Shashi Tharoor tear apart British colonialism in this Oxford debate

Tharoor began by talking about the years of plunder by the U.K. of its colonies, a siphoning of wealth that propelled Europe’s industrial revolution of the 19th century. He highlighted the fact that India’s share of the global economy — 23% when the British first arrived — had dropped to 4% by the time the Union Flag was finally lowered.

Colonial apologists often argue that India’s dense and intricate railway network, one of the largest in the world, was built thanks to the British. But Tharoor’s simple rejoinder, after reiterating that the railways and roads were built only to serve British interests, is that “many countries have built railways and roads without having to be colonized in order to do so.”

I standing here with eight minutes in my hands in this venerable and rather magnificent institution, I was going to assure you that I belong to the Henry VIII School of public speaking - that as Henry VIII said to his wives 'I shall not keep you long'. But now finding myself the seventh speaker out of eight in what must already seem a rather long evening to you I rather feel like Henry VIII's the last wife. I know more or less of what expected of me but I am not sure how to do it any differently.

Perhaps what I should do is really try and pay attention to the arguments that have advanced by the Opposition today. We had for example Sir Richard Ottaway suggesting - challenging the very idea that it could be argued that the economic situation of the colonies was actually worsened by the experience of British colonialism.

Well I stand to offer you the Indian example, Sir Richard. India share of the world economy when Britain arrived on it's shores was 23 per cent, by the time the British left it was down to below 4 per cent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain.

Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by it's depredations in India. In fact Britain's industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialisation of India.

The handloom weaver's for example famed across the world whose products were exported around the world, Britain came right in. There were actually these weaver's making fine muslin as light as woven wear, it was said, and Britain came right in, smashed their thumbs, broke their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their cloth and products and started, of course, taking their raw material from India and shipping back manufactured cloth flooding the world's markets with what became the products of the dark and satanic mills of the Victoria in England

That meant that the weavers in India became beggars and India went from being a world famous exporter of finished cloth into an importer when from having 27 per cent of the world trade to less than 2 per cent.

Meanwhile, colonialists like Robert Clive brought their rotten boroughs in England on the proceeds of their loot in India while taking the Hindi word loot into their dictionary as well as their habits.

And the British had the gall to call him Clive of India as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.

By the end of 19th century, the fact is that India was already Britain's biggest cash cow, the world's biggest purchaser of British goods and exports and the source for highly paid employment for British civil servants. We literally paid for our own oppression. And as has been pointed out, the worthy British Victorian families that made their money out of the slave economy, one fifth of the elites of the wealthy class in Britain in 19th century owed their money to transporting 3 million Africans across the waters. And in fact in 1833 when slavery was abolished and what happened was a compensation of 20 million pounds was paid not as reparations to those who had lost their lives or who had suffered or been oppressed by slavery but to those who had lost their property.

I was struck by the fact that your Wi-Fi password at this Union commemorates the name of Mr Gladstone - the great liberal hero. Well, I am very sorry his family was one of those who benefited from this compensation.

Staying with India between 15-29 million Indians died of starvation in British induced famines. The most famous example was, of course, was the great Bengal famine during the World War II when 4 million people died because Winston Churchill deliberately as a matter of written policy proceeded to divert essential supplies from civilians in Bengal to sturdy tummies and Europeans as reserve stockpiles.

He said that the starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis mattered much less than that of sturdy Greeks' - Churchill's actual quote. And when conscious stricken British officials wrote to him pointing out that people were dying because of this decision, he peevishly wrote in the margins of file, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?"

So, all notions that the British were trying to do their colonial enterprise out of enlightened despotism to try and bring the benefits of colonialism and civilisation to the benighted. Even I am sorry - Churchill's conduct in 1943 is simply one example of many that gave light to this myth.

As others have said on the proposition - violence and racism were the reality of the colonial experience. And no wonder that the sun never set on the British empire because even god couldn't trust the English in the dark.

Let me take the World War I as a very concrete example since the first speaker Mr. Lee suggested these couldn't be quantified. Let me quantify World War I for you. Again I am sorry from an Indian perspective as others have spoken abut the countries. One-sixth of all the British forces that fought in the war were Indian - 54 000 Indians actually lost their lives in that war, 65 000 were wounded and another 4000 remained missing or in prison.

Indian taxpayers had to cough up a 100 million pounds in that time's money. India supplied 17 million rounds of ammunition, 6,00,000 rifles and machine guns, 42 million garments were stitched and sent out of India and 1.3 million Indian personnel served in this war. I know all this because the commemoration of the centenary has just taken place.

