Sons of Babur

‘Sons of Babur have only two places: the graveyard or Pakistan!’ went the bloodcurdling cry of militant Hindutva activists, seeking to whip up Hindu hatred against Muslims in the course of their movement to destroy the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya two decades ago. For these venom-spewing fanatics, the Indian Muslims simply had no place in the land of their birth at all. They were, so Hindutva leaders alleged, the progeny of foreign invaders. They linked them up with one such Muslim invader—but, curiously, not the first, and certainly not the most brutal of them—Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled over much of present-day India and considerably beyond for several centuries. That their claim was, historically speaking, totally wide off the mark—the vast majority of Indian Muslims being descendants of local converts, mainly of ‘low’ caste origin—was something that they did not seem to care about in the least.