Internal Sabotage or The Enemies Within

 

Internal Sabotage or The Enemies Within

Shrikant G. Talageri 

 

The campaign to prove a newly emerging DIT (Dravidian Invasion-of-India Theory), under the guise of disproving the AIT (Aryan Invasion-of-India Theory), being carried on jointly by Koenraad Elst and Jijith Nadumuri Ravi, is going on in full strength, and on an international scale. Someone just sent me the following: 

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad/status/2098055060546633942

“Do quote scientist Jijith Nadumuri Ravi as proving that the Sindhū-Sarasvatī civilization was the Vedic civilization par excellence.”

7:54 PM · Sep 10, 2026

This tweet by Koenraad Elst (which is apparently attracting thousands of views in a single day), is apparently in reply to the following tweet by Jijith:

https://x.com/Jijith_NR/status/2097721130786455846

“IVC was clearly a Vedic Civilization. The Geochronology of Rigveda perfectly corresponds to the Geochronology of Early & Mature Harappan Civilizations. The span of rivers in Rgveda is from Ganga upto Kabul River. Ditto same, the Early & Mature Harappan sites are between the Ganga and Kabul Rivers. Thus, Both Rgveda and Early-Mature Harappan have the same Geography. Chronologically they are both in the 3300-1900 BCE Period. Thus, both are two sides of the same coin. Early-Mature Harappan is the material culture and Rgveda is its literature counterpart. All symbolism inside IVC is Vedic in nature:- the altars, Svastika, Yoga, Pashupati, chakra (wheel) seals, bull seals, horse seals Rajarshis - priest-kings, Apsaras - dancing girl etc. The old notion of IVC as Dravidian has misled scholars for close to a hundred years. Now IVC Script is deciphered as Samskrtam. Thus it is proved to be Vedic civilization par excellence. This also means Vedic language (later named as 'Samskrtam') - a daughter language of Proto Indo-European (PIE) - was spoken in North West India minimum since 4000 BCE. This is why, all the river names in Rgveda are in Vedic language and not in Dravidian, Munda (Austro-Asiatic) or other languages. A foreign language entering a new region cannot easily rename the pre-existing river names in the native language of the region. This means the Vedic language wasn't foreign to India. It was native to India. It was born in India from its mother, PIE which was also native to India. This implies the PIE originated in North West India and spread to Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran and Europe. There are many Dravidian origin theories- Central India origin, Gujarat origin and Elam origin.

In Elam origin theory, the Dravidian languages, after originating from Elam in South West Iran did pass through the southern parts of IVC to southern Balochistan, Sindh and Gujarat during the Late Rgvedic Period (2400-1900 BCE). The Dravidian languages and culture absorbed some cultural elements of IVC and spread those into South India. This much is true. This fact is reflected in Rgveda with some Dravidian Rishis like Irimbiṭhi and Śirimbiṭha mentioned in the Late Rgvedic 10th Maṇḍala (2100-1900 BCE). These Dravidian Rishis were inducted into Kanva and Bharadvaja Gotras.”

9:47 PM · Sep 9, 2026

Today a massive transformation of Tamilnadu from A Land of Hindu Temples to A Land of Evangelist Christians is taking place, and the full effects of this will become apparent when, within a decade or two, census figures reveal that Christianity has  overwhelmingly become the majority religion of Tamilnadu. Earlier, the so-called Dravidian Movement concentrated on alleging that India was originally a Dravidian Land which was invaded by “Aryans”. This was a tool in the hands of Christian missionaries to propagate the idea that Hinduism is a religion brought into India by a foreign race which invaded, conquered and dominated over an original Dravidian India, and that Dravidian speakers should reject Hinduism and accept Christianity.

This theory is still the official stand of both the “Dravidianist” politicians as well as the Christian missionaries. But then a war is usually won with the simultaneous use of two seemingly opposite strategies both working towards the same end.

