The NCERTs denial of Islamic iconoclasms uniqueness

(Pragyata, March 2017)

During the Rama Janmabhumi commotion ca. 1990, it was the done thing for
secularists to deny that Muslims had ever committed destruction of Hindu
sacred buildings and statues. This even became the official position worldwide,
for practically all Indologists and India-watchers interiorized it and zealously
condemned any acknowledgment of Islamic iconoclasm as stemming from
Hindu fanaticism. However, this position is hard to sustain, because it is so
obviously untrue. Therefore, they have recently refined their propaganda
strategy, in two ways.

First, they now minimize Islamic iconoclasm, but admit some of it. Not that
they would concede the Islamic motivation for this Mandir-and-Murti
destruction, but alright, some Muslims had done it. That, after all, is what
human beings do, Hindus included, see? As long as Islam remains out of the
picture, they are willing to admit a little bit of destruction for the sake of
salvaging their own credibility.

Second, they now try to make Hinduism guilty of the crimes of Islam, viz. by
providing the inspiration through its own example. Muslims destroyed Hindu
temples because Hindus had destroyed Hindu temples. Provincials like our
secularists and their foreign imitators try to lead you by the nose towards
whatever happened within Indias borders, and never ask, nor want you to ask,
what the record of Islam outside India is, including in the period before it
entered India. They dont want you to realize that Islams behaviour in India
was only a continuation of its behavior in West Asia and around the
Mediterranean, starting with Mohammeds own model behaviour in Arabia.

The secularist narrative is now being propagated everywhere and inserted into
the textbooks of history, including in the projected new textbooks mulled over
by the National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). As per
the official procedure, there is a provision for feedback from the public. A
friend of mine sent in an objection to the NCERTs scenario. What follows is
the NCERTs response, interspersed with my comments.
Bluff

The objection to the cited passage that temples demonstrated the power and
resources of the kings who built them and that is the reason why medieval rulers
targeted the temples of rival rulers -- can be substantiated by innumerable
references.

This is sheer bluff. The two examples given do of course not amount to the
"innumerable" cases which they mendaciously claim to have. Nor have such
numbers of cases been mentioned elsewhere. Yet, given the strong motive the
NCERT secularists have to overrule the straightforward narrative of Islamic
iconoclasm, they would by now certainly have published a book full of such
evidence, and made sure it was quoted in every relevant paper and editorial if
it existed.

Sheer bluff, we said, but in the real world, there is nothing sheer about bluff.
On the contrary, bluff is a mighty weapon that can produce impressive results.
Take the Rama Janmabhumi controversy. The secularists suddenly claimed that
all the Muslims and Hindus and Europeans who had unitedly assumed that a
Rama temple had stood at the disputed site on which the Babri Masjid had been
imposed, had all been wrong. They offered no evidence whatsoever for their
proposed scenario (say, a sales contract in which a landlord sold Babar a piece of
empty real estate to build a mosque on), and denied the evidence on the opposite
side which had existed all along and which accumulated further once the
challenge to bring more evidence had been raised.

Though their behaviour was that of conspiracy-mongers, their shrill bluff carried
authoritative public opinion with it. They managed to make the Government
abandon its plans for a negotiated settlement, they managed to have national and
state governments toppled, they managed to trigger a number of bloodbaths, all
through sheer bluff. Even when they collapsed one after another when
questioned in Court, even when their bluff had been exposed (though the media
did all they could to hide this development from you), they have never
apologized, never publicly admitted how wrong they had been. Bluff can get you
very far in life, so the NCERT tries more of it.
Even the evidential value of their evidence is bluff. No matter how many cases
of Hindu idol abduction they manage to find, it will never amount to proof for the
hypothesis they really want to push: that Muslim conquerors and rulers did what
they did because Hindus had inspired them to do it. These conquerors mostly
didnt even know the record of Hindu kings, and at any rate they didnt care. They
would never have wanted to be seen imitating the idolaters and instead invoked
the solid justification for iconoclasm within their own tradition. Mohammed
himself had set the example, and in his wake came the conquerors of West Asia
and the Mediterranean, unaffected by Hindu examples.

