BABRI OR BAMIYAN... IT'S ALL THE SAME!

On 6th December 1992, I was in Lucknow. About five years old then, I was a toddler unaware of the tension prevailing in the city of my birth. One of my next-door neighbours was a Hindu, another a Muslim. So it's hardly a surprise that the air had a whiff of what was happening some 130 kms away, in Ayodhya.

We were in the safety of our homes, and it's only after these twenty-odd years that my mother has told me what were the scenes like in our locality. After Doordarshan aired those horrifying visuals of karsevaks bringing down the Babri Masjid, my Hindu neighbours had a small hush-hush celebration at their home. My Muslim neighbours did not step out of their home for a few days.

It might sound weird to someone reading this, but my mother, a Jain, was quite upset too. However, her reasons were not religious.

She is an archaeologist, if not by birth, at least, by love. Just a few months before Babri was demolished, she had accompanied her friends in an excursion to the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. None of those archaeologists knew then that it was the last time they were seeing it, else they would have at least clicked one picture with the mosque. They were all shattered to know that a structure of such historical importance had been demolished.

In 2001, after the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, my mother was again upset for days. She got hooked on to BBC and CNN. There were times when she would keep muttering how magnificent those Buddhist statues were, and how she wanted to see them in person one day. Those statues were UNESCO World Heritage Site and were destroyed with dynamite on orders of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. The reason? Taliban declared them 'idols'.

For my mother, even though they belong to different religions, the men who destroyed the Babri and the men who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan are the same. Both have brought down two archaeologically-important structures. The reasons cited by both are religious. Both did what they did to satiate their egos, nothing else. The Gods of both's religions preach peace.

And then she ends it with, 'It's the archaeologist, not a Hindu or a Muslim, who finally bore the pain of their actions.'