Note how the Muslims are claiming that this Buddhist site is actually the grave of a Sufi saint, and how they covered Buddhist inscriptions with Islamic prayers. This is the same pattern they have used all over the world. It recalls the Islamic claims to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, and the giant medallions covering Christian art in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
“In Nitish Kumar’s blatant minority appeasement, local Muslims permitted to offer prayers at Buddhist shrine,” Firstpost, December 2, 2022 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
New Delhi: A cavern in Kaimur Hills, nearly 3 km south of Sasaram in Bihar’s Rohtas district, where Lord Buddha is believed to have spent a night after attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, has turned into a symbol of the Nitish Kumar-led government’s blatant appeasement of minorities.
Barely a few days earlier, on 29 November, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), tweeted that it had wrested control of a 2300-year-old Buddhist shrine in Sasaram from Muslim encroachers, who used it to offer prayers.
But in reality, Muslims have been allowed to worship at the shrine that they had initially captured in 2005.
Legend has it that Emperor Ashoka inscribed an edict in Brahmi script in one of the walls of this very cavern. Since then, it is known as one of Ashoka’s 13 minor rock edicts. The cavern was discovered during the British rule and was acquired and declared a ‘protected monument’ by the ASI on 1 December, 1917.
But the central archaeological agency did not maintain the cavern nor did it take any measures to protect it. In its neglected state, in 2005, local Muslims of the area ‘captured’ the cavern and installed a gate at its entrance. They then declared that the cavern was the mausoleum of an obscure Sufi saint and began offering prayers there. They also managed to damage some of the rock edicts of Emperor Ashoka and later covered them with a green cloth inscribed with Islamic prayers.
With the passage of time, a large dargah was built next to the cavern and a part of the dargah even encroached on the roof of the cavern. Nearly three years later, in 2008, on being informed about the encroachment, the ASI swung into action and sent a letter to the Rohtas district authorities asking it to remove the encroachments.
The ASI also put up a signboard declaring it to be a protected monument. The signboard detailed the historicity of the cavern and stated that it contained Ashokan rock edicts and was a Buddhist shrine.
Ignoring the cavern’s Buddhist history, the local Muslims promptly removed the signboard and allegedly put out a false story that a Sufi saint had spent months in the cavern and was buried there….
