Richard Eaton: India’s self-destructive war on the deep roots of the Mughal Empire
Richard M. Eaton | 09 August 2025 | Scroll
“As is true of autocracies everywhere”, wrote David Remnick last April, “this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past.” Although Remnick was referring to Trump’s America, something of the same sort could be said of India today. Informed by Hindutva (Hindu-centric) ideals, the country’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party imagines a Hindu “golden age” abruptly cut short when Muslim outsiders invaded and occupied an imagined sacred realm, opening a long and dreary “dark age” of anti-Hindu violence and tyranny.
In 2014, India’s prime minister declared that India had experienced 1,200 years of ‘slavery’ (ghulami), referring to 10 centuries of Muslim rule and two of the British Raj. But whereas the British, in this view, had the good sense to go home, Muslims never left the land they had presumably violated and plundered. To say the least, India’s history has become a political minefield…