The 1761 battle of Panipat was not a binary war between Hindu Marathas and Muslim Afghans. There were Hindus fighting in the Afghan army, and Muslims leading the charge for Marathas; the Maratha defeat pleased many Hindu kings and the Afghan victory put many Muslim Nawabs out of business.

So, perhaps it was both, the wrong comparison in the context of the Lok Sabha elections and wrong season for BJP president Amit Shah to bring up the Panipat war during Sankranti (the day of defeat).

It has stirred up a hornet’s nest between not just Hindus and Muslims, as expected, but between Hindus and Hindus on the one side, and supporters of the Peshwas and those of Marathas and Dalits on the other. It has also revived bitter memories between Bengalis and Maharashtrians to some extent, though not many may today remember how the Marathas raided the largely-Hindu Bengal, governed by a Muslim Nawab who tried his best to save his Hindu subjects from them and ultimately had to cede Orissa to Raghoji Bhosale of Nagpur in return for peace in his territory.

However, the bigger story of betrayal at Panipat is that of the Rajputs and Jats who collaborated with Ahmed Shah Abdalali Durrani of Afghanistan to push the Marathas as far away from their territories as possible.

At the time of the third battle of Panipat, the Brahmin Peshwas had virtually reduced the descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj to rulers in name only. Bajirao (of Bajirao Mastani fame) was the general of the Maratha kings who never lost a single war but even his expansionism was governed not by religious fervour but by chauth - a quarter of the wealth he extracted from all the rulers whose kingdoms he either conquered or protected from raiders across their borders.

The Peshwa-Marathas virtually ruled the whole of pre-independent India before the British pushed them further and further to the confines of Pune, and finally defeated the Maratha empire in 1818.

Last year’s riots in Bhima Koregaon brought to the fore the mistrust among Dalits who were celebrating the 200th anniversary of their victory over the Maratha-Peshwa army. However, it is now clear, Dalits then and now had less acrimony towards Marathas than they had towards the Peshwas (Chitpavan Brahmins) in 1818, and the RSS-led Hindutvawadis (read Brahmins again) two centuries later.

Despite these differences though, Maharashtrians, in general, do not like being reminded of Panipat, not only because it set their empire/civilisation back by at least half a century but also because it brings to mind doubts about betrayals by more than just Rajputs and Jats. The latter were simply trying to protect their kingdoms from the all-pervasive Maratha influence but Maharashtrians — and not just Marathas — have always wondered why Malharrao Holkar exited the battlefield before the final war intensified and why Sadashivbhau, the general of the Peshwa army, did not heed the advice of Malharrao Holkar to stick to the time-tested Maratha tactics of ‘ganimi kava’ or guerrilla warfare, instead of a round battle they were bound to lose.

And where did they pick up the guerilla tactics? From Ambar Malik, an Ethiopian military general brought to India as a slave and sold into the service of the sultans of Ahmednagar. Those Islamic tactics served the Marathas, including Shivaji, well, and may also have won them the Panipat war had Sadashivbhau not ignored his general Ibrahim Gardi who advised him to wait and delay the war — for Abdalali’ s army, like Alexander’s before him, could not have withstood the Indian weather conditions for too long.

Most historians can only doubt and blame Sadashivbhau, the cousin of the ruling Peshwa, Nanasaheb, son of Bajirao, for not knowing the landscape, the politics of the region, its social dynamics and also war tactics that together lost the Marathas an empire. After the Panipat defeat that cost them numerous human lives, they had to cede Punjab to the Afghans, leave the Rajputs and the Jats well alone, and pay an enormous cost in terms of the loss of faith of their core subjects in their infallibility and invincibility.

The coming electoral battle can be nothing like Panipat. We do not have an invading army to defeat and it is only the people of India who might win or lose, depending on the outcome. Where I do see a similarity is in the bickering among the BJP’s allies – like with Sadashivbhau, not all the BJP’s generals are of accord with their commanding authority. No wonder Panipat comes to mind while going into 2019!

First Published: Jan 15, 2019 23:58 IST