Shahabuddin went on shifting his ground and indulging in a lot of casuistry in a series of letters published in the Indian Express in response to the… - Sita Ram Goel

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Shahabuddin went on shifting his ground and indulging in a lot of casuistry in a series of letters published in the Indian Express in response to the evidence provided by Dr. Harsh Narain and A.K. Chatterjee. Now he asked for evidence from Babar's own time. Hindu scholars, I could see, had walked into a trap-Muslims and Stalinists demanding more and more evidence about a pre-existing Rama Temple and even about the historicity of Sri Rama, and Hindus coming forward with it. It was clear that no amount of evidence could ever satisfy the likes of Shahabuddin and the Stalinist gang. They were playing a well calculated game of keeping Hindus on the defensive, reserving for themselves the right to ask any number of fraudulent questions and making it obligatory for Hindus to go on providing the answers. I, therefore, decided to shift the focus from Ayodhya and revert to what I had done earlier in my articles - marshalling evidence of large-scale Islamic iconoclasm inspired by a belief system. I put together whatever evidence I had collected about Muslim monuments standing on the site and or built with the materials of Hindu temples, all over India. From my point of view it was a very small list-only the tip of an iceberg. But it proved formidable for the Shahabuddins and the Stalinists. I had just completed this article when A. Ghosh (Houston, Texas, USA) sent to me a list of Hindu temples and monasteries destroyed or desecrated by Muslim mobs in Bangladesh in October-November 1989 as a reaction to the hila Puja Yatra and Shilanyasa ceremony from September 30 to November 1989 performed by the VHP. Hindus were molested, even killed and their properties destroyed on some scale all over Bangladesh.