Sikh History

The Sikh Raj
by Sirdar Kapur Singh

The learned author of The Hindu Polity makes the following observation, at the conclusion of his book:

But when there was a Hindu revival in the time of Sivaji and the Sikhs, the Sikhs as a polity failed, because they could not connect themselves with the Past. They followed a system which prevailed around them and estab­lished a polity of one man’s rule. Guru Govinda wanted to remedy it, but the attempt brought out no man's rule. It was the Padshahi, the Moghul form, in success and in defeat, in rise and in fall. [1]

It is necessary to examine this observation so as to clarify certain implications of our main thesis. The problem of the origin, distribution and exercise of power is the basic question of polity and goes to the very roots of human civilization. This question, therefore, has naturally engaged the attention of the ancient Hindu thinkers, which is the Past and the background of the Sikhs and the Sikh doctrines.

In the Rgveda, the monarchy appears as the only and the normal form of government. In the Aitreyabrahmana supplement of the Rgveda, it is asserted that the Law can never overpower lawlessness except through a monarch:

The devas, the gods and asuras, the antigods, were at war.... and the asuras were victorious; they defeated the devas. The devas said, ‘it is on account of our having no king that asuras defeat us. Let us have a king. To this all agreed. [2]

Do these devas and asuras represent the invading Indo-Aryan and aboriginal Dravidians of Harappa and Mohenjodaro respectively in the second millennium B.C.? Did the Rgevedic Aryan borrow the institution of monarchy from their non-Aryan adversaries of northwestern India, and did they abandon their original republican tradition owing to the exigencies of war? Whatever the truth in these speculations, a thousands years’ later, Mahabharta is quite clear that the republic or non-kingly forms of government are improper and unvedic. [3] In the third century B.C., Magesthenese recorded it as the accepted opinion that monarchy was the original and was prior to the republican form of Government in India. [4]

In ancient India, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Jain, all appeared to be unanimous that though kingly form of government is the most approved and desirable form of government, all the same it was an unfortunate necessity and in ‘silver’ ages of the past, a government itself was wholly unnecessary; "na tatra raja rajendra na dando na c^’a dandikah, svadharmenaiva dharmajnaste raksanti parasparam" [5] which means that ‘in the earlier ages, there was no king and no state apparatus, no penal code and no one to administer it, for, everyone faithfully performed his duties and obligations.’ Kingship came into existence to preserve, as much as was possible, of the golden age, in a period of all-out decline and degeneration in the current iron age’ (Aitreyabrahmana, i. 14, Taittriyopanisad, i. 5). These earlier texts visualise the king as merely a war-leader, such as Indra is portrayed in the Rgveda, to protect and preserve the pure-race, the aryans from external attacks, but later on, it would appear that, apprehension of lawlessness and fear of anarchy,arajakata, that is non-government chaos, preoccupied the minds of the sacerdotal theorists. The legend in Mahabharata(Santiparava, xii.67) informs us that in the ages gone by, once upon a time, men met to keep the peace and to expel evil-doers. The agree­ment was, however, more honored in breach than in observance, as students of political affairs know only too well,as the normal human situation, and so men waited upon the Creator of the world, Brahma, who then ordained Manu as the first King, a good-hearted soul. He, however, declined the assignment on the true enough ground that government, politics and politicking involved much evil and sin, but the people overcame Manu’s honest scruples by promising him a share of their crops and herds and also of whatever religious merit they might earn.

This is the origin of the theory of the divine king who derives his author­ity primarily from the Creator-god, Brahma, but who also bases his prerogatives on human consent that authorizes him to levy taxes.

There is another story in the Mahabharata (Santiparva, xii. 59) according to which not lawlessness and social chaos but religious decline, irregular perfor­mance of sacrificial ceremonials, Yajna, threatening the cosmic order and exist­ence of the gods themselves that obliged Brahma to compose the basic text on Polity, where upon the gods approached the Preserver of the Universe, Visnu, who then, out of his own mind, sankalpa, created a miraculous and supernatural being to rule over men and to ensure that the latter performed their religious duties duly.

This Mahabharata story further tells that the first king was Virajas, who in fullness of time was succeeded by a self- willed, progressive-minded king, Vena, who promulgated a new Hindu Code, so to speak, legalising inter-caste marriages, thus inaugurating social chaos, sankaravarana, and this king Vena was then summarily destroyed by his priestly counselors, the rishis.   

This is the origin of the fundamental Hindu right of the people to revolt against the State.

The points of this Mahabharata legend are clear, (1) the king is a divine figure nominated by gods in heaven and he does not derive any part of his authority from the consent of the people, (2) this king is the servant of the gods and he owes no obligation to men,his duty being to maintain religion and the social order sanctioned by it, and (3) the people may revolt against and destroy him if the king does not serve the gods well and faithfully.

The other polarity of the doctrine of the origin of kingship is enshrined in the Buddhist legend (Digh-nikaya, III.pp.92-3) as the ‘Mahamat’s Doctrine’ according to which ‘the Hon’ble chosen one’, the king, was elected at an enor­mous gathering of the people at a time when private property and family were being subject to all kinds of arbitrary ceilings, and unnatural interference in natural generation, santansanyam, and the king was appointed to maintain free­doms of lawfully acquired property and normal propagation of progeny and as his fees for performing these duties he was to be entitled to levy taxes in cash and kind.

This is the earliest version of Rousseau’s doctrine of Social Contract, making the king as a mere servant of the people.

The earthly Arthasastra, however, tells us that the divine-king theory as well as the civil-servant theory might both be pressed into the service of political propaganda. At one place, Arthasastra (xiii,1) advises the king to instruct his Public Relation agents to make it known that the king is divine, while at another place (X.3) the king is told to say before his troops that he is a paid servant, just as they are, of the state.

In this legendary background a picture emerges from pre-Christian centuries onwards, after the raid of Alexander into the Indian satrapy of the Persian empire, and the establishment of the Mauryan empire, in which the republican form of government, to the existence of which the Greek writers and the Buddhist chronicles bear ample testimony, almost disappears from India for the coming two and a half millennia and monarchy becomes the only accepted and prevalent form of government, till the establishment of the Republic of the Union of India in 1950. Obviously, it was this hoary Hindu tradition to which Maharaja Ranjit Singh tried to link the destinies of the Sikh nation and not to “the Padshahi, the Moghul form”, as Dr. Jayaswal erroneously thinks, and as we shall see, the Sikh polity failed or received a temporary setback, precisely because of Mahara­ja Ranjit Singh’s desire to ‘connect the Sikhs with the Past’, in disregard of the clear injunctions of Guru Gobind Singh to the Khalsa,

to march to securer stability and more enduring prosperity by renouncing Brahmanic traditions and the leadership of the priestly Brahmins, which is a pre-requisite of the Divine aid to the Cause of the Khalsa. [6]

For, “the only essential tenets of Hinduism are recognition of the Brahman caste and divine authority of the Vedas. Those who publicly deny these doctrines as  the Buddhists, Jains, and the Sikhs have done, put themselves outside the pale.” [7] It was the desire of this one strong man, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who imposed it upon an unwilling nation, to revert to the pale of Hinduism, that forced the Sikhs to try the fatal experiment of Hindu monarchy which resulted in the failure of the Sikh polity in the first half of the 19th century.

