A rallying cry for India’s Hindu nationalists
The name of a long-dead Muslim emperor is used in a way that raises alarm.
NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi walked briskly to the podium to deliver another nighttime address to the nation. The speech was expected to include a rare message of interfaith harmony in the country where religious tensions have risen under his rule.
Modi, a Hindu nationalist, spoke from the historic Mughal-era Red Fort in New Delhi at an event marking the 400th anniversary of the birth of Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur, who is remembered for championing religious freedom.
But Modi used the April event to turn back the clock some 300 years and speak about India’s most despised Muslim ruler, saying: “Aurangzeb severed many heads, but he could not shake our faith.”
His invocation of the 17th century Mughal emperor was not a mere blip.
Aurangzeb Alamgir had long remained buried deep in the annals of India’s history. Its current rulers are resurrecting him as a brutal oppressor of Hindus and a rallying cry for Hindu nationalists who believe India must be salvaged from the taint of the so-called Muslim invaders.
As tensions between Hindus and Muslims have mounted, scorn for Aurangzeb has grown, and politicians from India’s right often invoke him with a warning to India’s Muslims to dissociate themselves from him.
“For today’s Hindu nationalists, Aurangzeb is a dog whistle for hating all Indian Muslims,” said Audrey Truschke, a historian and author of the book “Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth.”
Hating and disparaging Muslim rulers, particularly the Mughals, are distinctive to India’s Hindu nationalists, who for decades have tried to remake officially secular India into a Hindu nation.
They say Muslim rulers like Aurangzeb destroyed Hindu culture, forced religious conversions, desecrated temples and imposed harsh taxes on non-Muslims, though some historians say such stories are exaggerated. Popular thought among nationalists traces Hindu-Muslim tensions to medieval times, when seven successive Muslim dynasties made India their home.
This belief has led them on a quest to redeem India’s Hindu past, to right the perceived wrongs suffered over centuries. And Aurangzeb is central to this sentiment.
The last powerful Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb ascended to the throne in the mid-17th century after imprisoning his father and having his older brother killed. Unlike other Mughals, who ruled over a vast empire in South Asia for over 300 years and enjoy a relatively uncontested legacy, Aurangzeb is one of the most hated men in Indian history.
Richard Eaton, a University of Arizona authority on pre-modern India, said that even though Aurangzeb destroyed temples, records show it was a little more than a dozen and not thousands, as many believe. And he did it for political, not religious reasons, Eaton said, noting that he extended safety and security to people from all religions.
“He was a man of his own time, not of ours,” Eaton said, adding that the emperor has been reduced to “a comic book villain.”
But for Aurangzeb’s detractors, he embodied evil and was nothing but a religious bigot.
Makkhan Lal, a rightwing historian whose books on Indian history have been read by millions of high school students, said ascribing political motives alone to Aurangzeb’s acts is akin to the “betrayal of India’s glorious past.”
It is a claim made by many historians who support Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, also known as the BJP, or its ideological mothership, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a radical Hindu movement that has been accused of stoking religious hatred with aggressively anti-Muslim views. They say India’s history has been systematically whitewashed by far-left revisionists, mainly to cut off Indians — mostly Hindus — from their civilizational past.
“Aurangzeb razed down temples, and it only shows his hate for Hindus and Hinduism,” said Lal.
The debate has spilled over from academia to angry social media posts and noisy TV shows. Modern Muslims have been insulted and called the “progeny of Aurangzeb.”
Last month, when a Muslim lawmaker visited Aurangzeb’s tomb, a senior leader from Modi’s party questioned his parentage.
“Why would you visit the grave of Aurangzeb who destroyed this country,” Hemanta
Biswa Sarma, northeastern Assam state’s top elected official, thundered during a TV interview. Referring to the lawmaker, he said: “If Aurangzeb is your father, then I won’t object.”
The insults have led to more anxieties among the country’s significant Muslim minority, which in recent years has been at the receiving end of violence from Hindu nationalists, emboldened by a prime minister who has mostly stayed mum on such attacks since he was first elected in 2014.
Modi’s party denies using the Mughal emperor’s name to denigrate Muslims. It also says it is merely trying to tell the truth.
“India’s history has been manipulated and distorted to appease minorities. We are dismantling that ecosystem of lies,” said Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a spokesman for the BJP.
The dislike for Aurangzeb extends far beyond Hindu nationalists. Many Sikhs remember him as a man who ordered the execution of Tegh Bahadur, their ninth guru, in 1675. The commonly held belief is that the religious leader was executed for not converting to Islam.
Some say Modi’s invocation of Aurangzeb’s name at the Sikh guru’s birth anniversary in April serves only one purpose: to further fan anti-Muslim sentiments.
“In so doing, the Hindu right advances one of their key goals — namely, maligning India’s Muslim minority population in order to try to justify majoritarian oppression and violence against them,” said Truschke, the historian.
Despite routinely referring to Aurangzeb, Hindu nationalists have simultaneously tried to erase him from the public sphere.
In 2015, New Delhi’s famous Aurangzeb Road was renamed after protests from Modi’s party leaders. Since then, some Indian state governments have rewritten school textbooks to de-emphasize him. Last month, the mayor of northern Agra city, home to the Taj Mahal, described Aurangzeb as a “terrorist” whose traces should be expunged from all public places. A politician called for his tomb to be leveled, prompting authorities to shut it to the public.
A senior administration official, who didn’t want to be named due to government policy, compared efforts to erase Aurangzeb’s name to the removal of Confederate symbols and statues in the United States.
“What is wrong if people want to talk about the past and right historical wrongs? In fact, why should there be places named after a zealot who left behind a bitter legacy?” the official said.
This sentiment, fast resonating across India, has already touched a raw nerve.
A 17th century mosque in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city (once known as Benares), has emerged as the latest flashpoint between Hindus and Muslims. A court case will decide whether the site on which the mosque sits should be given to Hindus, who claim the mosque was built on a temple destroyed on Aurangzeb’s orders.
For decades, Hindu nationalists have laid claim to several famous mosques, arguing that they are built on the ruins of prominent temples.
Critics say it could lead to long legal battles like that over the Babri mosque, which was ripped apart by Hindu mobs with spades, crowbars and bare hands in 1992. The demolition set off massive violence across India and left more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court gave the site of the mosque to Hindus.
Such worries are also felt by historians like Truschke.
She said the “demonization” of Aurangzeb and India’s Muslim kings is in “bad faith” and promotes “historical revisionism,” which is often backed by threats and violence.
“Hindu nationalists do not think about the real historical Aurangzeb,” Truschke said. “Rather, they invent the villain that they want to hate.”