Twilight of the Sultanate c13.s2.39

c13.s2.39

Muhammad Sharqī was a man who could turn friends into foes.⁵¹ He was wrathful and blood-thirsty. His Amīrs dreaded him, his brothers feared him and even his mother developed contempt and hatred for him. While he was at Sirsa he got inkling of a conspiracy at Jaunpur, and sent instructions to the Kotwal there to put to death his brothers Hasan Khan and Qutb Khan,⁵² while to beguile his mother he asked her to come to the camp and effect a compromise between him and his brother Hasan. The unsuspecting lady started from Jaunpur. On her way, at Qannauj, she learnt of the assassination of poor Hasan. She halted there to observe the mourning on which Muhammad wrote to her that since all the princes were to meet the same fate, she could mourn for them all at once.⁵³ The queen-mother could hardly tolerate such an insult added to grief, and determined to destroy the fiend. She sent a word to her other sons present in the camp at Sirsa to escape with their armies. Princes Husain and Jalāl, on the pretext of repulsing an expected night attack from Bahlūl, moved off with their contingents towards Qannauj,⁵⁴ but Jalāl Khan fell into the hands of Bahlūl, who made him captive as a reprisal for the imprisonment of Qutb Khan.⁵⁵