After my work of over three decades, both disproving the AIT as well as proving that Hinduism is more a “Dravidian” than an “Aryan” religion, and pointing out that in fact it is Christianity which represents the foreign invading force, the effectiveness of the AIT is becoming less important, and the emphasis on disproving the OIT less necessary, in the Evangelist propaganda sphere:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-primarily-dravidian-and-pan-indian_30.html

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2021/09/does-aryan-invasion-theory-mean-that.html

 

And in the face of the fact that despite everything Christianity is still on a winning spree in Tamilnadu, it has become both feasible and possible to open up a second front to strengthen the Evangelist onslaught on Tamilnadu: strangely by now propping up a Dravidian Invasion Theory to show that Dravidianist ideology and Evangelist ideology (as foreign comrades-in-arms against a common enemy:  Pagan “Aryan” India) are on the same side of the battle-lines. And what more effective and credible way to pursue this second front than through a caucus of writers and scholars (including “scientists”) who seemingly represent the opposite side in the war: who are nominally “OIT supporters and AIT opponents”?

 

Hence the increasing intensity of the new “AIT: NO, but DIT: YES” campaign by Koenraad and Jijith. So now, whether AIT or DIT, or both working simultaneously on seemingly opposite sides of the battle-lines, the winner in both (or all) cases is Evangelist Christianity in “Dravidian” Tamilnadu.

The first (but then still foggy) signs of this New Evangelist Front were in Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s book “Rivers of Ṛgveda” which, while purporting to show only the large collection of Epic-Puranic data in his repertoire, was actually a direct attack on the Internal Chronology and Geography of the Rigveda as shown by the Rigvedic data and as forming the First Base of the OIT Case: his book subtly tried to turn this Internal Chronology and Geography of the Rigveda on its head (thus sabotaging the very First Base of the OIT Case) by insisting that certain eminent kings (Purukutsa and Trasadasyu) of the New Rigveda were actually older than certain pre-eminent kings (i.e. Divodāsa and Sudās) of the Old Rigveda, and that these kings of the New Rigveda were actually already established in the Northwest of India as Rigvedic kings well before Sudās first crossed the Punjab from Haryana in the East and long before Sudās’ descendants reached as far West as Afghanistan.

In spite of this, Koenraad Elst started propagating the book on a massive scale, completely refusing to note (not only the OIT-sabotaging nature of Jijith’s book, but also) the extremely stupid and zero-data-and-evidence-based contents of Jijith’s entire book (including and especially baseless fairy-tales about five different rivers named Sarayu, two mutually-hostile “Bharata” groups in the hymns with both being the heroes or enemies in various hymns, a new fictional “Battle of Asiknī”, etc. etc.).

And both Koenraad Elst and Jijith himself started a campaign (which ran on for over a year) where they simultaneously started propagating that Jijith was the original pioneer of many aspects of the OIT, while at the same time making blatantly false claims about what I myself had written in my books and articles. in order to make my OIT Case appear ridiculous. These have been the subject of acrimonious debate in different internet groups and even in many of my blogs, so I will not go into all that again.

Earlier this year, Koenraad Elst (who has already undergone major surgeries for heart and cancer – a fact in itself of great distress for all true sympathizers of the Hindu Cause, since his valuable and unrewarded pro-Hindu writings are beyond comparison, which makes his single-minded advocacy of Jijith’s “scholarship” and more especially of the DIT all the more inexplicable), was away from the public eye for a long time. After that, although he has started tweeting again, his tweets are few and far between and all his other activities I assume are drastically reduced. Nevertheless, even in this condition, he has been regularly exerted himself to make claims about “scientist” Jijith’s revolutionary role as the pioneering scholar in the matter of various aspects of the AIT-OIT debate. To give just three out of literally countless examples, he propagated “scientist” Jijith to be the first and/or only scholar to explain the presence of Steppe genes in the Indian population, to date the Mahabharata War to the first half of the second millennium BCE, and (now) “proving that the Sindhū-Sarasvatī civilization was the Vedic civilization par excellence.”

