India’s Union Minister Anantkumar Hegde stoked a new controversy on Sunday by claiming history had been distorted and the Taj Mahal and Qutb Minar were not built by Muslims, according to the Hindustan Times.
The Taj Mahal is a “big construction that Shah Jahan built for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal” but it was “definitely not” built by Muslims, Hegde claimed. “History says that, even Shah Jahan in his autobiography has said that he bought the palace from Raja Jaisimha, and that it was a temple constructed by Raja Paramardi Deva, Tejo Mahalaya, which became Taj Mahal,” he alleged.
Similarly, the Qutub Minar was not built by Qutab-ud-din Aibak, Hegde said. “If you go to that compound, you will see a board by the Archaeological Survey of India, not the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, Vishwa Hindu Parishad or RSS,” he said. “It is clearly written on that board that it was a complex of temples dedicated to 24 stars, of Jain temples, and this was destroyed by Muslim invaders. But governments over the past 70 years had said that Qutub Minar was built by Aibak. Lies, lies, lies, lies. They tried to destroy the identity of our community over these many years.”
If Hindus continued to sleep, then their houses would soon be called “manzil” (a house of rest), the Union minister of state for skill development claimed. “If this continues in the coming days, Lord Ram will become Jahanpanah and Sita will become bibi.”
Hegde has landed in several controversies for making such statements before. On January 2, he had said that the Kerala government’s handling of the Sabarimala row was “daylight rape” of Hindus. In the past, he has compared some Dalit protestors with dogs, claimed Islam must be wiped out to bring peace, said the Church is a conversion machine, that the constitution must be changed, and that secular Indians do not have their own identity and do not know about their parentage.