Spirit of Independence
K. Chandrasekhar, via e-mail

I find it odd that many in Pakistan think that the Muslims in India were reduced from being rulers to the ruled by the British. Perhaps a brief history of those times would enlighten them:

1. It was Mir Jafar who let them down by betraying Siraj Udduallah.
2. The Marathas captured Delhi in the mid-18th century and held it with uneven gaps till 1803 when the British captured it. As a matter of fact, the problem is that most of our worthy elites have not read the history of the sub-continent. The Pakistanis are not the descendants of the Turk armies that invaded India.
3. Hindu Marathas militarily defeated the Mughals long before 1971 and their hold on India was finally and successfully challenged not by any Punjabi or Pathan Muslim army but by the Bengal and Madras armies of the English East India Company at Laswari and Assaye respectively in 1803.
4. Punjab, a province with a Muslim majority, was firmly under Sikh domination despite the fact that the Sikhs constituted an eight or nine percent minority! During the Sikh rule, mosques were often used as military magazines, including the famous Badshahi Mosque and some times plastered with cow dung (pages 347 to 360, Lahore - Past and Present, M.Baqir, Punjabi Adabi Academy, Lahore 1984). This was also true for the Golden Mosque of Kashmiri Bazaar, Lahore.
5. The problem is that we have forgotten (including the erudite writer of this column) that all territory west of Aligarh district (including Aligarh), including Delhi, Agra, Punjab and Frontier was under Hindu Maratha or non-Muslim Sikh rule till 1803 or as late as 1849!

Indeed after Shah Jehan, the Mughal Rule came to an end. It started with Aurangazeb doing away with Dara Shikoh.