But when Vasco da Gama arrived in Cochin on November 1 1498, the Syrian Christians rallied round him in warm welcome. Some time earlier, Vasco da Gam… - Sita Ram Goel

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.

The same logic leads to another and a very ominous conclusion. JihAd cannot be regarded as something which happened only in the past. On the contrary, it is an ever-present possibility in India. The Quran will create a jihAd whenever and wherever the “infidels” provide an opportunity. Pious Muslims in every place and at all times, are taught to see, or seek, or provoke situations in which solutions prescribed by the Quran can be practised.

Coming to the period following Islamic invasions, Hindu society did not bother to remember the Arabs, the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyads, the Lodis, and the Mughals. But it took pride in Bapa Raval who had humbled the Arabs; in Maharani Nayakidevi of Gujarat and Prithivi Raj Chauhan who had defeated Muhammad Ghuri again and again; in Gora and Badal who had rescued Rana Ratan Singh from the camp of Alauddin Khalji and then laid down their lives in defence of Padmini and her Chittor; in Harihara and Bukka who had founded the Vijayanagar Empire which stood like a rock against Islamic imperialism for more than two centuries; in Rana Sangram Singh who had crossed swords with Babur; in Maharana Pratap who had defied the mightiest Mughal in the midst of great adversity; in Durgadas Rathor who had despised the wrath of Aurangzeb in defence of his right to give refuge to a rebellious Mughal prince; in Chhatrapati Shivaji who devised a new diplomacy and innovated a new art of warfare which finally worsted the most powerful Muslim empire and rolled back the Islamic invasion; in Chhatrasal Bundela and Maharaja Surajmal who revived Hindu rule in the north; in Banda Bairagi who avenged the wrongs done by Muslim despots to Guru Arjun Deva, Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh; and in Maharaja Ranjit Singh who liberated the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province from Islamic stranglehold.