After the reclamation of Ram Janmabhoomi by Hindus, the left media and its Islamist cohorts are bracing themselves to unleash a war against the Hindus. The media which promoted myriad lies of the Marxists and other Leftist-minded Islamic apologists convinced the Muslims of the Babri Masjid Action Committee that no temple had existed at the spot of the disputed structure on Ram Janmabhoomii! Syed Shahabuddin once said in 1990 [on record] that he will demolish Babri Masjid with a hammer if proven that a temple pre-existed at the spot.
Until 1989 there had been no question about the Ayodhya Ramjanmabhoomi site’s history. All the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, were in agreement about the pre-existence of a Ram temple at the site. “Rama’s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple”, according to the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry “Ayodhya”. There was testimony after testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with a mosque.
Belgium-based world famous scholar, Dr. Koenraad Elst (1959-) has written:
“In December 1990, the government of Chandra Shekhar invited the two groups involved, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Babri Masjid Action Committee, to mandate a team of scholars for discussing the historical truth of the matter. Misled by the media into believing that the Hindu claims were pure fantasy, the BMAC office-bearers arrived ill-prepared, expecting a cakewalk over the ‘discredited case of the VHP fanatics’. They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting their case.
The BMAC then invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who arrived at the next meeting with the demand that they are recognized as “independent scholars” entitled to sit in judgment on the controversy, i.e. to pass a verdict between their BMAC employers and their VHP opponents. The government representative did not grant this hilarious demand.
At the next meeting, these Marxist historians declared that they hadn’t studied the evidence yet and needed six more weeks, a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was absolutely no evidence at all for a temple. At the meeting scheduled for 24 January 1991, they simply didn’t show up anymore.”
The 1990-91 scholars’ debate was a resounding victory for the Hindu side. It also showed that the Leftist historians can only lie to a naïve or uninformed audience or an audience which WANTS to believe or hear what they say; while in front of real scholars, they have no arguments on facts. We saw this in case of other negationists like Supriya Verma, in their articles and publications, they denied the existence of any temple, refuting the ASI report, and yet when questioned by the court, they admitted that they had not visited the site and what they said was merely their ‘opinion’.
After it was proven in the December 1990-January 1991 scholars’ debate with irrefutable evidence presented by the Hindu side that the Babri Masjid had indeed been built after demolishing a temple, Syed Shahabuddin and the Muslim side was left speechless and did a U-turn!
Later, the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) did an excavation on orders of the court in 2003, the labourers who did the digging included a number of Muslims, deliberately hired as per the demand of the Muslim side, and 4 out of the 20 authors of the ASI report which found the temple were also Muslims [included as per their demand], and the excavation found a temple. Despite all their demands on the inclusion of Muslim labourers and Muslim authors of the ASI report being granted and evidence of a temple being found, the Muslim side refused to accept the truth that a temple pre-existed, and refused to give up claim.
All along, post-1989 Marxists and Muslims had claimed that Babri Masjid had been built on virgin land. Later when the existence of a structure [clearly temple] was proven, some of them started claiming that the pre-existing structure was Buddhist, and not a temple, or, like Supriya Verma, that they were ‘older mosques’! Then what about their claim of the Babri having been built on ‘virgin land’? In short, nothing in the world [not all the proofs in the world] will ever make them accept that the Babri Masjid was built after demolishing a temple on that site, despite conclusive literary evidence, conclusive archaeological evidence, despite the ASI report’s authors including Muslims, the labourers digging including Muslims.
Dr. Koenraad Elst has also written in his book “BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence” (Voice of India, 1997):
“You wouldn’t guess it from their polished convent-school English, their trendy terminology, or their sanctimoniousness, but the likes of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib or Gyanendra Pandey [our comment: Marxist historians in India who have indulged in negationism-denying the crimes of Islamic rulers, and denying that a temple existed at the spot of the disputed structure] have blood on their hands. The wave of Muslim violence after the Ayodhya demolition (and the boomerang of police repression and Shiv Sena retaliation) was at least partly due to the disinformation by supposed experts, who denied that the disputed building [our comment: Babri Masjid] had a violent iconoclastic prehistory [our comment: i.e. been built after demolishing a temple], and implied that Hindus can get away with concocted history in their attacks on innocent mosques. This disinformation gave Muslim militants the sense of justification needed to mount a ‘revenge’ operation and to mobilize decent Muslims for acts of violence, which they never would have committed if they had known the truth about Islam’s guilt in Ayodhya”.
Now there is a very real danger that the pseudo-secularists’ (apologists of Islamists and Hindu-baiters) demonization of Babri demolition and opposition to the Ayodhya Ram temple Bhoomi Pujan will lead to more attacks on Hindus in Pakistan and/or Bangladesh or even in India like they did in the past. Hence there is an urgent need to highlight Islamists’ demolition of Hindu houses and around 5000 temples in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kashmir under Indian rule (including 500+ temples demolished BEFORE the demolition of the illegal structure) both before and after the demolition of 6 December 1992, looting and killings of Hindus in Bangladesh, bomb blasts in Mumbai, Chennai, other places and the fact that there is going to be re-building of a mosque at a different site in Ayodhya.