That I have been writing all this (and much more) with much more data and evidence right from my first book in 1993 is stonewalled by Koenraad:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2025/06/cant-people-jijith-koenraad-lie-without.html

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-date-of-mahabharata-war.html

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-common-identity-of-rigvedic-and.html

 

Likewise, Koenraad has been stonewalling my own blog articles as a whole. I have, in the last few years, written many articles of significance in the AIT-OIT debate (my three recent articles on Indra are a case in point) bringing out new and clinching evidence. Even more significantly, I have written one long article which was the result of extremely back-breaking original research on the Rigveda, and of high academic level (I am told a French scholar Arnaud Fournet, whom I have very sharply criticized and even abused in reply to his unwarranted criticisms, recommended this article for reading) which I consider my single most important article in the AIT-OIT debate (although there are countless other important articles where I have introduced pioneering and revolutionary new data and evidence of a fundamental nature on various aspects like the Mitanni, the Dāśarājña battle, the Elephant, various aspects of Linguistics, etc. etc.):

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-version-of-chronological-gulf.html

Even this article (already four years old now) has been completely stonewalled by Koenraad Elst who so assiduously does diligent PRO work for every word written or spoken by OIT-sabotaging Jijith Nadumuri Ravi.

 

The stupidity of Jijith’s work should be apparent to any knowledgeable person who reads his books. Koenraad Elst is not stupid. This makes one wonder if there is an agenda involved behind Koenraad’s unremitting and unrelenting glorification of such stupid writings. So far it seemed only a personal issue. But now it increasingly looks like something more: like an alliance formed to propagate the DIT or Dravidian Invasion Theory. Every single claim about Jijith’s revolutionary new discoveries on the AIT-OIT Front simultaneously propagates the DIT on a war footing and is endorsed by Koenraad.

Clearly we now have a new unspoken Grand Alliance of

1. a section (an OIT-sabotaging section) of the OIT side,

2. a section of the Evangelists, and,

3. a section of Dravidianists who seek to portray Dravidian(language-speaker)s as an earlier invader group into Pagan “Aryan” India, as the Evangelists are a later such group, and want to form an alliance between the two against the Pagan “Aryans”/Hindus.

All these three groups are united in their independent propagation of the utterly and totally baseless DIT.

Of these three groups, the second and third groups still have to come out in the open to show their fangs and claws. But all the signs are there.

Perhaps a prominent recent example of the ever-strengthening Evangelist-Dravidianist Alliance, and its capability to slowly co-opt Rigvedic culture into its joint operations, is the recent “Prajapathi” controversy.

A Google overview of this controversy:

“The new project is called Prajapathi, a feature film and long-running dramatic production that portrays the life of Jesus Christ by mapping him onto the Vedic concept of Prajapati. [1, 2]

Key Details About Prajapathi

Origins: It began as a live stage drama and passion play that toured across India for more than 25 years before transitioning into a feature film format. [1, 2]

Theological Premise: The production and its promotional materials frame Jesus as the fulfillment of ancient Vedic prophecies, equating the sacrificial post (yupa) in Vedic texts to the Christian cross (Purusha-medha). [1, 2]

Presentation Style: Performances and promotional events often blend traditional Indian musical instrumentation, Vedic-style chants, and conch-shell soundscapes with biblical narratives. [1]

Cast & Crew: Instead of mainstream commercial film actors, the project features veteran devotional stage artists who have portrayed these roles in the live theatrical version for decades. [1]

Reception & Debate: The adaptation has drawn significant public discussion and critique from cultural observers and publications like Swarajya regarding how ancient Hindu texts and terminology are reinterpreted within Christian evangelism in Tamil Nadu. [1, 2]”

[The film (or its trailer) was launched by John Christian Devaram Prabhakar, former member of the AIADMK and now speaker of the state assembly in Christian CM C. Joseph Vijay led Tamilnadu.]

