RSS Sarsanghchalak Dr Mohan Bhagwat ji said on April 7, 2025 that everyone was welcome in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha except those who consider themselves as the descendants of Aurangzeb. Arguments on Aurangzeb are continuing in Bharat and his memory too is still alive. While a sect of Bharatiyas view the radical Mughal Badshah as their icon, another much larger section of the populace feels fomenting repulsion for him.
Hence, ever since Bharatiya Janata Party renamed Aurangabad as Chhatrapati Shambhajinagar, political slugfests between BJP & their rival parties continued that reached its peak during the time of the pre-election rallies before the recent Maharashtra Assembly Poll when both BJP & AIMIM engaged in fierce verbal attacks against each other. AIMIM, indeed, was supported by all the left liberal parties who did their part to glorify the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb who, in spite of his huge empire and all his might, became the immediate cause of the Mughals’ fall. The left liberals of Bharat, however, didn’t hesitate to glorify the tyrant emperor who, finally, was a loser in Maharashtra.
Hadn’t Aurangzeb been a loser, why would he stick to his guns in Maharashtra for such a prolonged period, away from his capital? Why did the Badshah of Delhi, the ruler of a gigantic empire, die so unceremoniously at Maharashtra which he couldn’t win in spite of his ceaseless efforts? Even if he happened to breathe his last there at Maharashtra, why wasn’t he buried at Delhi with due honour to his profile? What all could be the compulsions of the mighty Mughal during whose reign the Mughal empire grew the largest? Though Aurangzeb was indeed the mighty Mughal, couldn’t his fanatic pertinacity to subjugate the Marathas & his ultimate failure to do so logically paste on him a ‘loser’ tag? Referring to contradictory accounts of various historians seems unnecessary in this regard as the writings of Aurangzeb’s courtiers & the contemporary administrative orders serve the purpose enough to realize his character as that of a ruthless administrator and a radical Islamist. His bigotry didn’t spare even his own father and brothers.
After the release of the film ‘Chhaava’, Aurangzeb-eulogy by left liberals, however, reached a new height while the film also reignited the anti-Aurangzeb emotions of Bharatiyas resulting in a communal violence in Nagpur. As the Hindu Organisations like Bajrang Dal & Vishva Hindu Parishad engaged in a protest demanding removal of Aurangzeb’s grave from near Khuldabad, rumours were spread that the protest groups were also burning a flag with Quranic inscriptions on it. This yielded a rampage by the Muslims on local Hindus which had been covered by the media.
Following such incident, one Aurangzeb-eulogizer wrote, from the left liberal perspective, an article in the ‘Times of India’ lambasting the anti-Aurangzeb paranoia in a section of Hindus. “There is an increasing, and disturbing, tendency to frame the violence in Indian history in terms of religion -Hindu and Muslim. India’s history is a litany of wars that Hindu kings waged against each other. It is marred and marked by rapacious colonialism by the European powers. But no one is seeking to take revenge on a Chola emperor or going on a protest march against British PM Keir Starmer.” She wrote.
While the Chola Emperor was an Indian emperor who once fought fierce wars against contemporary rulers to expand Chola empire & establish supremacy, none of his descendants today are threatening the rest of Bharat that since they ruled once, they’d capture & subjugate the rest of Bharat once again. On the contrary, those who claim themselves as the descendants of Aurangzeb are asserting exactly the same. For example, Samajwadi Party’s Sambhal MP Ziaur Rahman Barq had said within the parliament on April 2, 2025, “we (Muslims) are not servants, we are the owners of India…” Moreover, if the attire be an indicator of cultural expressions, it is impossible to identify the present descendants of the Chola Emperor from their attire while it is easy to identify, from the very attire, those who claim themselves to be the descendants of Aurangzeb in present Bharat. This indicates the Aurangzeb-clan didn’t assimilate the cultural mainstream of Bharat.
The Chola Emperor neither engaged in genocide of common people nor in destruction of the icons of others’ faiths nor imposed special taxes on his subjects like Aurangzeb did impose jizya on non-Muslims. Chola Rule was a rule of prosperity during which flourished not only the royal treasury but also the subjects of the King. So why would a sense of revenge exist in common Bharatiyas against the Chola Emperor?
Revenge, if at all, needs to have positive manifestations. Aurangzeb was so much psychotic of his religious dogma that his ceaseless warfare against the Marathas dragged him & his Empire to a condition near bankruptcy. Aurangzeb was left with almost nothing at hand when he died at that place of Maharashtra. The eulogizer of Aurangzeb wrote ‘If his father Shah Jahan built the most magnificent mausoleum, the Taj Mahal, Aurangzeb wanted a simple, unadorned grave open to the skies for himself. It is just a few feet of mud, a sapling in the middle.’ Was it simply because Aurangzeb wanted an unadorned grave for himself or was it because he turned a pauper at the time of his death? Could the Emperor who built ‘Biwi ka Maqbara’ copying the architecture of Tajmahal built by his father be portrayed as frugally minimalistic in all aspects of life? Then why such an unadorned grave for himself?
