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Mumbai: For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), history has never served as a guide. It has always been a weapon, selectively wielded whenever anything Islamic enters the frame. In the past, it was Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, whose name Maharashtra’s BJP invoked relentlessly to rally its base and stoke polarisation in the state. Now, in a fresh twist, the target is Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century Mysore ruler whose legacy is now being exhumed and vilified in the same playbook.

The controversy broke out on February 14, after the BJP and Maharashtra deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena took objection to the Malegaon deputy mayor Shan-e-Hind Nihal Ahmed’s decision to hang Tipu Sultan’s photo in her office. Both right- wing parties demanded that the photo be taken down and the deputy mayor should “face action” for her decision to put up the photo. 

On the same day, Congress state president Harshwardhan Sapkal compared the Mysore ruler with King Shivaji. Terming Sultan as a “great leader”, Sapkal said, “The kind of bravery that Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj possessed, and the concept of ‘Swarajya’ that he introduced… following in that very tradition and taking inspiration from his ideals, Tipu Sultan waged war against the British. In that sense, Tipu Sultan was a great warrior who displayed immense bravery and was a true son of India. He never allowed any poisonous or communal ideas to sway him. As a symbol of bravery, we should view Tipu Sultan as equivalent to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.” 

This prompted BJP leader and chief minister Devendra Fadnavis to call the........

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