Francois Gautier is a truly vindicated man today. For him, the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on January 22 is a dream come true.

“It was great. I was reporting the temple-masjid issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s and I could never have imagined that a day would come when such a grand temple would be built at that site in Ayodhya,” Gautier told this reporter.

He reminisces: “In the late 1980s, when I started reporting in India it was the secular Hindus, allied with Christians, Muslims, and Marxists, who ruled the roost. There were very few voices which spoke up for Hindus”.

That picture may seem radically opposite today.

This French journalist, an Indophile and avid supporter of all causes Hindu much before it became fashionable to do so, credits Prime Minister Narendra Modi for consecration of the Ram temple.

“Only Modi could have done it. Full credit to him,” Gautier said.

‘Modi is going to win’

Asked about the political motivations of the Prime Minister and the BJP through such high voltage coverage, months before the general elections, the India-based journalist, who has in the past served as the South Asian correspondent for multiple reputed French-language dailies, including Li Figaro, said that is no more than a charge being levelled by the Indian opposition parties.

Also read: Ayodhya: Massive crowd throngs Ram temple as mandir opens its doors for devotees after ‘pran pratishtha’

“Modi is going to win elections anyway. But I reiterate that it is only he who could have achieved what was long overdue,” Gautier said, stressing that the Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, should have been present.

“After nearly 15 centuries of bloody invasions, enslavement, razing of millions of temples, the inauguration of the Ram Mandir symbolised the return of a united Hindu psyche. For long, Indians had a confused identity of themselves: British colonisation left a deep imprint on the Indian mind, which started to think that everything good comes from the West,” the journalist, who is building a private museum in Pune, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum of Indian History (CSMMIH), which he founded in 2012 under the banner of his not-for-profit organization, the Foundation For Advancement of Cultural Ties, said.

Hinduism spread peacefully

The younger generations today may be unaware of the intellectual battles, which raged during the 1980s and 1990s, when protagonists on both sides – including himself – flexed their muscles.

“Sitaram Goel, a visionary and extraordinary Hindu, who paved the way for Hindu renaissance; Rajeev Malhotra who gave his wealth and his health for the intellectual defence of Hindus; Koenraad Elst, the wonderful Belgium-born Indologist, who started speaking first about the reality of Ayodhya as well as Muslim and Marxist negation – and Nehruvian historians such as Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib, who denied atrocities of Muslim invasions,” Gautier summed up.

Hinduism, he said, is the only religion in the world that was spread peacefully.

“In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions. You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus,” the French journalist, who shuttles between Pondicherry, Bangalore, and Delhi, said.

Gautier’s only gripe: he was not invited to Ayodhya on the D-day, January 22, “which is an auspicious day for Hindus.” But that he reasons, is because of too many VIPs that day.