Empire of the Sikhs (30 page)

Ranjit Singh did in fact follow the injunction of Guru Gobind Singh by creating a meritocracy based on virtue and talent and dedication. However, the distinction between an aristocracy defined not by ‘right of birth' but by its ‘self-imposed code of service and sacrifice' is soon lost when upstarts with unearned titles of princes and such usurp the rights of those who have virtue and talent but are humble by birth. This is precisely what happened after Ranjit Singh's death, and it is not surprising that the Khalsa started to revolt:

The Khalsa is never a satellite to another power,

they are either fully sovereign or

in a state of war and rebellion.

A subservient coexistence they never accept.

To be fully sovereign and autonomous is

their first and last demand.
¹¹

The truth of this became evident within months of Ranjit Singh's death. When his sons and their wives, nephews and senior functionaries of the Durbar vengefully turned against each other, the army, too, was inevitably, and irresponsibly, drawn into political decision-making. ‘Such a right is not inherent in the concept of the Khalsa,' as one of the present authors has written elsewhere. ‘Furthermore, whilst Ranjit Singh's leadership qualities had kept the army in line, its restiveness against his weak successors was now evident and when it spilt over, a major shift occurred from the political system created by the Gurus, in which rights had been invested in the entire Khalsa community, and not just the army. The manner of the army's assertiveness, though not directed at the state, damaged the state's cohesiveness since it lacked the discipline with which the Khalsa had closed its ranks against all adversaries in the past. This time it was divided both against itself and against others; an antithesis to the concept of a united Khalsa.'
¹²

The qualities of spirituality, self-discipline and unlimited self-confidence which the Khalsa had introduced into the Indian mosaic were fatally subverted at this time, a process aided and abetted by the elites of India's older religious faiths, led by Hinduism and Islam, which had always at heart resented the vigorous self-assertiveness of the Sikhs. The end result was the weakening of the great legacy of the Khalsa's founding principles, of a magnificent and unprecedented state. This was the ultimate price paid for Ranjit Singh's error of judgement in departing from a key founding principle of his religion and creating a monarchy, even though he never behaved like most despotic monarchs have done through the ages.

Monarchical rule had been habitual during the most significant periods in Indian history, whether Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Mughal or British. The fountainhead of power was the sovereign, not the people. If the people were restless, the rulers knew how to repress them. Those who were benign and ruled justly did so out of inner convictions, not because they were compelled to by the tenets of their faith. The emergence of the Sikh faith, committed to the republican democratic tradition, was a rare event in an environment in which authority was exercised arbitrarily and decisions in statecraft were whimsical more often than wise.

Another point to note is that whilst all great religions have waged wars against each other in attempts to establish their primacy, the Sikhs never fought wars to establish the supremacy of their faith. Their wars were fought to restore the sovereignty of their country, not the right of their religion to dominate people of other denominations. Ranjit Singh's critics, who rightfully criticize his monarchical bent, give him little or no credit for the even-handedness with which he applied the secular principle to the Sikh state. This quality of the man stood out in barbaric times. If the Sikh faith still has vitality and vigour, despite the setbacks it suffered as a consequence of his mis-step in establishing a monarchy, it is because the Gurus, unlike Ranjit Singh's critics, took into account human foibles and frailties.

Many of them, so as to curry favour with tyrants, for a fistful of coins, or through bribery or corruption, are shedding the blood of their brothers.

EMILIANO ZAPATA

Within days and months of Ranjit Singh's death his empire began to flounder – something that would have been unlikely to happen had the republican character of the Sikh state remained unchanged. Ranjit Singh's successors were unable to carry their fellow Sikhs with them because the Durbar's intrigues left many of them utterly disenchanted at the spectacle of all major decisions being taken by a few courtiers who lacked any integrity and moral vision. Such men no longer enjoyed the confidence or respect of the fearless and resolute Sikh troops on whom the power of the Sikh state had always rested. That power was now being destroyed from within.

The poet George Herbert writes that ‘storms make oaks take deeper root'. Just the opposite happened when Ranjit Singh died. Prince Kharak Singh, who succeeded him as the Maharaja, was no oak, and the storms that began blowing after his father's death destroyed whatever roots he had. He was weak and ineffectual, with neither the charisma nor the qualifications to hold together the extraordinary legacy with which he had been left. He was incapable of dealing with external or internal threats, and it was
the latter that put an end both to his rule and to his life. Some contemporaneous historians have their own agendas for holding that he was not as much of a weakling as he has been made out to be and that Dhian Singh ran him down to his father. ‘It will readily be acknowledged by all who knew anything of Kurruck Sing', writes one such English historian, ‘that in the early part of his life he gave the promise of, or in reality possessed, all the abilities requisite for a sovereign of the Punjaub; with perhaps one exception, viz. that while not so crafty as the minister, Dhian Singh, he was more religiously and peacefully inclined, and far less ambitious. Yet though peaceful, he proved when roused to energy that he possessed no small share of personal bravery, activity, and determination.'
¹
It has at least to be admitted that in the immediate aftermath of Ranjit Singh's death and during the brief period in which he was still active Kharak Singh did score victories with the occupation of the hill states of Mandi, Saket and Kulu in 1840 – the same year in which he died, on 5 November.

