Opinion | Tyrants And Religious Bigots Cannot Be Eulogised

To comprehend the present controversy, we need to understand who Aurangzeb really was. Was he truly a great ruler worthy of veneration, as some claim, or was he an unapologetic tyrant and religious despot who should have no place of honour in modern secular India?

Aurangzeb was the sixth Mughal emperor, reigning from 1658 to 1707. While he expanded the Mughal Empire to arguably its greatest extent, his rule was marked by inhuman brutality, conservatism, and stark religious bigotry. I will highlight some of his crimes, so egregious and horrendous that anyone and everyone should feel embarrassed to defend him.

He was the epitome of religious intolerance. He reimposed jizya on Hindus, banned the celebration of the Parsi festival of Nauroz, prohibited the playing of music, and encouraged the forcible conversion of Hindus and Sikhs.

The persecution of non-Muslims was a prominent feature of his governance. In 1675, Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru of the Sikhs, was arrested by Mughal officials when he sought to protect 500 Kashmiri Pandits who were being forced to convert to Islam. To break his will, three of his disciples were cruelly tortured and killed before his eyes in a gruesome manner: one was cut in half by a saw, another was thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, and a third was chopped to pieces. But Guru Teg Bhadur did not relent. He was publicly beheaded in Chandni Chowk, and his severed head was paraded through the streets as an example to those who opposed forcible conversion.

This sadistic streak appears repeatedly in Aurangzeb’s life. Describing the brutal torture of the Maratha king Sambhaji (the subject of the recent film Chhaava), the great historian Jadunath Sarkar writes in History of Aurangzib (Orient Longman, 1912): “That very night, his eyes were blinded, and the next day, the tongue of Kavi Kalash was cut out. The Muhammadan theologians pronounced a decree that Shambhuji should be put to death on account of his having ‘slain, captured and dishonoured Muslims and plundered the cities of Islam.’ … The Emperor, seeing no chance of getting anything out of Shambhuji, consented to his death. After undergoing a fortnight of torture and insult, the captives were removed to the imperial camp at Koregaon, on the bank of the Bhima… and there they were put to a cruel and painful death on 11th March, their limbs being hacked off one by one and their flesh thrown to the dogs… Their severed heads were stuffed with straw and exhibited in all the chief cities of the Deccan to the accompaniment of drum and trumpet."

Aurangzeb’s ill deeds were not confined to targeting personalities alone; they had a broader intent—the annihilation of Hinduism as a whole. Accordingly, in September 1669, he ordered the destruction of the Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, the holiest of Hindu temples, and built a mosque over it. However, parts of the original temple were retained and remain visible even today—nearly 300 years after the end of Mughal rule and 75 years after a predominantly Hindu government was established—standing as constant reminders of the humiliation, hurt, and agony endured by Hindus. The present Kashi Vishwanath Temple was built by Rani Ahilyabai Holkar, the queen of Indore, in 1777, adjacent to the original site.

Aurangzeb also demolished another sacred Hindu site—the Kesava Deo temple in Mathura—and replaced it with an Eidgah.

These acts of destruction committed by Aurangzeb are not fantasies conjured up by the Hindu right-wing, as some claim, but established historical facts, supported by irrefutable evidence.

Maasir-i-Alamgiri is an authorised account of Aurangzeb’s rule, written by Saqi Mustad Khan, a contemporary of Aurangzeb. It was completed in 1710, three years after Aurangzeb’s death, and later translated into English by Jadunath Sarkar, the renowned Indian historian. On page 55, Saqi Mustad Khan states: “It was reported that, according to the Emperor’s command, his officers had demolished the temple of Viswanath at Kashi."

Even the rabidly anti-Hindutva historian Audrey Truschke—an otherwise enthusiastic cheerleader for Aurangzeb—is forced to acknowledge this crime in her book The Man and the Myth: “Aurangzeb brought the bulk of Benares’s Vishvanatha Temple down in 1669. … The Gyanvapi Masjid still stands today in Benares with part of the ruined temple’s wall incorporated into the building."

To grasp the gravity of his crimes, let us summarise what Aurangzeb did. Here was a ruler who publicly beheaded the supreme spiritual leader of the Sikhs, tortured a popular king to death, and razed the holiest sites of Hindus to the ground. These are cardinal sins with no parallel. No other religion would have tolerated such atrocities had they been inflicted upon them. However, the prevailing narrative has long been that Hindu sensibilities can be trampled upon with no consequence.

Whatever supposed good deeds Aurangzeb may have done cannot absolve him of these gravest of crimes. One wonders whether there can be any limit to a human being’s diabolicality. Can such a person be worthy of veneration? That is the million-dollar question that all right-thinking Indians, including Muslims, need to introspect on.

Can present-day Muslims be held accountable for the misdeeds of medieval Muslim invaders? The answer is a categorical no—they are not guilty per se. However, when Muslims defend these historical atrocities and protest to preserve the status quo, they not only align themselves with the perpetrator but also with the vile deeds themselves. In effect, they knowingly and deliberately accept responsibility for the crimes of medieval Muslim invaders. It is this polarising activism and domineering mindset that has vitiated the socio-political climate, which makes them culpable in current times.

People who claim that Aurangzeb is no longer relevant or urge us to forget the past are making a fatal error—an oversight that will leave us vulnerable, making us easy prey for the same predatory forces that once sought to annihilate us. This is not paranoia. The exodus of Hindus from Kashmir, where they were driven out of their homes in a supposedly Hindu-majority India, the steady trickle of Hindus fleeing Pakistan, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh following Sheikh Hasina’s exit are constant reminders of the threats facing our pluralistic society—particularly the Hindus of the subcontinent.

It is therefore imperative that barbaric tyrants and religious bigots are not glorified, so that their memory does not encourage and perpetuate more evil.

What should be done with Aurangzeb’s tomb? This decision should be left to its custodians and the Muslim community. It is a test for the community to decide what they will choose: secularism in line with the pluralism of modern India or the religious bigotry and Muslim domination of medieval times.

However, one thing must be made clear—it can no longer remain a monument under the protection of the ASI, nor can it continue as a public monument to be exhibited and revered.

The writer is a US-based author. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.