When Kitabkhana protested the destruction of the Baghdad library, we had no idea that Pune would witness vandalism on a similar scale. "Thousands of books, rare manuscripts in Sanskrit, Pali and Ardha Magadhi and old Vedic literature, research work, meticulously and painstakingly arranged index cards for reference and photographs were seen strewn all over the two buildings housing the institute after Monday's incident," says this IANS report.
The Sambhaji Brigade, a wing of the Maratha Seva Sangha, was responsible for the assault. The provocation was a passage in Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India--the book has already been withdrawn and Laine had previously apologised for an error he committed.
Laine comments on the assault and the controversy over his book here: "Today is the saddest day in my career, because my love of Maharashtrian culture has produced a vicious backlash against those institutions and innocent scholars who are devoted to its exploration."
Seventy people, if you can call a screaming mob of hooligans human in any meaningful sense of the word, have been arrested for their role in the destruction of 18,000 books and 30,000 manuscripts. I would wish the worst of fates for them but that won't bring back the years and years of history they've destroyed. Ironically, in their urge to "protect" icons of Hindu culture, these unmitigated barbarians also smashed statues of Ganesh, the god to whom one ritually makes an invocation before embarking on a manuscript, and Saraswati, the goddess of learning.

Laine had made the point that the Sena's attacks and the subsequent withdrawal of his book ensured that there would be no debate--only, as he said, displays of "anger and frustration". He had not intended to write a life of Shivaji; historian Bhaskar Gajanan Mehendale had. But after the attacks on Laine--and a few days before the Pune atrocity--Mehendale announced that he had destroyed a thousand pages of his planned biography. "[He] stated he just wanted ‘‘leaders of the society’’ to react and the attackers to apologise. ‘‘Those who can plan such an attack, can also write the king’s biography,’’ says Mehendale. If the only history that is acceptable is a sanitised, airbrushed history, there will soon be no historians left in this country.