This monarchy as the form of government, declared and accepted as the only proper form of government for the Hindus was, as we have seen, accorded divine sanction, as, in the Manavadharma-sastra it is laid down that, "God Himself created the King to protect people from lawlessness." [8]

Since the King ruled by divine right, he was a god, unamenable to the control or opinions of the people, as for as theory goes and, therefore, "Even an infant King must not be despised, as though a mere mortal, for, he is a great god in human form." [9]

The king, to be formally invested with godhead, must, however, be anointed with the abhiseka ceremony by the Brahmin priest, for, an unanointed king is an unlawful king whom the gods do not favor. An unanointed king is a term of contempt in Hindu politics, and it is declared that, "Such barbarous customs are the hallmark of dirty westerners and foreigners." [10]

So far as Hindu king is subject to the control and influence of God Almighty and His Brahmins only, the earthly Arthasastra of Kautiliya decrees, somewhat inaccurately, that "A single wheel cannot turn and so government is possible only with assistance. Therefore, a king should appoint ministers and listen to their advice." [11]

This is the eternal triangle of Hindu monarchy, the god-king, the priestly Brahmins, and the ministers by royal choice. Here is a king who has no legislative powers and whose function it is to uphold the social structure of varnasramadharma as laid down in the Brahmanic sacred texts, whose formal installation is dependent upon the approval and good will of the hereditary priestly class of Brahmins, and who is constantly surrounded by a clique of ministers of his own creation, who tend to usurp his powers and replace him. This Hindu polity ensures a static, conservative society which abhors social progress and change as intrinsically un-desirable and dangerous, for Manavadhar­masastra bids a citizen to—"walk in that path of good and virtuous people which his father and grandfather followed; while he walks in that, he will not suffer harm." [12]

It further ensures that this Society is upheld by an autocratic king, who rules not only by divine right but as a divine being, answerable to no mortal on earth as far as the theory goes. As a necessary consequence, this form of government ensures the intellectual leadership of the Hindu Society to the priestly Brahmins, who are, ex hypothese, committed to the varnasramadharma, the fourfold economic-political structure of the Hindu social pyramid. The concept of human, man-made, legislation, as an instrument of social change, social justice or amelioration of human inequalities, simply cannot arise in this polity, for, as Henry Ward Beecher has rightly said, “Laws and Institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up and set to true time.” And this leads to another, equally grave, consequence. The continuity and stability of State depends upon a permanent, well-trained and loyal Civil Service, and a permanent Civil Service stems out of the concept of impersonal law and the rules to which this law gives birth, the day-to-day implementation of which is the function of such a Civil Service. The concept of the impersonal law alone can give birth and validity to the modern concept of ‘State’. In an autocracy, there is no rule of law, but the rule of the fiat, and it is the whim and the will of the ruler which is paramount and supreme. If there is no rule of law, there is no State, but only the personal domain of an individual, which is born with every new ruler and dies away with him. In such a polity, there can be no permanent Civil Service, but only a team of personal minions and there can be no loyalty to any supra-individual state, which does not exist. All is personal favor and personal loyalty, preferment and courtier-ship, fiat and whim, presided over by a paranoic individual, under the delusion that he is a god, subject to the control of no man on earth but, in practice, a prisoner of the priestly Brahmins and his own creation, the ministers.

True enough, there is no proper concept of ‘State’ understood or recognized in Hindu polity. There is the concept raja, the king, and the concept of rajya ‘the kingdom’ or, more accurately, ‘that which pertains to a king’. True, it was recognized that there are seven prakrtis or characteristics of a kingdom and this is the maximum approximation to the western concept of ‘State’ in Hindu polity, a concept of a State in an embryonic form, by no means even remotely comparable to the Platonic or Hegelian ‘State’. In a text on Hindu polity, called Sukraniti, a vastly more developed concept of ‘State’ is given, derived from the formula of the Seven Prakrtis, but it has now been finally established that Sukraniti is a composition of the 19th century by a Brahmin, who was well-acquainted with the government Regulations of the East India Company and the Marathas administration. Government, in Hindu polity is extension of the king and the king’s duty is to protect social order which is fixed and predetermined. This the king does through danda, punishment and coercion, for, as it is put in the Manavadharmasastra tersely, “a sinless and straight man is hard to find.”(VII.38). There is a mystical nexus between the raja and his rajya, the king being the microcosm of his kingdom. A righteous king not only produces good citizens but also good crops, the right weather, peace and prosperity: raja kalasya karnam, as Sukraniti puts it, ‘the king causes the times to be what they are’. This idea is unambiguously expressed in the Greek inscription of Asoka discovered in 1957, at Kandhar, in the Kabul Velley : Now, owing to the piety of the King, everything prospers throughout the world. [13]

It is not exactly a cause and effect relationship but something mystical and extra-rational that conceives of the king and his kingdom as an integral unity. And both must live and perish together as is the case with the body and the soul.

This is the whole weakness and tragedy of the Hindu polity, the Hindu theory of monarchy, a stateless kingdom, a lawless government, without a permanent Civil Service and a polity, grounded in a triangle of king, Brahmins and ministers, with inherent seeds of self-destruction. This is the key to the recurrent impermanence of all great kingdoms of ancient and medieval India, the Maurya empire, the Gupta empire, the Harsha empire, the Pala kingdom of Bengal and Bihar, the Pratiharas of Kanyakubja, the Kalchuris of Tripuri, the Chalukyas of Gujarat, the Senas of Bengal, the Pallavas of Kanci, the Chaulukyas of Kanc^’i and Vengi, Rastrakutas of Mankheta, Cholas and Hoyaslas of Tanjore, Yadavas of Devgiri, Kaktiyas of Warangal, Pandvas of Madurai, the Vijyanagar empire, and the modern Maratha empire and the Sikh empire. It is the same story again and again; the god-king dies, is defeated or disappears otherwise; there is no state, no corpus of secular law, no legislating organ, no permanent Civil Serv­ice there to ensure continuity, and chaos follows in the wake of brilliant achievements of individuals, and decay supervenes after remarkable peaks of civilisation and culture reached. More often than not, a minister succeeds in obtaining complete control of a kingdom and the king becomes a denizen of the land of the dead, or a mere puppet. This happened more than once in ancient India, as in the middle of the 4th century B.C. Mahapadma Nanda, the emperor of Magadha, was a virtual puppet in the hands of his minister, Chanakya, who later on helped Chandragupta to found the Mauryan empire; this happened in the Vijya­nagar empire, where the aged Ram Raj who lost the battle of Talikota (1565), was not the legal king, but the hereditary minister of the insignificant Sadasiva; this happened in the Maratha state, where the descendants of Sivaji were completely eclipsed by the peswas, and the same thing happened in Nepal till only recently. It was precisely this eternal trend of the Hindu polity which so heartlessly destroyed the Sikh empire through low conspiracy, vile treachery, and rank betrayal, in the vain hope of replacing the descendants of Maharaja Ranjit Singh by the descendants of minister Dhyan Singh Dogra.

