The Jum’a Masjid at Irach (in Bundelkhand) is assigned to Aurangzeb’s reign. It is said to be built of materials taken from a Hindu temple. While pas… - Sri Ram Sharma

Then came the turn of the temple of Keshav Rai at Mathura built at a cost of Rs. 33,00,000 by Rao Bir Singh Bundela in the reign of Jahangir. It had excited the envy of many Muslims, before Aurangzeb, who however had not Aurangzeb ’s opportunities and power. It had been built after the style of the famous temple at Bindraban which Man Singh had built at a cost of Rs, 5,00,000. But Bir Singh had improved upon his model and spent more than six times as much as Man Singh had lavished on his shrine at Bindraban. It had become a centre of pilgrimage for the whole of India. The idols, studded with precious stones and adorned with gold work, were all taken to Agra and there buried under the steps of Jahanara’s mosque. The temple was levelled to the ground and a mosque was ordered to be built on the site to mark the acquisition of religious merit by the emperor.

Shah Jahan changed the spirit of religious toleration that had characterised the Mughal government so far in several other ways as well . To begin with, the emperor forbade the completion of certain temples that had been started during his predecessor’s reign. Repairs to old temples were prohibited and the building of new temples was forbidden. Complaints against the Hindus on the frontiers of the Punjab had been received. It was alleged they had rebuilt seventy temples using the material of the mosques ; which had been in their turn built utilizing the material of the temples which had originally stood there. All these temples were ordered to be destroyed and mosques built in their place. Shah Jahan now embarked on a campaign of complete destruction of the new temples of the Hindus. Three temples were destroyed in Gujarat, seventy-two temples in Banaras and its neighbourhood, and probably four temples elsewhere in the province of Allahabad, Some temples in Kashmir were also sacrificed to the religious fury of the emperor. The Hindu temple of Ichchhabal was destroyed and converted into a mosque. This betokened a rather serious fit of religious frenzy which Akbar’s reign seemed to have made impossible. The materials of some of the Hindu temples were used for building mosques.

In short, Jahangir ordinarily continued Akbar’s toleration. He experimented in the simultaneous maintenance of several religions by the State. ... With all this, Jahangir sometimes acted as protector of the true faith rather than as the king of a vast majority of non-Muslims. Departures, however slight, from Akbar’s wide outlook had begun.