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Introduction > Page 1
What was uncovered at Sidhpur only to be covered up again was verily the tip of an iceberg which remains submerged in hundreds of histories written by Muslim historians, in Hindu literary sources which are slowly coming to light, in the accounts of foreign travellers who visited India and the neighbouring lands during medieval and modern times, and above all in the reports of the archaeological surveys carried out in all those countries which had been for long the cradles of Hindu culture. No systematic effort has yet been made by scholars to see the iceberg emerge from the dark depths and tell its own story in a simple and straight-forward manner. Rare is the historian or archaeologist who had related this vandalism to the theology of Islam based on the Qurăn and the Sunnah of the Prophet. On the contrary, the subject has been politicised by the votaries of Secularism who become hysterical by the very mention of the untold story. Politicians in power have made and are making frantic efforts to suppress every tip of the iceberg which chances to surface in spite, of the conspiracy to keep it out of sight.
Some of these politicians are masquerading as academicians and selling far-fetched and fantastic apologies for the havoc caused by Islamic iconoclasm. The following story illustrates what happens whenever the subject comes into the open and invites attention.
One day in August, 1986, The Times of India printed on its front page the photographs of two stones carrying defaced carvings of some Hindu deities. There was a short statement beneath the photographs that the stones had been found by the Archaeological Survey of India in course of repairs to the Qutb Mînăr at Delhi. The stones, according to the Survey, had been built into a wall with the carved faces turned inwards. But the daily had dropped this part of the news.
Some correspondence cropped up in the letters-to-the-editor column of the newspaper. The majority of writers congratulated the editor for breaking a conspiracy of silence regarding publication of a certain type of historical facts in the mass media. A few writers regretted that a news item like that should have been published in a prestigious daily in an atmosphere of growing communal tension. None of the writers raised the question or speculated as to how those stones happened to be there. None of them drew any inference from the fact that the Qutb Mînăr stands near the Quwwat al-Islăm Masjid which, according to an inscription on its eastern gate, was built from the materials of twenty-seven Hindu temples.
Author : Shri Sita Ram Goel
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