And, what about the Islamic polity, the mughal pattern of administration, which our learned critic, Jayaswal, tells us, Maharaja Ranjit Singh followed that led to one-man rule?

A hadith of the Prophet tells us that ‘king is the shadow of God on earth.’ [14] A Persian manuscript [15] of twelfth century informs that, ‘if there were no king, men will devour each other.’ On the authority of Alchemy of Felicity [16] by famous Al-Ghazzali, (1058-1111) we learn that ‘king is the heart of the organism of the State’. Mujjaddad, the famous Indian Muslim theologian, a con­temporary of Akbar and Jehangir asserts in his letters [17] that, ‘king is the soul and people the religious frame.’

What does all this language of images and symbols mean in simple words? It means that the ideal of an Islamic state is not self-government by the people but the observance of the laws of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet. The begetter of the idea of the Islamic state of Pakistan, now transformed somewhat unislamically into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has tersely summed up the ideal of an Islamic State, by exhorting its citizens: "Repudiate democracy and representative forms of Government and become efficient law-abiding slaves of the Islamic State." [18]

In an Islamic State the ruler is the administrator of laws laid down by God Himself and the ‘Ulema, the theologians, consider themselves to be the persons best qualified to explain those laws. The Caliph, the Sultan or the Amir, is merely the executive officer whose task it is to see that the divine rules, as interpreted by the theologians, are duly observed. These are the fundamental features of an Islamic State and its feudal or agrarian economic framework is a mere superstructure, a secondary character of this state.

What had Ranjit Singh’s Government in common with such an Islamic State except that its military organization, its fiscal system and its structure of feudal levies and agrarian laws were similar to those of the prevailing Mughal pattern, which ‘blemish’ was shared by the Marathi Pad-Padshahi also in equal measure?

But this tradition of Hindu polity of monarchy, or the Muslim polity of Islamic State, are not the only traditions familiar to Hindus. As we have suggested earlier, there are reasons to believe that this tradition was alien to the early Indo-Aryans and they apparently accepted it subsequently, when they came in contact with the Mohenjodaro civilization and peoples who along with other ancient contemporary civilization of the second and third millennia B.C. had a universal tradition of god-kings. We consider it as alien to the pristine Indo-Aryan tradition, for it is not supported by any reference in the earliest and the main corpus of the Rgveda and it finds mention only in its supplemental corpus and in the later Vedas, in particular, the Atharva, which is admittedly “the least ancient and which shows marked Semitic influence.” [19] Though undoubtedly a repository of much that is ancient and pristine, while the earliest and the main corpus of the Rgveda suggests and adumbrates another and republican tradition of organization and exercise of power. Further, this tradition of monarchy in Hindu polity, stoutly upheld by the Hindu thinkers in the historic period, is strangely reminiscent of the similar, identical and older tradition of the civilizations of Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia which were, if not anterior to, certainly contemporaneous with the Mohenjodaro civilization. This Mohenjodaro civilization which, under the military shock of the Indo-Aryans, deliquesced into Hinduism and Hindu civilization, [20] was not, as was believed a few years ago, confined to the Indus Valley and the Punjab alone, but extended over the most part of Northern India, as archaeological excavations undertaken during 1950-51 and more recently, reveal and this great civilization was in constant commerce and contact with its mighty contemporaneous civilizations and peoples across the Persian gulf.

It is in this context that the now famous Code of Hammurabi, acquires a lively significance for us while considering the Hindu polity. Hammurabi was the king of Babylonia during 2123-1081 B.C., about four thousand years ago. He promulgated a Code of Laws in his dominions, a copy of which came to light in 1902 when this Code engraved on a diorite cylinder that had been carried from Babylon to Elam in about 1100 B.C. as a war trophy, was unearthed at Susa. [21] One side of this cylinder shows the king, Hammurabi, receiving the Laws from the God on High, the Sun-God, Shamas, Himself. The prologue on the other side of this cylinder says:

When the lofty Anu, King of the Annaki and Bel, Lord of Heaven and Earth, He who determines the destiny of the land, committed the rule of all Mankind to Marduk....When they proclaimed the lofty name of Babylon, when they made it famous among the quarters of the world and in its midst established an everlasting kingdom whose foundations were firm as heaven and earth—at that time Anu and Bel called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, the worshipper of the gods, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong oppressing the weak.

Is not the doctrine of divinely appointed god-king, as laid down in our Manavadharmasastra, ‘raksarthamasya sarvasya rajanam-sarjata prabhuh’ [22] , almost a paraphrase of parts of this prologue contained in the Code of Hammurabi ? And, is not the functional claim of Hammurabi made in this Code strangely reminiscent of the functional purpose of the Divine Incarnations, as laid down in the Bhaga­vadgita : paritranaya sadhunam vinasaya c^’a duskrtam, dharma sansthapnarthaya sam^.bhavami yuge yuge. [23]

This Code of Hammurabi contains 285 laws, all secular in character, arranged almost scientifically, under the headings of Personal property, Real estate, Trade and Business, the Family, Injuries, Labour, etc., and the prototypes of these laws were the Sumerian laws which during the days of Hammurabi, were already two thousands years old.

This is the Hindu polity, and this is “the Past” with which Maharaja Ranjit Singh attempted to connect the political destiny of the Sikhs, which resulted in the failure of the Sikh polity and consequent enslavement of the Sikh people, a condition to which Guru Gobind Singh had specifically bidden them, never to submit. This “Past” is, in important essentials, is the same as “the Moghul Padshahi,” the Islamic monarchy, because the origin of both is the same, the ancient semitic civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and the civili­sation of Mohenjodaro. In the Islamic monarchy, the king assumes the status of Mohammed’s apostle instead of that of god, though by no means less exalted, as is apparent from the claim, which the Moghul emperors validly made for themselves, of being the Zilli-Ilahi, the Shadow of God, on earth. The laws of the static conservative society which a muslim monarch is required to uphold are derived from the Qur’an and the hadith, instead of the Vedas and the dharmasastras, and the hereditary intellectual leadership of the Brahmins is replaced by the arrogant and presumptuous prerogatives of the ‘Ulema. Likewise, the Islamic monarch has his ministers, selected and appointed by royal arbitra­tion, whose functions are excellently and truly summed up by Sadi, the Persian didactic poet(1184-1282), in the famous quip to the effect that a minister’s “loyal duty is to say, ‘Sire, look, how beautifully shine the moon and the stars’, whenever His Majesty, the King, asserts at midday, ‘It is night” [24] . Such ministers, whether of Hindu monarchy, Maratha Pad-padshahi, Mughal Badshah, or a Sikh Maharaja, can hardly be anything but obsequious courtiers to, and surrep­titious intriguers against the very monarch, who creates them, and they cannot, as a rule, provide any real assistance or check and counter-balance to the will and wishes of their king.