Power of discrimination

Consider the gold statue of Vishnu which was once in the Lakshmana temple of
Khajuraho. The statue actually belonged to the rulers of Kangra, it was taken by
the Pratiharas and finally by the Candella ruler Yasovarman just before 950 CE
(and a near contemporary of Mahmud Ghazni). The inscription in the foundation
stone of the Khajuraho Laksmana temple commemorated these events and stated
With his troops of elephants and horses, Herambapala (Pratihara, ruler of
Kanauj) seized it form [the king of Kangra]. Obtaining it from his son, the
(Pratihara) prince Devapala, the illustrious (Candella) king Yasovarman an
ornament among kings and a crusher of enemies performed the ritual
establishment of [Vishnu] Vaikuntha [in the Laksmana temple at Khajuraho].
See, F. Kielhorn. Inscriptions from Khajuraho, Epigraphica Indica, vol. 1
(1892), p. 192.

This example is a beautiful illustration precisely of how Hindu idol-kidnapping

differs radically from Islamic idol-breaking. According to the NCERT itself, the
Vishnu statue from Khajuraho was abducted not once but twice, and ended up
(not walled into a lavatory or underfoot, nor smashed to pieces, but) consecrated
as a prominent Murti in a Vaishnava temple, exactly where it belonged. What was
abducted, was merely an object of art, duly consecrated. There was no destruction
of the religion behind the Murti. It was used for Vaishnava worship in its original
site, after it was abducted, and again after Yasovarman abducted it. Further, the
worship at the temples robbed of their Murtis, was perfectly allowed to continue,
though they would have to install a new Murti.
By contrast, in Islamic iconoclasm, the goal was to destroy the idolatrous
religion of which the Murtis were an expression. The destruction of Murtis and
the demolition of Mandirs had the purpose of destroying Hinduism or whichever
the Pagan religion behind some given Murtis was. When Mahmud Ghaznavi was
done destroying the Somnath temple, he did not mean to let Shiva worship resume
at the site, not as long as he was militarily in a position to prevent it. While
Yasovarman installed the abducted Vishnu Murti for worship, Mahmud Ghaznavi
would have the captured Murtis destroyed, or worked them into lavatory walls or
into floors in order the humiliate them -- not so much the Murtis themselves but
the religion they represented. In destroying the Somnath Shivalingam, he meant
to destroy Shiva worship.

One day, a man needed some paper to light a campfire, but he had none. His
friend suggested: I have some paper, wait. And he took his wallet to produce a
wad of dollar bills. The friend turned out not to see any significance in the dollar
bills, only their material dimension. Whether a little rectangle of paper was a
currency note worth an exchange value, or a newspaper clipping containing
specific information, or merely a blank slip of paper, they were all the same to
him: enough paper to light a campfire with. Now that is Nehruvian secularism for
you: a deliberate suspension of the power of discrimination. This wilful
superficiality claims not to see any difference between abducting an object
without any further consequence and destroying this object as part of the
attempted destruction of the religion it stands for.

Lalitaditya

From a different cultural zone note also the example of the conflict between the
soldiers of the Gauda (Bengal) ruler and the ruler of Kashmir, Lalitaditya. The
episode concerns the moment when the Bengali rulers chose to attack the idol of
Vishnu Parihasakesava who was providentially saved because the soldiers
mistook this image of the royal God for another. The Rajatarangini notes
Though the king was abroad, the priests observed that the soldiers wanted to
enter, and they closed the gates of the Parihasakesava shrine. Aroused with
boldness, the soldiers got hold of the silver Ramasvamin image, which they
mistook for Parihasakesava. They carried it out and ground it into dust. And even
as Lalitadityas troops who had come out from the city were killing them at each
step, the Gaudas continued to break it into particles and scatter them in every
direction. See Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, trans., Rajatarangini, The saga of the
Kings of Kashmir, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1935, pp. 326-28.

