: Opinion: Perils of righting historical wrongs #IndiaNEWS #News By Arun Sinha Thanks to Hindu revivalists, ‘historical wrong’ is never out of the news. We are at the Gyanvapi mosque today but

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Opinion: Perils of righting historical wrongs #IndiaNEWS #News
By Arun Sinha
Thanks to Hindu revivalists, ‘historical wrong’ is never out of the news. We are at the Gyanvapi mosque today but we will surely go to other mosques sooner or later. For, so deeply traumatised is the Hindu heart by the demolition of temples by the Muslim rulers in medieval India — we are told — that it would not find rest until all those temples have been reclaimed.
Are we on the right path? Are the Hindu revivalists taking the nation in the right direction? The answer is a big no. Not only because they are relentlessly battering the walls of the centuries-old fort of religious harmony, but also because they are trying to seduce the nation to lose its power of reasoning and sense of history.
Look at the way they define ‘historical wrongs’. These ‘wrongs’ are invariably committed by Muslim rulers in medieval India. Now, nobody denies that Muslim rulers demolished Hindu temples. But were they the only ones who demolished places of worship in Indian history? Was there no destruction of religious establishments before Islam arrived in India?
Pre-Muslim India
There are several descriptions and references of Hindu kings demolishing Buddhist and Jain temples and monasteries in pre-Muslim India in the ancient and early medieval literature left behind by historians, seers, religious chroniclers and foreign travellers. These descriptions and references are supplemented by the discovery of remains of Buddhist structures at the sites of Hindu temples by archaeologists at several places in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Buddhism and Jainism were looked upon by Brahmanical leaders of Hinduism as heresies and denounced as the religious ideologies of the outcasts, worthy of little else but obliteration. Buddhism spread far and wide during the Mauryan emperor Asoka’s lifetime, and that was one of the reasons that generated a great deal of hostility from the Brahmanical forces towards it, which was reflected in the widespread persecution of the Buddhists and the destruction and desecration of their temples and monasteries in the centuries following the Mauryan era.
Pushyamitra, a king of the Sunga dynasty that took over power after the Mauryas, was said to have destroyed many Buddhist monasteries and killed Buddhist monks wherever he could find them; so did the Gauda king of Bengal, Shashanka. According to Rajtarangini, a Shaivite descendant of Ashoka ruling Kashmir destroyed Buddhist monasteries in his kingdom. Hsuan Tsang in his travels through India in the 7th century AD mentions that Shashanka cut down the Bodhi tree in Gaya under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment. Hindu seers have gloated over the temples of Buddhists and Jains being left in ruins in the wake of Shankara’s triumphal anti-heresy campaign.

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