Tampering with recorded history had failed in achieving Hindu-Muslim unity. But the misguided attempt had set an evil precedent, namely, that history… - Sita Ram Goel

The voice which a Valmiki or a Vyasa would have raised for resistance to and destruction of the dasyu, marauder, and the ãtatãyî, gangster, is missing. Samartha Ramdas is the only exception.

Goel’s elaborately argued thesis, tellingly left unmentioned here by Eaton, is precisely that Islamic iconoclasm in India follows a pattern set in the preceding centuries in West Asia and accepted as normative in Islamic doctrine. Eaton’s glaring omission of this all-important precedent makes his alternative explanation of Islamic iconoclasm in India suspect beforehand... This misrepresents the thrust of Goel’s book as being merely a morbid piling up of gruesome Muslim crimes rather than an insightful tracing of this behaviour pattern to its ideological roots. Goel’s long and unchallenged list of temple destruction data is explicitly offered as “a preliminary survey” in the smaller first volume before developing the book’s main thesis in the bigger second volume, viz. the explicit justification of iconoclasm by Islamic theology and the normative precedent set Prophet Mohammed... Contrary to the impression created in the secularist media, Prof. Eaton has not even begun to refute Sita Ram Goel’s thesis. He manages to leave all the arguments for Goel’s main thesis of an Islamic theology of iconoclasm undiscussed. Of Goel’s basic data in the fabled list of mosques standing on the ruins of temples, only a single one is mentioned: “an inscription dated 1455, found over the doorway of a tomb-shrine in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh” which mentions “the destruction of a Hindu temple by one Abdullah Shah Changal during the reign of Raja Bhoja, a renowned Paramara king who had ruled over the region from 1010 to 1053”... Either way, the inscription is considerably younger than the events recorded in it. In history, it is of course very common that strictly contemporary records of an event are missing, yet the event is known through secondary younger records. These have to be treated with caution (just like the strictly contemporary sources, written from a more lively knowledge of the event, but also often in a more distortive partisan involvement in it), yet they cannot be ignored. Eaton makes the most of this time distance, arguing that the inscription is “hardly contemporary” and “presents a richly textured legend elaborated over many generations of oral transmission until 1455”. Therefore, “we cannot know with certainty” whether the described temple destruction ever took place. So, at the time of my writing it has been twelve years since Goel published his list, and exactly one scholar has come forward to challenge exactly one item in the list; who, instead of proving it wrong, settles for the ever-safe suggestion that it could do with some extra research. Given the eagerness of a large and well-funded crowd of academics and intellectuals to prove Goel wrong, I would say that that meagre result amounts to a mighty vindication. And the fact remains that the one inscription that we do have on the early history of the Islamic shrine under discussion, does posit a temple destruction. So far, the balance of evidence is on the side of the temple destruction scenario, and if the evidence for it is merely non-contemporary, the evidence for the nondemolition scenario is simply non-existent... For the rest, all that Eaton has to show against Goel’s thesis is that it is based on “selective translations of premodem Persian chronicles, together with a selective use of epigraphic data” However, the larger a body of evidence, the harder it becomes to credibly dismiss it as “selective”. Goel’s hundreds of convergent testimonies cannot be expelled from the discussion so lightly.

Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers.”