Essay - Arms And The Almighty

“God is always on the side of the big battalions.”

        - Anon

Why, oh why, didn’t Allah read the script his faithful so thoughtfully prepared for him?

This used to be a common occurrence on the North-West frontier of the British Raj, when itinerant preachers periodically used to arouse the Pashtun tribes to drive the infidel Angrezi to the sea. All this was supposed to be at Allah’s direction. These crusades were supposed to cleanse the land of the unbelievers’ influence and establish a dar-ul-Islam in its place.

What then always happened was that the English unbelievers, forewarned by their excellent intelligence network, invariably rallied and successfully routed the invading tribal levies – usually inflicting heavy casualties on them in the process.

How the Mullahs of those days explained away these periodic failures would have been very interesting to hear. Allah certainly wasn’t on-script in these many disasters, especially during the great Pathan rising of 1897-98. The Almighty was similarly invoked by Pakistan in its many wars with India (1965, 1971 & 1999) – with roughly the same result.

I

It appears this is not a peculiarly Pakistani trait. Arab countries have done the same, in their many wars with Israel, to similar effect.

The late Saddam Hussein, who prided himself as the president of a secular Iraqi republic, followed suit when the occupation of Kuwait inexorably led to the first Gulf War of 1991. Images of this worthy at namaaz mushroomed before the onset of hostilities, together with religious exhortations to the Iraqi faithful for the coming conflict.

As before, it didn’t work. History records the outcome of that particular misadventure as ranking among the most egregious one-sided routs in the annals of combat. This overwhelming psychological dependence on divine intervention from the Almighty seems to be endemic among second and third world nations engaged in war.

Their first world European counterparts were much less reliant on spiritual support. While European armies did have chaplains to minister to their troops’ religious needs, these worthies were rigorously excluded from military planning and often portrayed in much reportage and war fiction as rather dotty figures of fun. The prevailing attitude generally appeared to be a robustly pragmatic “praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition”.

Before the historic battle of Assaye on 23^rd September 1803, the then-Major General Arthur Wellesley received intelligence that his opponents, Daulat Scindia and the Raja of Berar, were conducting a massive yagna to ensure victory against the forces of the East India Company. Reservations were expressed about the effects of this on the morale of the native Hindu sepoys commanded by the future 1^st Duke of Wellington.

“I don’t give a daam (a now defunct unit of Indian currency)!” snapped Wellesley in response. This famous line has since been immortalized in the anglicized phrase “...I don’t give a damn” uttered by the character Rhett Butler at the close of the novel Gone With The Wind.

In spite of heavy casualties inflicted by their artillery, the Marathas were decisively routed and set to flight.  Despite the best efforts of Scindia’s assorted Brahmins, Pundits, Purohits, Jyotishis, etc., this significant first major victory of Wellesley’s distinguished military career signalled the eventual collapse of Maratha power in the heartland of India.

A similar pattern can also be discerned in the many small Indian principalities that were annexed by the forces of the rapacious  John Company through the infamous “Subsidiary Alliance” or the “Doctrine of Lapse”.  Their hapless rulers invariably succumbed to the British onslaught despite holding elaborate rites to influence various deities in averting this dreaded outcome. Even after being so desperately invoked, divine intervention from members of the Hindu pantheon was regularly conspicuous by its absence.

Perhaps the last word on the above subject, curiously enough, came from the 17^th century English puritan Soldier-Statesman Oliver Cromwell. Despite being commonly thought of as a religious extremist, the essentially pragmatic Lord Protector famously declared “keep your faith in God but keep your powder dry”.