“We were discussing the Middle East crisis. The Middle East has been in crisis, as we know, since the 1950s, 40s, even before that. It’s always in crisis, permanently in crisis. I half-jokingly said that I have a short solution to the Middle East crisis: convert them to Hindu Dharma. It will be over in an instant. My esteemed co-panelists on that TV debate all blew their tops, saying, “How can you say that ,blah blah blah?” So that is the power of narrative. The dominant narrative worldwide is that our Dharma, Hindu Dharma, is regressive, backward, and capable of nothing good, and so on. That’s the power of the narrative taken at face value, taken as self-evident, and that is what we are up against.

So, what is a narrative? Narrative is a story, and a story can be based on facts or in fiction. Fiction is lies; facts are just factual evidence. First of all, we have to ask ourselves, who are we? Who are all the Bharatiya people, the Hindu people? Who are we all? Secondly, where are we coming from? What’s our past history so that we understand who we are better? And thirdly, where are we going? What ‘s the way forward? What’s the future like? What is our envisioned future like 100years down the line, a thousand years down the line? We need to have these components of the narrative very clear.

So, to do that, first of all, we have to examine our history. Right now, our history is full of distortions. Our history textbooks are full of distortions. The historians, our esteemed eminent historians, are all anti-Bharat, anti-Dharma, anti-Hindu. Hindu Dharma; they’re all leftists, Marxists. So that’s what we are up against. First of all, we need to correct our history. We need to make it fact-based, not falsehoods based. So, our history is immense. We probably have a 50,000-year-old history of Bharatiya civilization and culture. The archaeological evidence that I have found this far goes back at least 10,000 years. The city of the ancient archaeological site of Bhirdana in Haryana is almost 10,000 years old. So, first of all, we need to examine our history and correct the distortions. The recent history, the 20th century onwards, history itself, is almost something that’s in living memory that’s full of distortions. We need to reexamine the great figures about whom geographies have been written, like Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Nehru. We have to reexamine the legacy of great figures like Mr. Bose, like Mr. Savarkar, and so on. So, we need to re-examine the recent history. The history of the 18th and 19th century also is full of falsehoods and distortions.