The long glorious history of the Hindu kingdoms, the illustrious and long story of the Muslim monarchies, and the sad solitary tale of a Sikh kingdom, broadly support the analysis of this theory of monarchy.

What was the pristine Indo-Aryan or, more correctly, Aryan tradition of polity at which we have hinted, a few pages supra, and which tradition flourished amongst Aryans of Greece and the Aryan settlements of northern India till, in the latter case, it was destroyed completely under the impact of monar­chical ekraja systems and Huna invasions by the 5th century and which tradition, in the former case, after many vicissitudes, has flowered into the republican democracy of the United States of America and the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain ? For, it is to this star of tradition and polity that Guru Gobind Singh has hitched the wagon of the Khalsa, and through them of the Hindu race and the whole mankind, for their sure progress on the road to unlimited prosper­ity, happiness, freedom and spiritual expansion.

The idea of a samiti or a Folk-assembly is adumbrated in the Rgveda itself, where there is a prayer for “a common assembly and a common policy.” [25] In the later Atharvaveda there is a reference to the continuity of this tradition, where “a general session of this, the folk-assemblies” [26] is spoken of. The same Atharva declares this samiti, the Sikh equivalent of which is the sangat, as “a daughter of God,” [27] i.e. eternal or sui generis sovereign. It is this doctrine which the Sikh Gurus revived when they declared that “the Guru’s sovereignty is full, of twenty measures, but that of the sangat, as the mouth-piece of the people, is of overriding paramountcy, of twenty-one measures.” [28] The Sikh doc­trine of the sui generis and inalienable sovereignty of the Khalsa perfected by Guru Gobind Singh, stems out of, and is grounded in, this pristine Aryan tradi­tion of polity. The same hymn of the Atharva refers to the ‘common Assembly’ of the Rgveda as sabha, adumbrating the principle of collegial representation, when every citizen’s personal representation, becomes impracticable. “The samiti and the sabha are the two daughters of the prajapati, god,” [29] it declares, implying that the principal of indirect representation in no way detracts from the sovereign character and authority of the representative sabha. This representative Assembly of the People, is given the name of narista in the same hymn. [30] Sayana the medieval commentator of the Vedas, in his Sayanabhasya, explains this term, narista to mean that which is final and cannot be violated, "narista”, he says, “from its inviolability, the same is derived.” [31] The samiti and the sabha consist of, or, are representative of the whole People, visah, [32] and there is no defranchised secondary citizenship, slaves or zimmis, inferior citizens of the Islamic law, in this pristine Aryan polity. This representative Assembly of the People, the sabha, though sovereign, is still subject to certain eternal principal of good conscience and bonafides and through transgressing these principles the Assembly loses its representative and sovereign character. This dictum is preserved in a Buddhist Pali Jataka which says that

the Assembly which has no well-meaning and honest members, is no Assembly, the members who do not speak  and act bonafides, are no honest members, and the honest and well-meaning members are those who are not swayed by bias or favor and who speak out truthfully and fearlessly. [33]

These are the roots out of which the main doctrine of the Sikh polity grow. These doctrines constitute a septinate of the following order:

(1) The sangat, meaning, the local folk assembly of direct representation.

(2) The Panth, which is the whole Commonwealth represented by the Peoples’ Assembly of indirect representation.

(3) The Khalsa, which postulates the sui generis, inalienable sovereignty of the People.

(4) The condominium of Guru Granth and Panth, which implies that the exercise of power is always subject to bonafides and good conscience.

 (5) The Panjpiaras which is the doctrine of collegial leadership in the direction of State policies. [34]

(6) The Gurmata which is the symbol and form of the authority of the Collective Will of the people duly formulated.

 (7) The Sarbat Khalsa doctrine of completely equalitarian free democracy.

Did a republican polity ever function in India, of which any credible evidence is available? And did the Sikhs ever attempt to put principles of their polity into practice?

The answers to both these queries are in the affirmative.

In 330 B.C. Alexander, the Macedonian, defeated Darius III, the last of the Achaemenids, and entered on a campaign to subdue the whole of the Persian empire of which the Gandhara and the Hindush, the present Pakhutunistan and the West Punjab of Pakistan, were satrapies or provinces. After a long campaign in Bac­tria, the Oxus region Alexander crossed Hindu Kush to occupy the Kabul region. He crossed Indus in the spring of 328 B.C. after the king of Taksasila, Ambhi, had submitted to him, and he crossed Jhelum in the winter of the same year to defeat Paurava, the local chief, by a strategy which would render him a war criminal in the eyes of the International conventions or laws of those days, for, it was an accepted Aryan convention not to attack the enemy at night, and never without a forewarning, both of which conventions, the chiv­alrous Paurava took it for granted, would be observed by the enemy in this case, but which the world-conquering Greek hero violated at the first opportunity to win an un-Aryan victory over his Oriental adversary. It is interesting to recall here that only a year earlier, at the battle of Arbela, in 331 B.C. Alexander had spurned the suggestion of Parmenio to surprise the hosts of Darius by night attack, saying, “No, I will not steal a victory.” Obviously, the tradition of Europeans to relax their morals on crossing the Suez into Indian Ocean is of ancient origin. Justly did Vrahmihira, the astronomer, whom Indian writers [35] place in the second century before Christ, while European writers [36] in the 6th century bemoan in his pancasidhantika that “although the Greeks are well advanced in the sciences, they are otherwise uncivilized”. [37]

After this victory, Alexander advanced farther east, meeting with stiff resistance from small republics and local militias, till at the western banks of the river Beas, his soldiers lost heart, and the conqueror was obliged to beat a retreat, across the Punjab and down the Indus, throughout meeting with stiff opposition from local republics and tribal democracies. Before he could reach his homeland, Alexander, though he survived Hindu military attacks, was finally overpowered by the febriculose toxin-injected in noctunal un-Aryan raids into his European veins by Hindu mosquitoes of the anopheline caste, as a consequence of which he died of high fewer at Babylon, in 323 B.C. and the last of his generals, Endamus, was obliged to vacate the overrun portions of north western India in 317. B.C. When in 305 B.C. Seleucus Nicator, another general of Alexan­der, once again tried to reassert Greek dominion over this north western India, he met with such a severe defeat at the hands of Chandragupta Maurya, ‘Sandro­cottus’ of Plutarch, that Seleucus had to cede Kabul valley and give the hand of his daughter in marriage, as terms of the peace treaty to the victor. It was an ambassador of Seleucus, Magesthenese, at the Mauryan court at Patliaputra, who wrote a detailed account of India, the first eyewitness record of a foreign traveller, which gives such valuable information about the social and political conditions of the country in the 3rd century B.C. Though no manuscript of Maga­sthenese’s description of India has survived, many Greek and Latin authors had made use of it, from which Magasthenese’s Indica has been reconstructed.

