Muhi al-Din Muhammad, also known as Aurangzeb, was one of India’s longest-serving rulers belonging to the Mughal dynasty. In his book, Aurangzeb, Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narratives, Saurabh D Lohogaonkar systematically disintegrates the lies that were spun around one of the world’s greatest mass murderers by presenting actual data and historical eyewitness accounts.
Lohogaonkar’s book reads more like a detailed forensic study of this dark period that saw millions of Hindus die and their places of worship systematically demolished. The author has presented compelling evidence of Aurangzeb’s cruelty and hatred against non-Muslims and his lack of faith in those Muslims who had recently converted to Islam and even Shia Muslims.
The book conclusively proves that during his reign as the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb was very proud of his Timurid connection, which is clear evidence that he only saw Bharat as his property but not his country. In his eyes, Bharat was the land of the Kuffar, and it was his duty to either either kill or convert them to Islam.
In fact, in this book, the author gives the actual percentage count of how many foreign Muslims there were in comparison to converts and Hindu nobles. The book gives the exact percentage of many Irani-Turkish served under the Mughals and under Aurangzeb. More than 65 per cent of top positions were held by foreigners, and Indian Muslims consisted of only 14 per cent and Hindus less than 20 per cent. The author has actually given pie charts to prove his point.
American historian Will Durant, in the book, Our Oriental Heritage, writes, “Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed its “heathen” monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own,”.
Aurangzeb, Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narratives covers many facets of Aurangzeb’s rule, from his quest to gain power by killing all his brothers and nephews to how he reintroduced the humiliating Islamic taxation of Jazia over non-Muslims and his constant wars to expand his territory. However, his most cunning masterstroke was to use his religion as leverage during his struggle for succession. Aurangzeb was a tyrant, but he was also at the same time one of the coldest and most calculating people, and his decisions, albeit cruel, were well thought out. The story of how he outwitted his elder brother Dara Shikho was perhaps his finest achievement from a psychological perspective since he had nothing but hate for his brother, who was not only liked by their father but also by the people.
After Dara Shikho was captured, he wrote to Aurangzeb to forgive him and allow him to live in retirement, which many readers might find as new information because it has been conveniently erased from public memory. However, Aurangzeb saw his brother Dara, who had translated the Vedas to Persian, as a threat, and to ensure his brother’s killing did not affect him in any way, he declared Dara an apostate. Once Dara was declared an apostate, his fate was sealed as now Aurangzeb had a watertight religious reason to have him killed.
Killing people in the name of blasphemy and apostasy are still prevalent in Islam and Pakistan is proof. Once Dara was killed, his head was paraded all over Delhi to terrorise the people and relish victory of Aurangzeb.
For over three hundred years, Aurangzeb has been portrayed as a pious man who lived a simple life, but in reality, he was one of the most vindictive human beings to ever walk on the face of the earth. After getting rid of his elder brother, he put his youngest brother Murad Bakhsh in prison, where he was given drugs to make him senseless, and he did the same to his nephew Sulaiman Shikoh. Once every bit of life was sucked out of them, they were both executed and now buried in a traitor’s cemetery in Gwalior.
Aurangzeb’s blind and vengeful faith in Islam ensured the Mughals were constantly at war which led to the depletion of its treasury. Even his own son, Prince Akbar, who had fled to Persia, said that his father’s quest for more territory in the last twenty-five years of his life ravaged the Mughal army. He said, “The soldiers are impoverished and unprovided with arms, people have no employment, traders being assassinated or their goods stolen. The lands of the Deccan, which are so vast and once seemed like terrestrial paradise, are now a day’s uncultivated, unproductive, and inhabited (Page 250)
Aurangzeb’s empire travelled with him because he was an extremely paranoid person who did not trust anyone. Wherever he went, he turned that place into a barren moon as his troops ransacked the countryside, which led to millions dying. His obsession with annihilating the Maratha empire cost the Mughals very dearly as the coffers ran dry, and there was rebellion all over his domain.
