Aurangzeb tomb protest

Hindutva goons in India have a new target these days, as they have begun a violent campaign to try and get the tomb of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb "removed" and replaced with a memorial for Hindu Maratha rulers of the region. The recent violence in Nagpur has so far seen extremists — who were inspired by, if not directly affiliated with, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) extremist group — riot and attack the police to demand the removal of the tomb, which is over 400km away from Nagpur.

The trigger point for the protest was reportedly a recent Bollywood movie about Sambhaji — a Maratha ruler who fought and got defeated by Aurangzeb, who then ordered him to be tortured and killed. The movie includes a graphic depiction of him being tortured. However, it also ignores - or rewrites — the fact that the real Sambhaji was betrayed by upper-caste Hindus who were bribed by Aurangzeb, because this would go against the myth portraying them as noble religious warriors, rather than unscrupulous politicians.

Unfortunately, like most forms of extremist ideologies, logic is the greatest enemy of Hindutva. It is also worth noting that the VHP makes Modi's strain of Hindutva seem almost inclusive — VHP leaders have said they were the real masterminds of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and Modi was simply their pawn.

The group is one of the most virulent far-right extremist organisations in India and, thus, the source of some of the most outlandish historical conspiracy theories. The tomb removal demand is a reflection of this. Unlike most recent attempts to raze mosques and replace them with temples, Aurangzeb's tomb has little religious value for Muslims, and the Hindu extremists are not demanding a temple to replace it, or claiming that a temple once stood in its place.

The objective is a straight-up attempt at historical erasure — razing and replacing the tomb of the last great Mughal emperor with a monument to a Hindu Maratha ruler, never mind that Aurangzeb's tomb happens to be located on the shrine of a Muslim saint, which would be an odd location to memorialise a Hindu king.