Then on the authority of none other than Christophe Jaffrelot, another virulent Hinduphobe, Tharoor categorizes this as ‘strategic syncretism’.

Anyone who has read Sri Aurobindo even customarily would not dare to make such an erroneous statement. Far from Sri Aurobindo claiming that ‘every modern Western idea’ could be traced to ‘the ancient Hindu scriptures’, let it be said that some of the latest modern trends in psychology in the West have been traced to Sri Aurobindo.

Felicity Edwards, a scholar-theologian of Rhodes University, in her article about Sri Aurobindo in the 'Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature' points out that leading transpersonal theorists consider Sri Aurobindo 'the pioneer of Transpersonal Psychology'.

Sri Aurobindo is by himself an important phenomenon in the history of world religions. He pioneered understanding and integrating of evolution as a process with human spirituality .

This is a profound continuation of Sankhya Darshana of Hindu Dharma. In this, Sri Aurobindo seems to have, what could be seen as premonitions of some of the recent developments of evolutionary science in his essay that was written in 1915.

For example, he rightly points out that the ‘struggle for life at least as popularly understood, formed no real part of Darwinism’.

This is something that many social philosophers in the West never understood and even today remains a fallacy in popular understanding of evolution.

He further points out in this that what gets inherited is more a predisposition towards a trait than the trait itself in a mechanistic way.

He also knows that the inheritance of acquired characters had been discarded. At the same time, he cautions: ‘The propagation of acquired characteristics by heredity was too hastily and completely asserted; it is now perhaps in danger of being too summarily denied.’

Today, with the hindsight of epigenetics, one cannot but marvel at the way this Hindu seer had envisioned the way science would progress. Alas, all these are lost for our politician-writer in his new pretentious act of neo Hindu-phile.

That a person who jeers at the so-called Hindutvaites for being ignorant of the inner riches of Hindu Dharma should be so ignorantly dismissive of one of the greatest Hindu phenomena of recent centuries is indeed telling.

As we near the end of the book, the rhetoric against Hindutva reaches a fevered pitch. Here again our author gets it all wrong. Like all Hindutva-bashers, Tharoor also contends that for both Savarkar and Golwalkar ‘India being the punyabhumi of the Hindus required the Aryans to be indigenous to India, in contrast to India’s Muslims, whose faith clearly originated in the Arabian peninsula.’ (p.230).

The straw-man argument is demonstrably wrong. For, Savarkar considered all ideas of races and racial purity fallacious. They were to him ‘artificial barriers’ and 'to try to prevent the commingling of blood is to build on sand'.

And as early as 1924, Savarkar could say something even the most radical of Western humanists were then finding it hard to comprehend: ‘Truly speaking all that anyone of us can claim, all that history entitles one to claim, is that one has the blood of all mankind in one's veins.'

But going beyond superficial constructs and mediocre arguments is not Tharoor’s strong point. So he continues to fill pages with rhetoric flourish.

Did not Nandivarman II of Pallava dynasty who built the Vaikunta Perumal Temple, have genetic component of Cham dynasty of Cambodia-Vietnam people? Are not the shallow Hindutvaites going against history in claiming Aryans to be indigenous?

In reality, the ‘Hindutva brigade’ does not call Aryans indigenous. Rather they claim that there is no such thing as Aryan race and they are right. They claim that there is no racial basis to the traditional social structure with all its social stagnation and innate ability for social emancipation.

And they are right. But Tharoor purposefully goes full throttle on this straw-man because and only because his international audience and elite culturally vacuous Indians would not know both HInduism and Hindutva.

One of founding fathers of modern Indian State and the chief architect of Indian Constitution, while discussing Pakistan, emphasised the spiritual unity of 'Hindustan’ as being more with Burma than with ‘Pakistan’ though when he wrote those lines there was no Pakistan as a separate nation.

Similarly, there is indeed a spiritual and cultural unity between Java and Sumatra, Cambodia and Vietnam with India.

Hindutva has always accepted it and Hindutva has placed this spiritual unity more valuable than biological lineage.

Then, he comes to one of his real agendas — defending attacks on Hinduism in the form of conversions. There is an argument once proselytizers in our district used to make. Hinduism says all religions are true. So Hinduism itself says Christianity is true. Christianity says Hinduism is a false religion. So Hinduism itself admits that it is a false religion. Tharoor does not hesitate to make a variant of the same ‘logic’: