Tussle between communities for the legacy of Raja Mihir Bhoj

The following day, Gurjars began pouring into Kaithal, 174 km away from Delhi to attend the function. They came from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The police presence was heavy, the education minister backed out, and organisers decided to advance the schedule to 8 am. In the minister’s absence, Lila Ram Gurjar unveiled the statue himself to a loud roar around him. He opened his speech with a popular song among the community, the chorus of which goes, “Jo Gurjar ne chedega, wo marya jayega” (he who provokes a Gurjar will be killed). “There is enough evidence that Mihir Bhoj ji belonged to the Gurjar community, and nobody can change history,” he said.

By that evening, the Rajput community was up in arms. Within hours, 35 BJP office bearers from Kaithal offered to resign in protest. Soon, 88 members, office bearers and volunteers of the BJP in neighbouring Karnal too did the same. In villages with a Rajput population, members of the community “banned the entry of the BJP”. Haryana chief minister ML Khattar was forced to react, and said, “People should not indulge on such issues, as great personalities do not belong to a particular community or caste, but to everyone. They should not be diminished.”

But it isn’t just Haryana. Over the last three years, this battle between Rajputs and Gurjars for Raja Mihir Bhoj’s legacy has only grown, including in the politically crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

In September 2021, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath inaugurated a similar statue of Mihir Bhoj amidst tight security in Dadri, on the outskirts of Delhi, with tension ratcheted up between the two communities. In Saharanpur earlier this year, there were prohibitory orders in Nakur town after the Gurjars defied government orders to take out a “Gurjar Pratihar Samrat Mihir Bhoj Gaurav Yatra”, and the Rajputs protested. In Bihar, RJD MLA and former minister Sudhakar Singh, son of the state president Jagdanand Singh has started a website to remind people of Bhoj’s Rajput heritage. With less than a year to go for Lok Sabha elections, and both communities influential, it is a battle that may well have political ramifications.

The claims

What is uncontested is that Mihir Bhoj ruled from 836 to 885 CE and was king of a dynasty that was called “Gurjar Pratihara”, succeeding his father Ramabhadra. At its peak, Bhoj’s empire stretched from the Narmada in the south, Sutlej in the northwest up to Bengal in the East, with its capital at Kannauj in modern-day Uttar Pradesh.

Acharya Virender Vikram, a Gurjar leader and historian said that the fact that “Gurjar Pratihar” was a popular term in documentation of Mihir Bhoj is claim enough of his ancestry. “Our claims are strong as there was no mention of the Rajputs before the 13th century while Mihir Bhoj ruled in the ninth century. How can they make a claim on a king who ruled 400 years before the origins of the Rajput clan?” Vikram said.

Virender Chauhan, a Rajput community leader and also the state spokesperson of the Haryana BJP said, “A Mahapurush does not belong to a particular caste or community, but can anyone really claim to be a descendant of such a great personality? However it is also true that every great personality is born in a caste or clan, and that is Rajput.”

Chauhan pointed to the family of Arunoday Singh (a Rajput) that lives in present day Nagod in Madhya Pradesh that claim to be descendants of Mihir Bhoj. “The legacy cannot be claimed by a streetfight, and there is a need to adhere to historical documents. The matter is also under the consideration of the Gwalior high court.”

In December 2015, the Gwalior municipal council passed a resolution to install a statue of Samrat Mihir Bhoj. The structure was readied and the words “Gurjar” were prefixed on the plinth. In a pre-ordination of events that would be repeated several times over in the next decade, the Rajputs were enraged, and the two communities faced off. The statue was eventually erected in the Kampu area of the city in September 2019, even as tensions intermittently continued.

Two years later, in 2021, Rahul Sahu, a Gwalior local filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Gwalior bench of the Madhya Pradesh high court, asking for the matter to be resolved once and for all because it was creating a law and order situation. Hearing the petition on September 24, 2021, the MP high court asked the district collector of Gwalior to form an eight member committee; with two police personnel, two administration officials, one representative of the Gurjar and Rajput committees and two historians. The court also ordered that till the report was submitted, likely on the next date of hearing in October 2023, the nameplate that is at the centre of the dispute be kept duly covered.

In July 2023, the debate took another turn, when Arunodaya Singh Parihar of Nagod, who claims to be 44th in a line that he traces back to Mihir Bhoj filed a writ petition before the Madhya Pradesh HC, arguing that the local administration and Gurjar organisations were ignoring the family’s contention. Since then, at least 25 different people have filed intervention petitions, and the PIL is set to be heard in October as well.

Singh told HT, “How can they claim that Samrat Mihir Bhoj was Gurjar? I am his scion and I have all the proof in this regard. It has always been open and shut. No person has two surnames and Gurjar was just a title. His name was Mihir Bhoj Pratihar, which is also known as Parihar. We are Kshatriyas (Rajputs) and there has never been any doubt.”

On August 10, following the orders of the Punjab and Haryana high court, the district administration covered the word Gurjar on the statue until the matter is pending with the court.

The political battle

Historians that have looked at Bhoj’s past said his legacy was the subject of deeper research, but that, as always, it was reductive to apply a modern-day understanding of caste to a complicated history. Professor SK Chahal, chairman of Kurukshetra University’s department of history and dean of the faculty of social sciences said that Bhoj occupied the throne in 836 Common Era (CE) and ruled until his death in 885 CE, conquering several regions in Gujarat and Malwa from the Rashtrakutas and territories in Gorakhpur from the Pals of Bengal. “These three powers were locked in a tripartite struggle during the 9th century, especially for the city of Kannauj that was considered the political seat of India,” Chahal said.

Chahal added that the issues that arise from present day caste configurations cannot be superimposed on history. “Current caste politics uses history for political purposes and views it from that prism. At the time when Raja Bhoj ruled, caste identities had not developed clearly. In fact, the deeper we go into history, the more caste identities seem to blur. Politicians should leave subjects like these to historians and not appropriate historical figures for their interests. That is how incorrect interpretations perforate and harm our society.”

But as much as historians would like to keep politics away, it is clear that Mihir Bhoj is now central to a political battle, particularly with the Lok Sabha elections less than a year away. In Haryana for instance, one of the epicentres of this caste tension, both communities have a 3.5% share of the state’s population. The Gurjars, categorised as OBC in Haryana, can influence the outcome in seats in Kaithal, Samalkha, Tigaon, Jagadhri, Naraingarh, Badkhal, Kalka and Sohana areas. The Rajputs, who are categorised as a general caste, are more scattered around the state’s north and south. “The controversy, if not resolved, may cause a social divide and have an impact on elections next year. Broadly, the inclination of the Rajputs has been towards the ruling BJP, but this (issue) may cost them and the party is under pressure from their Rajput representatives,” said political science professor Ramji Lal.

In Bihar, former agriculture minister and RJD MLA Sudhakar Singh, the son of the RJD president Jagdanand Singh, a Rajput who launched a Raja Mihir Bhoj website last year, said, “This is all vote bank politics. The issue is being fanned for political benefit; I launched the website so people know about Samrat Mihir Bhoj.”

DM Diwakar, former director of the AN Sinha Institute of Social Sciences said, “My sense is that, in Bihar, this is being fanned by the BJP to divert attention from the restart of the caste survey. Its findings may impact caste polity in the Hindi heartland, and the claims of Gurjars on Raja Mihir Bhoj have become louder because they help the BJP to mobilise backward classes ahead of the polls.”

(With inputs from Shruti Tomar and Anirban Guha Roy)