But not just that, India had to supply 173,000 animals 370 million tonnes of supplies and in the end the total value of everything that was taken out of India and India by the way was suffering from recession at that time and poverty and hunger, was in today's money 8 billion pounds. You want quantification, it's available.

World War II, it was was even worse - 2.5 million Indians in uniform. I won't believe it to the point but Britain's total war debt of 3 billion pounds in 1945 money, 1.25 billion was owed to India and never actually paid.

Somebody mentioned Scotland, well the fact is that colonialism actually cemented your union with Scotland. The Scots had actually tried to send colonies out before 1707, they had all failed, I am sorry to say. But, then of course, came union and India was available and there you had a disproportionate employment of Scots, I am sorry but Mr Mckinsey had to speak after me, engaged in this colonial enterprise as soldiers, as merchants, as agents, as employees and their earnings from India is what brought prosperity to Scotland, even pulled Scotland out of poverty.

Now that India is no longer there, no wonder the bonds are loosening. Now we have heard other arguments on this side and there has been a mention of railways. Well let me tell you first of all as my colleague the Jamaican High Commissioner has pointed out, the railways and roads were really built to serve British interests and not those of the local people but I might add that many countries have built railways and roads without having had to be colonalised in order to do so.

They were designed to carry raw materials from the hinterland into the ports to be shipped to Britain. And the fact is that the Indian or Jamaican or other colonial public - their needs were incidental. Transportation - there was no attempt made to match supply from demand from as transports, none what so ever.

Instead in fact the Indian railways were built with massive incentives offered by Britain to British investors, guaranteed out of Indian taxes paid by Indians with the result that you actually had one mile of Indian railway costing twice what it cost to built the same mile in Canada or Australia because there was so much money being paid in extravagant returns.

Britain made all the profits, controlled the technology, supplied all the equipment and absolutely all these benefits came as British private enterprise at Indian public risk. That was the railways as an accomplishment.

We are hearing about aid, I think it was Sir Richard Ottaway mentioned British aid to India. Well let me just point out that the British aid to India is about 0.4 per cent of India's GDP. The government of India actually spends more on fertiliser subsidies which might be an appropriate metaphor for that argument.

If I may point out as well that as my fellow speakers from the proposition have pointed out there have been incidents of racial violence, of loot, of massacres, of blood shed, of transportation and in India's case even one of our last Mughal emperors. Yes, may be today's Britains are not responsible for some of these reparations but the same speakers have pointed with pride to their foreign aid - you are not responsible for the people starving in Somalia but you give them aid surely the principle of reparation for what is the wrongs that have done cannot be denied.

It's been pointed out that for the example dehumanisation of Africans in the Caribbean, the massive psychological damage that has been done, the undermining of social traditions, of the property rights, of the authority structures of the societies - all in the interest of British colonialism and the fact remains that many of today's problems in these countries including the persistence and in some cases the creation of racial, of ethnic, of religious tensions were the direct result of colonialism. So there is a moral debt that needs to be paid.

Someone challenged reparations elsewhere. Well I am sorry Germany doesn't just give reparations to Israel, it also gives reparations to Poland perhaps some of the speakers here are too young to remember the dramatic picture of Charles William Brunt on his knees in the Walter Gaiter in 1970.

There are other examples, there is Italy's reparations to Libya, there is Japan's to Korea even Britain has paid reparations to the New Zealand Maoris. So it is not as if this is something that is unprecedented or unheard of that somehow opens some sort of nasty Pandora box.

No wonder professor Louis reminded us that he is from Texas. There is a wonderful expression in Texas that summarises the arguments of the opposition 'All hat and no cattle'.

Now, If I can just quickly look through the other notes that I was scribbling while they were speaking, there was a reference to democracy and rule of law. Let me say with the greatest possible respect, you cannot to be rich to oppress, enslave, kill, maim, torture people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.

We were denied democracy so we had to snatch it, seize it from you with the greatest of reluctance it was considered in India's case after 150 years of British rule and that too with limited franchise.

If I may just point out the arguments made by a couple of speakers. The first speaker Mr. Lee in particular conceded all the evil atrocities of the colonialism but essentially suggested that reparations won't really help, they won't help the right people, they would be use of propaganda tools, they will embolden people like Mr Mugabe. So, it's nice how in the old days, I am sorry to say that either people of the Caribbean used to frighten their children into behaving and sleeping by saying some Francis Drake would come up after them that was the legacy, now Mugabe will be there - the new sort of Francis Drake of our time.

