Not Koenraad Elst

May 4,1992

Dear Shri Khushwant Singh,

Please accept my thanks for making it known (Hindustan Times, May 2) to a large number of people that Koenraad Elst exists in flesh and blood, and is not Sita Ram Goel’s invention or disguise.

Far from being “made up by BJP’s propanganda wing”. most people in the RSS/BJP crowd believed and said that it was was I trying to pass under a foreign name and a changed style. That was when I published his first book in 1990. My own son-in-law said it to my face. It was only when Koenraad stayed here in the winter of 1990-91 and met a lot of people in the RSS family of fronts, that the suspicion was shed.

For your information, I have never been part of the RSS family. though I have known it for a long time. Nor have they any use for what I write. They stopped me from writing in the Organiser on the plea that my articles had cost them all their Muslim votes. Their pet “scholar” is P.N.Oak who says that everything in Islam and Christianity is derived from Hinduism. Had the Hindu movements developed any scholarship worth the name I would not have wasted my time on reading the Bible, the Quran, the Hadis and the rest of the Semitic lore. I would have remained devoted to the Sanskrit classics which is my favourite field.