There were around 100 temples demolished in Kashmir (under Indian control) and 400+ temples demolished in Bangladesh BEFORE the demolition of the illegal structure called Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. There were around 400 temples demolished in Bangladesh in the year 1989 itself in light of the Ayodhya movement, including around 200 temples demolished in October-November 1989 in light of the Shilanyas of 9 November 1989. Thousands of Hindu homes and businesses were destroyed. Many Hindu shops were looted and burnt.
At least 45 temples were demolished in Bangladesh in 1990, in light of the kar sewa of 30 October and 2 November 1990, at least 34 in Dhaka district and at least 11 in Chittagong district. Hundreds (at least 550+) of Hindu shops and houses were looted or burnt in this violence in Bangladesh too.
Since these attacks happened in Bangladesh on such a large scale in both 1989 and 1990, it is absolutely certain that such anti-Hindu violence would also have occurred in Pakistan. However, this writer has not been able to find out the exact number of temples demolished in Pakistan or Hindus attacked there in 1989 or 1990. He found a report that at least, one Hindu was killed and 4 temples were damaged in November 1990 in Pakistan.
After the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, it is reported that there were at least 245 temples demolished in Pakistan, and 3600 (Three thousand six hundred) temples demolished in Bangladesh. In the 1992 anti-Hindu pogroms in Bangladesh post-Babri, 28,000 non-Muslim homes were destroyed, 2,700 Hindu businesses, 3,600 temples and other places of worship were destroyed. The estimates of the total loss amounted to 2 billion (200 crores) Bangladesh Takas. More than a hundred temples were also demolished in Kashmir under Indian rule, and also other temples in some other places in India like Bhopal, Assam.
95% of all Hindu temples in Pakistan have been destroyed or converted since 1990. As per the 2014 survey report of the All Pakistan Hindu Rights Movement (APHRM) out of the total 428 minority places of worship in the country, 408 are converted into toy stores, restaurants, government offices and schools after 1990 and only 20 Hindu temples are remaining there. It is possible that a lesser number of temples were attacked in Pakistan than Bangladesh after 6 Dec 1992. It doesn’t mean that Pakistan was more tolerant, it was because of the low number of temples existing there by 1992. Thousands of temples had already been destroyed by that time since Pakistan came into being in 1947.
Sikh religious places are usurped too. Many of the places of worship of Sikhs have also been decimated by Pakistan. The most prominent among them was Guru Duwara Gali, a Sikh religious place, that has been converted into a garments shop in Abbottabad. Around 171 Gurudwaras in Pakistan are either destroyed, are close to collapsing, have been converted into mosques (or schools, police stations, etc.), or were demolished in order to build homes.
The government of J&K officially said in 2012 that 208 temples were destroyed in Kashmir in 20 years since the early 1990s. But its true number may be much higher. According to the Kashmiri Pandit organization Kashmiri Pandit Sangarsh Samiti (KPSS), the actual number of destroyed temples is around 550. The Government of J&K admitted that its summer capital Srinagar tops the chart in the destruction of temples with the number of such destroyed temples being 57 there. However, none of the mosques was destroyed in this vandalism. Many of these temples are now converted into mosques.
This article gives just an indication of what happened in Pakistan in just 1 day after Babri demolition- Pakistanis attacked 30 Hindu temples. A lot more happened after that too. Police forces did not intervene when the temples were attacked, nor did they act when a crowd stormed the Air-India office, dragged furniture into the street, and set the office on fire as reported by The New York Times on 8 December 1992. At least 24 people (safe to assume, mostly Hindus) were killed in Pakistan and at least 100 temples were attacked by Muslims as reported by The Dallas Morning News on 15 December 1992.
Pakistani journalist Reema Abbasi and photographer Madiha Aijaz have travelled across the length of Pakistan and documented the state of Hindu temples. Reema wrote a book titled “Historic Temples in Pakistan: A Call to Conscience”. Reema notes that nearly 1000 temples were targeted during that frenzy spate of vile destruction of temples in Pakistan which took place after the Babri mosque’s destruction in the early 1990s. This same number of 1,000 temples being attacked was given by this website giving information on Hindus of Pakistan.
Just read one report of the Associated Press dated 31 October 1990 on the violence in Bangladesh in 1990 in light of kar sewa in Ayodhya headlined Moslems Attack Hindu Temples in Bangladesh:
“CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh (AP) _ Gangs of Moslems, many armed with knives and clubs, attacked Hindu temples, smashed idols and set fire to hundreds of homes in response to clashes in India, witnesses said today.
Angry mobs took to the streets late Tuesday on hearing news of an attempt by fundamentalist Hindus in India to take over a mosque and replace it with a temple at the holy town of Ayodhya. More than 150 people have been killed in India in fighting related to the dispute…
A crowd of about 100 people defied the curfew imposed at dawn today and assaulted a Hindu shrine. In all, at least 11 temples have been broken into and vandalized since Tuesday, according to officials and witnesses.
The worst violence flared at Kaiballadham, site of the Chittagong’s largest temple. Witnesses said 2,000 people with knives and iron rods rampaged through a residential district around the temple at midnight and burned at least 300 houses.
