Voice of India

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Voice of India is an Indian publishing house founded by Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup, that specialises in Hindu nationalist books and serves as an important tool in the propagation of Hindutva.

Quotes

• 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...
  • Chad Baumann in : Knut A. Jacobsen (editor) - Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions (2020, Routledge) - 255 ff

• Gandhi can be credited with having established and/​or popularized many of the basic arguments against conversion to Christianity, but it was Ram Swarup who brought those arguments back to life at the end of the twentieth century. In 1982, Swarup established a publishing house, Voice of India, which has since then published a significant amount of literature in defense of Hinduism, including many of the texts referenced in this chapter. One of the stated goals of Voice of India, according to Swarup, was to “show to its own people that Hinduism is not that bad and other religions not so wonderful as they are painted by their theologians and televangelists”. With Voice of India’s publication of his own Hinduism vis-​à-​vis Christianity and Islam, Swarup inspired a new generation of anti-​Christian critics, as we will see in the next section on Sita Ram Goel. Though many of his arguments may have been Gandhi’s originally, the assertive, orotund, and confrontational style was distinctly Swarup’s, and the influence of that style can be felt in the writings of nearly all the other authors profiled in this chapter.... Trained as an historian at the University of Delhi, Sita Ram Goel had an active career as a social activist, fighting for various causes throughout his career. As he describes it, a narrow escape from a murderous Muslim mob in 1946 appears to have moved him in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to his views on Islam. After 1982, he became involved, with Swarup, in establishing Voice of India.
  • Chad Baumann, quoted from [Routledge Handbooks in Religion] Chad M. Bauman, Michelle Voss Roberts - The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations (2020, Routledge) 142 ff

• 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.
  • Sandeep Balakrishna in [1] Aug 4, 2020

• 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 ..
  • Heuze, Gerard (1993). Où va l'inde moderne?. Harmattan. ISBN 2738417558. p 123-124

• One wonders too at the relevance of his next rather irrational comment: “Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N S Rajaram, S Kak and S Kalyanaramam, who ship their ideas to India from US shores”. What indeed has this absurd statement to do with facts and evidence?… Then, it continues in the same tone of irrelevance and contempt, forgetting how many Universities and Journals spend enormous funds on useless hypotheses and ostracise all non-immigrationists: “They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K. D. Sethna, S. P. Gupta, Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie, S. R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vocal following in the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier, and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to propagating their ideas”. Here two further points are worthy of note: first, Prof Witzel obviously does not know what “New Age” writers are; second, the whole passage has the shrill tones of McCarthyism or any totalitarian dogmatism (and censorship). Instead of emitting such strident emotional cries and witch-hunt slogans, Prof Witzel and his followers had better re-examine their unfounded linguistic assumptions and recall the words of Edmund Leach, who was neither an Indian nationalist technocrat, nor a New-Age writer, but a solid, mainstream pillar of the academic establishment
  • Nicholas Kazanas, The RV Date - a Postscript': The Greek Indologist Nicholas Kazanas, in a reply to Prof. Michael Witzel's criticism on Voice of India.

• 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.
  • Meera Nanda, Hindu Triumphalism and the Clash of Civilisations. Economic and Political Weekly. 2009. p. 110. 

• 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.
  • Paramacharya Palaniswami, Ram Swarup (2009). Hinduism and Monotheistic Religions. Voice of India. pp. back flap. ISBN 978-81-85990-84-2. : Editor-in-Chief shows how many Hindus honor Ram Swarup and Sitaram Goel and their work.

• 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.
  • S.G. Talageri, The Rigveda, A Historical Analysis.

• An informative and a must-visit site for every Hindu who wishes to rediscover his roots and dharma.
  • About the Voice of India website which hosts a selection of online books by Voice of India. Ibn Warraq, Leaving Islam, p. 519.