Empire of the Sikhs (15 page)

While the Maharaja was attending to the state of his army, the East India Company, having solved the Wellesley problem, had another concern – the treaty signed by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit in July 1807. London viewed this treaty as a threat to the British hold on India, especially as Persia had also been persuaded by the French to grant passage to a French army should Napoleon decide to attack India.

It is held by some that it was around this time that Ranjit Singh began to give serious thought to the need to establish a demarcation line between British territories and the Sikh kingdom. Perhaps the Jamuna or the Sutlej rivers could provide that line. He was not unaware of British concerns about Napoleon's victories in Europe and the distinct possibility of his making plans to annex India. If he was right in his assessment, then the British would prefer a strong Sikh state to hold an enemy at bay. And the Sikhs had proved their ability to expel intruders from India. So he was keen to turn the French threat to his advantage.

The incoming governor-general Lord Minto was as convinced of the likelihood of hostile French moves against India as were the mandarins in London, and soon after he took up office in the summer of 1807 the British opened negotiations for a treaty with the Lahore Darbar. In 1803, while they were debating whether the River Jamuna or the Sutlej should be the dividing line between the British and Sikh spheres of control, Ranjit Singh had already suggested the Sutlej as the natural frontier between them. This boundary had the disadvantage of splitting Punjab, leaving many cities, towns and regions south of the river, such as Ludhiana, Kapurthala, Jind, Patiala, Nabha, and Faridkot, outside the Sikh state. But Ranjit Singh had much bigger plans for his Sikh empire beyond the Punjab.

Wellesley's indecision on which boundary to agree on had given Ranjit Singh the opportunity he needed, and the justification for making the most of it. He crossed the Sutlej in 1806, 1807 and 1808 and each time not only added new territories to his state south of
it but redistributed some of the lands to win allies. The British continued to debate treaty terms that would suit them best, and Ranjit Singh complicated the matter for them by being unwilling to sacrifice Sikh interests south of the Sutlej to the British. In 1808, after the governor-general had received intelligence that the French were planning the conquest of Kabul and Punjab, the British government accordingly decided to dispatch envoys to both Lahore and Kabul. Mr Charles Theophilus Metcalfe was chosen to conduct negotiations with Lahore and a rising member of the British political service in India, Mountstuart Elphinstone, with Kabul.
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Metcalfe was the younger of the two, aged only twenty-three. Born in Calcutta, he was the son of a director of the East India Company, whose service Metcalfe had entered at the age of sixteen. He was assistant to the resident at Delhi, where the British held sway over the blind and infirm Mughal emperor Shah Alam, when he was called to Lahore. He was to develop into an able British adminstrator, but at this stage he had a lot to learn. The real purpose of the mission he headed was ‘to initiate a penetration of the Punjab',
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although this was disguised as a response to the serious threat Napoleon was perceived to pose to India.

The eight months following Metcalfe's crossing of the Sutlej on 1 September 1808 were stormy so far as his negotiations with Ranjit Singh were concerned. His brief was twofold: to alert Ranjit Singh to the imminent danger of a French invasion from the north and to make him agree to accepting Britain's suzerainty over all the territories south of the Sutlej. Ranjit Singh found this demand impudent and proved himself more than a match for Metcalfe in the art of negotiation. He was not as inexperienced as the British had hoped. Easily seeing through the Napoleon ruse, he expressed his complete willingness to side with the British in the event of a French invasion. But English suzerainty south of the Sutlej was quite a different matter. A rueful British comment on Metcalfe's inability to make full use of the French card aptly summed it up:
'In this wild encampment the bogey of Napoleon could not look so convincing as in the dining rooms of Calcutta and Delhi.'
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Ranjit Singh brushed aside the envoy's talk about British commitments to the Sikh chiefs south of the Sutlej. Indeed, he went a step further. After their meeting at Kasur, on the north bank of the river, Metcalfe, on waking up the next morning, found that Ranjit Singh and his force had moved on and left word for him to follow. The highly indignant envoy, left with no option, reluctantly rode after Ranjit Singh and caught up with him the next day. The discussions that followed, although affable, did not serve the British purpose at all. To add to British discomfiture, Ranjit Singh, with Metcalfe following him around, set about straightening out some recalcitrant Phulkian states, starting with Faridkot, which surrendered on 1 October 1808. In the two months or so that Ranjit Singh campaigned south of the Sutlej he annexed not only Faridkot but Shahabad and Ambala. While he shrewdly kept the talks with Metcalfe in progress, he made sure they were held while he was on the move – which was all the time – because the obvious message this sent to the Phulkian chiefs was that the British were a party to Ranjit Singh's designs on them. Why else would their envoy be by his side all the time? In fact the Patiala chief, who now looked on the British as his protectors, was described by the British resident in Delhi as ‘labouring at this moment under the most cruel anxiety' lest Ranjit Singh attack him.

Thoroughly exasperated by Ranjit Singh's diplomacy-on-the-run since it made them look quite silly, the British decided they did not want to keep up with Ranjit Singh's momentum but, rather, gain time to find their own feet, especially as their latest assessment showed that the danger of French invasion of India was receding, and having Ranjit Singh as a buffer between British India and possible invaders from the north was now less important to their interests. From a position of ‘scrupulous nonintervention' they could not now ‘resist the conviction that the
interests and security of the British Government would be best promoted by the reduction, if not the entire subversion of [Ranjit Singh's] power'.
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To warn Ranjit Singh of their displeasure, and send a signal of their clout to him, a Lieutenant-Colonel David Ochterlony was dispatched with an expeditionary force to a point south of the Sutlej so as to underscore the extent to which the territories between the Jamuna and the Sutlej were now British protectorates. At the same time Metcalfe, too, was withdrawn from Ranjit Singh's side and asked to camp some way off. On returning to Lahore at the end of 1808 and being told of the new aggressiveness in British moves south of the Sutlej, Ranjit Singh ordered General Mohkam Chand to proceed with a force to Phillaur, which lay north of the Sutlej facing Ludhiana on the south bank. The British in turn ordered Ochterlony to Ludhiana.