The fact is very simply said, that we are not talking about reparations as a tool to empower anybody, they are a tool for you to atone, for the wrongs that have been done and I am quite prepared to accept the proposition that you can't evaluate, put a monetary sum to the kinds of horrors people have suffered. Certainly no amount of money can expedite the loss of a loved one as somebody pointed out there. You are not going to figure out the exact amount but the principle is what matters.

The fact is that to speak blithely of sacrifices on both sides as an analogy was used here - a burglar comes into your house and sacks the place but stubs his toe and you say that there was sacrifice on both sides that I am sorry to say is not an acceptable argument. The truth is that we are not arguing specifically that vast some of money needs to be paid. The proposition before this house is the principle of owing reparations, not the fine points of how much is owed, to whom it should be paid. The question is, is there a debt, does Britain owe reparations?

As far as I am concerned, the ability to acknowledge your wrong that has been done, to simply say sorry will go a far far far longer way than some percentage of GDP in the form of aid.

What is required it seems to me is accepting the principle that reparations are owed. Personally, I will be quiet happy if it was one pound a year for the next 200 years after the last 200 years of Britain in India.

8 lessons that Tharoor’s electrifying Oxford speech teaches us about India’s history

Rediff.com India News, Friday, July 24, 2015

‘While British politicians continue to wonder whether countries like India should even get basic compensation, let’s remind them 200 years of injustice can’t be compensated for with any amount of money. What we need is a simple ‘sorry’, an apology for all the wrong.’

Lok Sabha Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor’ s gripping speech at the Oxford Union Society (external link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

has brought back afresh the wounds that the country faced during 200 years of colonization, and the need for repentance by the British, says Nalini Narayani

The motion of the debate was, “This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies”, to which the MP gave detailed statistical evidence, driving home the point that why it was important to say ‘sorry’ for what they have done to us.

Tharoor’s oratory skills not just bring out the patriot in you but also teach you some important lessons about India’s history while it was under British rule. Here are some highlights:

1. Economic situation of the colonies was worsened by the experience of British colonialism. Our s(hr)inking handloom industry was a case in point. Our weavers, who used to make fine muslins as light as woven air, became beggars as the British broke their looms, imposed duties and tariffs on Indian cloth and even cut off their thumbs while replacing Indian textiles with cheaper fabric from satanic steam mills of Britain.

Our share of world exports fell from 27per cent to 2 per cent.

2. In short, British industrialisation took its strength from de-industrialisation in India.

3. With the earnings of their loot — a Hindi word for pillage, which found a place in their dictionaries as well as habits — in India, colonialists like Robert Clive bought their rotten boroughs in England. And the British had the gall to call him Clive of India as if he belonged to the country while all he did was to ensure that the country belonged to him.

4. By the end of the 19th century, India was Britain’s biggest cash cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants.

5. During their rule, 15-29 million Indians died due to induced famines. The worst and the last large-scale was the Bengal famine of 1943 when around 4 million Bengalis died of starvation.

Winston Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Europe. When he was intimated about the scale of tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s peevish response was “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

6. Violence and racism were the reality. Jallianwala Bagh massacre where the unarmed protesters were blew to bits is the symbol of British despotism.

7. India contributed more soldiers to the wars than Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa put together. One sixth of the British forces were from the Indian subcontinent. Almost 800,000 soldiers took part in the war, around 53,000 Indian soldiers died, 64,000 were wounded and around 4000 went missing.

In 1945, India’s war contribution estimated to about 8 billion pounds in today’s money, while Britain owes 1.25 billion pounds war debt to India that it still hasn’t paid.

8. While Indian Railways is often referred as a gift by the British, it was actually built to benefit the rulers, to carry Indian raw materials to the ports so that they can be shipped to Britain. It was to serve colonial interests.

It was a scheme described at the time as private enterprise at public risk. Private British enterprise, public Indian risk.

Also read:

10 assassinations that shook the world: Rajiv Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and more

39 absolutely iconic photos from India’s past that every Indian must see

6 painful memories from the emergency: One of the darkest periods in modern India’s history

Source: http://www.folomojo.com/ Tags: Lok Sabha Member of Parliament Shashi, India, Oxford

http://www.rediff.com/news/report/eight-lessons-that-tharoors-electrifying-oxford-speech-teaches-us-about-indias-history/20150724.htm

Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust

British policies killed nearly 4 million Indians in the 1943-44 Bengal Famine

The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.

What is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination. It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.

Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.

Author Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”

“No one had the strength to perform rites,” a survivor tells Mukerjee. “Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages.” The ones who got away were men who migrated to Calcutta for jobs and women who turned to prostitution to feed their families. “Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters,” writes Mukerjee.

