Integrity Score 270
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Prologue continues....
In a relatively short span of four years, he achieved all that he had set out for. He conquered India and established a powerful empire that covered most parts of it and for the longest period. He was a man of varied interests.
He considered himself a holy warrior out to destroy the infidels but history does not record him as a religious zealot. Yet, of all the Mughal emperors, Babur’s name sparks off a political controversy even in 21st-century India.
The controversy is about a mosque that he is supposed to have built around 1528 in a place called Ayodhya in the present state of Uttar Pradesh. Wendy Doniger, a renowned English scholar of the Hindu religion and philosophy, says that this mosque might not have been built by Babur. She writes:
“Babur is thought to have built several mosques, including the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, which an inscription attributes to him. But the pages of the diary covering the period in which such a mosque would have been built, sometime before 1528, are missing, and it is possible that Babur merely renovated an already existing mosque,built sometime after the armies of Muhammad of Ghor reached Ayodhya in 1194.”
Babur died in 1530, four years after he established the Mughal empire.
Whatever the truth about the mosque, this place of worship from the
Mughal era defines India’s secular politics in the 21st century.
To be continued....