पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

good But the Marathas would not sit idle if there was no stır amongst them They would do the work themselves irrespective of the cost Aurangzib wanted to enrol the valiant Marathas as his loyal servants like the Rajputs in the north To avoid that fate they waged a continuous war and went through untold sufferings for two generations And now Shahu became a Mughal servant without a struggle! He never struck his own coins but only those of the Mughal emperors His generals and ministers spread all over India but only as Mughal grandees or governors Even all the Marathas never became his subjects and why should they be when they knew Shahu to have been a Mughal subject like themselves albeit styled Chhatrapati? All who felt dissatisfied with the Maratha kingdom crossed over the border and got them elves employed under the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan on better terms than Shahu could hope to offer This support was utilized by the cunning viceroy to stop the payment of Chauth in the first instance and later for buttressing his own independent rule in defiance of Delhi Shahus ministers and gen erals had to fight for their very existence many a time when the viceroy (Nizam) had grown strong with outside support or the Marathas had become weak by internal dissensions This struggle was carried on intermittently for full three quarters of a century and though the Marathas triumphed on most occasions the Nizams rule came to be stabilized in the Deccan But the fun damental cause of this consummation was the primary mistake committed by the Prime Minister of Shahu in accepting the Mughal service on behalf of his guileless master which was later on continued by his successors in office Even Justice M G Ranade has misconstrued this point in his Rise of the Maratha Power because the material before him was scanty Others have fallen into the same error because they have blindly accepted Ranade as their guide Be cause the Peshwas throughout their career tried to act as agents of the Mughal emperors others more clever played the same game and outwitted the Marathas by securing the orders of the puppet emperors set up by themselves The second short sighted step taken by Balaji Vishwanath has also been similarly misconstructed by Ranade and others In the worst days of the Maratha kingdom during 1690 1700 when king Rajaram had gone to the Madras coast and ruled from Gingee (Jinji) the Maratha ministers as a tem porary policy offered fabulous rewards in land and money to the wavering Marathas so that they might not go over to Aurangzib Many of these grants under duress were afterwards resumed by Tarabai whose ministers would have again reverted to Shivajis far sighted policy of awarding no spoils or jagirs but paying in cash from the central treasury Shahus return as a Mughal protege and the outbidding of his clever but short sighted Peshwa put a premium on disloyalty to Tarabai the de facto ruler and thus weakened the very basis of Shivajis modern state Ramachandrapant Amatya who knew at first hand Shivajis state craft has put down for posterity Shivajis ideas and ideals in his unique Rajaniti Balajis policy of awarding a share in the con quered lands to ministers and generals created semi independent barons who ultimately overshadowed the central government after Panipat Balajis pre- caution—lauded as a unique invention—against these barons growing strong and uncontrollable by the central authority viz not to bestow contiguous lands x i