Mani Bhaumik, the first to get a PhD from the IITs and whose invention of excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine etched in his memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a portion of her food.

By 1943 hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying on the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers amidst this apocalyptic landscape was “the final judgement on British rule in India”, said the Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru.

Churchill could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the US .

Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then fighting on the side of the Axis forces, offered to send rice from Myanmar, but the British censors did not even allow his offer to be reported.

Churchill was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and Greek civilians. To him, “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks”, a sentiment with which Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery, concurred.

Amery was an arch-colonialist and yet he denounced Churchill’s “Hitler-like attitude”. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the then Viceroy Archibald Wavell to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.

Wavell informed London that the famine “was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule”. He said when Holland needs food, “ships will of course be available, quite a different answer to the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring food to India”.

Churchill’s excuse — currently being peddled by his family and supporters — was Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies, but Mukerjee has unearthed documents that challenge his claim. She cites official records that reveal ships carrying grain from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean.

Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits”. His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.

According to Mukerjee, “Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme, and he hated Indians, mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very long.” She writes in The Huffington Post, “Churchill regarded wheat as too precious a food to expend on non-whites, let alone on recalcitrant subjects who were demanding independence from the British Empire. He preferred to stockpile the grain to feed Europeans after the war was over.”

In October 1943, at the peak of the famine, Churchill said at a lavish banquet to mark Wavell’s appointment: “When we look back over the course of years, we see one part of the world’s surface where there has been no war for three generations. Famines have passed away — until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again — and pestilence has gone… This episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers.”

Churchill was not only a racist but also a liar.

A history of holocausts

To be sure, Churchill’s policy towards famine-stricken Bengal wasn’t any different from earlier British conduct in India. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years before British rule.

In his book, Davis tells the story of the famines that killed up to 29 million Indians. These people were, he says, murdered by British State policy. In 1876, when drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau, there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent their export to England.

In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported record quantities of grain. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within these labour camps, the workers were given less food than the Jewish inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp of World War II.

Even as millions died, Lytton ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering of millions of peasants in the Madras region and concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation “happiness, prosperity and welfare”.

In 1901, The Lancet estimated that at least 19 million Indians had died in western India during the famine of the 1890s. The death toll was so high because the British refused to implement famine relief. Davis says life expectancy in India fell by 20 percent between 1872 and 1921.

So it’s hardly surprising that Hitler’s favourite film was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which showed a handful of Britons holding a continent in thrall. The Nazi leader told the then British Foreign Secretary Edward Wood (Earl of Halifax) that it was one of his favorite films because “that was how a superior race must behave and the film was compulsory viewing for the SS (Schutz-Staffel, the Nazi ‘protection squadron’)”.

Crime and consequences

While Britain has offered apologies to other nations, such as Kenya for the Mau Mau massacre, India continues to have such genocides swept under the carpet. Other nationalities have set a good example for us. Israel, for instance, cannot forget the Holocaust; neither will it let others, least of all the Germans. Germany continues to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and arms aid to Israel.

Armenia cannot forget the Great Crime — the systematic massacre of 1.8 million Armenians by the Turks during World War I. The Poles cannot forget Joseph Stalin’s Katyn massacre.

The Chinese want a clear apology and reparations from the Japanese for at least 40,000 killed and raped in Nanking during World War II. And then there is the bizarre case of the Ukrainians, who like to call a famine caused by Stalin’s economic policies as genocide, which it clearly was not. They even have a word for it: Holodomor.

And yet India alone refuses to ask for reparations, let alone an apology. Could it be because the British were the last in a long list of invaders, so why bother with an England suffering from post-imperial depression? Or is it because India’s English-speaking elites feel beholden to the British? Or are we simply a nation condemned to repeating our historical mistakes? Perhaps we forgive too easily.

But forgiveness is different from forgetting, which is what Indians are guilty of. It is an insult to the memory of millions of Indians whose lives were snuffed out in artificial famines.

British attitudes towards Indians have to seen in the backdrop of India’s contribution to the Allied war campaign. By 1943, more than 2.5 million Indian soldiers were fighting alongside the Allies in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of arms, ammunition and raw materials sourced from across the country were shipped to Europe at no cost to Britain.

Britain’s debt to India is too great to be ignored by either nation. According to Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly, “It was Indian soldiers, civilian labourers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India.”

There is not enough wealth in all of Europe to compensate India for 250 years of colonial loot. Forget the money, do the British at least have the grace to offer an apology? Or will they, like Churchill, continue to delude themselves that English rule was India’s “Golden Age”?

http://www.tehelka.com/2014/06/remembering-indias-forgotten-holocaust/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html

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