 

To sum up, people can understand only as far as their intellects permit. As a Marathi saying goes: “zashi drushti tashi srushti”: roughly “one’s understanding of the world is limited to the scope of one’s vision”. There can be anti-AIT and pro-OIT people to whose intellects Jijith’s fairy-tales sound attractive and convincing. But they should reflect whether the true agenda behind Jijth’s writings, the DIT Dravidian Invasion Theory, sounds equally attractive and convincing to them.     

 

APPENDIX ADDED 16 Sept 2026:

Why Would Evangelists Want To Promote a DIT?:     

A reader sent me a private mail asking me: “Why would Evangelists want to promote a Dravidian Invasion Theory? And why would a staunch Hindu like Jijith, and one of the staunchest supporters of the Hindu Cause like Koenraad Elst, support such a theory?”

It is a well-known fact that from Day One, Evangelists have been strongly supporting the AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory) and using it as a tool to break out pieces of Hindu Society: Dravidian-language speakers are told that Hinduism is an “Aryan religion” imposed on the originally Dravidian-language speaking native people of India by “Aryan” invaders from outside India (just as “SCs” and “STs”, to put it in present political terms, are told that they are descendants of non-Aryan inhabitants of India, conquered and reduced to a lowly status by “Aryan” invaders who imposed not  just their religion but also their “Aryan” language and an inferior status within the “Hindu” social system) and that therefore they must reject Hinduism − and, of course adopt Christianity, or just simply carry on the Evangelist battle from within Hindu Society.

This fact is so well known to Hindu activists that they automatically assume this to be the natural tactic of Evangelist Christianity. But, on the contrary, this kind of reasoning is out of sync with the normal and natural Christian Ideological Playbook. Christianity does not typically convert people of target communities by appealing to them to embrace their ancestral identities (in this case, the alleged “pre-Hindu” “non-Aryan” religious heritage of Dravidian-language speakers). Christianity (like its successor Islam) typically converts people by telling them that their ancestral religious identities are “Heathen” or “Pagan” identities which will take them to Hell and must therefore be abandoned for the One True Religion.

So the campaign to make sections of Indians (Dravidian-language speakers, “SCs” and “STs”, etc.) reject Hinduism by appealing to their “pre-Aryan-invasion” identities (even if to ultimately accept Christianity), is actually an aberration in Abrahamic Evangelist history. Although it has been a grand and extremely successful tactic so far as India goes, it does not represent true Christian Evangelism. To a true Christian, any “Dravidian” religion, howsoever it is to be defined, is as Heathen, Pagan and a “Doorway-To-Hell” as any “Aryan” religion. And, as identifying Hinduism as “Aryan” and therefore to be rejected in favor of “pre-Aryan” religion was only the first step to Christianization, the next step is to define or redefine what exactly was this “pre-Aryan” religion.

Today, the main target of Evangelism is Tamilnadu, closely followed by Andhra, and both are Dravidian-language speaking areas. And the problem is that howsoever it is redefined, it is not possible to redefine “pre-Aryan” (or specifically “Dravidian”) religion as somehow being the same as Abrahamic Christianity.

So the most ideologically feasible tactic is to leave it almost totally undefined (except to hint that it was somehow ideologically similar to Abrahamic Christianity, without going into specifics). If the Dravidian speakers are accepted as native to India, it leaves the door open for the idea that they were originally idol-worshipping polytheists who held India’s geography to be their sacred geography. Not quite conducive to the Evangelist game! So: the original Dravidian-language speakers must now be claimed to have no original connection to the Indian soil, and it is necessary to make them invaders (into a Pagan India) with no definable religious features of their own which could connect them to idol-worshipping and polytheist Pagan Hinduism. In this sense, they were just like the Christian Evangelists who came much later. Hence the two (Evangelists and Dravidianists) must now become comrades-in-arms against Pagan “Aryan” Hinduism. And the binding force must ultimately be Evangelist Christianity.

