Originally posted by: lashy
In the same article about him (I know I know wikipedia is not the be all end all... but still)
Bureaucracy
Aurangzeb's imperial bureaucracy employed significantly more Hindus than that of his predecessors. Between 1679 and 1707, the number of Hindu officials in the Mughal administration rose by half, many of them Marathas and Rajputs. His increasing employment of Hindus and Shia Muslims was controversial with several of his fellow Sunni Muslim officials petitioning against it, which he rejected, and responded, "What connection have earthly affairs with religion? And what right have administrative works to meddle with bigotry? 'For you is your religion and for me is mine.'" He insisted on employment based on ability rather than religion.
Under Aurangzeb's reign, Hindus rose to represent 31.6% of Mughal nobility, the highest in the Mughal era. This was largely due to a substantial influx of Marathas, who played a key role in his successful Deccan campaign. During his time, the number of Hindu Mansabdars increased from 22% to over 31% in the Mughal administration, as he needed them to continue his fight in the Deccan.
One of his Rajput nobles, Jaswant Singh, Hindu ruler of Jodhpur, "destroyed mosques and built idol-temples in their stead around 16581659, according to Aurangzeb. Despite this, relationships did not turn sour between the two, as they worked together for the next two decades up until Singh's death in the late 1670s.
And in the same article, this is written about him too
Policy on temples and mosques
During his reign, Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of many temples and some mosques. For example, he ordered the destruction of Vishvanath Temple at Varanasi for being a centre of conspiracy against the state, and he ordered the destruction of the Jama Masjid at Golkund after finding out that its ruler had built the mosque in order to hide revenues from the state. Aurangzeb also ordered a rescue raid on a temple, in order to rescue a Rajasthan minister's female family members who went there on a pilgrimage.[18][need quotation to verify]
Aurangzeb displayed a particular animus towards Hindus and their temples. In his the first volume of his Pulitzer Prize winning book series, historian Will Durant stated the following:
Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other subordinates, 'to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Christians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. In one year (167980) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixtythree at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur; and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque. He forbade all public worship of the Hindu faiths, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy capitation tax.
As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed. Aurangzeb converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him as a monster, fled from his tax-gatherers, and prayed for his death.
During his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into the Deccan; but it was a power that had no foundation in the affection of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous touch. The Emperor himself, in his last years, began to realize that by the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his fathers.
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