Suddenly British intelligence reports indicated a renewal of French interest in India. The British commander-in-chief was quietly told to withdraw his military force from its advance position; Ranjit Singh had again become important as the redoubtable defender of northern India. Reflecting this pragmatic view of their self-interest, the British now put forward terms for a treaty of ‘perpetual friendship' with the Sikhs, and the Sutlej Treaty was signed on 25 April 1809. According to its provisions the Lahore Durbar would not relinquish its sovereignty over the territories acquired by it south of the Sutlej prior to 1806. The ‘perpetual friendship', according to the treaty, would rest on these four main clauses: that the British would leave control of the territories north of the Sutlej to the Sikh state; Ranjit Singh would not maintain ‘more troops than are necessary for the internal duties' of his territories south of the Sutlej; he would ‘not commit or suffer any encroachments on the possessions or rights of the chiefs in its vicinity'; in the event of a violation of these articles, or a ‘departure from the rules of friendship', the treaty would be considered terminated.

THE TREATY WITH LAHORE OF 1809

Treaty between the British Government and
the Raja of Lahore (dated 25th April 1809)

Whereas certain differences which had arisen between the British Government and the Raja of Lahore have been happily and amicably adjusted; and both parties being anxious to maintain relations of perfect amity and concord, the following articles of treaty, which shall be binding on the heirs and successors of the two parties, have been concluded by the Raja Ranjit Singh in person, and by the agency of C.T. Metcalfe, Esquire, on the part of the British Government.

Article 1. – Perpetual friendship shall subsist between the British Government and the State of Lahore: the latter shall be considered, with respect to the former, to be on the footing of the most favoured powers, and the British Government will have no concern with the territories and subjects of the Raja to the northward of the river Sutlej.

Article 2. – The Raja will never maintain on the territory which he occupies on the left bank of the river Sutlej more troops than are necessary for the internal duties of that territory, nor commit or suffer any encroachments on the possessions or rights of the Chiefs in its vicinity.

Article 3. – In the event of a violation of any of the preceding articles, or of a departure from the rules of friendship, this treaty shall be considered null and void.

Article 4. – This treaty, consisting of four articles, having been settled and concluded at Amritsar, on the 25th day of April 1809, Mr C.T. Metcalfe has delivered to the Raja of Lahore a copy of the same in English and Persian, under his seal and signature; and the Raja has delivered another copy of the same under his seal and signature, and C.T. Metcalfe engages to procure within the space of two months a copy of
the same, duly ratified by the Right Honourable the Governor-General in Council, on the receipt of which by the Raja, the present treaty shall be deemed complete and binding on both parties, and the copy of it now delivered to the Raja shall be returned.

[Ratified by the Governor-General
Lord Minto on 21 May 1809]

The British fully honoured the treaty in the early years despite being irked by the rapid expansion of the Sikh state. They turned down appeals for help against Ranjit Singh from both Sansar Chand of Kangra and the Gurkhas. During the first unsuccessful siege of Multan in 1810 by the Lahore Durbar, the beleaguered city's governor was similarly told that in view of the treaty there was little the British could do to help him.

The British were to adhere to the treaty, to Ranjit Singh's advantage, on other occasions as well. In 1819 Kashmir's Afghan governor Azim Khan pleaded with them to place Kashmir under their protection but was refused. Shah Zaman and Shah Shuja, who also asked for British intervention, were turned down. When an over-zealous British envoy to Afghanistan, Alexander Burnes, tried to persuade Company officials to help the Afghans take back Peshawar from Ranjit Singh, the British governor-general Lord Auckland, after some thought, turned down the suggestion.

How did the British view the treaty when it came to serving their interests? According to Captain Claude Wade, British political agent at Ludhiana: ‘Ranjit Singh has hitherto derived nothing but advantage from his alliance with us. While we have been engaged in consolidating our power in Hindustan, he has been extending his conquests throughout the Punjab and across the Indus, and as we are now beginning to prescribe limits to his power, which it cannot be supposed he will regard with complacency, he is now more likely
to encourage than to withdraw from an alliance, which may hold out to him a hope of creating a balance of power.'
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In the final summing up, did the Sutlej Treaty benefit Ranjit Singh more than it did the British? A consideration of the different mindsets of the two signatories will help to begin to answer this question. The British, of course, were pastmasters in the art of diplomacy; they were able to judge precisely where their self-interest lay and had centuries of experience in wars, battles, victories, defeats, annexations, treaties and much else. Ranjit Singh, by contrast, a school drop-out in his twenties, had no experience of negotiating treaties or dealing with Europeans. Yet, relying entirely on his own unaided perception and evaluation, he arrived at a clear and intelligent assessment of his adversary's strengths. After the eight-month negotiations he got what he wanted from the treaty.

Having witnessed how the British had dealt with the Marathas in 1803 after Jaswant Rao Holkar had seized Delhi and ravaged the East India Company's territories between the Jamuna and the Sutlej, he had a prime example to go by. Holkar had got no help from the Punjab Sardars of that region, and subsequently he had been defeated and forced to come to terms with the British. The conclusion Ranjit Singh drew from this was that he could never build up his Sikh state without accurately assessing his own limitations against his adversary's advantages.