Sita Ram Goel - Legacy and Criticism

Legacy and Criticism

Sita Ram Goel has been described by Koenraad Elst as an "intellectual kshatriya". Another sympathiser, David Frawley, said about Goel that he was "modern India’s greatest intellectual kshatriya", and "one of India’s most important thinkers in the post-independence era". According to Frawley, "Sitaram followed a strong rationalistic point of view that did not compromise the truth even for politeness sake. His intellectual rigor is quite unparalleled in Hindu circles..."

The Japanese scholar Mitsuhiro Kondô claimed that Golwalkar's views on monotheistic religions "bear a striking resemblance to, and at times are identical to" the views of the Sita Ram Goel. She claimed: "the common structure between these two ideological currents, separated by several decades as they are, highlights the core of the Hindu nationalist movement: ethnicism or exclusive particularism" Koenraad Elst disagrees with Kondo, and says: "In sharp contrast with the repetitive-nationalistic and Indocentric approach of Golwalkar and the RSS, Goel and Shourie (and Ram Swarup before them) have developed a historical and philosophical critique of Christianity and Islam that has universal validity. It is part of continuum with Western and other foreign critiques of the said religions.

Catherine Cornille has claimed that Goel belongs to a movement that "seeks to return to the pure Vedic religion", which Goel has denied.