In reality, Aurangzeb, at the end of his life, fiscally turned out to be like a juiceless strand of sugarcane. Marathas devastated him & the Mughal Empire not only economically but also smashed their religious bigotry by turning their spree to crush all the ‘kaffirs’ futile because Aurangzeb could not subjugate the Marathas in spite of his lifelong endeavours. Such spiritual shock along with near-bankrupt condition of his own were irrecoverable that finally yielded the fall of the Mughals.
The positive manifestation of revenge would be to get rid of the religious bigotry Aurangzeb himself suffered from & inculcated in Bharat through his despotic tyranny which was described by the first line of a poem by Rabindranath Thakur. The poem titled “Maanee” (i.e. “Honourable”) began as “Aurangzeb Bharat jobe koritechhilo khan khan” (i.e. “when Aurangzeb was ravaging Bharat). This poem, however, portrayed a praiseworthy gesture of Aurangzeb while it began with a line that offered a glimpse of the tyrannical approach of the Emperor. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Muslims of Kolkata claimed an apology from Rabindranath Thakur as, according to them, that one line of the poem had hurt their religious sentiments. Aurangzeb was an icon of bigotry & tyranny from the very beginning. Prafulla Ketkar’Ji has beautifully written, “Aurangzeb represents the ideology of iconoclasm and intolerance of the highest order as per the historical records.” Once all Bharatiyas get rid of the bigotry & intolerance that Aurangzeb stood for, revenge would be taken.
Drawing an equivalence of the protest against Aurangzeb with a protest march against the present British PM Keir Starmer was ludicrous. It is impossible to believe that the writer didn’t realize the comparison between Aurangzeb & Keir Starmer were like matching an apple with a tomato. Neither Aurangzeb & Keir Starmer belonged to the same historical period nor the 2 persons’ relationship dynamics with Bharat were ever the same. While Keir Starmer is a person of the present time & is in mere diplomatic terms with Bharat Sarkar, Aurangzeb once ruled parts of this land, died here & is still lying under the ground of Bharat unlike any of the British rulers hereof. Except Lord Cornwallis, no other British Governor Generals & Viceroys got buried here. The British officially left Bharat with all bag & baggage while the Mughal invaders were still lying underground and a section of Bharatiyas were still nurturing their barbaric attitude, daydreaming to repeat the same savage show of religious fanaticism on the soil of Bharat. To put an end to all such bitter propositions, the Mughal-minds need to leave Bharat for good just like Keir Starmer’s ancestors.
Even during the pre-Islamic Era, countless wars were fought between the various Hindu kingdoms of Bharat. The Epic-history too has depicted fierce wars that let rivers of blood flow out of the war-ground. In wars one after another, Bharatiya Kings never hesitated to cause bloodshed to establish their domination on the defeated kingdoms though none such wars were ever fought against the cultural existence of common men of any kingdom irrespective of who won & who lost. Kings fought as a display of power parade & for gaining wealth but not to outrage the modesty of women of the defeated kingdoms. Bharatvarsha never objectified women sexually which happened for the first time during the Islamic invasion. During the invasion by Ghaznavi Mahmud, Bharatvarsha witnessed for the first time that women could be bought & sold like objects. Bharat couldn’t avenge that attack on her civilizational ethos as yet.
Amongst the Mughals, Aurangzeb was perhaps the worst such invader who didn’t fight only to prosper as per Kshatra-Dharma but rampaged the soul of Bharat causing series of genocides of non-Muslims plainly out of religious fanaticism, extorting them with special taxes for their variance of civilizational values, destroying the Mandirs one after another imposing Mosque-heads upon them & the last but not the least, giving free hand to his army for oppressing women to any extent crossing all limits of Bharat Sabhyata.
This is where the intra-Hindu wars differed from those between Hindu Kings & the barbaric Islamists like Aurangzeb, Tipu Sultan et al who didn’t only fight for wealth & land but ravaged the faith and women of the society attempting to destroy the civilizational ethos. While both our epics, The Ramayana & The Mahabharata, account for epochal wars to avenge the insult of women, present Bharat could still not take on the barbaric forces that attempt to capture women as sex objects. Even after the physical partition of Akhanda Bharat in 1947 on demand of those who upheld Aurangzeb as their icon, Aurangzeb’s traits are still on display on Indian roads in West Bengal, Uttarpradesh, Maharashtra. This is nothing other than pusillanimous poltroonery of post-partition Bharat. Even after the formation of Pakistan, presence of Aurangzeb-eulogizers in this part of Bharat is a policy failure of Bharat Sarkar which the Government may deny & try to cover-up as a sound display of freedom of speech in Indian democracy. However, Hindus’ spontaneous display of repulsion for Aurangzeb may be viewed as a hint of dissipation of the colonial fog from over Bharat & may be perceived as a sign of awakening of swa-bodh (self-realization).
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