Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c54.s6: § 1. The effect of the political folly of Baji Rao II
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c54.s6
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§ 1. The effect of the political folly of Baji Rao II
v4.c54.s6.1
At the beginning of May 1802, Jaswant Rao Holkar lost all hope of using his eldest brother as his screen, and took up the policy of standing forth as the working head of the House of Holkar (vicariously for the infant Khāndé Rao II). He began to press the Peshwā with all his power to give public recognition to this claim. The timid and deceitful character of Bāji Rao and his truly oriental policy of gaining time by doing nothing decisive in the hope of "something turning up," led by an irresistible sequence of events to the Treaty of Bassein and the loss of Marātha independence.
v4.c54.s6.2
Peace in the Marātha territories could have been imposed only by a suzerain strong enough to overawe his refractory feudatories and wise enough to make a clear-cut geographical division of their respective spheres of rule in Mālwā, Khāndesh and Hindustan. Only such a division could have permanently put a stop to their eternal boundary disputes, encroachments across the frontier, and mutual raids and reprisals. The life of the Marātha empire depended on the solution of the hereditary rivalry between Sindhiā and Holkar. But such a feat of supreme statesmanship was beyond the mental capacity and armed strength of Bāji Rao II. It was also opposed to the traditional Punā policy of never settling a dispute finally, but keeping two separate and rival authorities in the same locality so as to weaken both of them and make both dependent on the central Government, and thus increase the chance of the Punā Court exacting as much money as possible from the two.
v4.c54.s6.3
In addition to this foolish policy of selfish gain, Bāji Rao had but too good a reason to dread Jaswant Holkar. He had injured the strongest living member of the Holkar family beyond forgiveness, by his brutal execution of his brother Vitoji. When this rebel was brought to Punā as a captive, Bāji Rao gave him two hundred lashes with a whip and then tying him to the leg of an elephant had him trampled to death publicly in the streets (16 April 1801), and threw his wife and son into prison.*
v4.c54.s6.4
Vitoji was no doubt an unmitigated ruffian and had done incalculable harm to the Peshwā's prestige by his heartless and unprovoked devastation of the Peshwā's estates as a freebooter fighting on his own account. He had sinned heavily, but he was at the same time the son of a ruling Holkar, and his princely blood and the past services of his family to the Peshwās made him deserve a milder punishment, or at least a less humiliating form of death. Jaswant Holkar nursed in his heart a silent but sleepless thirst of vengeance on the Peshwā and his three advisers in this tragedy, and they knew it.