Police fired into the air to disperse a mob that was preventing firemen from approaching the area. Sushil Gosh, one of 500 displaced people who set up a camp on a hill above the temple, said four men were missing.
Police also fired at Reazuddin Bazar and Chittagong Medical College when mobs of up to 200 people tried to storm temples and burn Hindu-owned stores. One group destroyed about 50 mud-and-straw houses inhabited by low-caste Hindus, mainly fishermen. Another group attacked a garage owned by a Hindu and damaged five vehicles.
Police said about 1,500 Hindu fishermen at central Chowkbazar district fled their homes during the night attack but returned in the morning when the situation was brought under control…”
If the media had repeatedly mentioned these attacks on Hindus (killings of 24 people, mostly Hindus, in Pakistan), destruction of thousands of temples before and after Babri, destruction of thousands of Hindu houses, loss of property of Hindus of 200 crore Takas only after 6 December 1992, and a lot in 1989 and 1990 too, there would have been no (or at least, lesser) infuriation among Muslims, and it is quite possible that the bomb blasts of Mumbai and Kolkata of March 1993, and subsequent acts of terrorism could have been avoided.
After this anti-Hindu violence in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir, there were the deadly 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai which killed 257 people, injured 1400+ and damaged property worth more than 100 crore rupees. There were bomb blasts by Islamists in Kolkata as well, killing 69. After this there was a bomb blast by Islamists in August 1993 in the RSS office in Chennai, killing 11 including 6 high-level pracharaks. Then on 6 December 1993, there were blasts in various trains. On 6 December 1997, there were again blasts in trains in Tamil Nadu killing 10 people and injuring 70.
But the Indian media covered up these temple demolitions, as well as these bomb blasts by Islamic radicals in India (except the 1993 Mumbai blasts), and focused only on Babri Masjid-that too ignoring the fact that it was built after the demolition of a temple, on a site very sacred to the Hindus (the birthplace of Lord Ram), and a slaughter of hundreds of Hindus by Babur’s soldiers in 1528 at that place before demolishing the temple.
Besides this, it is entirely obvious that a Hindu sacred site (Ayodhya) belongs to Hindus; no one, whether a religious Western or East Asian or a Muslim will ever agree to give up his own sacred sites to others. There are dozens of mosques in Ayodhya. Forget temples, not even non-Muslims are allowed in Mecca and Medina. Here, we will not even consider the historical context of the demolition of thousands of temples including sacred ones like Somnath, Puri, etc, and slaughter of millions of Hindus in medieval India. Seen just in the context of the pre-and-post 6 December 1992 violence, the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya is a very tiny atonement for the acts of Islamists.
And here we are again not considering the lives sacrificed by kar sewaks (the death toll of kar sewaks in the 30 October 1990 kar sewa was more than 120, nowhere near the official figure of 16) in Ayodhya in the 1990 kar sewa, as well as 1992 kar sewa (some kar sewaks lost their lives on 6 December 1992 in Ayodhya too, e.g. one man named Dinesh Chand) and in the Godhra massacre of 27 February 2002. Ram temple is a very small consolation, in light of all these facts.
Seen in the correct context, Babri demolition itself was absolutely nothing Muslims should have had infuriation about had they truly known the reality- as Koenraad Elst said. But here it is a large section of the media which is guilty of reporting inflammatorily by needlessly infuriating Muslims even more. It is not that there would have been no sense of infuriation. Because the terrorists who attack and kill do so thinking that it is their duty to ‘convert or kill’ all non-Muslims, and especially believe that worship of idols and more than 1 God (polytheism) are unforgivable sins. Hindus who are idolators and polytheists are to be severally crushed, according to this ideology.
Bhure Lal, former IAS officer who had also served in the Army in Vigilance Commission and is a highly respected expert wrote in his book “The Monstrous face of ISI” (published in early 2000 just after the 1999 Kargil war) on pp 44-45:
“The ISI resorts to the following:
…5-Infiltrate and capture mass media and identify pro-Islamic newspapers and asking them to write pro-Pakistani and pro-Islamic articles.
6-Spreading disinformation through media that Indian Muslims are victimized.
7-Indentifying Indian politicians who thrive on Bangladeshi Muslim vote bank so that they can be protected against police and other administrative action…
12- The agency had set up a ‘disinformation’ cell and planted ‘stories’ designed to denigrate India. The ISI has funds placed at its disposal to manipulate news. …
15-The ISI employed tens of thousands of agents, “including at least every other newspaper reporter”…”
Who gains by the repeated painting of Muslims as victims, whitewashing their fanaticism completely? It only helps our enemies across the border and Islamic radicals inside. Such repeated infuriation of Muslims by painting them as victims over the Ayodhya Ramjanmabhoomi issue and the demolition of the Babri Masjid has to be countered by highlighting the guilt of Muslims in all these anti-Hindu acts in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir as well as in other parts of India like the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, 1993 Kolkata blasts, 1993 RSS Chennai office blasts, 1997 Tamil Nadu trains blasts etc.
