Amit Shah’s Freudian slip: The Panipat reference in his BJP national convention speech

Maharashtrians identify three events in Indian history that set their society back by a generation or two. The first was the Third War of Panipat in 1761. The second was Nathuram Godse’s assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the third was the emergence of Bal Thackeray and his narrow parochialism that prevented large sections of Marathi youth from seeking premier education and becoming more than just clerks and peons in government offices.

Godse’s assassination of Gandhiji had the effect of making the rest of Indians suspicious of Maharashtrians, and Maharashtrian Brahmins in particular, affecting their job opportunities, careers and social capital for decades.

But it is the defeat of the Peshwa army at Panipat in 1761 that has been the most traumatic and damaging to Maharashtrian ethos, raising many unanswerable questions for all times.

Panipat was a bloody massacre so far as the Maratha army was concerned and those lives were lost essentially because the Peshwa commander Sadashivbhau, who had no political knowledge and little military skills, refused to listen to better counsel of his more experienced generals, both Hindu and Muslim, and led his army into an avoidable bloodbath.

The defeat created many suspicions between various sections of Maharashtrian society, setting Marathas against Brahmins, Dalits against both and the British closer to the conquest of most of the Maratha territory, leading to the eventual collapse of the Peshwa empire in barely 50 years, a trauma from which they have been unable to recover to this day.

So, raising the spectre of Panipat as we head towards the 2019 elections was perhaps not the most advisable thing that BJP president Amit Shah could have done. Shah, of course, wanted to project both Panipat and 2019 as a direct war between Hindus and Muslims but he is way off the mark on both.

Ahmed Shah Abdali Durrani could never have defeated the Marathas at Panipat had it not been for the considerable support he got from the Rajput and Jat Hindu kings who were sick and tired of the Hindu Marathas interfering in their succession battles and troubling them for chauth - a quarter of their wealth in taxes - all the time.

Marathas had conquered much of Punjab as far as Peshawar and Khyber Pakthoonthwa in modern-day Pakistan and, like the Rajput and Jat kings, Durrani wanted to be left alone to govern his territories in peace. The fact that he left Delhi to the Marathas after winning the Panipat war shows he did not have plans to conquer India in the manner being made out by most historically challenged bigots with affiliations to the BJP and the RSS.

But even if these bigots know, what they won’t talk about is the personal (and not related to empire or territory) betrayal by the Malharrao Holkar, a Dhangar (shepherd) chieftain with vast experience in the Maratha-Peshwa army who left the battlefield minutes before the final confrontation, on a tip-off from Shuja-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Oudh, who owed Holkar a favour and warned him of the coming massacre.

The Nawab was fighting on the side of the Afghan army, for Maratha expansionism was getting to him, as it was to the Hindu Rajput and Jat kings of northern India. But he knew how to pay his debts and so saved Holkar’s life.

In view of all these mixed-up loyalties and allegiances, 2019 is unlikely to be anything like Panipat. Firstly, India is not going to war with foreign powers though the BJP, in view of Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s fantastic claims that the Congress is conspiring with Pakistan to defeat the BJP, would like to fool the people into believing as such.

Secondly, the 2019 electoral battle is likely to be one for the very soul of India as Panipat in 1761 never was – that was a material war on both sides to gain just territories and taxes and religion had little to do with it for either the Hindus or the Muslims. Though for the times, the Peshwa Brahmins were by and large orthodox and conservative, upper caste Hindu hegemony was never their aim – apart from Holkar who hailed from a nomadic community, they had Shamsher Bahadur, the son of Bajirao and Mastani, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his cousin Sadashivbhau in the Peshwa army (he died alongside his Hindu cousins too).

Today, the BJP-RSS combine has a sinister game plan of not just dividing Hindus and Muslims but pushing for a return to the Brahmin domination of the general masses and leaving the socially deprived classes at the mercy of the more privileged upper castes.

If there was ever any doubt about the push for a return to the pre-Independence days of upper caste hegemony, the Modi government’s 11th hour bill to provide reservations to economically backward upper castes is a case in point.

For the poor Brahmin has always been more privileged than even a rich Dalit in terms of social capital and placing all the poor in the same category – never mind the fact that there are no jobs to reserve in the first place – is surely destined to push the underprivileged classes into a permanent state of social deprivation.

But that and the fact that the BJP should fall back on a distorted version of history to attempt to win the 2019 elections is clear confirmation of the failure of their government in the last four years with little electoral stock among the people anymore. Their shenanigans in Karnataka is another sign of desperation and the fact that even a previously loyal ally like the Shiv Sena would rather lose the Lok Sabha elections than be bullied into an alliance with the BJP is an indicator of where the party is really headed.

Narendra Modi’s fading charisma and the collapse of Shah’s ‘Chanakya Neeti’ seem to have brought the BJP to a state where both leaders are flailing about in the dark, with little clue on how to minimise their losses and prevent the decimation of the party in the coming elections.

The Panipat reference may thus be just a Freudian slip – related less to the Hindu-Muslim divide they are trying to create than to the fear lurking in a dark corner of their mind that, for the BJP, losing 2019 would be akin to the Peshwas losing Panipat. Which was not just a defeat per se - 1761 set the tone for the civilisational wipe-out of the Peshwa empire, 2019 could erase the BJP in similar fashion.

No wonder, the BJP is taking such a tortuous path to survival.

(Views expressed are personal and do not reflect those of NHS)