Thread
1n Remember Ghoris had a running feud with the Khwarezmi Shah, with the latter capturing large parts of the ghurid empire & all of western Afghanistan. Despite fighting a 2 front war, the Ghurids simply snuffed away Indian opposition (except the Gujarat Solankis) why? https://twitter.com/iyervval/status/1317721609755451392

2. We’ve seen how inept & clumsy Prithviraj Chauhan was (courage isn’t a substitute for aptitude) - no intelligence gathering, no early warning, lackadaisical preparations, no interest in course correction. But what about other Indian rulers? Are we to assume India was infected

3. By a plague that turned all our kings of the time into zombies? Not really. These pathologies debilitate us even today - First: Zero ability to introspect & adapt leading to excessive pride driven reliance on foreign imports (today Rafale in 1192 it was horses) - the DRDO &

4. & Tejas are the continuing symptoms of this obsession despite the fact they can’t be domesticated. Second was this shocking approach to intelligence gathering. No Indian ruler invested in foreign intelligence. Prithviraj had no idea that Ghori was planning a second invasion &

5. even less Intel on how he had adapted his tactics & cavalry manoeuvres (today: clear post balakot.. battle damage imagery & constant undermining of human assets in pakistan over 3 prime ministers). The third is sociologically the most problematic.

6. Identity = Substance (what unites us) + Salience (what makes us different from others). Indian rulers clearly had an idea of what United us: a common geography, religions traditions & ethos... but not what divided us from the Turks. For example bitterly divided Greek city

7. states would take help from Persia against each other (Peloponnesian war), but unite if Persia invaded. Yet when Ghazni was destroying The Jyotirlinga at Somnath, noted Shiva-Bhakta Rajendra Chozha was blissfully unconcerned & was mounting his own expedition against the Hindu

8. SriVijaya empire in Malaysia-Indonesia. That the Ghaznavids conquered and colonised Punjab & their persecution of hindus never seemed To bother a single hindu ruler. We see many manifestations of this complex... the Deccan sultanates uniting against Vijayanagar but not

9. examples of counter-consolidation. You can of course see this same pathology today (Rahul Gandhi’s “hindu terror”)

To sum up: the same 3 pathologies that infected us in 1192 remain valid today 1) obsessing over undomesticatable tools of war 2) zero introspection & course

10. correction (Intel etc) 3) lack of salience. I’ll add to this thread if some of you give me other causal factors, though, I suspect, in typical Indian fashion you’ll be outraged & instead of introspecting, probably masturbate to some glorious fantasy past which never existed