On previous occasions, Yogi Adityanath had publicly commented that the Taj Mahal, built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, did not reflect India’s ancient culture. Also, he made it amply clear that no replicas of the Taj Mahal would be presented to the foreign dignitaries visiting Uttar Pradesh; instead copies of the Hindu scriptures would be presented to them.
The Maharashtra government under the earlier BJP rule had almost near-defaced the names of Muslim rulers from its history text books. It planned to omit from the text books, vital details to the Delhi Sultanate and the Suri Empire in India. Without realizing that without those, the very history of India would be incomplete, if not riddled with gaps. As a commentator put across, “Without focus on the Bijapur Sultanate, Aurangzeb’s rise to power over other contenders to the throne and the invasion by Ahmed Shah Durani, cannot be put in the historical context. Also, one cannot bypass other vital historical facts — In the third battle of Panipat, where the Marathas were defeated by the Durani Empire of Afghanistan, the Marathas sided with Shah Alam II (Shah Alam II was only a puppet under the Marathas) and then led an army to punish the Afghans for their atrocities in 1772. They attacked the fort of Pathargarh and forced the Rohilla Afghans to pay a huge war indemnity… Muslim rulers hold out much in terms of the historical past. And it would be a folly if not unethical to cut or omit or trim or distort historical facts.”
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Verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz will always hold out. For generations to come. Such intense verse cannot ever be crushed or erased or bypassed.
Leaving you with Faiz’s this particular verse:
Love’s Prisoners
Wearing the hangman’s noose, like a necklace,
The singers kept on singing day and night,
kept jingling the ankle-bells of their fetters
and the dancers jigged on riotously.
We who were neither in this camp nor that
just stood watching them enviously.
shedding silent tears.
Returning, we saw that the crimson
of flowers had turned pale
and on probing within, it seemed
that where the heart once was
now lingered only stabbing pain.
Around our necks the hallucination of a noose
And on our feet the dance of fetters.
