EMILIANO ZAPATA Within days and months of Ranjit Singh’s death his empire began to flounder – something that would have been unlikely to happen had the republican character of the Sikh state remained unchanged. Ranjit Singh’s successors were unable to carry their fellow Sikhs with them because the Durbar’s intrigues left many of them utterly disenchanted at the spectacle of all major decisions being taken by a few courtiers who lacked any integrity and moral vision. Such men no longer enjoyed the confidence or respect of the fearless and resolute Sikh troops on whom the power of the Sikh state had always rested. That power was now being destroyed from within. The poet George Herbert writes that ‘storms make oaks take deeper root’. Just the opposite happened when Ranjit Singh died. Prince Kharak Singh, who succeeded him as the Maharaja, was no oak, and the storms that began blowing after his father’s death destroyed whatever roots he had. He was weak and ineffectual, with neither the charisma nor the qualifications to hold together the extraordinary legacy with which he had been left.
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