Magesthenese definitely states that two forms of government, monarchical and republican, were then prevalent in India.

They report everything to the king where the people have a king and to the magistrates where the people are self-governed. [38]

One such republican people, referred to by Greek writers, are the forefathers of the modern Majhails, the back-bone of the Sikh people, who, just before Alexander’s raid, had inflicted a defeat on the valiant Paurava, and who, though hopelessly outnumbered by the Greeks, fought Alexander by the sakata-vyuha, or ‘waggon-formation,’ which the Greek phalanx could not pierce, and who refused to submit formally. The Greek writers call them “Kathians” and describe them as a nation, residing to the east of Hydraotes or the river Ravi, the present districts of Lahore and Amritsar of the West Pakistan and Indian Punjab, respectively.

The Kathians themselves enjoyed the highest reputation for courage and skill in the art of war. [39]

It will be recalled that the descendants of the “Kathians,” the Majhail Sikhs, were the leaders of the Sikh mass of about 30,000 unorganized men, women and children at village Kup, near Malerkotla, in the Indian Punjab, who were surprised and attacked by the 100,000 strong veteran Afghan horsemen of Ahmad Shah Abdali, on the grey raw morning of 5th February, 1762, killing over 15,000 Sikh women and children, mostly in the first onrush, and as many men more in the next few days of the Sikhs' retreat towards Barnala in the Patiala District. In this carnage, called the ‘Great Holocaust', wadda ghalughara in Sikh history, the Sikhs defended themselves by means of the same sakata-vyuha with which they had met the equally overwhelming numerical odds of the Greek invaders, and once, though literally decimated to a man, they refused to submit. The capital city of these “Kathians” is mentioned by the Greek writers as “Sankala,” which most probably occupied the site at which the Sikh Gurus built Amritsar at the end of the 16th century. To the west of this Majhail republic, adjoining their terri­tory, was a republic state of the “Sophytes,” whom  Dr. Sylvain Levi has identified with the Sambhutis [40] whose territory extended upto the Salt Range, the frontier of the territory of Paurava. Their cities

were governed by laws in the highest degree salutary..... and their political system was one to admire. [41]

It was from this region that the ancestors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh arose to help build the foundations of the Sikh Commonwealth which the Maharaja con­verted into a monarchy. Two city states are further mentioned as republics, on the west Beas, but their names, unfortunately are not given. [42] When the army of Alexander reached Beas, he received intelligence that across the river there was the territory of a republic, which was

exceedingly fertile and the inhabitants [of which] were good agriculturists, brave in war and living under an excellent system of internal government. [43]

The territory of this republic extended, it would seem, upto Jamuna, beyond which was the empire of Mahapadma Nanda. The citizens of this trans-Beas repub­lic, had, according to Arrian, elephants of superior size and courage and in greater numbers, and so the Greek invaders “now began to lose heart,” and “positively asserted that they would follow no further.” [44] The citizens of this republic were the forefathers of the Sikhs who founded the cis-Sutlej Sikh states in the 18th century, which endured upto 1956, when they were finally merged in the state of Punjab of the Indian Union.

Thus Alexander retreated. On his retreat, upto Baluchistan, almost all the people Alexander met, were republican. The most powerful republics amongst these people are mentioned as “Oxydrakai” and “Malloi” the Kshudrakas and Mallavas. Their cities were along the river Chenab, and their capital was on the river Ravi, probably, at the site now occupied by Lahore. These two republics in a confederacy, mustered, according to Curtis, [45] 100,000, soldiers to block the retreat of Alexander, whereupon,

the Macedonians lost their heart at the prospect of meeting this army..... When the Macedonians found that they had still on hand a fresh war in which the most warlike nation in all India would be the antagonists, they were struck with an unexpected terror, and began again to upbraid the KIng in the language of sedition. [46]

It was, while assaulting this capital city or some other city of this confederacy that Alexander almost lost his life. Greek writers assert that this confederacy was defeated, but Patanjali in his Mahabhashya shows the Ksudrakas as emerging out victorious. [47] These ksudrakas and Mallavas are, undoubtedly, the ancestors of most of the Majha misls of the Sikhs of the 18th century, who, as we shall presently show, organised themselves on the basis of republican polity, before they were absorbed into the Sikh empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Next republic mentioned by the Greeks is “Sambastai.”  

They were a people inferior to none in India, either for numbers or for bravery, and their form of government was democratic. [48]

Alexander made peace with them. The next “independent nation” which Alexan­der encountered were the “Xathroi”, or Khatris. Most of Sindhi sahajdhari Sikhs, now settled throughout India, and particularly in the Bombay area, are the modern descendants  of these  republican people. Another republic mentioned by the Greek writers is, “Musicani”, which, from the scanty information given, is difficult to identify now. Their realm is described as “most opulent in India”. [49] It is said about “the Musicani” that they took their meals in a common kitchen, a practice revived by the Sikh Gurus, in the well-known institution, Guru-ka-langar. The institution of Guru-ka-langar, (langar Sanskrit, analgrha, meaning ‘fire-place’ (kitchen) which was used by the Sikh Gurus as a powerful lever for equalitarian uplift of the people, by demolishing caste-barriers and the economic apartheid of varnasramadharma, is a pristine Aryan institution, non-Brahmanic, but having Vedic sanction. A reference to the community kitchen, a sort of Guru-ka-langar, occurs in the Atharvaveda, [50] which says, “Identical shall be your drink, in common shall be your share of food.” These “Musicani,” whoever they were, are certainly the spiritual, if not endemic, progenitors of those, now a Sikh people. Another city republic, called “the country of the Brachmins”, is mentioned by the Greek writers. [51] “These philosophers”, bewails Plutarch, [52] “gave Alexander, no less trouble” than others. To the south of this ‘city of brachimns’ was the republican state of “Patala”. ‘Patala’ has been identified with Haidarabad Sind, whose ancient name, Patalpuri, is still remem­bered. Before Alexander arrived, the whole population of this republic migrated to avoid submission.