Note firstly that this Lalitaditya episode is also related, complete with the spin
dear to the NCERT, in Robert M. Hayden, Aykan Erdemir,Tuba Tanyeri-
Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Devika Rangachari, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno,
Enrique Lpez-Hurtado, and Milica Baki-Hayden: Antagonistic Tolerance:
Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces, 2013, p.136-137. As you
can see, the Nehruvian secularist bluff is being spread far and wide and is
acquiring the status of academic orthodoxy.

We are here dealing with a typical case of Western imitators, if not careerists
who want to serve the current orthodoxy of battling Islamophobia.
Concerning India, they have completely swallowed the Nehruvian bias. Thus,
about Islamic iconoclasm deniers Romila Thapar and Richard Eaton, they say:
As scholars of India in the late 20th century, their aim in doing so is to counter
the accusations by Hindu nationalists that the Muslims uniquely violated the
sensibilities and rights of Hindus by destroying temples, by showing that Hindu
rulers had done much the same thing before Muslims reached India. (RM
Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

It is in itself commendable that they point out the political intentions of these
academics. These have a purpose other than dispassionately seeking the truth,
which to Marxists would only be bourgeois objectivity. While not in itself
disqualifying their research, it should at least set some alarm bells ringing. But
this political bias only enjoys the unquestioning approval of the new generation
of dupes.

So much have they already interiorized the belief in Hindu iconoclasm that they
take it one step further: From the perspective of the AT [= Antagonistic
Tolerance] project, of course it would be surprising if Hindu rulers had not done
so. (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Naturally they should think so, for it fits in with the reigning paradigm that all
religions are essentially the same.
At the end, when practical conclusions are drawn, fashionable academics tend
to differentiate again and favour Islam over Hinduism, e.g. by clamouring about
Islamophobia but ignoring Hinduphobia (including their own); but at some
point within their narrative, it is useful to put forward the equality and sameness
of all religions, viz. in order to preclude or drown out all specific Hindu
complaints about distinctly Islamic behaviour.

Since those authors are only second-hand spokesmen of the Nehruvian view,
they sometimes let on facts that, when properly analysed, dont really fit their
narrative, e.g.: Tantalizingly, Eaton (2000a:293) mentions that temples not
identified with royal patrons were generally left unharmed. (RM Hayden et al.:
Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Tantalizing? Only if you pursue the Nehruvian paradigm. In fact it follows

logically from the difference between Hinduism and Islam. If at all there were
Hindu kings who harmed temples because through them they wanted to harm
hostile kings, they clearly opted for a policy that constituted another distinction
with Muslim iconoclasm: they left politically irrelevant temples untouched. By
contrast, when Muslim armies went on an iconoclastic spree, they did not care
about these petty considerations, precisely because their motive had nothing to
do with royal patrons but only with non-Islamic religion.

Thus, when the Ghurid army ca. 1193 destroyed a thousand temples in
Varanasi (as admitted by Eaton), obviously not all of them had enjoyed royal
patronage. But all of them contained Pagan idols, and that was enough to get the
Muslim conquerors in a destructive mood. This off-hand refutes the whole point
of this new-fangled soft-Marxist hypothesis: that iconoclasm had nothing to do
with religion.

Now, as to Lalitaditya, he defeated the Gauda king, invited him with

the Parihasakeshava (Vaishnava) idol as guarantee for the Gauda kings safety,
yet had him murdered. To take revenge, the Gauda servants contrived to visit
the relevant shrine in order to destroy this idol. Though they mistook another
idol for Parihasakeshava (and apparently the story is gleefully told in order to
convey this idols supposed cleverness in arranging for its own safety at the
expense of another), they did indeed destroy the idol that they could lay their
hands on. The fragmentation of the idol is duly described.

So, this indeed is one rare case where Hindus destroyed a Hindu idol. To be
sure, they did nothing to Vaishnavism in Kashmir, nor in Bengal, nor anywhere
else. They only wanted to get at that particular idol, a radical difference with the
numerous campaigns of idol-breaking by Muslims, who were not so fussy.
While Hindus did it, Hinduism was not involved. On the contrary, the text itself
stipulates that their motive was quite mundane, viz. vengeance for their
murdered king. The perpetrators did not quote any Hindu scripture prescribing:
Thou shalt destroy a Parihasakeshava idol whenever thou seest one! They did
not invoke any idol-breaking model behaviour of a Vedic Rishi.

