"Dara Shikoh, tell us, are you a secret Sikh? Do you truly believe, Prince, that the Hindu faith is as valid as Islam? Prince Dara, it is painfully clear you strayed long ago from the pure path of Islam," said the prosecutor in Aurangzeb's court, as Shah Jahan's eldest son and once the heir apparent to Hindustan's throne, stood in shackles inside Delhi's Red Fort.

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"Who cares which door you open to come into the light?" Dara replied. A moment later Aurangzeb ordered him to be taken away. What followed was Dara Shikoh's end.

It was the autumn of 1659. Days ago, Alamgir had risen as Aurangzeb to become the emperor of Hindustan after defeating his brothers—Dara Shikoh, Murad Bakhsh, and Shah Shuja. Like Dara, Murad and Shuja too met their end at Aurangzeb's hands. This was after he had imprisoned his ailing elderly father. Though the throne was his, the family lay in ruins.

The Mughal dynasty that had ruled India since 1526 was now a house divided and destroyed. And when Aurangzeb, the sixth and last of the "great Mughals", finally died nearly half a century later in 1707, the empire he had won at sword's edge, too crumbled and scattered.

Earlier this week, when Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif claimed that India was "never truly united" except under Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, an ironic pattern emerged. Aurangzeb's reign and his policies have a mark of division, ruin, and fragmentation. It's a strange but a telling link.

"History shows that India was never one united nation, except briefly under Aurangzeb. Pakistan was created in the name of Allah. At home, we argue and compete.