CULTURE-AFGHANISTAN: Indian Experts Fear for Other Relics

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 5 2001 (IPS) - Indian experts who had helped conserve the world’s tallest statues of the Buddha, which were reportedly smashed over the weekend by Afghanistan’s Taliban militia, are now fearing for the safety of other relics in that country.

High on the list of pre-Islamic relics targeted by the cultural cleansing of the Taliban, is Aikhanoum near the Oxus river, says Indian archaeologist, R. Sengupta who worked several years on conserving the Bamiyan Buddha statues, three decades ago.

Akhanoum is the site of an ancient Greek settlement replete with idols of Greek gods, says Sengputa, who spent nine years in the Bamiyan valley till the late 1970s.

He had led a team of experts from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which earned international acclaim for its conservation activity in Afghanistan, then a monarchy.

It was Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then foreign minister, who, a quarter of a century ago, ceremonially handed the Bamiyan Buddha statues back to Afghan authorities after the ASI had completed extensive restoration work on them.

Vajpayee Sunday lashed out at the Taliban.”Those who are ruling Afghanistan are not Muslims as this kind of an act can only be done by uncultured people,” Vajpayee said.

The prime minister, who was inaugurating a dam project in western Punjab state, charged the Taliban with attempting to turn the whole world into one big battlefield by its “barbaric acts.”

Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh earlier offered to relocate and preserve the colossal Buddha statues, which stand 53 and 36.5 metres and are carved out of a sheer cliff face at Bamiyan 130 km from Kabul.

“If the Taliban do not wish to retain this inheritance, India would be happy to arrange for the transfer of all these artifacts for all mankind, in the full knowledge and clear understanding that they are, in the first place and above all, treasures of the Afghan people themselves,” Singh said.

According to news reports from Kabul, the Taliban fired anti- aircraft guns and cannons at the delicately robed statues, hewn out during the second and fifth centuries when Buddhism flourished in the region.

Sengupta said that a few months ago, a German scholar who toured the area, reported the bulldozing of the ancient Buddhist centres of Hadda and Ghazni on the orders of the Taliban.

Said M.N. Deshpande, a former director general of the ASI: “A page of history has been torn from the world of civilisation.”

The Dalai Lama, exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans and revered as a living incarnation of the Buddha, said the Bamiyan statues were a “world treasure” and could have been “economically useful” to the local people as a tourist attraction.

Indian scholarship on Bamiyan is extensive and includes ‘The History of Buddhism in Afghanistan,’ written by C.S. Upasak. Upasak traces the arrival of Buddhism in Afghanistan to the fourth century when it was part of the Indian Maurya dynasty under the emperor Chandragupta.

According to Upasak, the statues at Bamiyan have come under attack from several historical figures who passed through the famed Silk Route on which it stands. These included Genghis Khan and Aurangzeb, the medieval Indian Mughal ruler, who ordered cannons fired at them.

But while Genghis Khan and Aurangzeb could only mutilate the statues, Taliban chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar may have succeeded in completely obliterating them and defying international opinion.

Francesc Vendrell, assistant secretary-general and head of the U.N. special mission to Afghanistan, was reported telling Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil of the world anger, during a three-hour meeting in Kabul early March.

Vendrell said he told Muttawakil that carrying out the edict would be a setback to the Taliban’s efforts to seek international recognition as the legitimate government in Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar’s decree that all statues in Afghanistan should be destroyed because they are un-Islamic has not gone down well even in Pakistan, which is one of three nations to have recognised the Taliban, besides Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Meanwhile, Taliban spokesman Sayeed Rahamtullah Hashmi was reported saying that the destruction of the Buddha statues was in retaliation for the December 1992 demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics.

India never recognised the Taliban after the Islamic militia overran that country in 1996. The only official contact was during the December 1999 hijack of an Indian Airlines plane by Kashmiri militants, who took it to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

Foreign minister Singh was then forced to personally fly to Kandahar with three Kashmiri militants, who had to be freed from Indian jail and handed over to the Taliban, in exchange for the plane and 154 hostages.