पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

THE JUDGMENT 127

but did not gain anything, materially speaking, thus proving the futility of war in the material sense to any party, long before Sir Norman ANGEL wrote his Great Illusion. Incidentally it also proved the correctness of the Maratha stand in the political sense. The Marathas lost the Panjab no doubt, but it was gained not by Abdali a foreigner, but by the Sikhs in the long run. The treacherous Najib-ud-daulah, the arch-villain of the piece, outwardly succeeded in warding off the Marathas, but found himself thrown between two mill- stones—the Sikhs from the north and the Jats from the south—never getting a moment's rest till his death a decade later. The hated Marathas again ruled in Delhi and uprooted Najib's family together with his buried bones in the grave at Najibabad. The trans-Ganges Ruhelas under Hafiz who had joined Abdali as Afghans, also experienced the scourge of the Marathas after Najib's death. Shuja-ud-daulah who had been enticed away into joining the side of Abdali by cajoling and threatening, not only left the Afghan side just after Panipat, but became the annihilator of the Ruhelas with the help of Warren Hastings, thus historically proving that he had acted under "duress" the wrong party. He himself had escaped falling under the suzerainty of the Marathas, only to find himself obliged to fall a victim to the utterly foreign English. In fact, the ultimate result of Panipat was to make the way smooth and clear for the English, a result which could have been avoided only by a victory for the Marathas. History thus vindicates the correctness of the Maratha stand and exposes the basic hollowness of their critics. Further, it also proves the com- plexity of the Afghan border problem, which has not been satisfactorily solved by the British even after a rule of 150 years. The irony of history can have no better illustration than Panipat.