The Desire to Humiliate

Today’s troubled and perhaps fevered world can do with one bold nation that is not drawn to the road of “might is right,” one that searches instead for the road of wisdom. Is India such a nation today? Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said about the Russia-Ukraine conflict that “this is not an era for war,” when it comes to defying the current global fashion in favor of bullying, signals from the world’s most populous country (a decade or so from now, India will probably hold 1.5 billion people) are, sadly, not encouraging. 

A movie depicting tortures inflicted more than three centuries ago on a Hindu prince by a Muslim king is currently enjoying a great run in India. Political leaders have hailed the movie and are calling for “action”. Action against whom? Against the king who had died, well, in the year 1707, and whose name was Aurangzeb. In fact, he was called emperor, which is also how his Mughal forebears, including his father Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal in Agra, were addressed. Aurangzeb extended the Mughal empire to its greatest size. In the process he also weakened that empire irretrievably, but that’s a different story.

“REMOVE THE GRAVE” 

The movie’s scenes of torture have triggered a demand that Aurangzeb’s ancient and modest grave in the state of Maharashtra (long designated a “protected monument,” i.e. something which the central government must preserve) be removed. When some Muslims in Maharashtra’s Nagpur city protested against this demand in thoughtless ways, not only was their alleged leader detained, his home was bull-dozed by the authorities, without the formality of a trial. 

For India’s Hindu chauvinists, this bulldozing is cause for a fresh celebration. Humiliating any or every Muslim today for the real or imagined excesses of a Muslim ruler in the dim past is seen as praiseworthy activity. Recovering a hazy past with provocative vividness and unabashed selectivity is viewed as great art. Punishing today’s Muslims for a flawed king’s offences in the 1680s is regarded as overdue justice. 

In 2025, India’s 210 million Muslims (yes, you read the number, an approximate one, correctly) include a few who live in comfortable homes, but the vast majority search for fresh air and elbow room in poor, pathetic, over-crowded ghettos. They are under-represented in local, state, and federal legislatures, in the police, in the civil and military services, in the judiciary, in India’s commercial and industrial establishments, in universities and schools, and almost everywhere else. Studies have repeatedly shown that even Dalits, the former untouchables of India’s society, which despite noticeable progress remains hierarchical, are better off than the country’s Muslims. 

Notwithstanding these realities, India’s majority Hindus, who add up to more than 1.1 billion human beings, are continually pressed by chauvinists among them to think that they’ve been the victims of the Indian state’s alleged policy, dating back to the start of independent India, of “Muslim appeasement”. The latest plug to the Hindu masses goes something like this: “While that heroic prince was tortured in 1689, all of you were all ill-treated in independent India until Modi came along in 2014.” Since Hindus form 80 percent of India’s population, a “narrative” (to use the pop phrase) of this kind carries considerable political potential. 

UNQUESTIONED NARRATIVE 

The really sad part of the story is that neither Modi nor any senior colleague of his has questioned the narrative or tried to stop it. The line is accepted or welcomed as being politically advantageous. Some, moreover, say to themselves, “Why risk your career, and maybe even your life, by objecting?” 

Sadder still is the fact that no prominent non-political figure from a Hindu platform has denounced the narrative or spotlighted the damage it is causing. Or the danger it is inviting. Can you continually humiliate more than 200 million people and get away without sparking frightening reactions within and beyond your national boundaries? 

Moreover, dislike or hatred is not easily controlled. Today you argue that targeting Muslims “consolidates” all Hindus. Tomorrow Hindus of a particular stripe, or a specific caste, will be the enemy against which other Hindus will be exhorted to “consolidate.” Humiliating one Hindu caste will be found politically useful by other Hindu groups. Benefits from the hate pill will soon turn into harms, which are more than a side effect. They are the pill’s inescapable consequence. 

One reply given to this reasoning goes like this: “We’re not advocating hate for hate’s sake. We’re only seeking revenge for the humiliation Hindus suffered in the past from Muslims.”

Revenge is the central theme of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, with which millions of Hindus are familiar. The Mahabharata is repeatedly serialized on India’s TV screens and mobile phones, and many if not most Hindus know its story of a great battle. At the story’s end, every hero on either side is dead: an empty stage spotlights the folly of revenge. However, no one watches the entire story, not only because it contains a seemingly never-ending sequence of chapters, but also because every chapter is riveting by itself. 

Not revenge’s folly but its excitement is the message that many viewers or readers of the Mahabharata take. Some of the Mahabharata’s noblest and most-loved characters perform deeds of revenge that are hard to read or describe. If a movie were to focus at length on some of the Mahabharata’s revenge scenes, it would provoke acute discomfort. Yet no Hindu defines a Mahabharata hero by the unpleasantness of the revenge deed the hero enacts. Aurangzeb was a hugely flawed emperor. He was, among other things, a bigot. But he was more than his flaws and more than his bigotry. In some ways Aurangzeb was a great ruler. 

PURE MADNESS 

Moreover, not every Muslim of his time possessed Aurangzeb’s flaws. To think that every Indian Muslim of our times, separated from Aurangzeb by more than three centuries, should be punished because of the excesses in Aurangzeb’s treatment of a former ally who had become a foe is more than a gigantic leap of unreason. It is pure madness.

Would it be anything other than madness to see a Hitler in every German? Not that Aurangzeb’s goals or methods were anything that approached Hitler’s.

To dislike today’s Muslims in India would also be to defy Hinduism and the message of its epics, including the Mahabharata. Be it remembered that for all its attention to warring, killing, and revenge, the Mahabharata contains powerful calls for forgiveness. Says Yudhishthira, the head of the Mahabharata’s “good” side, to his wife Draupadi, who is furious at the “bad” side: 

Draupadi, my beautiful wife...

How will the world run,

If bitterness rewards bitterness,

Injury is returned for injury,

Hate for hate?...

Do not argue me away from forgiveness, my wife.*

Today, after a century or more of the world’s realization that people everywhere have a great deal in common, the narrower view that differences in race or belief should be given a decisive role has gained strength in many countries. In this view, domination is attractive, equal rights is an inferior and even harmful goal, revenge is noble, and reconciliation foolish. I am unable to accept this view, and the promotion in India of supremacy as a value saddens me deeply.

*  P. Lal, The Mahabharata, Vikas, New Delhi, 1980, pp. 144-5.