Balkanisation fears and threats: What Aurangzeb can teach new India in 2021

Aurangzeb's actions sowed the seeds of the disintegration of the Mughal empire 50 years or so after his death and therein lie some lessons

A recent remark by a well-known politician about the potential Balkanisation of India set me wondering. The analogy was made with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. But rather than looking at the one-party system of the 20th century USSR, a look at the map of the subcontinent circa 1721 may prove more illuminating.

At that time, the Mughal Empire controlled vast dominions and Mughal coinage was acceptable everywhere. So you had a central power based in Delhi, and a de facto currency union. The Mughals also had the largest military force.  

Various regional forces chipped away at that centralised power. Even within Mughal dominions, the Nawabs of Oudh were semi-autonomous, and soon had a separate kingdom. Various Rajputs scattered across what is now Gujarat and Rajasthan were allies, but also largely autonomous.

To the South, the Nizam-ul-Mulk and sundry Sultans were effectively rulers of their own domains. They raised taxes, and they maintained armies, which are the two most basic functions defining government. To the west, there were the Marathas, whose writ eventually ran across a wide swathe, including bits of modern Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. They too raised taxes and maintained armies and often raided into Mughal territory.

To the east, there was Murshid Quli Khan and his successors who paid nominal lip service to the Mughals, while doing as they pleased across much of modern Bihar, Odisha, Bengal and Bangladesh. Even further east, there was the independent Ahom Kingdom in what is now Assam.  There were also sundry tribes scattered across the Seven Sisters, which cared nothing for the Mughals.

To the north-west (NW), the Mughals struggled to maintain a tenuous hold on Punjab and Kashmir, including large chunks of territory in what is now Pakistan. But they were severely challenged by the Sikh peasantry, which organised under the ninth and tenth Gurus, and then Banda Bahadur. The Mughals were also challenged to the NW by Afghan raiders.

So in 1720, the subcontinent was a patchwork quilt of competing kingdoms, ruled by many people of different ethnicities, and religious persuasions. Since most of them didn’t get on with one other, the entire region was ripe for the plucking.

Anyone with some local support and resources could establish localised sovereignty over vast tracts. Somebody with greater ambitions and better organisational skills, such as say, a multinational company, could look to replace the Mughals. That’s pretty much what happened over the next 50 years or so.

The Mughals started losing their mojo 50 years before 1720, under Aurangzeb in the 1670s. Aurangzeb was a pretty good general and a fairly efficient administrator. But he had a fixation about conquering more territory, while ignoring the welfare of the areas he controlled.

Aurangzeb ran the Mughal economy into the ground, raising tax after tax to fund endless wars.  He alienated large chunks of the population with his zealotry, and the imposition of discriminatory laws. He furthered the temporary control of more territory by setting up local satraps like the Nizam-ul-Mulk and Murshid Quli, who later broke free from the shackles of Mughal control. He made treaties with various rulers, bribing and supporting different factions. He had little hesitation in reneging on agreements when there was advantage to breaking them. It took the Mughal Empire another 50 years or so to disintegrate after his death in 1707.

The later Mughal Empire was characterised by peasant revolts all over the place, “raiders” in Kashmir, high taxation with revenues used for opaque purposes that did not further the well-being of subjects, laws discriminating on the basis of religion, malleable political alliances broken at convenience, local satraps who carved out their own niches, and multinational companies seeing a region ripe for the plucking.

Are any of these phenomena visible in the modern India of 2021? If not, there’s no cause for concern on the Balkanisation front. Other differences are also caused by the passage of three centuries. These include the emergence of technological tools like social media, cellphones and the internet. Those could enable faster political change if there are indeed any triggers.