Islamic iconoclasm

We have spent some time writing out several pages in analyzing the NCERT
response to an objection. To be sure, a fool can famously ask more questions in
a few lines than a normal man can answer in a number of pages. Nevertheless,
the fact deserves mention that, through misdirection, the NCERT has succeeded
in keeping us busy all while the true answer was so simple. We have been
forced to deal with two of the handful of cases of idol-abduction and
iconoclasm by Hindus as the supposed reason for Islamic iconoclasm, when in
reality, Islamic iconoclasm had nothing to do anything good or bad done by a
Hindu. And no secret is made of this in Muslim chronicles, clear enough about
the real motive.

Neither the NCERT, nor the Nehruvian historians, nor their foreign followers,
has ever succeeded in finding a Muslim chronicle saying that the Sultan was
inspired by Hindu example to destroy idols and demolish temples. The point,
after all, was not finding fault with what Hindus may have done (though finding
fault with Hindus is certainly also on the secularists agenda), but to explain
through Hindu behaviour the known Islamic conduct of iconoclasm. This
relation between Islamic iconoclasm and Hindu example has never ever been
established. On the contrary, whenever Muslim iconoclasts feel the need to
motivate their destructive behaviour, they cite Islamic examples, first of all the
destruction of the idols in the Kaba by Mohammed himself.

And let alone the words in chronicles or elsewhere, it is actual deeds that prove
the radical difference between Islamic iconoclasm and any possible Hindu
attitude. The NCERT itself quotes a case where a Vishnu statue was abducted,
and then installed for worship by the abductor himself. If such were the example
followed by Muslim iconoclasts, we would expect to find mosques where Hindu
statues from, say, the Somnath temple or the Rama Janmabhumi temple had
been installed. Unlike the Nehruvians, we are not provincials and will not
confine ourselves to India, so images of Apollo, Osiris, or any other deity will
also do. Pray, NCERT, where is that mosque where an abducted idol has been
installed for worship? We are not asking for two examples, just one.

(Pragyata, March 2017)

During the Rama Janmabhumi commotion ca. 1990, it was the done thing for
secularists to deny that Muslims had ever committed destruction of Hindu
sacred buildings and statues. This even became the official position worldwide,
for practically all Indologists and India-watchers interiorized it and zealously
condemned any acknowledgment of Islamic iconoclasm as stemming from
Hindu fanaticism. However, this position is hard to sustain, because it is so
obviously untrue. Therefore, they have recently refined their propaganda
strategy, in two ways.

First, they now minimize Islamic iconoclasm, but admit some of it. Not that
they would concede the Islamic motivation for this Mandir-and-Murti
destruction, but alright, some Muslims had done it. That, after all, is what
human beings do, Hindus included, see? As long as Islam remains out of the
picture, they are willing to admit a little bit of destruction for the sake of
salvaging their own credibility.

Second, they now try to make Hinduism guilty of the crimes of Islam, viz. by
providing the inspiration through its own example. Muslims destroyed Hindu
temples because Hindus had destroyed Hindu temples. Provincials like our
secularists and their foreign imitators try to lead you by the nose towards
whatever happened within Indias borders, and never ask, nor want you to ask,
what the record of Islam outside India is, including in the period before it
entered India. They dont want you to realize that Islams behaviour in India
was only a continuation of its behavior in West Asia and around the
Mediterranean, starting with Mohammeds own model behaviour in Arabia.

The secularist narrative is now being propagated everywhere and inserted into
the textbooks of history, including in the projected new textbooks mulled over
by the National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). As per
the official procedure, there is a provision for feedback from the public. A
friend of mine sent in an objection to the NCERTs scenario. What follows is
the NCERTs response, interspersed with my comments.

Bluff

The objection to the cited passage that temples demonstrated the power and
resources of the kings who built them and that is the reason why medieval rulers
targeted the temples of rival rulers -- can be substantiated by innumerable
references.

