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Prime Minister Narendra Modi won an electoral victory on June 4, which can at best be described as a pyrrhic victory. This term owes its origin to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable losses while defeating the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC. Closer to our times and nearer home we have the turn of events after the Battle of Gangwana between the armies of the Marwar Rathores and the combined forces of Jaipur and its Mughal overlord led by Jai Singh in 1741.

In this battle, the imperial army of over 40,000 massed in a field at Kunchagaon near Pushkar, with its fabled artillery guns lined up to force terms on the rulers of Jodhpur and Nagaur. As it happened, it fell upon Bakht Singh of Nagaur and his cavalry, numbering about a thousand, to take on the imperial forces. But that didn’t deter Bakht Singh and his horsemen charged into the massed imperial forces and quickly punched through Jai Singh’s gun line.



The Rathores rode through the Jaipur army, cutting down thousands of men. They lost most of their men but the huge toll extracted demoralised the Mughal forces. After this victory, the imperial army soon disintegrated.

Jai Singh never recovered his elan and died two years later. The BJP-led NDA might have won the 2024 elections but its apparently inexorable march towards establishing a Hindutva theocracy was halted by the combined formations committed to the letter and spirit of the Constitution. The Hindi-Hindutva phalanx that threatened to.

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