Fall of the Mughal Empire v2.c29.24

v2.c29.24

Ahmad Shah left Lahor for his home on 12 Dec. 1762, and immediately afterwards Sikh aggression revived * and was aggravated by the misrule of his lieutenants, who, like all Afghans, had no administrative capacity or honesty, and the administration broke down on the rock of finance. The eye-witness Miskin writes, “Zain Khan departed from his former character and rules of conduct. He stopped paying his soldiers their salaries and began to live by looting the villages of his district, and giving a portion of the booty to his troops in payment of their arrears, though not amounting to one-fourth of their dues. He planned in alliance with the hill-Rajahs to amass a fortune,” probably with a view to carving a larger and more independent principality of his own out of the disintegrating Mughal empire. The starving of his soldiery, however, had the inevitable result of weakening his defensive strength and ultimately bringing about his ruin. Throughout the whole of 1763 Ahmad Shah was kept busy in his own country by a rebellion in Khurasan and could not attend to India. This was the Sikhs’ opportunity. In the autumn of this year we have the final and decisive upheaval of their power. They assembled at Amritsar on Dipavali day (4 November) and vowed to restore their sacred shrine and assert their independence. They first turned against the enemy within the gates, crushed the Muslim colony (Gurdezi Afghans) of Kasur and Bhikhan Khan of Maler Kotla,—who had joined every Durrani invasion,—and then attacked Sarhind in a body 40,000 strong (December 1763.) Just before this fateful contest, Zain Khan had been abandoned by his starving lieutenants, Qasim Khan and Murtaza Khan, who had marched away in search of bread to Najib’s estates in the Gangetic Doab. The faujdar of Sarhind, at the head of a small impoverished army, came out of the city and was defeated and slain, with the loss of his baggage and armament. The Sikhs, flushed with victory, entered Sarhind, and “looted and totally devastated it, turning the city upside down”, and converting into an untenanted wilderness the “ accursed place which had witnessed the death of the mother and children of Guru Govind” at the hands of Aurangzib’s officers. Swept on by the impulse of victory, the Sikhs crossed the Jamuna at Buriāghat and poured into the Upper Doab, plundering the Saharanpur (20 Feb. 1764), Shāmli and Kandela parganahs. Their owner, Najib Khan, fresh from the slaughter of Suraj Mal,—which paralysed his Jat enemies for the time,—hastened to the defence of his estates, and induced the raiders, by a bribe of 11 lakhs to recross the Jamuna. (February 1764.)* But it was the beginning of the annual Sikh raids into the Doab.