This is sheer bluff. The two examples given do of course not amount to the
"innumerable" cases which they mendaciously claim to have. Nor have such
numbers of cases been mentioned elsewhere. Yet, given the strong motive the
NCERT secularists have to overrule the straightforward narrative of Islamic
iconoclasm, they would by now certainly have published a book full of such
evidence, and made sure it was quoted in every relevant paper and editorial if
it existed.

Sheer bluff, we said, but in the real world, there is nothing sheer about bluff.
On the contrary, bluff is a mighty weapon that can produce impressive results.
Take the Rama Janmabhumi controversy. The secularists suddenly claimed that
all the Muslims and Hindus and Europeans who had unitedly assumed that a
Rama temple had stood at the disputed site on which the Babri Masjid had been
imposed, had all been wrong. They offered no evidence whatsoever for their
proposed scenario (say, a sales contract in which a landlord sold Babar a piece of
empty real estate to build a mosque on), and denied the evidence on the opposite
side which had existed all along and which accumulated further once the
challenge to bring more evidence had been raised.
Though their behaviour was that of conspiracy-mongers, their shrill bluff carried
authoritative public opinion with it. They managed to make the Government
abandon its plans for a negotiated settlement, they managed to have national and
state governments toppled, they managed to trigger a number of bloodbaths, all
through sheer bluff. Even when they collapsed one after another when
questioned in Court, even when their bluff had been exposed (though the media
did all they could to hide this development from you), they have never
apologized, never publicly admitted how wrong they had been. Bluff can get you
very far in life, so the NCERT tries more of it.

Even the evidential value of their evidence is bluff. No matter how many cases
of Hindu idol abduction they manage to find, it will never amount to proof for the
hypothesis they really want to push: that Muslim conquerors and rulers did what
they did because Hindus had inspired them to do it. These conquerors mostly
didnt even know the record of Hindu kings, and at any rate they didnt care. They
would never have wanted to be seen imitating the idolaters and instead invoked
the solid justification for iconoclasm within their own tradition. Mohammed
himself had set the example, and in his wake came the conquerors of West Asia
and the Mediterranean, unaffected by Hindu examples.

Power of discrimination

Consider the gold statue of Vishnu which was once in the Lakshmana temple of
Khajuraho. The statue actually belonged to the rulers of Kangra, it was taken by
the Pratiharas and finally by the Candella ruler Yasovarman just before 950 CE
(and a near contemporary of Mahmud Ghazni). The inscription in the foundation
stone of the Khajuraho Laksmana temple commemorated these events and stated
With his troops of elephants and horses, Herambapala (Pratihara, ruler of
Kanauj) seized it form [the king of Kangra]. Obtaining it from his son, the
(Pratihara) prince Devapala, the illustrious (Candella) king Yasovarman an
ornament among kings and a crusher of enemies performed the ritual
establishment of [Vishnu] Vaikuntha [in the Laksmana temple at Khajuraho].
See, F. Kielhorn. Inscriptions from Khajuraho, Epigraphica Indica, vol. 1
(1892), p. 192.
This example is a beautiful illustration precisely of how Hindu idol-kidnapping
differs radically from Islamic idol-breaking. According to the NCERT itself, the
Vishnu statue from Khajuraho was abducted not once but twice, and ended up
(not walled into a lavatory or underfoot, nor smashed to pieces, but) consecrated
as a prominent Murti in a Vaishnava temple, exactly where it belonged. What was
abducted, was merely an object of art, duly consecrated. There was no destruction
of the religion behind the Murti. It was used for Vaishnava worship in its original
site, after it was abducted, and again after Yasovarman abducted it. Further, the
worship at the temples robbed of their Murtis, was perfectly allowed to continue,
though they would have to install a new Murti.

By contrast, in Islamic iconoclasm, the goal was to destroy the idolatrous

religion of which the Murtis were an expression. The destruction of Murtis and
the demolition of Mandirs had the purpose of destroying Hinduism or whichever
the Pagan religion behind some given Murtis was. When Mahmud Ghaznavi was
done destroying the Somnath temple, he did not mean to let Shiva worship resume
at the site, not as long as he was militarily in a position to prevent it. While
Yasovarman installed the abducted Vishnu Murti for worship, Mahmud Ghaznavi
would have the captured Murtis destroyed, or worked them into lavatory walls or
into floors in order the humiliate them -- not so much the Murtis themselves but
the religion they represented. In destroying the Somnath Shivalingam, he meant
to destroy Shiva worship.

