Gulab Singh, Dhian Singh and Suchet Singh, Dogra Rajputs of Jammu, entered Ranjit Singh Ji's service as troopers and rose to be the most powerful family at the Lahore court after the Maharaja himself.
Dhian Singh was wazir for over twenty years. Gulab Singh was given Jammu as a jagir in 1822 and conducted the conquest of Ladakh and Baltistan under the Lahore state's flag through his general Zorawar Singh, extending the state to Tibet.
After 1839 the court destroyed itself. Kharak Singh died in confinement, Nau Nihal Singh was killed by falling masonry on the day of his father's funeral, and Chet Singh, Sher Singh, Dhian Singh, Hira Singh and Suchet Singh all died violently between 1839 and 1844. The Dogras were both agents and victims of that sequence.
Gulab Singh survived by staying at Jammu, held back from the war of 1845, brokered the settlement, and was rewarded with Kashmir.
Zorawar Singh's Ladakh and Tibet campaigns, in which a Dogra general under a Sikh state fought at over four thousand metres and died at Toyo in western Tibet in December 1841, are the least known military operations in Punjab's history.
Hira Singh was made wazir at nineteen and killed within two years, and Jawahar Singh after him lasted less than a year. Dhian Singh, Hira Singh and Jawahar Singh were all murdered in office between 1843 and 1845. Lal Singh, who followed them, was deposed and exiled and died in his bed at Dehra Dun in 1866, which makes him the exception that ends the sequence.
After 1839 they were at the centre of the killings that ran through the court, and by 1846 the surviving brother had a kingdom of his own out of the wreck.
The Sikh account treats them as the agents of the state's destruction. The evidence is circumstantial in parts and overwhelming in others, and no full study has been made from the Lahore records.