The medieval-era Arya-Manjushri-Mula-Kalpa mentions a wicked and foolish king named Gomimukhya ("cattle-faced"), or Gomishanda ("Gomin, the bull"), w… - Pushyamitra Shunga

Interestingly, she [Romila Thapar] has refrained from mentioning the persecution of Buddhists by Pushyamitra Shunga... and the melting of idols by king Harsha of Kashmir, which had so far figured most prominently in the writings of her school. I wonder whether she has realized that those allegations have no legs to stand upon, even though others of her school continue to harp on them.

By contrast, until proof of the contrary, the carbon-copy allegation against Pushyamitra may very reasonably be dismissed as sectarian propaganda. But a 20th-century Hindu scholar will twist and turn the literary data in order to uphold a sectarian and miracle-based calumny against the Hindu ruler Pushyamitra, and to explain away a sobering testimony about the fanaticism of Ashoka, that great secularist patron of Buddhism. Such is the quality of the "scholarship" deployed to undermine the solid consensus that among the world religions, Hinduism has always been the most tolerant by far.

Hsuan Tsang's story from hearsay about Shashank's devastating a monastery in Bihar, killing the monks and destroying Buddhist relics, only a few years before Hsuan Tsang's own arrival, is contradicted by other elements in his own report. Thus, according to the Chinese pilgrim, Shashank threw a stone with the Buddha's footprint into the river, but it was returned through a miracle; and he felled the bodhi tree but a sapling from it was replanted which miraculously grew into a big tree overnight. So, the fact of the matter was that the stone and the tree were still there in full glory. In both cases, the presence of the footprint-stone and the fully grown bodhi tree contradict Husan Tsang's allegations, but he explains the contradiction away by postulating miracles (which everywhere have a way of mushrooming around relics, to add to their aura of divine power).