One day, a man needed some paper to light a campfire, but he had none. His
friend suggested: I have some paper, wait. And he took his wallet to produce a
wad of dollar bills. The friend turned out not to see any significance in the dollar
bills, only their material dimension. Whether a little rectangle of paper was a
currency note worth an exchange value, or a newspaper clipping containing
specific information, or merely a blank slip of paper, they were all the same to
him: enough paper to light a campfire with. Now that is Nehruvian secularism for
you: a deliberate suspension of the power of discrimination. This wilful
superficiality claims not to see any difference between abducting an object
without any further consequence and destroying this object as part of the
attempted destruction of the religion it stands for.

Lalitaditya
From a different cultural zone note also the example of the conflict between the
soldiers of the Gauda (Bengal) ruler and the ruler of Kashmir, Lalitaditya. The
episode concerns the moment when the Bengali rulers chose to attack the idol of
Vishnu Parihasakesava who was providentially saved because the soldiers
mistook this image of the royal God for another. The Rajatarangini notes
Though the king was abroad, the priests observed that the soldiers wanted to
enter, and they closed the gates of the Parihasakesava shrine. Aroused with
boldness, the soldiers got hold of the silver Ramasvamin image, which they
mistook for Parihasakesava. They carried it out and ground it into dust. And even
as Lalitadityas troops who had come out from the city were killing them at each
step, the Gaudas continued to break it into particles and scatter them in every
direction. See Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, trans., Rajatarangini, The saga of the
Kings of Kashmir, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1935, pp. 326-28.

Note firstly that this Lalitaditya episode is also related, complete with the
spin dear to the NCERT, in Robert M. Hayden, Aykan Erdemir,Tuba
Tanyeri-Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Devika Rangachari, Manuel
Aguilar-Moreno, Enrique Lpez-Hurtado, and Milica Baki-Hayden:
Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces,
2013, p.136-137. As you can see, the Nehruvian secularist bluff is being
spread far and wide and is acquiring the status of academic orthodoxy.

We are here dealing with a typical case of Western imitators, if not careerists
who want to serve the current orthodoxy of battling Islamophobia.
Concerning India, they have completely swallowed the Nehruvian bias. Thus,
about Islamic iconoclasm deniers Romila Thapar and Richard Eaton, they say:
As scholars of India in the late 20th century, their aim in doing so is to counter
the accusations by Hindu nationalists that the Muslims uniquely violated the
sensibilities and rights of Hindus by destroying temples, by showing that Hindu
rulers had done much the same thing before Muslims reached India. (RM
Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

It is in itself commendable that they point out the political intentions of these
academics. These have a purpose other than dispassionately seeking the truth,
which to Marxists would only be bourgeois objectivity. While not in itself
disqualifying their research, it should at least set some alarm bells ringing. But
this political bias only enjoys the unquestioning approval of the new generation
of dupes.

So much have they already interiorized the belief in Hindu iconoclasm that they
take it one step further: From the perspective of the AT [= Antagonistic
Tolerance] project, of course it would be surprising if Hindu rulers had not done
so. (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Naturally they should think so, for it fits in with the reigning paradigm that all
religions are essentially the same.

At the end, when practical conclusions are drawn, fashionable academics tend
to differentiate again and favour Islam over Hinduism, e.g. by clamouring about
Islamophobia but ignoring Hinduphobia (including their own); but at some
point within their narrative, it is useful to put forward the equality and sameness
of all religions, viz. in order to preclude or drown out all specific Hindu
complaints about distinctly Islamic behaviour.

