00:00Again, a city burned. Again, a dead Mughal ruler has been invoked. Aurangzeb, a 17th
00:06century Mughal ruler who's been dead for over 300 years, is back in the news. One of
00:11the last powerful Mughals in India, vilified for taxing non-Muslims and accused of religious
00:17persecution. But is Aurangzeb or any other Mughal ruler really relevant today? The answer
00:22is no.
00:23Welcome to Deep Dive with Outlook. Today we are taking a look at why the ghosts of long
00:29dead Muslim emperors still haunt India's streets and politics. Spoiler, it's not about
00:35history, it's about power.
00:40A city ablaze. Cars torched. Stones hurled. Over 30 wounded. One man, Irfan Ansari, dead.
00:48The spark? A 300-year-old name, Aurangzeb. Far-right groups burned his effigy raging
00:55against the tomb, 500 km away. Rumours of a desecrated Muslim cloth triggered retaliations.
01:03Firebombs, over 100 arrests and curfews. Maharashtra's CM Devendra Fadnavis called it pre-planned.
01:11He also said that the release of recent Bollywood film Chhawa is likely the reason for the tensions.
01:17Who were the Mughals? Turkish-Mongol conquerors who ruled India for three centuries. Muslims,
01:24but clerics? Not really. Babur, the founder, toppled Delhi in 1526, a warrior obsessed with
01:31gardens. Akbar married Hindu princesses, scraped the Jizya tax, and wove a tapestry of tolerance.
01:38Jahangir painted a court of Hindu and Muslim brilliance. Even Aurangzeb, cast as villain,
01:44fought more for the empire expansion than faith. Historian and academician Ashok Pandey
01:50points out that Mughals were rulers of their subjects, just like any other king of the medieval
02:20era. Historian Richard Eaton notes that Aurangzeb did raise temples but as political reprisals,
02:36yet funded others like the Jagamwadi Math and shielded a Jain saint with a 1659 Farmaan.
02:44Historian Harbans Mukhia writes, Mughals crave power and order, not theocracy.
02:49So why are Indian Muslims made to carry the burden of dead Mughal emperors?
02:54This is what history expert Ashok Pandey said about the relentless obsession
02:58of Hindu right with the Mughals.
03:00In fact, when you don't care about the present, when you don't have any remedy for the problems
03:06of the present, you go to the history.
03:36Enter Babur and the Babri Masjid. In 1528, his general Mir Baqi built a mosque in Ayodhya,
03:54allegedly atop the Ram Mandir. No hard proof, just a claim that festered for centuries.
04:00In 1992, it exploded. Hindu mobs, egged on by the BJP and RSS, demolished the mosque.
04:06Over 2,000 died in the riots.
04:09In 2019, India's Supreme Court handed the site to Hindus.
04:13And a grand Ram temple was erected at the place.
04:16Babur, a king who wrote poetry and died in 1530, became the far-right's eternal invader.
04:23Yet, most Indian Muslims do not pray to Babur.
04:26Blame starts with the British.
04:27James Mill's 1817 History of British India smeared the Mughal rule as despotic
04:34and enslaving a Hindu golden age.
04:36It ignored the Persian Ramayans and Rajput Pacts, birthing a myth of Muslim tyranny.
04:42Hindu nationalism ran with it.
04:44B.D. Savarkar's 1923 Hindutva cast Muslim kings as India's epic foe.
04:50It can be argued that the RSS painted Aurangzeb and Babur as boogeymen after partition.
04:56Audrey Truschke says,
04:57Aurangzeb is vilified beyond his deeds.
05:00A ruler, not a monster.
05:02But he and Babur are perfect puppets for hate.
05:05This is not about dead emperors.
05:07It's about the rampant Islamophobia and assault against India's Muslims.
05:11The far-right's playbook is as follows.
05:14Paint Muslims as foreign invaders, tie them to Mughal ghosts and unleash the mob.
05:20In Nagpur, effigies burn.
05:22In Ayodhya, a mosque fell.
05:24From Aurangzeb Road, now APJ Abdul Kalam Road, to Akbar Road, renamed in 2022,
05:30streets shed Mughal shadows.
05:32NCRT books shrink Akbar's piece, inflate Aurangzeb's taxes
05:37and frame Mughal era as a scar in Indian history.
05:40Most Indian Muslims don't worship Aurangzeb or mourn Babur.
05:44They are not Mughals.
05:46They are citizens, taxed and toiling like everyone else.
05:50Blaming them for feudal kings is as absurd as Italians owning up to Caesar's wars.
05:55Yet it works.
05:56It buries unemployment, inflation and broken promises under a saffron flag.
06:02It turns neighbours into enemies over tombs and ruins no one prayed at.
06:07So the question really is, who wins when we chase the ghost of long-dead feudal kings?
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