From Panipat to Bengal

FIVE hundred years ago exactly this week, on April 21, 1526, in a town called Panipat only 161 km from Chandigarh, Zahiruddin Muhammed Babur overran the last ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, the most cruel Ibrahim Lodi, and laid the foundation of Mughal rule in India.

By the time it more or less ended, 231 years later, in 1757, in faraway Bengal in the killing fields of Palashi — far better known by its anglicised name, the Battle of Plassey — the Mughals had been reduced to a whimper of the progeny Babur had sired. Alamgir II was the titular head in Delhi’s Lal Qila. Of his son, Shah Alam II, who succeeded him two years later, in 1759, the Persian taunt was thrown around publicly. Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, az Dilli ta Palam. The Sultanate of Shah Alam extends, in today’s geographic terminology, from Delhi-6 to Palam village, on the outskirts of the capital’s Terminal 1 airport, less than 30 km.

This short history lesson is hardly necessary in the already hot days of a Punjab summer, when the koel hoots insistently and the mango tree sheds its fine blossoms. Nobody need tell Punjab, it’s seen everything these past 500 years — and forever, before — by virtue of being the favourite stomping ground of invaders, conquerors, dictators and democrats.

And then there is Bengal. Anything that happens anywhere in India, is multiplied several times more in this part of the subcontinent. The green is greener, especially during the monsoons. The red is redder, especially during the nine days when the Devi reigns supreme during Pujo. The rivers are longer — some even longer than those in Punjab, although both states have rivers that flow into other countries and allow people of other castes and religions to live off them.

(Moreover, back in 1398, when Babur’s ancestor, Timur, was laying waste to Punjab — more than a hundred years before Babur defeated a fellow Muslim to win Hindustan — Muslim Pathan rulers of Bengal like Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah encouraged the translation of Hindu epics like the Ramayana into Bengali, apart from fostering diplomatic ties with the Ming dynasty and co-writing poetry with the Persian poet Hafiz.)

All the emotions are played out in Bengal, many at the same time. Anger : Partition of the province in 1905. Reconciliation : Reunification in 1911. Betrayal : Mir Jafar, Suvendu Adhikari. Religion : birth of the Muslim League in 1906 and 34 years of the atheist Communists, 1977-2011. Culture: Both Jana Gana Mana and Vande Mataram. Empire : Fall of the Mughals in 1757 in Plassey; in Barrackpore in 1857; rise and fall of East India Company and British Raj. Revenge : Direct Action Day, 1946. Politics : Partition of the country in 1947.

You can love or hate Bengal, but you cannot ignore it. Both PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah understand that fundamental truth well, which is that Amartya Sen’s “argumentative Indian” is probably Bengali. In what is now an oft-quoted line from his book by the same name, Sen argued that India’s centuries-old tradition of dialogue is remarkable because it is enriched by a diversity of opinion that cuts across caste, class and education.

In his preface to the book, Sen writes that just before the 2004 General Election, a villager just outside his home in Kolkata, “barely literate and certainly very poor” told him this : “It is not very hard to silence us, but that is not because we cannot speak.”

No wonder Bengal — and Punjab, as was made more than clear on Friday evening — has been in the BJP’s fish eye for some time now. Unlike in 2021, when the PM’s “Didi, oh Didi” heckle didn’t go down too well with Bengal, the BJP’s arsenal this time around has been far more diverse. The deletion of 27.10 lakh voters in the Special Intensive Revision which has cut the electoral rolls by 11.63 per cent in the state, has thrown political equations out of gear. The BJP is declaring victory after the first phase of voting. Equally, Mamata Banerjee knows that this battle for Bengal won’t just make-or-break her own political career, it will have a profound impact on the fortunes of the entire Opposition.

It’s easy to travel in Bengal and watch the story change — just follow the Ganga if you’re coming from UP and Bihar. Not far from Plassey, where the bell tolled for the Mughal satrap Siraj-ud-Daulah in 1757, is Murshidabad district, one of the richest areas in the world in the 19th century and at the heart of a rift today between Mamata and suspended Trinamool MLA Humayun Kabir, who has since floated his own party — both sides are now competing for the minority vote, which means that Mamata’s bastion is no longer safe.

You can cross the Bhagirathi at Murshidabad on a raft — know, though, that it can hold only humans, a cycle and scooter or two, plus a few chickens coming home to roost. On the other side is the Hazaarduari, the incredible 900-room Greek-style palace built in 1837 by Nawab Humayun Jah, which holds one of seven extant copies of Akbar’s Ain-i-Akbari. Here, then, is the other twist in the centuries-old Bengal story — Jah was not a successor of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the man who lost Plassey to Robert Clive, but of Mir Jafar, the man who betrayed the Bengal Nawab in 1757 to the British.

Not that betrayal is unique to the fertile mind of the Bengali. Back here in the heat and dust of the Punjab plains, the split in the ruling AAP on Friday evening — with 3 of the 7 MPs who have defected joining the BJP — has sent a shiver down the spine of the political class. The message is clear. Neither in Bengal in the coming week nor in Punjab, where elections are due less than a year from now, will the BJP leave anything to chance. It believes it has a shot at power in both these states that bookend the country, where it has never ruled on its own before and will give everything it has to do so.

In the 500 years since the First Battle of Panipat, much has changed but so much still remains the same — TS Eliot, writing in The Waste Land, in the wake of the First World War, may or may not have thought of Babur when he wrote the unforgettable “April is the cruellest month…” line to invoke the anomie and exhaustion of war.

Thank god, the month is soon coming to an end.