How dare the BJP speak for all Hindus?It is shocking and outrageous that a Chief Minister of a state inflamed passions in his state by expressing hatred at the fact that the much-reviled Mughal ruler Aurangzeb should have his last resting place in his state.
It is a modest site,not at all grandiose or imposing like some other Mughal monuments. Aurangzeb had recognized the common levelling fate of all men high and low and provided for a small,quiet and modest mausoleum.Had he been vainglorious and exultant over his dominance over Hindus it would have been a quite different affair. People with any sense of decency would have allowed him to lie in that place in peace.But no! they are wired to go haywire about a fact that someone who had tried——-and failed to absorb their land into his empire should have his grave in it.A battle that had taken place three hundred years ago,as Uddhav Thackeray,who yields to none in upholding Marathi pride,had pointed out soberly,is being mimicked in sheer goondaiism in the streets and imaginary retaliation is melted out to hapless ordinary men and women who had no hand in the attacks of the remote past.Needless to say this hardly redounds to the glory of the Marathi heroes of those days.
This is only meanness and not at all worthy of the admired heroes who certainly would have considered such conduct beneath contempt.There are anecdotes like Shivaji returning a copy of Koran Sharif with due honour to a Muslim general whom he had forced to retreat in haste.And also the anecdote of Sambhajee paying a visit to Aurangjeb’s tomb to show his respect.
And now we have according to press reports the CM regretting that alas! the tomb is protected as an historical relic,but vowing that he would still try to undo the wrongs done by that hated villain!
So when he roused the destructive passions was he not aware as a Chief Minister that such a relic was protected like other historical antiquities by law?
Before I end I would like to raise a question.There is absolutely no ground to hold that the Muslim rulers were interested in forcible mass conversion of Hindus.They were not idiotic fanatics like some present-day hooligans but astute people who wanted peace and stability in their realms so as to reap more wealth for themselves from the subjects’ earnings.Such an outrage would have simply wrecked such plans.If like Tipu Sultan who was not such a fanatic either,had indeed forced people of some place to convert it was not out of zeal,but a design to force ultimate humiliation on them for daring to take arms against him.Then why should we swallow the canard that the intention in such cases had been mass conversion to Islam?
ADDENDUM
The strange turns and twists in our system of ‘Nyaya’,which is perhaps much more subtle and mystical than Western justice,are once again highlighted by the reported advice of the SC to the government that Dara Singh,accused and convicted in that most horrifying and revolting crime,incineration of Graham Staines and his sons alive in their car,may be considered for release from the rigour of life-time imprisonment.
This appears to be of the same kind of legal and moral conundrum as the victims of Delhi riots getting charged as main culprits of the communal flare-up,leaving those grossly and patently visible as provoking riots clean as new-born lambs.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
