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Five hundred years of Muslim misrule (1206 to 1707 A.D.) had transformed the usurped Delhi throne into so dreaded a death-trap that after Aurangzeb many a time when the Moghul crown went abegging for a figurehead-emperor, influential courtiers rummaged the teaming imperial harem for a successor but the molested women, sobbing, shrieking, wailing and piteously entreating, hid their children to save them from a transient ceremonious kingship ending in an unceremonious ouster and torturous murder.
Day after day members of a brood of mushroom mini-Moghuls basking for a while in the favor of some powerful clique of courtiers went up the throne in mock majesty only to be imperiously knocked down like nine pins and blinded and/or murdered after a while.
Between 1707 and 1858 A.D. - when the last Moghul, a mere pensioner, was banished to end his life outside Hindusthan - there were over a dozen mini-Moghuls who sported the Islamic crown before Allah put an end to their infamous and notorious tribe.
In these last 150 years of Muslim rule in Hindusthan the august, Moghul-occupied palace in Delhi's usurped Hindu Red Fort witnessed no ponderous parleys of national or international politics and imperial power but exclusively interminable sessions of inordinate drinking, lewd dancing to the accompaniment of sensuous music, lecherous sexual orgies and brutal torture and horrid murders.
This bizarre scene had its own fitting interludes in the massacre-swoops, =85 la Mohammed Ghazni and Ghori, of two Muslim invaders - Nadir Shah of Persia and Ahmed Shah Abdali alias Durrani of Afghanistan. They proved to the world that they could make time stand still. Even a thousand years, from the 8th century massacrer Mohammed Qasem to the 18th century manslaughterers Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah, did not make even the slightest difference to their religious zeal in perpetrating mass massacres of non-Muslims, plundering their property, razing their temples, molesting their women and kidnapping their children for conversion to Islam, as often as they could.
But what is still mystifying is that the 1,000-year-long incessant terror, torture and tyranny of alien Muslims in Hidusthan had a fitting finale in the weird devil-dance of a hoodlum known as Ghulam Kadir. At a time, when history took a sharp turn and reduced Shah Alam II from a proud Moghul monarch to a helpless blinded destitute begging for crumbs and food and drops of water, Ghulam Kadir stripped the royal women and children in the imperial harem naked, had the women raped by his Afghan soldiery and made the children dance in abject humiliation for his entertainment while he sat dagger-in-hand on the chest of a prostrate Shah Alam II neatly carving out the emperor's eyes like scarlet bits of a dripping water-melon.
Author : Shri Purushottam Nagesh Oak
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