This seems to be an ancient tradition of republican Aryan freemen, to prefer migration to submission. It is recorded in the Jataks and the Mahabharata that the citizens of the Vrsni republic migrated from Mathura to Dwarka to avoid submission to Jarasandha. ‘Sibis’ of the Punjab migrated to Rajputana and some of them migrated to Kangra hills in the area now called, Dada Siba, under similar circumstances. The Mallavas of the Punjab, migrated to Malwa in central India under the impact of White Huna invasion, and later on established power­ful states there, as Agnikula Rajputs. The Powars or Parmars, a branch of these Agnikula Rajputs founded the Malwa state, with its capital at Dhar, whose most powerful king was Bhoja (1018-1060), not to be confused with his namesake of Kannauja. Bhoja was a scholar of legendary repute, and a patron of learning having the reputation of an ideal Hindu monarch. He is the author of numerous works on astronomy, architecture and poetry and he adorned his capital, Dhar, with many fine buildings, one of which was a Sanskrit college, now a mosque, and the great irrigation lake at Bhojpuri, measuring 250 square miles in area, which he constructed and which was breached by Muslims in the 14th century, and has never been repaired since, was a remarkable feat of engineering. When Dhar was overrun by Muslim invaders in the fourteenth century the whole population of the ruling Powars, original Mallavas of Alexander’s time, migrated towards Punjab, their original habitat and established their headquarters at village, Kangar in the Patiala region, to which place Guru Gobind Singh, repaired in 1706 to write a letter of admonition to emperor Aurangzib, inviting the emperor for personal interview there and assuring him of a safe conduct and a friendly reception [53] .

These people are now known as Dharwar or Dhaliwal Jats, and are found in Patiala, Ludhiana and Amritsar Districts mostly. The veteran General, Akali Phula Singh of Nowshera fame, was one of those whose ancestors had thus emigrated from Dhar. It was the same spirit and tradition of republican independence, which impelled the Sikhs of the West Punjab, along with their endemic Hindu groups, to choose instinctive migration from Pakistan in 1947, while no such reaction was evinced by the Indo-Mongol East Bengal Hindus.

During the pre-Christian era, the Greek invaders throughout the major portion of the Punjab and Sindh, encountered only two of three monarchical systems of government which, in all probability, were elective monarchies, and all others, scores of them, were republican.

This story of political organisation in northwestern India in ancient times, revealed by foreign observers, finds some corroboratory support in ancient Sanskrit literature as well.

Panini, the illustrious Professor of Grammar at the Taksasila University, modern Taxila, is placed by European scholars at the close of the 6th century B.C. on the basis of political data found in his Astadhyayi Grammar. Without doubt, this Grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilisation and it is the most elaborate and scientific grammar com­posed by any one in the world, before the 19th century. But it is so terse, that without a preliminary study, it is difficult to follow without the aid of a suitable commentary. Later Indian grammars are mostly commentaries on Panini, the most famous of which is the Mahabhashya of Patanjali of about three centu­ries later and Kasikavritti of Jayadittya and Vaman of thousand years later (6th century A.D.). Panini says “that the word sangha is in the meaning of gana.” [54] Gana means numbers, the people, the majority of them. That is why Kasikavritti explains, “Sangha is in the meaning of gana; why, because it is the majority which is the essence of sangha.” [55] That gana means a republican government becomes quite clear from Mahabharata where Yudhistra puts the question to Bhisma:

I desire to hear O wise and sagacious teacher, how the ganas achieve prosperity and how they counteract the enemy sabotage, and how they are victorious, gain alliances and expand, Disunity apparently is the root cause of their ruin, and their greatest weakness, I think, is to keep the resolutions of the state secret, on account of their large numbers. [56]

There is no manner of doubt that these republics or sangha were in exist­ence in the north western India, as Panini himself enumerates these republics by name, in which are included the Ksudrakas and the Mallavas encountered by Alexander. [57] Some of these republics, Panini describes as ayudhyajivinis, in which all able-bodied citizens bear arms. Earlier, we have noticed that the Greek writers found the Ksudrakas and Mallavas as being famous for their mili­tary skill. Do we, here, have the prototype of the Khalsa of Guru Gobind Singh, whose members are required to bear arms and to acquire skill in them with a view to protect and maintain their political independence and way of life? [58]

Another point Panini while enumerating the sanghas, adds that they are situated in the vahika land. The kasikavritti explains that the Ksudrakas and Mallavas of Greek fame were vahika sanghas. [59] Mahabharata explains that the vahika land is ‘away from the Himalayas’ [60] , i.e. does not include the mountainous Himachal Prades^’.

This vahika land is precisely the Sikh Homeland, the land of origin of Sikhism, and the republican roots of the Sikh polity sprout out of those hoary republican traditions of the race to which Guru Gobind Singh belonged. The territories of the Sikh Raj under Maharaja Ranjit Singh comprised this vahika land and the sub-mountain Himalayan lands of Jammu and Kangra, in addition to the exotic Kasmir Valley and the Little Tibet. The Bonapartist political policy of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, as we shall see presently, was beset with mutually contradictory trends of the republican temper of the vahika [61] land and the autocratic monarchical proclivities of the Himalayan trigarttas,  Jammu and Kangra, and the Sikh empire eventually blew up in 1849 by the incendiary powder of this mutual ideological conflict between the policies and aims of the republican Khalsa Army and the despotic monarchical trends and aims of the civil apparatus of the Government under the exclusive control of the hill dogras, Dhyan Singh and Gulab Singh.

These ganas or republics were, by no means exclusively confined to the vahika land though the vahika land may be said to be the traditional birthplace and homeland of republicanism in ancient India. In the ancient Hindu literature ganas functioning in other parts of India are also frequently mentioned into the details of which it is not necessary to go here. These republics struck their own coins, some of which have been unearthed during the present century, and are now preserved in museums and private collections. These coins are struck in the name of the gana and not any individual, which fact provides a further link between these ancient political institutions and the Sikh political tradi­tion. These coins bear heraldic legends in the then current Indian script of the pre-Christian era, and declaim in the following strain : “Victory to the gana of Arjunayans”, “Victory to the Yaudheya-gana.” [62] The Sikh greetings, coined and made current by Guru Gobind Singh, “The Khalsa is of God, Victory to God”, apparently has this ancient republican slogan as its prototypal idea and im­pulse.

Guru Gobind Singh’s “light passed into the Great Light”, joti-jot-samae, on the 8th October 1708, the preceding midnight. A little earlier he had dis­patched Banda Singh Bahadur to the Punjab to establish the Sikh Raj, with de­tailed instructions on the strategy to be followed [63] and the pattern of the government to be established. [64] Precisely two years after demise of Guru Gobind Singh, in November 1710, the Sikhs, thus making the imperial rule of Delhi untenable over the whole of india. The coin which they struck, as a symbol of their sovereignty, bore the following heraldic legend.

