पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

12 PANIPAT 1761 of Raghunathrao in this far famed Panjab campaign was Sakharam Bapu He seems to have developed a faculty for easily disposing of the twenty two subahs of the Mughal Empire by his parlour calculations ¹⁴ Raghunathrao also had developed a similar faculty from his early boyhood ¹⁵ Thus there seems to have been some brain wave set in motion at the court of Poona whereby all such problems of high imperial policy were quickly settled at one sitting on the basis of theoretical or oral information supplied by Munshis! When Raghunathrao went on his first expedition to Gujarat in 1753 ¹⁶ (when he was only nineteen), he had already discussed from his base in Kathiawad the possibility of proceeding to Sind and Multan via Bhujnagar, i e Cutch ¹⁷ Had he followed that idea and put it into an actual plan, he would have then and there realized the necessity of organizing an efficient camel corps, for his route would have taken him through the great Indian desert, between Marwad and Sind As it was, the project never materialized, and Raghunathrao re turned to pursue his way to Kumbher of Surajmal Jat to break his head there There seems to be something fundamentally wrong in the plans of conquest hatched in the hen coop of Shanwarwada (the Peshwa's palace in Poona), for the Peshwa is found constantly ordering his generals to proceed on new conquests and then as suddenly recalling them or transferring them to dif ferent fields! Otherwise we cannot account for the miserable failure of that decade of incessant activity preceding Panipat Raghunathrao had left behind not more than ten thousand troops in the Panjab when returning Afterwards, when Tukoji Holkar and Sabaji Shinde arrived, the total number was perhaps twenty thousand This force, with its shortcomings, was quite inadequate to keep back Abdali and govern the Panjab against a number of rebellious adventurers with local support Raghunathraos idea of setting up a rival claimant in the Kabul area and get ting the necessary work of stopping Abdali done through him, was good on paper, but a rival who would be able to make even a semblance of a stand against the overpowering personality of Ahmad Shah Abdali was difficult to find The only feasible plan in the circumstances then existing was to stop at the river Jehelum and try to defend the line of Multan, Lahore and Jammu by making a common cause with the Rajputs and Sikhs in those regions This meant a departure from the policy of governing the Mughal provinces through the old decrepit machinery of derelict officers, civil and military Men like Ranjit Dev of Jammu and Alasingh Jat of Patiala would have been ready to join such a front with an ideological basis different from the ideology of the Mughal Empire But there was no personality of Shivaji's type amongst the then existing Marathas That was the real difficulty of the Maratha Empire if it was going to be built Ahmad Shah Abdali, it should not be forgotten, was a Shivaji amongst his compatriots He had put the name of Afghanistan on the map Before his advent the Afghans were divided into various inde- pendent, warring and backward tribes, ready to accept service under any con- ¹⁴ Ibid 284 ¹⁵ Purandare 1 158-9 ¹⁶ SPD 21.38 ¹⁷ Ibid. 21.58.