The next day Ahmad Shah made a triumphant visit to the Sufi shrine of Sirhind with the Koh-i-Noor flashing on his arm.4 He had won a crushing victory that definitively ended the dream of the emergence of an independent Maratha empire to replace that of the Mughals, and in the long term created a power vacuum that would leave India at the mercy of the armies of the East India Company.
