply to the versions of history and "science of religion" imposed by the monotheist world- conquerors, both at the level of historical fact (e.g. Sitaram Goel's "History of Hindu-Christian Encounters") and of fundamental doctrine (e.g. Ram Swarup's "Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam"), both in terms of the specific Hindu experience (e.g. Sitaram Goel's "Hindu Society under Siege") and of a more generalized theory of religion free from prophetic-monotheistic bias (e.g. Ram Swarup's "The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods", a ground-breaking statement of Pagan doctrine).”

“Pirbhai is not too far off the mark when he writes: “Voice of India, in fact, was established to provide the Sangh Parivar ‘a full-blooded Hindu ideology of its own and process all events, movements, parties and public figures in terms of that ideology, rather than live on borrowed slogans or hand to mouth ideas invoked on the spur of the moment’.”... “Swarup puts it most succinctly in ‘A need to face the truth’, making what seems the most repeated statement in Voice of India writings, that ‘the problem is not Muslims but Islam’.”... Pirbhai is at his best when he sums up Voice of India thinking as devising an ideology “rationally akin to the Enlightenment without falling prey to materialism”. (p.52) For some reason he, along with the Sangh, he considers this a “staggeringly harsh theology”. (p.51) Maybe it is just “secular” in the real sense of the term.”

“The members of the Voice of India group themselves are inspired only by democratic texts when they invoke contemporary European thought to justify their anti-Muslim crusade, and they deliberately leave out anything that has an extreme right appearance .... (It is) the appearance of cosmopolitan and sometimes extremely sophisticated intellectuals, like Girilal Jain, former editor-in-chief of the Times of India, Swapan Dasgupta, who works in the same newspaper or Arun Shourie ex-editor-in-chief of the Indian Express who mark the scene. Some are former members of Socialist parties or the Congress (notably Jay Dubashi). There are also former Communists. Many ... have notably gathered around the publishing house Voice of India of Sita Ram Goel, this new avatar of Hindu nationalism. He loses, in a way, any traditional side. He ... takes up all that is possible from secular and democratic polemicists ..”

“Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel were witnesses to the untiring aggression against Hinduism by Christian missionaries, they deemed Christianity a serious problem, and so they took aim at Christianity. Not some mysterious force behind Christianity, but Christianity itself. They adopted the typically modern rejection of Christianity as exemplified by Bertrand Russell's book Why I Am Not a Christian. Their criticism focused mainly on three points: (1) the irrational basis of Christian theology; (2) the largely fabricated basis of early Christianity's sacred history as related in the New Testament; (3) the intolerant and inhumane record of Christianity in history. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "postmodernism" but is purely and consistently the modern approach to the Christian belief system and Church, in the footstep of the criticisms developed by Western secularists since the 18th century... The next one among the errors in this paragraph: Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva".”