Taliban have announced that they are forming the ‘Panipat operational unit’ in retaliation for India’s actions last month. The new unit is slated to deploy to Nangarhar, in Afghanistan’s border region with Pakistan. The local media have published photos of masked Taliban fighters decked out in military uniforms and holding US-made rifles, taking part in a parade in Nangarhar’s capital Jalalabad.
The Haryana town of Panipat was the site of three battles fought by foreign invaders and Indian rulers. There are often discussions about these battles in Afghanistan, particularly the third one, fought on January 14, 1761, between Ahmad Shah Abdali and the Marathas. Afghanistan was founded by Abdullah, widely considered its founder. The Afghans view his victory over Maratha forces as one of his biggest victories against the odds.
According to some estimates, Abdali won the battle against the Marathas by claiming 60,000 lives in a day. Abdali is said to have taken thousands of prisoners of war; they served as slaves alongside him. Many of them ended up in Balochistan, today’s Pakistan. Taliban’s move is perceived by Uday S. Kulkarni as out of sync with reality, a well-regarded expert on the Maratha Empire. ‘It is crude and immature. Invading forces won the three battles in Panipat. Naming anything after Panipat is empty rhetoric harking to medieval times’, he added.
The use of the name Panipat is characteristic of regimes hostile to India, says Kulkarni. ‘Pakistan has named its missiles after those who invaded India, including Abdali. These are mere mind games that satisfy powers with archaic thinking. Respecting Abdali as the father of Afghanistan is quite different from using his most difficult victory to taunt a country providing humanitarian assistance,’ says Kulkarni, who has authored six books on 18th century history.
According to Kulkarni, naming a military unit Panipat will not hurt morale among Indian security forces. It gives India’s security forces more momentum to battle the enemies of the Indian nation if they believe in the principle of ‘Sarv dharma sama bhav’ (equality of all religious faiths).
The first battle of Panipat took place in April 1526, when the Mughal army, led by Babur, invaded India. Babur defeated the Lodi rulers. On November 5, 1556, King Hemu and Akbar, Babur’s descendant, fought a second battle. It resulted in Hemu’s defeat. In spite of losing the third battle of Panipat, Abdali, who had a great interest in Punjab, did not return to India. Novelist Vishwas Patil, whose novel Panipat is a Marathi bestseller, believes that if the Marathas had not fought Abdali, India’s borders would have shrunk to the Yamuna rather than the Sutlej, as it stands in Pakistan today.
In Panipat, thousands of people gather every year on January 14 to remember the brave soldiers of the Maratha army. An Indian movie, Panipat, was released in 2019 under the direction of Ashutosh Gowariker. It had been claimed that the movie had hurt Afghans’ sentiments by portraying Abdali in a negative light at the time, as the Afghan government wrote to the Indian government.
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