This coin is struck as token of Our sovereignty Here and Hereafter.

This divine bounty flows from the central doctrine of Nanak (teghi- nanak), and the Victory and Felicity is the gift of Guru Gobind Singh, the King of Kings, the true Master. [65]

An official Seal of Sovereignty was also adopted and introduced, to the effect that,

“The ever expanding prosperity, the strength of arms, and continuous victory and common weal

Are all guaranteed to mankind by Guru Gobind Singh, the Nanak. [66]

It was an ancient tradition of the republics of the pristine Aryan polity to have an official heraldic legend and a seal, called laksnam and ankam respectively, as is implied by Panini. [67] After a brief spell of sovereignty of five years the Sikhs faced a fifty years’ persecution. pogroms and systematic genocide campaigns of the Mughal and Afghan tyrants, till in 1760, they again proclaimed  their formal sovereignty at Lahore under the leadership of Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, and they adopted the legend of the official Seal of Banda Singh Bahadur, as their heraldic legend as well as the official seal citation, laksnam and ankam, both. For five years after this, the Sikhs had to face another genocide pogrom and campaign of the redoubtable Ahmad Shah Abdali, after which, in 1765, they reoccupied Lahore, and formally reasserted their sovereignty, again sticking to the ancient pristine Aryan tradition and the precepts of Guru Gobind Singh of republicanism, and adopting the identical legends for coins and the official seal, first introduced by Banda Singh Bahadur, in 1710.

This position and this tradition, was first compromised by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, gradually, progressively and purposely.

For almost twenty-five years, the general governance of the Sikh Raj at the capital of Lahore remained entrusted in the hands of a triumvirate of Sikh captains, and in the meantime, the Sikhs continued the struggle for liberating the whole of the Punjab, from the Jamuna to the Indus, from the yoke of foreign­ers and their collaborators and culturally foreign elements, and every captain jathedar or sirdar, who thus freed and liberated a territory for the Sikh Raj, had it entered in the records which were maintained by the Custodian-General at Akal Takht, Amritsar, in separate files, which in Arabic is misl (misl in Punjabi) till the time that the Sikh Raj would be duly regularized and estab­lished with a constitution based on the principles of Sikh polity. This is the origin of the Sikh misls or, confederacies, as they are somewhat loosely called. There were twelve such misls, autonomous Sikh militias, in charge of territo­ries, each with a definite clear objective of conquest and preliminary consoli­dation before itself, it being tacitly understood throughout that the ultimate aim was to establish the Sikh Raj in the land based upon the true principles of Sikh polity in accordance with the ancient precedents, and the precepts of Guru Gobind Singh. [68]

This tacit understanding is explicit in every Sirdar personally reporting the details of the area liberated by his militia, twice a year, to the Custo­dian-General at the Akal Takht, and in having the fact duly recorded in the Commonwealth Files, the misls; and he reported also, on the interim pattern of government which he set up in the territory under his militia’s temporary control. Sir George Campbell, a foreign observer, giving eyewitness account, testifies that the internal government of Phulkian misl, out of whose territo­ries subsequently stemmed the ruling states of Patiala, Nabha and Jind,

was much more than a mere village, a municipal government; it was diplomatically recognised as a state and had its own administration and state justice.... There was no chief or hereditary ruler; the state was governed by its panchas or representative elders . . . Mehraj continued a completely independent, self governing republic down to my own time. [69]

The same writer generally testifies that,

the Sikh system is very much like that out of which the German system sprang. They formed misls or confederacies. Twelve misls were recognized in early days. Each misl elected its own supreme chief and sub-chief, and every horseman had his rights and his share in the common conquests. The combined misls formed the Khalsa or the Sikh Commonwealth. Just as in Germany, the tendency was to an elective supreme chief who had very little power and whose place was not hereditary. [70]

What is this doctrine of panca which is enumerated in the very first pages of the Guru Granth, the Japu of Guru Nanak, which doctrine was given the form of the basic principle of Sikh organization and polity, the panjpiaras, by Guru Gobind Singh ?

Literally, the expression, panca means five. The number 5, is basic to the decimal system of enumeration, a gift believed to be, of Hindu genius to the world. It represents the five fingers of the human hand, including its master tool, the thumb, which has made homo-sapiens superior to the apes in technic-skill. The fingers of both the human hands add up to 10, which is the ultimate number. 5, as one term of this system of computation, is the number of the Hindu arithmetic, now adopted by the whole world. The Babylonian system of counting by 12’s and 60’s, which has been the basis of Indian coinage, weights and measures from times immemorial, till quite recently, when it has been replaced by the original Hindu system of decimals, is also derived from the number, 5, as one term of this system of computation. The number 12, the other term, represents the twelve months of the solar year, or twelve zodiacs of the sky, and the number 60, is obtained by multiplying it with 5. The other normative number 16, which forms the basis of old Indian coinage, is simply the square of 4, that is, 4x4, ‘four’ representing the four quarters of the Space and the perfect number of Hindu numerology. The expression, pancha, occurs in the Atharvaveda itself, where in a hymn, referring to election of a representative chief by the people, it is said:

The people elect you to exercise power, the whole people of five directions, pradesah pancha, whose is the glory, for ever and for ever. [71]

The ‘people of five directions’ means all the people of the four directions of the compass and those who represent them at the centre, the venue of the Assembly. In the similar election hymns of the Atharva the expression pancha, frequently occurs as indicative of the whole assembly. In classical Sanskrit, however, this word, panca, has acquired a secondary meaning, that of ‘moral intellect’, srestabuddhi, and also one who is endowed with this ‘moral intel­lect’, integrity and conscience. The expression panca which occurs in the Japu of Guru Nanak, has to be interpreted in this context and background, where the text says:

The panca is the true doctrine.

The panca are supreme.

The panca must be recognised in the organisation of power, (literally in the courts of kings.)

The panca alone are fit to occupy seats of supreme authority for exercise of power.

