There’s always a moral in the lesson of history
A few days ago on April 28, Sardar Latif Khan Khosa, the Governor of the Punjab, while addressing the Lahore Press Club, likened the fallen presidential favourite ex-Law Minister Babar Awan and the former Law Secretary Masood Chishti to a Mir Sadiq and a Mir Jafar (Quisling to the ‘English medium’). In both India and Pakistan, these two names from eighteenth century Indian history remain synonymous with greed, duplicity, betrayal and treachery even today and will continue to do so till eternity.
One sold out the ‘Tiger of Mysore’ Tipu Sultan to the English, the other his master Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab of the rich province of Bengal, to the same co-conspirators. The deceit doesn’t say much for Lord Cornwallis and Lord Clive (who made two million rupees out of the Bengal deal) or for the clichéd British motto of fair play and ‘playing the game’.
Now Babar Awan is a formidable personality, never a laggard in entering a fray for his party leader in the past, and blessed with a skin as thick as that of a rhinoceros, but he must have been deeply wounded by the withering taunt. For even at first glance, it is obviously a case of a false analogy. After all, both the traitors were rewarded with the positions they hungered for, Mir Jafar becoming Nawab of Bengal, and Mir Sadiq the Sultan of Mysore. Incidentally (or more likely, not!) one of the descendants of the former was appointed as the first president of Pakistan with the blessings of the inheritor of the British Empire, its former colony, the US.
On the contrary, Babar Awan has been stripped of all his party and governmental posts, except his Senate seat, his impressive law books library and the few remaining strands of thin hair carefully combed down over his head.
The Nazim (as provincial governors were called in Mughal times) went further, calling the Punjab chief minister, nemesis Shahbaz Sharif, a ‘mini Mughal emperor’. One cannot say for sure what prompted the governor’s time-travel for a suitable contrast in all these instances, but he undoubtedly seems to have acquired some sort of a fixation with period Indian history. Perhaps living in a grand old historic house spurred the impulse to pass such lofty judgments… But one feels that this is not the end of the verbal duel, and Babar Awan too would be biding his time and waiting for the opportune moment to strike back with his trademark smirking sarcasm.
However in one respect the governor hit the bulls-eye in making this comparison. The reference to the Mughals and their times was inevitable because almost all our rulers have tried their utmost to replicate these Central Asian profligates in the extravagance, decadence, conquest and intrigue arts. ‘I am dying as I have lived – beyond my means’, wrote the Victorian wit and playwright, Oscar Wilde from his French exile and these lines are an exact portrayal of almost all of our leaders, past, present and in all pessimistic probability, the future.
Witness the sorry state of our economy, with bankruptcy and doom staring us in the face if only someone of goodwill were to throw spanners in all the printing machines that are daily churning out currency notes by the trillions, and then consider the ‘question mark’ prime ministers’ entourage of reportedly seventy-plus, on a week long fling to London (leave the best for the last?), no doubt to inspect the work undertaken so far in the 2012 Olympic Games and to proffer much-needed advice to the befuddled organisers on how best to carry out the job—particularly in the realm of security!
Mir Jafar and Mir Sadiq both belonged to the eighteenth century, a period as intense and turbulent as our own times. Treachery, jealousy, ruthlessness and intrigues for personal gain were its keywords, the highest bidder its moving spirit. Every man had his price, and brigands, spies and mercenaries, local as well as foreign, roamed freely over the land, looting and plundering at will.
The Mughal Empire was falling apart (although the powerless puppets and nerveless entities that now passed for emperors were still regarded as the ultimate ‘repository of legitimate status for all subordinate rulers of India’) and deeply divided among the Hindustani, Irani and Turani (Central Asian or Turkic) factions, all conspiring against each other for maximum power and influence in the court and in their personal fiefdoms. They could not unite even in the face of a Nadir Shah or an Ahmed Shah Abdali.
Among the emerging forces rushing in to fill the Timurid void or exploiting the arising opportunity were the Marathas (‘the southern robbers’), the Sikhs, the Rajputs, the Jats, the English, the French, the Persian bala (calamity) Nadir Shah and ‘the northern robber’, the Afghan Ahmed Shah Abdali.
With such a terrifying cast of characters, or ‘political actors’ in the modern terminology, all hungry for power and driven by boundless greed and ambition, a fine free-for-all ensued, but the final outcome of all this frenzy was that an entire nation was brought to slavery and hardship and condemned to poverty for the next two centuries, as it was the British who eventually climbed to the top of the greasy pole.
One incident alone depicts the cynical and ruthless tenor of the times. On the fateful afternoon of February 24(?), 1739 in a fortified camp in Karnal near Panipat, a Mughal nobleman sat on his war elephant casually drinking coffee and watching the centre and right wings of the Mughal army being cut to pieces a couple of miles away by the forces of the Persian invader Nadir Shah. When pressed by his Emperor Mohammad Shah to go to their rescue, his force constituting the left wing of the army, he was vague and evasive. His name: Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan, among his many his titles of honour Chin Qilich Khan (by Aurangzeb in 1690-91), Nizamul Mulk (by Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1713) and Asaf Jah (by Mohammad Shah in 1725), the former Prime Minister of the Mughal Empire and ruler of the Deccan.
He was unmoved by the massacre unfolding before his eyes because at the receiving end of Nadir Shah’s musketeers was Khan Dauran, commander-in- chief of the Mughal army, who also held the lucrative position of Mir Bakshi (Paymaster-in-chief), a post much coveted by the Nizamul Mulk. Khan Dauran was defeated (a condition not unfamiliar to all those who dared to tangle with the ferocious Persian military genius) and died later of his wounds. With a little gentle but insistent persuasion, the plum posting soon fell into the lap of Mir Qamaruddin Khan.
As for the governance style of the later Mughals, it is best described by the contemporary historian Warid in the strange case of the thirteenth Mughal emperor, Nasir ud-din Mohammad Shah (reigned, but did not rule 1719-1748) and his Grand Vizier, the selfsame Qamar-ud-din Khan, mentioned before ‘who held the destiny of nearly 200 million people in their feeble hands’:
‘For some years past, it has been the practice of the imperial court that whenever the officers of the Deccan or Gujarat and Malwa reported any Maratha incursion to the Emperor, His Majesty, in order to sooth his heart afflicted by such bad news either visited the gardens – to look at the newly planted and leafless trees – or rode out to hunt in the plains, while the Grand Vizier Qamar-ud-din Khan went to assuage his feelings by gazing at lotuses in some pools situated four leagues from Delhi, where he would spend a month or more in tents, enjoying pleasure or catching fish in the rivers and hunting deer in the plains. At such times, Emperor and Vizier alike lived in total forgetfulness of the business of administration, the collection of the revenue, and the needs of the army. No chief, no man, thinks of guarding the realm and protecting the people, while these disturbances daily grow greater.’
If ever there was a moral in this rambling piece, it is best left to the reader to discover it. And, of course, any resemblance to current events and present personalities is also purely coincidental.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
