Political Causes

The East India Company’s greedy policy of aggrandisement accompanied by broken pledges and promises resulted in contempt for the Company and loss of political prestige, besides causing suspicion in the minds of almost all the ruling princes in India, through such policies as of ‘Effective Control’, ‘Subsidiary Alliance’ and ‘Doctrine of Lapse’. The right of succession was denied to Hindu princes. The Mughals were humbled when, on Prince Faqiruddin’s death in 1856, whose succession had been recognised conditionally by Lord Dalhousie, Lord Canning announced that the next prince on

succession would have to renounce the regal title and the ancestral Mughal palaces, in addition to the renunciations agreed upon by Prince Faqiruddin.

The collapse of rulers—the erstwhile aristocracy—also adversely affected those sections of the Indian society which derived their sustenance from cultural and religious pursuits.