Children break toys they get bored with. Adults invent more ingenuous ways of venting their ennui. Like those loonies blowing up prized heritage in the Middle East. Can you undo the past with such actions though? If it were that simple, the world would be a different place. By destroying the past and rewriting history according to their worldview, if some think they can change the present, they’ve got another think coming. You cannot alter the past by demolishing a mosque or temple. Nor can you change the course of history by renaming streets or cities.
Hindutva rabble-rousers haven’t stopped cheering the renaming of Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road after APJ Abdul Kalam. It’s a no-brainer that while the Mughal emperor is despised for his “anti-Hindu” policies and actions like the imposition of jiziya and numerous wars he fought against various Hindu rulers, the humble fisherman’s son who went on to become the president of the republic is loved for building the successful Indian missile program and scripting India’s leap into the elite nuclear club.
Some of them have been abusing poor Nehru, who in accordance with the changed order is held responsible for most of independent India’s woes, for naming the popular street in Lutyens’ Delhi after the Mughal emperor. But it wasn’t Nehru but the British who had named the leafy boulevard after Aurangzeb.
Indeed, as Prof Ravindran of Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture suggests, Aurangzeb Road wasn’t named so in isolation. It’s part of a cluster of roads named after Mughal emperors, from Akbar to Shah Jahan.
The British had inherited power from the Mughals. They had understandably no love lost for their predecessors. The British were nearly wiped out when they first challenged the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, in what is known as the Child’s War.
Yet while laying the foundations of a new capital in New Delhi, the British couldn’t ignore the influence of the Mughal rule in shaping modern India. This is how the most iconic roads and landmarks of the British Indian capital got named after Mughal rulers. All that must change, now that India has decisively turned right.
The sixth Mughal emperor is said to have seldom lost a battle. But in the new war of perceptions and distorted realities, he stands no chance. In any case, he has been so systemically vilified and demonized over the past century and more in official narrative and popular discourse.
It hardly matters if the accusations and slurs thrown repeatedly at the man who ruled India for more than 50 years and who united the subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Bengal and from Kashmir down to the Indian ocean, stand independent, objective scrutiny. Aurangzeb’s was the largest empire India ever saw. He was of course no saint. He was as complex as his realm. He may have committed many excesses in the course of ruling a vast empire. Many of his actions such as targeting of Sikh gurus and Bohra spiritual leader were unfortunate and indefensible. But then there are many such actions by many rulers of the yore that are unfortunate and indefensible. Apparently everything was fair to enforce order and perpetuate their reign. It’s therefore wrong to view their actions through a religious prism.
But was Aurangzeb indeed a villain and Hindu-hating bigot? He couldn’t have survived 50 years in power by targeting his own people, 90 percent of whom were Hindus. Doubtless, he fought long and pitched battles with Hindu chieftains. But then he also fought similar battles with Muslims. Who can forget his long siege of Golconda and wars with other Deccan sultanates?
He is famously accused of demolishing a part of Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi. It’s seldom explained why. According to historian and former Orissa governor B. N. Pande, an enraged emperor got a part of the temple razed when he learned that the wife of a Hindu raja who was part of the emperor’s convoy was dishonored in a temple cellar. By the way, he also had a beautiful mosque in Deccan demolished apparently suspecting it to horde the sultan’s riches. Responding to the accusations of bias against Aurangzeb, historian B.N. Banerjee writes: “No one should accuse Aurangzeb of being communal minded. In his administration, Hindus formulated the state policy. A number of non-Muslims including Hindus, Sikhs, Marathas and Jats, were employed by him in his court.”
Banerjee also rejects the charge of forced conversions of Hindus by Muslim rulers by arguing that if that were the case, there wouldn’t be nearly five times as many Hindus in India today as compared to Muslims despite the fact that Muslims ruled the country for nearly a thousand years. As for the much-reviled jiziya, there’s a simple explanation. If the state collected jiziya from non-Muslims, it also collected similar amount from Muslims in the form of 2.5 percent zakat. Indeed, Muslims paid more in the form of ashr to the state, 10 percent of their crop revenues.
All this of course wouldn’t make sense to those who are inseparable from their tinted blinkers. The renaming of Aurangzeb Road isn’t just unfair to someone who united India but it’s also an affront to Kalam who worked all his life to harmonize all faiths and people.
But the move has little to do with the saffron reverence for the missile man and more to do with the BJP’s cynical politics of expediency. From releasing religious census figures and sparking the scare about multiplying Muslim ranks (Muslim rate of growth has actually slowed down in comparison to the 80s and 90s) to the renaming of a Delhi street, everything is nicely timed with the critical Bihar elections.
The supreme leader just cannot afford to lose to someone who so contemptuously dumped the BJP over its choice for the PM’s job.
