India’s tensions heightened by dead emperor
Muslim ruler’s name, legacy invoked by Hindu nationalists
NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi rose from his chair and walked briskly toward the podium to deliver another nighttime address to the nation. It was expected the speech would include a rare message of interfaith harmony in the country where religious tensions have risen under his rule.
Modi was speaking from the historic Mogul-era Red Fort in New Delhi, and the event marked the 400th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh guru who is remembered for championing religious freedoms for all.
The occasion and the venue, in many ways, were appropriate.
Instead, Modi chose the April event to turn back the clock and remind people of India’s most despised Muslim ruler, who has been dead for more than 300 years.
“Aurangzeb severed many heads, but he could not shake our faith,” Modi said during his address.
His invocation of the 17th-century Mogul emperor was not a mere blip.
India’s modern rulers are now resurrecting Aurangzeb Alamgir 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 mount, the scorn for Aurangzeb has grown, and politicians on India’s right have invoked him like never before. It often comes with a warning: India’s Muslims should disassociate themselves from him as retribution for his alleged crimes.
“For today’s Hindu nationalists, Aurangzeb is a dog whistle for hating all Indian Muslims,” said Audrey Truschke, historian and author of the book “Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth.”
Hating and disparaging Muslim rulers, particularly Moguls, is distinctive to India’s Hindu nationalists, who for decades have striven to transform officially secular India into a Hindu nation.
They argue that Muslim rulers such as Aurangzeb destroyed Hindu culture, forced religious conversions, desecrated temples and imposed harsh taxes on non-Muslims, even though some historians say such stories are exaggerated. Popular thought among nationalists traces the origin of Hindu-Muslim tensions back to medieval times, when seven successive Muslim dynasties ruled India.
This belief had 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.
Aurangzeb, the last powerful Mogul emperor, ascended to the throne in the mid-17th century after imprisoning his father and having his older brother killed. Unlike other Moguls, who ruled over a vast empire in South Asia for more than 300 years and enjoy a relatively uncontested legacy, Aurangzeb is, almost undoubtedly, one of the most hated men in Indian history.
Richard Eaton, a professor at the University of Arizona widely regarded as an authority on pre-modern India, said that even though Aurangzeb destroyed temples, available records show it was a little more than a dozen and not thousands, as has been widely believed.
This was done for political, not religious reasons, Eaton said, adding that the Muslim emperor also extended safety and security to people from all religions.
“In a word, he was a man of his own time, not of ours,” said Eaton, adding that the Mogul emperor has been reduced to “a comic book villain.”
But for Aurangzeb’s detractors, he embodied evil and was nothing but a religious bigot.
Right-wing historian Makkhan Lal, 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 widely accused of stoking religious hatred with aggressively anti-Muslim views. They say India’s history has been systematically whitewashed by far-left distortionists, 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, where India’s modern Muslims have often been insulted and called the “progeny of Aurangzeb.”
The insults have led to more anxieties among the country’s significant Muslim minority who in recent years have 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 Mogul emperor’s name to denigrate Muslims. It also says it is merely trying to out 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 of the BJP.
The dislike for Aurangzeb extends far beyond Hindu nationalists. Many Sikhs remember him as a man who ordered the execution of their ninth guru in 1675. The commonly held belief is that the religious leader was executed for not converting to Islam. Some argue that Modi’s invocation of Aurangzeb’s name at the Sikh guru’s birth anniversary in April serves only one purpose: to further widen anti-Muslim sentiments.
Despite referencing Aurangzeb routinely, 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 deemphasize him. Last month, the mayor of northern Agra city 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 close it to the public.
A senior administration official, who didn’t want to be named because of government policy, compared efforts to erase Aurangzeb’s name to the removal of Confederate symbols and statues — viewed as racist relics — 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 asked.