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The female apartments were broken into despite the wailing and weeping of their occupants. Prince Bidar Dil's name was called out. He was the son of Bidar Bakht, a grandson of Aurangzeb. But her mother implored that her child be spared the indignity of the royal Moghul throne. The harried nobles were in a fix. At last, someone pounced on Rafiud Darajat, a teenager, and dragged him in his bed-clothes to ascend the glittering Peacock Throne. He was proclaimed the Emeperor of the World with a fanfare of trumpets and drumbeats. A long tail of tongue-twisting titles went with the kingship as an accretion and secretion of 500 years of murderous Muslim power. But by now all those high-sounding titles have begun to sound funny, ominous and hollow.
Darajat's reign was of short duration. It was only symbolic of the Muslim bigotry against the Hindus. The Hindus were now, at last, awakening. Ajit Singh of Jodhpur was one. He too had been dishonored and shamed into surrendering his daughter to Farrukh Siyar's harem. Ajit Singh, overwhelmed with grief at the plight of the women confined inside the purdah of the Moghul harem, who were being violated day and night by the warring generals and petty soldiery, brought away his dear daughter with all her jewelry and property. What is more, she threw off her Islamic shroud and apparel, dismissed her Mohammedan attendants, proclaimed herself as a proud re-born Hindu and was escorted safely to her paternal home in Jodhpur.
Ajit Singh set a laudable example. He proclaimed hope and a way outfor forcibly converted and detained women to breathe the fresh air of Hindu freedom unmindful of the time they had spent inside the smothering burqa. The property that Ajit Singh could salvage along with his daughter is said to have amounted to ten million rupees. That should give the reader an idea of how Hindu rulers had been robbed not only of their daughters but also of their wealth. At least one Hindu had at last shown by his example that stupid Hindu orthodoxy must be spurned to save the honor of one's daughters, sisters, mothers and wives; that abducted Hindu women must and could be restored to their homes and religion; that one forced to convert himself must not resign himself to tyrannical subjection. This is what crores of people throughout the world, whether converts to Islam or Chrsitianity, must learn from history. Injustice, subjection, subjugation and turanny must never be tolerated.
In the short period of about seven moths that intervened between Farrukh Siyar's deposition (February 28, 1719) and Mohammed Shah's accession (September 24, 1719) three hapless princelings were ceremoniously raised to the throne only to be unceremoniously dragged down and thrown into the dungeons under the throne-room, blinded and murdered.
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