Roads are a city's arteries, and when they are given new names, the old lose their connect, and with it a part of history is lost.


The Bharatiya Janata Party has picked on Mughal emperor Aurangzeb to rewrite New Delhi's history by renaming a road named after him.


Aurangzeb is the archetypal villain in the Hindu nationalist imagination -- the cruel ruler who put a sword to people's heads, offering them a choice between Islam and death.


And a despot who hated music so much he ordered it buried deep so that no sound could escape and reach anyone's ears. Perhaps much of it was true, but often the nuance is lost in textbooks where the process of internalisation of history begins at a young age.


Not only cruel, Aurangzeb for the BJP is an outsider, a part of Mughal history, and history it desires to wish away. And when the party decided to replace Aurangzeb with another Muslim, a former President who was the antithesis of the Mughal ruler, a man who loved to play the veena, a benevolent man who pardoned many people from being marched off to the gallows, it was hard not to miss the political statement being made.
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