Branding the Taliban's plans to smash relics from Afghanistan's cultural past a regression into mediaeval barbarism, India offered today to look after the artifacts for all mankind.
In a statement to parliament India’s Foreign Minister Mr Jaswant Singh said, Afghanistan's radical rulers appeared bent on committing a sacrilege to humanity with their plans to blow up two towering rock- hewn statues of Buddha.
Earlier the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press quoted Taliban sources as saying explosives were being assembled to destroy the Bamiyan statues, which date back to a few centuries after the birth of Christ.
The Taliban have targeted statues in the name of a purist vision of Islam, drawing outrage from around the world.
Activists of Prime Minister Mr Ata Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the federal coalition, staged a demonstration in Bombay and burnt an effigy of Taliban leader Mullah Mohamad Omar, who ordered the destruction of the statues.
The Indian parliament resolution called this an appalling act of cultural vandalism.
In New York yesterday, Philippe de Montbello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world's premier repositories of art and artefacts, offered to purchase the Afghan statues rather than see them destroyed.