पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

122 PANIPAT 1761 under some circumstances as honourable as a victory, and never, in all their annals, did the Maratha armies cover themselves with greater glory than when the flower of the chivalry of the Deccan perished on the stricken field of Pani- pat, fighting against the enemies of their creed and country But, after all, the general who wins a campaign is the one who makes the fewest mistakes The Bhausaheb did not commit a tithe of the blunders of both Wellington and Napoleon in the Waterloo campaign He lost not because he was a bad gen- eral, but because his opponent was a better one ' We have shown above that these opinions are correct as far as they go But that is beside the point The wisdom for the Marathas lay in not coming to grips with such an awkward enemy as Ahmad Shah Abdali Had Panipat resulted in a defeat of the Afghans, it would not have meant the same thing to them or to others Nobody was going to invade barren Afghanistan and try to rule over it Instead of consolidating and making sure of what they had got the Marathas had no business to march forward, lengthen their lines of communication and multiply their responsibilities This wrong policy had begun already with Bajirao's invasion of Delhi in 1736 Geographic fac- tors were completely ignored, because they were completely misunderstood by the Marathas The Marathas boasted all along that "the Deccan was as good as theirs," but had never once understood the implications underlying that state- ment Even in their hey day before Panipat, others had coolly stolen a march on them The implication of the destruction of the Angre's naval power seems to have been understood by Alivardi Khan³ in Bengal just before his death, but not by the Peshwa The short sighted policy pursued by the Peshwa even after his experience in the Vijayadurg affair resulted in his directly playing into the hands of his enemy and assured Clive's success in Bengal A similar thing occurred at Mysore and made the line clear for Haidar Ali It should never be forgotten that Surat and Janjira never came into the hands of the Peshwa, much less could he have hoped to touch the European citadels on his coast, Bombay and Goa While the Marathas were exhilarated by their march be- yond the Indus, the English were silently entering Surat by the back door of the sea A big army of the Marathas was encamping outside Surat and their navy had also entered the Tapti estuary Diplomats were coming and going and taking sides in the civil struggle at Surat, but still the English could carry on independent correspondence with the Wazir Ghazi ud din (a so called crea- ture of the Marathas) and get a Firman from the Mughal Emperor (wh thought himself a protege of the Peshwa) appointing them the keepers of th Surat fort and admirals of the Mughal fleet This neglected Surat episode throws a flood of light on Maratha politics during its most triumphant days Sadashivrao's defects have been well pointed out by the English envoy John Spencer⁴ four years before Panipat He knew him to be a man with great capacity for business, but as hasty and avaricious, too The impatience men- tioned by the English Vakil was born of ignorance The ignorance was due to the defective educational system or rather absence of a progressive system marching with the times and adequate for making its votaries able to cope with ³ S C HILL, Bengal in 1756-57 (1905), Vol II, pp 16, 65, & ⁴ C H F