भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

Tipu Sultan, The Savage 555. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the Maratha Empire had become so expansive and so powerful as to have brought about the de facto overthrow of the Moghul Empire at Delhi. The Hindu power had no Muslim rival state to oppose it effectively throughout the length and breadth of India, right from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari. But at this very time, Hyder Ali, an ordinary Muslim soldier, had been gradually rising to power in the army of the Hindu State of Mysore and had already become quite indispensable. Even after the sad experience of centuries together how the very Muslim servants, in whom the Hindu kings had placed complete confidence and whom they had brought to prosperity and power, had betrayed those very Hindu masters most treacherously ever since the times of Mahmud of Ghazni and Ghori, this Hindu King of Mysore committed the same blunder. Because of his usual artless, and almost unwise attitude of equality to all religions, which was imbibed assiduously amongst the Hindus in general, King Chikka Krishnaraj Vodyar or more particularly his Chief Minister, Nanjeraj, entrusted the supreme military command to this fanatical Muslim adventurer, Hyder Ali. The consequences were inevitable. Hyder Ali set aside Chikka Krishnaraj Vodyar, with a little pension and usurped the throne of Mysore. He once marched against the Marathas also but was so sorely beaten by them on the battlefield that he dared not give it a second trial again. He had also once attacked the English at Madras successfully. But as we are not concerned here with the other activities of his, it would be sufficient simply to add that after his death in 1782, he was succeeded to the throne of the Hindu State of Mysore by his equally unscrupulous adventurer of a son, Tipu Sultan-1. 556. As soon as he came to the throne, Tipu wiped out even the name of the original Hindu King and proclaimed himself the Sultan of a Moslem state. Tipu was the last of the Muslim rulers to establish a new independent state, and style himself a Sultan during the millennial Hindu-Muslim war. 557. True to the usual Muslim tradition, Tipu performed his first duty as a Sultan of announcing publicly in the very first session of his court (Darbar), that he would see to it that all the kafirs were made Muslim willy-nilly. He commanded all the Hindus in his state to embrace Islam. He ordered his various officers of high and low ranks in every city, town and village to