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The stupidity of some members of India's increasingly nationalistic ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ....

The Taj Mahal Was Built By A Mughal Emperor

.... apparently knows no bounds. 

One of its members has demanded the opening of doors of more than 20 "permanently locked rooms" in the Taj Mahal to find out the "real history of the monument".

 

Queen Mumtaz and Shah Jahan

When he said the "real history of the monument" what he meant is, could it be Hindu and not Muslim, or at least built on top of a Hindu shrine. Rajneesh Singh told a court that he wanted to check out "claims by historians and worshippers" that the rooms housed a shrine to Shiva, the Hindu god.

This despite the fact that the mausoleum in Agra city is a 17th Century construction, by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife Queen Mumtaz. The locked rooms, stretch in a line along the riverfront, and are reached by a narrow corridor. They were actually tahkhana or underground chamber rooms for the court to sit in during the summer, and have been visited within memory, as they were open to visitors until a flood in 1978 damaged them, and were empty of anything, let alone a secret Hindu shrine.

But why let facts get in the way of fake history (something the woke rewriters of UK history in the BBC and Sky should note), so this doesn't stop nationalists claiming otherwise .... There claims are based on the fact that after a Hindu king, Suraj Mal, conquered Agra in 1761, a court Hindu priest was said to have suggested converting the Taj into a Hindu temple, leading PN Oak, who founded an institute for rewriting Indian history in 1964, to say in a book that the Taj Mahal was indeed a Shiva temple.

Sangeet Som, a BJP leader, called Taj Mahal a "blot" on Indian culture as it had been "built by traitors", while in 2022, Diya Kumari, another BJP MP, said Shah Jahan had "grabbed land" owned by a Hindu royal family and built the monument. Recently the tomb of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in Maharashtra has had to be shut to visitors after threats by a regional politician questioned "the need for its existence" and called for its destruction.

The Mughal Empire At Its Greatest ...

 

In fact this is all part of a trend, that got traction, when the hashtag "Remove Mughals From Books" went viral in India in 2016, calling for history books to scrub all references to the Mughal dynasty that ruled much of the subcontinent in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its claimed by nationalists that the Mughals killed Hindus, forced them to convert to Islam and destroyed Hindu temples as well as spreading Islam, Islamic architecture, literature and cuisine.

India's then Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani of the nationalist BJP party said in a speech, that a history book aimed at primary school pupils, misrepresented religious tensions in the country and insulted Shivaji, a Hindu warrior king who many nationalists view as a national hero.

This provoked comments in support such as "It is better that we remove Mughals from books. They were ISIS of India," and "Don't remove Mughals from books but show the brutality they did on Indians, just like what ISIS is doing today!" .... of course there are rationalists in India, but their voice are increasingly being drowned out by the nationalist fervour that Modi and his BJP party use to win elections.

Where all this unbridled Hindu nationalism is leading to, its hard to say for sure, but its probably going to a very dark place that will be the real "blot" on Indian history.