Notice the sleight of hand. The repair of temples is allowed! Temples can be constructed in villages! Temples can be constructed ‘within the privacy … - Arun Shourie

What we are witnessing today in relation to the criminals of the Emergency is not the rule of law but the destruction of it. We are witnessing how the bourgeois rule of law is destroyed - members of the class itself destroy it for their personal aggrandizement and the bourgeoisie is unable to muster up the firmness needed to bring these blackguards to book. Today two features of our legal system are being laid bare for all to see. First, it cannot catch criminals if they are influential and well connected. Second, it cannot catch them for their principal crimes against the people and the State.

A case in which the English version of a major book by a renowned Muslim scholar, the fourth Rector of one of the greatest centres of Islamic learning in India, listing some of the mosques, including the Babri Masjid, which were built on the sites and foundations of temples, using their stones and structures, is found to have the tell-tale passages censored out; The book is said to have become difficult to get;... Evasion, concealment, have become a national habit. And they have terrible consequences... It was a long, discursive book, I learnt, which began with descriptions of the geography, flora and fauna, languages, people and the regions of India. These were written for the Arabic speaking peoples, the book having been written in Arabic. ... A curious fact hit me in the face. Many of the persons who one would have normally expected to be knowledgeable about such publications were suddenly reluctant to recall this book. I was told, in fact, that copies of the book had been removed, for instance from the Aligarh Muslim University Library. Some even suggested that a determined effort had been made three or four years ago to get back each and every copy of this book. ....Such being the eminence of the author, such being the greatness of the work, why is it not the cynosure of the fundamentalists’’ eyes? The answer is in the chapter “Hindustan ki Masjidein”, “The Mosques of Hindustan”. ... Each reference to each of these mosques having been constructed on the sites of temples with, as in the case of the mosque at Benaras, the stones of the very temple which was demolished for that very purpose have been censored out of the English version of the book! Each one of the passages on each one of the seven mosques! No accident that. .... why would anyone have thought it necessary to remove these passages from the English version-that is the version which was more likely to be read by persons other than the faithful? Why would anyone bowdlerise the book of a major scholar in this way?...

He did not heckle and spit at our tradition as an outsider. He never made truck with the conquerors and subjugators of India. He attained the highest states of spiritual awareness by immersing himself in the teachings of the Upanishads. He attained those states by practising the austerities and following the methods which our great seers had uncovered. As he attained these states, his entire life became a refutation of the claims of the orthodox as to their superiority, his beatific state became a refutation of the assertions of the orthodox that the esoteric lore was closed to the lower castes. And as he had attained those states, he received universal homage.