The past has violently collided with the present in Nagpur. A movie about a dour, puritanical, Mughal tyrant who usurped power three hundred years ago on the back of a regicidal blood bath was the trigger for the communal clashes. Indeed, politicians on both sides of the aisle discovered that Aurangzeb’s bloodstained legacy—brought to life in the Bollywood period drama—was still acidic enough to ignite Hindu-Muslim tensions.

But this piece is not about splitting hairs over which political faction—BJP or the Opposition—fanned the fires in Nagpur. Focusing on the momentariness of the opportunistic politics over Aurangzeb runs the risk of mistaking the symptoms for the disease. Instead, the real reasons lie in a decades-old expertly disguised intellectual machination. Post-independence, Nehruvian historians, in the name of progressivism, secularised India’s history.

At its most extreme, this sleight of hand involved not just burying the Hindu roots of India’s ancient civilisational history, but also going to the absurd length of denying the existence of Hinduism itself. Clearly, it was assumed that Muslims could only be comfortable in a de-Hinduized........

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