Ehm, it was Aurangazeb who destroyed the social fabric that had united the Empire since Great Akbar and vastly overextended the borders that kicked up the ant hill of the Marathas.
Not really, with the first. Aurangzeb generally represented the path the Empire was taking which started with Shah Jahan; under SJ, the Empire's revenue only doubled while the expenditures
tripled. Say what you will about the beauty of Shah Jahan's endeavours, but those cost a lot of money.
And honestly, the imposition of jizya did not really damage the rich or even the middle class of India; it hurt the poor- a poor that was already being hurt even under the rule of Jahangir onwards. In fact, Abraham Eraly posits that Aurangzeb tried to make the Empire more administratively capable so he could actually take care of poverty and such, stating that he came second only to Akbar in that regard.
The biggest problem with the Mughal Empire, is that by nature, its nobles were feeding off of the land to an unsustainable degree; they tried to squeeze as much revenue as they could from the land before moving on to other assignments. Akbar toyed with changing the system completely, and scrapped all land revenue assignments for a few years and solely paid cash salaries but that didn't work. The emperors themselves were at odds with the lower nobility in this regard, and the way to avoid the Empire feeding off of its people is to establish fully landed nobles similar to the zamindari class and the altamghas. It's something Tony Jones tackled in his TL, and it's something I'm tackling in mine (shameless plug).
True, but the situation was far from unsalvageable. If Dara Shikoh became emperor, things probably would have turned out much better.
Not really. Dara Shikoh was an intellectual- he was interested in a lot of intellectual pursuits and sure, he was interested in spiritual matters, but he did not have Akbar's authority, and that's what counts. He did not even have the trust of his army, and when he unseated himself from his mount, his army thought he had been killed and was launched into disarray; Aurangzeb, meanwhile did the same, and his army knew he was fighting. Dara would have been a weak emperor, and perhaps age and experience might have fixed that, but it is no certainty that he would have been a better emperor. An emperor that had no control over his vassals would not have been able to effectuate the change needed in the empire.
In addition, Bahadur Shah (Aurangzeb's son) was not a bad emperor and even reconciled with many of the Empire's enemies; it is a shame he died after only five years.
