DC Edit | Nagpur violence: Stop ‘irrelevant’ squabbles

Aurangzeb must be sleeping peacefully in his grave in Khuldabad, Aurangabad/Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar district, while people fight over it three centuries after his death. The people over whom he ruled have come under the reign of several foreign powers, including the British, after his demise. They fought valiantly sacrificing tens of thousands of lives and achieved freedom. They refused to be governed by religious diktats either, and went on to form the world’s largest secular democracy despite being partitioned in the name of faith.

Someone now wants to announce that the last powerful Mughal emperor was a brute who tortured, maimed and killed his own kin to achieve power and retain it and hence his tomb should be removed, even while others want to remember him as a frugal man who despised luxuries and that history is being distorted to defame him long after his death. While many say he plundered religious places, others opine that he helped build shrines even representing other faiths. India, being a democracy offering freedom of speech and expression as a fundamental right, must ensure all such persons are able to profess their beliefs publicly and in a peaceful manner. They should be able to tell their compatriots to learn the right lessons from the past so that we, as a people, focus on solving our day-to-day problems unitedly and prepare a better tomorrow for the future generations. That is what civilisational progress demands; that is what the Constitution asks of Indian citizens.

Sadly, though, this is not the case in India for quite some time now. There is a set of people who discover the wrongs of history as time passes and want them righted now. They place religion in front as a shield so that the people who are really in need of solutions to their problems can be hoodwinked into supporting them. They declare that the rule of law does not apply to issues when matters of religion are at stake.

Such people are back in action in Nagpur and want the tomb of the Mughal emperor demolished. They are willing to be draw blood to achieve that aim. Then there are the saviours of the honour of the same man who died some 300 years ago. They too have no compunction in resorting to violence to accomplish their mission. It cannot get worse, or in fact more surreal, when the government in power books the admirers of the ruler of a bygone era for sedition.

That religious passions are fuelling this issue should not be the concern of a government mandated to uphold the rule of law. It should ruthlessly apply it to anyone who seeks to dent peace and make the life of ordinary people miserable. This business of discovering historical reasons to sow seeds of hatred has no place in a civilised society. It is all the more ironical when it is done in the name of a man, who, as an RSS leader put it, is “not relevant today”.