India's third most embarrassing moment was the "last ball six" when Pakistan needed four runs off the last ball and Javed Miandad sent a full toss, and India's confidence, to the pavilion. Amongst over a thousand contenders for India's most embarrassing moment was the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics.

I don't particularly love antiquity. I find museums boring. Yet, the images of a mob destroying a defenceless mosque still makes me cringe. The mosque, which wasn't even used, said more when destroyed than intact.

Babri Masjid was built by the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, in Ayodhya - the city where Lord Ram was born. Fanatic, even mainstream, Hindus offered strident though simplistic logic for its destruction. Ayodhya is to Hindus what Mecca is to Muslims - would Muslims permit temples in Mecca, they'd reason. Babur built the mosque over the rubble of a temple to flex Islam's supremacy over Hinduism, they'd contend.

Being a dabbler in bullshit, I have a strong bullshit detector. I smell disingenuity a mile away. I asked my interlocutors if they were so concerned about Hinduism why not abolish the caste system. But it wasn't Hinduism or the Hindus the Hindus were concerned about. The mosque symbolised an abstract enemy and conveniently distracted Hindus from the real problems facing their religion and country.

The mosque's destruction regressed Hindu-Muslim relationships by decades, inciting riots and revenge attacks. Countless Indians were buried in the mosque's rubble. It put people like me straddling the gray zone of belief, permanently off theism. It singularly achieved nothing.

Many historians made scholarly arguments against the destruction of the mosque. Some challenged whether the mosque truly was where Lord Ram was literally born - this was before Google maps. Some defended Mughal emperors, claiming that they were more benevolent than Hindus believe. I found such arguments redundant. My point was simple - even if Babur had deliberately destroyed a temple at the birthplace of Lord Ram to build a mosque, so what? History is, so let it be. This was nearly 500 years ago. Should we break the Taj Mahal, too?

The destroyers of monuments, whether the ISIS sledgehammering cultural artifacts in Syria, the Taliban blasting the statue of Buddha, or Hindus destroying the Babri Masjid, have one commonality - they're all seeking purity. They're seeking a purge, seeking to be purged of, and seeking to purge. Since purity is abstract, and the purists can fight only symbols in the abstract, the quest for purity becomes an exhibition of symbolism leading to the destruction of symbols. The past must be erased because there's no time like the present. If the universe started at the Big Bang, for purists, all history starts today.

In the US, a recent movement wants statues of Robert Lee, a general on the wrong side of the Civil War, to be removed. Local authorities in Louisiana and Baltimore removed Lee's statues without fanfare, but a proposal in Charlottesville to remove Lee's statue sparked a protest from white supremacists.

Lee is a hero of white supremacists because he believed that African Americans were an inferior race. He fought for the freedom to enslave, against Americans who fought to free all. There's no moral ambiguity - Lee defended a barbaric practice.

It's easy to reason why Lee's statues should be removed. They're offensive because they remind of America's racist and forgettable past, even if it's unclear why they've suddenly become offensive. Since many statues were built in the 20th century they hardly qualify for antiquity - though to be fair neither does the US, which is younger than the Taj Mahal.

If a time machine accidentally dropped me off in 1860, Lee wouldn't be my first choice to have a beer with. But I doubt many people then would make good company. In the arguments for and against removing Lee's statues, there's a temptation to indulge in moral relativism. Trump asked, rhetorically, whether the statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should be removed as they, too, were slave-owning white men. Though it betrays an alarming level of judgement conflating Lee with Jefferson and Washington, Trump hit a point about the prevailing zeitgeist.

Students at Oxford University want Cecil Rhodes' statue to be removed. Rhodes, an arch imperialist, is the benefactor of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I know of no conscientious objector, many of whom hail from the lands once colonised by imperialists, who has turned down the career-transforming Rhodes Scholarship because Rhodes was an imperialist. Our principles seem more flexible than we admit.

Ghanaians want Mahatma Gandhi's statue removed because he believed Africans were inferior to Indians. Did he truly believe that? I'm afraid so. Does that make him a Lee? No, but you need judgement to distinguish between a man who rose above his racism to preach humanism and a man who preached, practiced and died for his racist beliefs. Are Ghanaians justified in removing Gandhi's statue? But you can see why they might feel sleighted by Gandhi precisely because Gandhi is treated like a deity.

Remember the truism: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Winston Churchill fought the most fascist regime ever, but he thought Indians were inferior people, incapable of self-rule. He may very well have abetted the Bengal famine in which millions died. I don't expect Bengalis clamouring to build statues of Churchill.

I chuckle at the reverence for Gandhi and Churchill. But it'd be lunacy if I concluded that those who revere these figures, knowing that they were racist, are racists, too, just because they revere them. I know it's idiotic pointing out this silly syllogism, but such is the primordial reasoning these days.

Moral relativism is bidirectional. Some have compared Lee, and Trump's administration, to Hitler. Rebutting such comparisons is tricky because you're straddling a fine line between robbing the Holocaust of the seriousness it deserves and dismissing racism. It seems people, particularly when suffused with righteous rage, can't hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts - Lee was a bad man but no Hitler, who was an extremely evil man. That Lee was no Hitler doesn't make Lee a Churchill, who was also a racist, and it still means Lee was a bad man.

In the 19th century, the Brits were imperia-lists but fought against slavery, and the Americans were slave owners but not imperialists (yet). If the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, both were light years behind, and if the Brits were ahead of the Americans, it wasn't by much.

I was raised to loathe Aurangzeb, the Mughal ruler who imposed jizya on Hindus. A Pakistani friend confessed to admiring Aurangzeb for his devotion to Islam. We're still friends. Neither of us truly understood the other side but we knew both were wrong to reduce Aurangzeb to a single dimension and both would be idiots if we ruined our friendship over some historical figure neither has met.

Many southern Americans, some of the most salt of the earth people I've met, admire Lee for his military courage. Lee is their Aurangzeb. It's lazy logic to assume that their admiration for Lee, an indisputable racist, makes them racists.

My argument against removing Lee's statues is simplistic - it'll do no good. Close to where the statue of Lee once was in Baltimore are neighbourhoods in which the legacy of Lee survives. African Americans born in such neighbourhoods, where jobs are few, good schools fewer, hope scant and crime rampant, are disadvantaged.

Society is like a 100-metre race in which some runners have a 90-metre head start, and other runners start at the start line and have hurdles to jump. An African American born in crime-ridden neighbourhoods of Baltimore and North Philadelphia does not have the same opportunities as an Indian born in Seattle's leafy suburbs. If Lee's statues remind us of this unfair race, removing them won't level the playing field. Fighting statues detracts us from solving problems.

Jha is Associate Professor of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, US. He can be reached on Twitter @RogueRad