Since those authors are only second-hand spokesmen of the Nehruvian view,
they sometimes let on facts that, when properly analysed, dont really fit their
narrative, e.g.: Tantalizingly, Eaton (2000a:293) mentions that temples not
identified with royal patrons were generally left unharmed. (RM Hayden et al.:
Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Tantalizing? Only if you pursue the Nehruvian paradigm. In fact it follows

logically from the difference between Hinduism and Islam. If at all there were
Hindu kings who harmed temples because through them they wanted to harm
hostile kings, they clearly opted for a policy that constituted another distinction
with Muslim iconoclasm: they left politically irrelevant temples untouched. By
contrast, when Muslim armies went on an iconoclastic spree, they did not care
about these petty considerations, precisely because their motive had nothing to
do with royal patrons but only with non-Islamic religion.

Thus, when the Ghurid army ca. 1193 destroyed a thousand temples in
Varanasi (as admitted by Eaton), obviously not all of them had enjoyed royal
patronage. But all of them contained Pagan idols, and what was enough to get
the Muslim conquerors in a destructive mood. This off-hand refutes the whole
point of this new-fangled soft-Marxist hypothesis: that iconoclasm had nothing
to do with religion.

Now, as to Lalitaditya, he defeated the Gauda king, invited him with

the Parihasakeshava (Vaishnava) idol as guarantee for the Gauda kings safety,
yet had him murdered. To take revenge, the Gauda servants contrived to visit
the relevant shrine in order to destroy this idol. Though they mistook another
idol for Parihasakeshava (and apparently the story is gleefully told in order to
convey this idols supposed cleverness in arranging for its own safety at the
expense of another), they did indeed destroy the idol that they could lay their
hands on. The fragmentation of the idol is duly described.

So, this indeed is one rare case where Hindus destroyed a Hindu idol. To be
sure, they did nothing to Vaishnavism in Kashmir, nor in Bengal, nor anywhere
else. They only wanted to get at that particular idol, a radical difference with the
numerous campaigns of idol-breaking by Muslims, who were not so fussy.
While Hindus did it, Hinduism was not involved. On the contrary, the text itself
stipulates that their motive was quite mundane, viz. vengeance for their
murdered king. The perpetrators did not quote any Hindu scripture prescribing:
Thou shalt destroy a Parihasakeshava idol whenever thou seest one! They did
not invoke any idol-breaking model behaviour of a Vedic Rishi.

Islamic iconoclasm

We have spent some time writing out several pages in analyzing the NCERT
response to an objection. To be sure, a fool can famously ask more questions in
a few lines than a normal man can answer in a number of pages. Nevertheless,
the fact deserves mention that, through misdirection, the NCERT has succeeded
in keeping us busy all while the true answer was so simple. We have been
forced to deal with two of the handful of cases of idol-abduction and
iconoclasm by Hindus as the supposed reason for Islamic iconoclasm, when in
reality, Islamic iconoclasm had nothing to do anything good or bad done by a
Hindu. And no secret is made of this in Muslim chronicles, clear enough about
the real motive.

Neither the NCERT, nor the Nehruvian historians, nor their foreign followers,
has ever succeeded in finding a Muslim chronicle saying that the Sultan was
inspired by Hindu example to destroy idols and demolish temples. The point,
after all, was not finding fault with what Hindus may have done (though finding
fault with Hindus is certainly also on the secularists agenda), but to explain
through Hindu behaviour the known Islamic conduct of iconoclasm. This
relation between Islamic iconoclasm and Hindu example has never ever been
established. On the contrary, whenever Muslim iconoclasts feel the need to
motivate their destructive behaviour, they cite Islamic examples, first of all the
destruction of the idols in the Kaba by Mohammed himself.

And let alone the words in chronicles or elsewhere, it is actual deeds that prove
the radical difference between Islamic iconoclasm and any possible Hindu
attitude. The NCERT itself quotes a case where a Vishnu statue was abducted,
and then installed for worship by the abductor himself. If such were the example
followed by Muslim iconoclasts, we would expect to find mosques where Hindu
statues from, say, the Somnath temple or the Rama Janmabhumi temple had
been installed. Unlike the Nehruvians, we are not provincials and will not
confine ourselves to India, so images of Apollo, Osiris, or any other deity will
also do. Pray, NCERT, where is that mosque where an abducted idol has been
installed for worship? We are not asking for two examples, just one.