All offenders who smashed Gandharan Buddhist statue in Mardan arrested: minister
Mardan: People can be seen smashing the statue with a sledgehammer. Photo/Twitter video
PESHAWAR: Police on Saturday arrested all those offenders who were seen smashing an antique Gandharan Buddhist statue in Mardan, Special Assistant to the Chief Minister for Information Kamran Bangash said.
A video has gone viral on social media, in which some unidentified people were seen smashing the statue with a sledgehammer that was discovered in Takht Bhai area of Mardan.
Taking to Twitter, Kamran Bangash said, “All offenders who were seen smashing an antique Gandharan Buddhist statue in Mardan have been arrested by KP Police.”
He added that a case has been registered against them under relevant sections of the Antiquity Act 2016.
The statute was reportedly discovered during construction activity in the area.
Taking notice of the incident, the officials of the Tourism Department reported the incident to the police which arrested the culprits.
"Silence not an option"
Commenting on the incident, Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry said: “If progressive people of Pakistan remains silent observers and neutral all hopes of progressive and modern Pakistan ll be dashed”.
“Social degradation is immense and silence is not an option unless you want this society to be as dead as [a] graveyard.”
According to UNESCO, the Buddhist Ruins of Takhi-i-Bahi (Throne of Origins) are a monastic complex, founded in the early 1st century A.D., is spectacularly positioned on various hilltops ranging from 36.6 metres to 152.4 metres in height, typical for Buddhist sites.
The complexes cover an area of around 33ha.
The area is frequently visited by tourists from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Japan.
https://www.geo.tv/latest/298669-al...n-buddhist-statue-in-mardan-arrested-minister
On the 17th of July yesterday, a man in a village of the Takhtbai sub-division of Mardan District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan — was digging the foundations for his new house, when a life sized statue of the Buddha was discovered lying in the ground.
The news quickly spread like wild fire. Mardan lies at the center of Gandhara — the heartland of a premier ancient civilization based on Peshawar Valley that traced its start to 4000 years ago, and dominated the scene for the next 3000 years thereafter.
The village priest quickly ordered the man to smash the statue — failing which he would be excommunicated from Islam, and that the validity of his marriage to his wife (“nikah”) would be forfeit. Both situations are among the most harrowing for any “true Pashtun”. So the house owner complied accordingly…
Once upon a time not that far back — perhaps 40–50 years ago, the whole of Peshawar Valley lay strewn with the remains of the successive cultures that this fertile area engendered. People did not give much importance to the shards, statues and other remnants…being devout Muslims, they often smashed the idols they frequently came across in fields or washed up by the rain. Larger statues and stones so discovered often became part of other buildings or were used as bridges and so on.
Then Western tourists and prospectors then began frequenting this area. They knew the history and the value of such objects and were prepared to pay exorbitant sums for them. The people became wiser, and soon a profitable illegal trade sprung up centered around Gandharan artefacts, with minimal government interference; government officials and high ups were often involved in such smuggling.
The statue found a few days ago was priceless and unique among such finds, and would surely have brought its owner a king’s ransom. But as already mentioned — there is another reaction the Pashtun locals have to the past history of their area, one of iconoclasm based on their puritan and severe Islamic beliefs. The past 40 years of Jihadi culture based on Afghanistan and Pakistan — which was laid in place by American interests to secure geopolitical objectives in the region — have seen an intensification of such attitudes, resulting in actions such as that perpetrated most notably by the Afghan Taliban on the Great Buddha of Bamiyan in 2001; Bamiyan was the westernmost periphery of ancient Gandhara, and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
It has to be noted here, that the greater part of the present inhabitants of the Peshawar Valley are not aboriginals. They comprise of warlike Afghan tribal hordes who invaded the area 500 years ago. Gandhara, which was once noted for being a major center of art and trade along the fabled Silk Route between China and Rome — was a Buddhist land with an Indic or Indianised population; however, it had been under Imperial Persian rule for the major 1100 years of its 3000-year history. During that time, it had been invaded by Alexander of Macedon, and was subsequently the center of Greek power and most of all Greek culture, in Asia for several centuries.
The arrival of the early Turkic White Huns in the region in about 450 AD saw the wholesale destruction of the Buddhist civilization with a return to orthodox Hinduism — since that was the religion the Huns adopted once they settled in India and mixed with Indic natives to become Rajputs, Gujjars and so on…the Huns were the last Hindu rulers of Gandhara for five centuries before Muslim Turks such as Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, operating from Khorasan — toppled Hindu power in this region.
Gandhara after the Huns was never the same again. After the arrival of Islamic rule, it disappeared totally from the record, becoming an area of darkness. Nowadays, after 500 years of domination under the Eastern Section of the Sarabani Afghan tribes, the Peshawar Valley once known as Gandhara represents a wild, run-down and lawless desolation of what it once used to be in terms of culture and civilisation.
However it must be noted that this is not due to the arrival of one or another horde. Gandhara itself was founded by the original Indo-Aryan horde in 3700 BC; the Persians and Greeks followed, and then the eastern Iranian Parthian, Saka and Kushan hordes settled it in succession — with the last one forming the basis for its Greco-Bactrian Buddhist pinnacle. But those hordes settled down and contributed to the amalgam of civilization. The Pashtun-Afghan hordes that invaded the area from 500 to 1000 years ago continue to live upto their reputation and remain wild and uncouth.
So it is against the background of this historical knowledge that we must measure all the present attitudes, negativity and continuing troubles of the area — and there are plenty. Gandhara is now the major node of “Pashtun” identity and political influence. This affects not only its own bedeviled environs, but also regional and international politics, owing to its primary geopolitical linkages.
