Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c7.s6.7

v1.c7.s6.7

The Ruhela campaign of Muhammad Shāh (1745) revealed the utter rottenness at the core of the imperial Government and the worthlessness of its military machine. It was a war waged not against a foreign invader like Nādir Shāh coming at the head of the veteran victors of a hundred battles, nor even against the organised and hereditary troops of a great feudal baron, but against a petty rebel who had started life as a mere private in a band of mercenaries and was now backed only by the village militia of his own clan.* Yet the full force of the Empire wielded by the Emperor, his Chancellor and Army Chief in person, for three months, achieved only the slightest and least durable result, and that, too, more by persuasion than by compulsion. The moral canker which this failure revealed in the Delhi State is more significant than a hundred defeats in the field. The campaign laid bare to public view the blind selfishness and insane jealousy animating the leaders, and the shameful love of ease and lack of any sense of duty prevailing among all ranks, which have been perpetuated for posterity in Anandrām Mukhlis's graphic diary of the expedition.