User:Nawayug9

''दानिश यासीऩ भोक्राहा ९ सुन्सरी नॆपाल The acquisition of the Nawab of Awadh's lands by the British East India Company brought the region of Gorakhpur into the close proximity of the raja of Palpa – the last remaining independent town within the Nepalese heartlands. Palpa and Butwal were originally two separate principalities; they were afterwards united under one 3 independent Rajput prince, who, having conquered Butwal, added it to his hereditary possessions of Palpa. The lands of Butwal, though conquered and annexed, were yet held in fief, or paid an annual sum, first to Awadh, and afterwards, by transfer, to the British.[6][7] During the regency of Rani Rajendra Laxmi, towards the close of the 18th century, the hill country of Palpa was conquered and annexed to Nepal. The rajah retreated to Butwal, but was subsequently induced, under false promises of redress, to visit Kathmandu, where he was put to death, and his territories in Butwal seized and occupied by the Nepalese.[7] Bhimsen Thapa, the Nepalese prime minister from 1806 to 1837, installed his own father as governor of Palpa, leading to serious border disputes between the two powers. The “illegal” occupation from 1804 till 1812 to the Terai of Butwal by the Nepalese, which was under British protection, was the immediate reason which led to the Anglo-Nepal war in 1814.[7][8][9] On October 1813, the ambitious Francis Edward Rawdon-Hastings, the Earl of Moira, assumed the office of the Governor-General, and his first act was to reexamine the border dispute between Nepal and British East India Company. These disputes arose because there was no fixed boundary separating the Nepalese and the British. A struggle with the former was unpromising as the British were ignorant of the country or its resources and, despite their technological superiority, it was a received persuasion that the nature of the mountainous tract, which they would have to penetrate, would be as baffling to them as it had been to all the efforts of many successive Mahomedan sovereigns.[10] A border commission imposed on Nepal by the Governor-General failed to solve the problem. The Nepalese Commissioners had remarked to the British the futility of debating about a few square miles of territory since there never could be real peace between the two States, until the British should yield to the Nepalese all the British provinces north of the Ganges, making that river the boundary between the two, “as heaven had evidently designed it to be.”[10] In the mean time, the British found that the Nepalese were preparing for war; that they had for some time been laying up large stores of saltpetre; purchasing and fabricating arms, and organizing and disciplining their troops under some European deserters in this service, after the model of the companies of East India’s sepoy battalions.[6] The conviction that the Nepalese raids into the flatland’s of the Terai, a much prized strip of fertile ground separating the Nepalese hill country from India, increased tensions[10] – the British felt their power in the region and their tenuous lines of communication between Calcutta and the northwest were under threat. Since there was no clear border, confrontation between the two powers was “necessary and unavoidable”.[11] Britain formally declared war with the Nepal on 1 Nov 1814.[12] 3 War preparation Bhimsen Thapa, prime minister of Nepal from 1806 to 1837. 3.1 Pre-war opinions When the Kathmandu Durbar solicited Nepalese chiefs’ opinions about a possible war with the British, Amar Singh Thapa was not alone in his opposition, declaring that – “They will not rest satisfied without establishing their own power and authority, and will unite with the hill rajas, whom we have dispossessed. We have hitherto but hunted deer; if we engage in this war, we must prepare to fight tigers.”[13] He was against the measures adopted in Butwal and Sheeoraj, which he declared to have originated in the selfish views of persons, who scrupled not to involve the nation in war to gratify their personal avarice.[13][14] This contrasts sharply with the naivety of prime minister Bhimsen Thapa – " ... our hills and fastness are formed by the hand of God, and are impregnable.”[15][16] This stance by Bhimsen Thapa is not surprising, as insinuated by Amar Singh, considering the fact that his father had made the usurpations in Butwal and Sheoraj, and whose family derived most of the advantages.