Thus, both the AIT and the DIT can be used as weapons in the service of Evangelist Christianity, in different hands and/or in different contexts. [On a broader scale, emphasizing that all Indians, and all their cultures, are ultimately “outsiders” in India is after all a basic element of Evangelist propaganda to counter the point that Christianity is a foreign religion].

 

As to the second question, there can be many reasons why Jijith supports the DIT:

1. The very first reason is that Jijith must have supported the DIT somewhere in the first place, in blind acceptance f some western scholar. Going by his record, he is not the kind of person to admit that he had made a mistake on any major point; and nor the kind of person to at least stop repeating the mistake, whenever a mistake is brought to his notice: the more the evidence is brought forward to show that he was wrong.he just keeps on repeating the wrong assertion again and again in more and more strident terms.

2. Jijith clearly belongs to the school of thought which believes that attack is the best form of defense, and somehow that the best way to defend the AIT is by postulating and promoting on a war footing a counter-case in the form of a DIT! Instead of “Aryans” migrating into a “Dravidian” India, he prefers to insist that “Dravidians” migrated into an “Aryan” India.

3. Jijith also belongs to the particular school of Hindu thought which assigns the origins of all the Vedic-Epic-Puranic tribes to the banks of the Sarasvati river; and holds that the whole of Hindu religion and culture (if not all the people themselves) in all parts of India emanated from the Harappan/Vedic Civilization, as it spread all over the land and gradually “developed” into modern Hinduism. Therefore all aspects of Hinduism from all parts of India represent “Aryan”\Vedic religion as it transformed over time. When speakers of Dravidian languages (as per his theory) migrated through the northwest into South India, they merely merged into the local “Aryan” cultures in the South, replacing only the local languages (he does not clarify what those earlier local languages were), but adopted the local “Vedic”- origin religions. All this is perfectly in sync with the Evangelist approach which seeks to erase all “Pagan Hindu” features from the alleged “Dravidian” religion.

 

What is noteworthy is that while not even the faintest vestige of any Dravidian language has ever been found anywhere outside India, the northwesternmost language Brahui had long been cited (as part of the AIT) to be a remnant of Dravidian speakers who remained behind in the northwest after the other Dravidian speakers migrated South. This is the only linguistic argument that has ever been made so far to take the origins of the Dravidian to and beyond the northwest (since attempts to connect Dravidian with Elamite have been completely debunked: see also my articles on that matter). But today all the major western academic scholars who support the AIT (including, for example, Witzel, Hock, Southworth, etc.) have accepted that Brahui is a migrant from South India. Isn’t it strange that it is Jijith and Koenraad (supposed to be supporters of the OIT) who are today citing an AIT argument which has been abandoned even by the topmost AIT scholars?

As to why Koenraad has formed an alliance with Jijith to propagate his fairy-tales, to spread disinformation about my own writings, and to promote the DIT: Koenraad himself is best placed to answer that question. Is he merely mesmerized by Jijith’s “scientist” status, or is there a bigger agenda?

ADDED 18 September 2026:

As a joke, it may be noted that Koenraad, in reply to a critic who wrote that Jijith’s map featuring the DIT (along with his AIOIT) consisted of mere “non-sense” and “speculations”, stresses that Jijith and he himself “have years of scientific investigation, & built solid knowledge”:

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad/status/2100280656706032045

“For you it is indeed "speculations". Your conformistic beliefs from the younger Max Müller, which he himself already outgrew in the 19th century, is still sheepishly repeated, yes. By contrast, Jijith & myself have years of scientific investigation, & built solid knowledge.”

11:18 PM · Sep 16, 2026

I find this bid to promote genuine “non-sense” and “speculations” as “scientific investigation” and building of “solid knowledge” truly pathetic.