The guiding light of the panca is their common objective of divine guidance. [72]

It was in exegesis of this text of the Guru Granth, apparently, that Guru Gobind Singh, while glorifying the panjpiaras, declared,

I am ever present, unseen, in the collective deliberations of the panca, and there is no higher guidance on earth, besides. [73]

It was in 1799 that Ranjit Singh, the Sirdar of the Sukracakia-misl, occu­pied Lahore, through fifth column activities and evicted the Sikh triumvirate from the control of the city and the neighboring territory. In 1801, on the Baisakhi day, he had the pre-requisite ancient ceremony of Hindu monarchy, ab­hiseka performed and he assumed the un-Sikh title of Maharaja. His native peas­ant shrewdness, however, warned him that he was sabotaging the very bases of the Sikh polity, and apart from choosing the Baisakhi day for his coronation, there­fore, he had other spectacular Sikh ceremonies performed by the revered Bedi Sahib Singh of Una to consecrate his sabotage, and he declared, which declaration and camouflage he scrupulously maintained throughout his life, that he was to be styled and addressed as His Majesty the Maharaja, only by the non-Sikhs, the Hindus, the Muslims and others, but under no circumstances, by the Sikhs, for the Sikhs, he was always, a simple, Singh Sahib, an honorable member of the Khalsa. Within a few years of his coronation, he reduced into desuetude the supreme authority of the Sikh polity, the gurmata, and entrusted the control of the government of his expanding territories to a cabinet of his own choice, in accordance with the ancient Hindu monarchical tradition but qua his own person, in whom he had gathered all the power and authority of the state in accordance with the un-Sikh, Hindu doctrine, he never claimed independence from the gurmata. On one occasion, when the Custodian-General of the Akal Takht took exception to a certain conduct of his in private life, he readily and humbly bared his back for receiving public flogging as chastisement for his un-Sikh like moral failing, as the humblest member of the Khalsa would. Gradually, he replaced the original Sikh patent of Banda Singh Bahadur on his coins and royal seals, with the cryptic, Akalsahaya, “May God help,” without making it clear as to for whom the help of God was being officially invoked, for the Khalsa or for his Majesty, the Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and in the latter half of his reign, when he became securer in his position, he had the heraldic device of the pipal, ficus religiosa leaf minted on his coinage, to give his kingdom and dynasty a truly Brahmanic basis, divorced from the mores of Sikh polity. The royal “Daily Diaries” of the closing years of his reign are full of uninterest­ing and boring details of lavish and indiscriminate alms-givings to Brahmins, a duty which every Hindu monarch is enjoined to perform scrupulously and without fail in the ancient Hindu texts. Since the expansion, consolidation and protec­tion of his empire throughout remained wholly dependent upon the arms of the Khalsa and the Sikh Army, he never styled his government as anything but the Sirkar-i-Khalsa, the Khalsa Commonwealth. Anybody who saw through the game, was demurrer or opposed to these un-Sikh trends of his policy, was tactfully, but without fail, eliminated from all effective voice in the councils of his government. Accordingly, General Hari Singh Nalwa, Baba Sahib Singh Bedi of Una, and Jathedar Phula Singh Akali, were kicked up or away or made otherwise inef­fective. The antagonism inherent between his policy and aims, and the true prin­ciples and traditions of the Sikh polity, obliged him to debar virtually the employment of Sikhs in superior civil posts of his government, which were re­served for Muslims and Hindus only, as a rule. In pursuance of this policy of his, he raised the alien hill Dogras, Dhyan Singh, Khushal Singh and Gulab Singh, almost from the gutter to positions of supreme authority in the civil apparatus of his government, and Teja Singh, an insignificant Brahmin of the Gangetic Doab, and Lal Singh, another Brahmin from Gandhara valley, were granted such influence which eventually raised them to the supreme command of the Sikh Army, and thus he dug his own grave, the grave of his descendants, and paved the way to the eventual enslavement of the Sikh people.

Once the true basis and the republican foundations of the Sirkar-i-Khalsa were thus well knocked out, the way was cleared for personal ambitions and intrigues in complete disregard of public interest or national good. The Dogras, the hill-aliens, indulged in low suicidal conspiracies to destroy and barter away the state in order to secure their own pre-eminence in the hill territories of the Sikh realm. The Chiefs of the state shamelessly placed their personal and family interests above the interests and safety of the state. The successors of Ranjit Singh themselves concentrated their entire individual energies to secure and strengthen their own illusory regal status even at the cost of the state’s territorial integrity.

Only the Sikh Army, the military arm of the Khalsa remained true to the Sikh polity approved and sanctified by the Gurus and they kept their faith and preserved their integrity up to the last. They could not save the Sikh state but in their defeat they upheld the eternal torch of true Sikh polity ensuring its emergence in the future on a securer and firmer basis.

Maharaja Kharak Singh the weak and gentlemanly successor of Ranjit Singh was slandered with the accusation that he wanted the Sirkar-i-Khalsa to be reduced to vassalage of the British East India Company and thus his promising son, Prince Naunihal Singh, was permanently estranged from his father by documentary forgeries purporting to be diplomatic communications between Kharak Singh and the Governor General at Calcutta and under these circumstances he was finished through slow poisoning. Prince Naunihal Singh died or was murdered under dramatically suspicious circumstances the same day and thus Rani Chand Kaur, the widow of Kharak Singh became the Queen Regent of the State.

On the 20th July (1841) Clark reported the opinion of Dhean Singh that his endeavors do not afford any promise of stability of the government at Lahore. The doubts that the raja expresses of the intentions of British government excite little corresponding sentiments in the Khalsa. They are more under the influence of a feeling of rancor towards him than of enmity to the British government. As it is usually understood amongst them that the British government rejected an offer of the half of Punjab from Chand Kaur to interfere to set her up as a Sovereign, they believe that the British government desire the adjustment of their internal distractions. They would like to get rid of the hill rajas first, after that they might not be disinclined for a rupture with the British government.” [74]

Queen-Regent Chand Kaur was soon murdered in the palace by her maid servants under circumstances that squarely fix the blame on the “hill rajas”, Dhyan Singh in particular, and,

on the 20th January (1842) Shere Singh obtained possession of the (Lahore) fort and on the 27th finally succeeded to the throne. The anarchy in Lahore continuing, it was thought right to have a British force ready to help Shere Singh—in all 10,000 men under Major-General Lumley. Mr. Clark having informed the Governor  General that he had a communication with a confidential advisor of Shere Singh with respect to affording of the aid of British of the troops on the condition of cession to the British of the Lahore territories to the north of Sutlej and the payment of 40 lakhs of rupees. [75]

Next year Sher Singh was publicly murdered by regicide committed by his Sandhanwalia kinsmen recently returned to Lahore from under the protection and hospitality of the British officers and thus Rani Jindan, a young widow of Ranjit Singh became the Queen Regent with Dalip Singh, the infant son of Ranjit Singh, placed on the throne,

The Ranee (Jindan) now reviews the troops unveiled and dressed as a dancing woman which pleases the old and gratifies the young but her irregularities are so monstrously indecent that the troops have held her horse and advised her to be more chaste or they would no longer  style her  the Mother of all the Sikhs. [76]

and further,

It appears to be true by Broadfoot’s report that at one moment the plan of the Ranee was to have urged the troops to move against the English to force our interference, to disavow the act of the troops and to trust that we should restore their Government after we had destroyed the army on the basis of Lord Auckland’s subsidiary arrangement of 1844. [77]

What about the Chiefs of the Realm?