His son, Nau Nihal Singh, was of a different mettle altogether. To begin with, because he was bright, alert and immensely proud of the legacy of which he was a part, Ranjit Singh saw him as a person who had the necessary energy and enthusiasm to continue the tradition of strengthening the foundations of the Sikh nation he had founded. But that promise remained unfulfilled, in part because of his early end and also because he lacked the humane instincts and wisdom that had set his grandfather apart. He had certainly started out in his footsteps, joining family tradition in being barely thirteen in May 1834 when he fought in the battle in which the Sikhs annexed Peshawar: both his grandfather and great-grandfather had gone out to battle before they were ten. So both at Peshawar and then among the Sikh soldiers who quelled a revolt at Dera Ismail Khan and Tonk, Nau Nihal Singh proved that the blood of his forefathers coursed richly through his veins.

What he completely lacked were scruples of any kind. He was
incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, which was in all likelihood responsible for his early end. While, for example, on the one hand he loathed Dhian Singh – and with considerable justification – he connived with him in crudely removing his father from power and exercising all the ruler's powers himself. On 8 October 1839 he also connived with Dhian Singh in the killing of Chet Singh, his father's closest adviser. It was a chilling and brutal murder, carried out in the presence of a very sick Kharak Singh. Nau Nihal Singh himself, it has been written, was present. According to some accounts Dhian Singh stabbed Chet Singh ‘twice through the stomach with a long knife'.
²

Kharak Singh declined rapidly, both in body and mind, after witnessing the brutal end of his friend and the callous disregard for his own dignity and sensitivity. The eighteen-year-old Nau Nihal Singh viewed his father's sad state as an opportunity to take over as virtual Maharaja of Punjab – a position to which he failed to bring any of his grandfather's qualities of statesmanship and leadership. ‘His virtual assumption of power in the name of the titular monarch in December 1839', writes a modern historian, ‘was characterized with unwise political steps … he prevented the British political agent Wade from meeting the Maharaja in December 1839, and made an attempt that Sir John Keane, the British general, should not have an interview with the Maharaja. He was also responsible for the recall of Wade from Ludhiana for the latter's alleged overbearing and obnoxious conduct towards him and the minister Dhian Singh.'
³

Not content with these patently unwise moves against the British – in contrast to Ranjit Singh who had always made it a point to curb his own feelings about them – Nau Nihal Singh showed no such finesse. But he certainly stood up to them when the British made various provocative moves, some of which were noted down by the governor-general in his minute dated 20 August 1839. Among other things, he ‘proposed the establishment of a permanent
British mission at Peshawar and a magazine at Rawalpindi in the territories of the Durbar though they were not stipulated in the Tripartite Treaty [signed on 26 June 1838 by Ranjit Singh with Shah Shuja and the East India Company agreeing on a joint invasion of Afghanistan to put Shah Shuja on the Kabul throne]'.
⁴

Nau Nihal Singh was perversely and provocatively rude to his father during the last few weeks of his life. Kharak Singh died on 5 November 1840 at just thirty-eight years of age. Ironically, Nau Nihal Singh's own life also ended the next day with the fall of an archway on him as he and some others were passing under it on their way back from his father's funeral. There are a number of versions of his death, one being that he did not die in the accident but was killed on the orders of Dhian Singh a day or two later, during which time no one was allowed to see him on the plea that he was being treated for his injuries.

Accounts of Nau Nihal Singh's end by writers of the period leave little doubt of Dhian Singh's role in it. ‘None of the female inmates [of Lahore Fort], not even his wives, were suffered to see him. Everything was kept locked up for a while … and the minister [Dhian Singh] with but two of his followers and chief hill men remained with the prince.'
⁵
An eyewitness account by Captain Alexander Gardener, an American serving in the Lahore Durbar's artillery, noted that it was some of his own men who put the injured prince into a litter to take him to the fort. ‘One of the
palkee
[palanquin] bearers afterwards affirmed, that when the prince was put into the
palkee,
and when he was assisting to place him there, he saw that above the right ear there was a wound which bled so slightly as only to cause a blotch of blood of about the size of a rupee … the blood neither flowed nor trickled in any quantity, before his being taken out. Now, it is a curious fact, that when the room was opened, in which his corpse was first exposed … blood in great quantity, both in fluid and
coagulated pools, was found around the head on the cloth on which the body lay.'
⁶

Whatever caused Nau Nihal Singh's death, the consensus of accounts is that the lives of two men whom Ranjit Singh had hoped would ensure the continuity of his legacy came to an end within two days of each other. Although there are other suspects, most fingers point not only at Dhian Singh but also at his brothers Gulab Singh and Suchet Singh (although the last name of each was Singh, they were not Sikhs); they had sworn allegiance to Ranjit Singh, who knew how to retain their loyalty during his lifetime. An added edge to Dhian Singh's intrigues was provided by his obsessive desire to see his son Hira Singh ultimately ascend Ranjit Singh's throne. The conspiracies he hatched after the Maharaja's death involved hatred, mistrust and other violent deaths to clear his son's way to the throne. As prime minister he was in a position to arrange the bloodbaths necessary to attain his ends.

Aside from these Kashmiri Dogras and the Brahmins Tej Singh and Lal Singh, members of Ranjit Singh's own family were equally involved in their own intrigues to capture power, indifferent to the fact that the British were waiting on the sidelines to exercise their skills in manipulation and subversion which inexorably led to domination and subjugation of the Sikh nation. The more active of these participants in the struggle for power were Chand Kaur, Kharak Singh's widow and mother of Nau Nihal Singh, and Sher Singh, Ranjit Singh's second son.