The reprehensible acts of British colonialism in India

In 2018, British Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski wrote that the “cost of the damage caused to Britain during the war was an incredible 120 billion pounds – equivalent to 3,620 billion pounds today”. Therefore, he deemed, that Britain did not owe the EU the estimated 39 billion pounds as part of Brexit. This money would go to the EU, not just Germany, and covers the UK’s contribution to EU annual budgets up to 2020, payments of outstanding commitments, and financial liabilities up to the end of 2020.

After the Second World War, the UK didn’t get direct payments from Germany as reparations. But in 1946, the Inter Allied Reparations Agency was set up to distribute reparations to certain countries, in the form of industrial assets. According to the book `The Price of War’ by economist Alec Cairncross , the UK received around $106 million worth of assets through the IARA

While many in Britain talk of war reparations, they have, so far, refrained from commenting about the tens of trillions of dollars Britain looted from India in its 200-year rule of the sub-continent. Seldom does Britain reckon that a debt, it claims, is owed to itself, should, in the same vein, make its debts to other countries applicable as well. It just can’t be convenient for one and not for the other. That should be the case for international justice.

Not only did Britain loot India, it reduced a thriving economy to utter poverty. Under British rule, India’s share of world manufacturing exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent as the East India Company made incredible fortunes.

The East India Company, itself, was founded in 1600. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies – the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia. The company seized large parts of India and was the beginnings of the British Empire in India. The company eventually came to rule almost the entire landmass of India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Its rule in India effectively began in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, and lasted until 1858 when, following the Indian mutiny of 1857, the Government of India Act led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India.

In 1857, Lord Salisbury, secretary of state for India and future prime minister of Britain, stated that “As India should be bled …the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested.” In fact so badly did Britain rape and plunder India, that a country that had a perfectly functioning economy of trade, crafts and agriculture, and exports of spices, cotton and tea, was reduced to abject poverty. The cumulative theft was so extortionate that Edmund Burke, as early as the late 1700s, predicted the money stolen from India would eventually destroy it.

In the 1930s, Will Durant, who co-authored, with his wife, Ariel `The Story of Civilization” wrote a short pamphlet called `The Case for India’. In this pamphlet, he wrote: “The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle […] bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and legal plunder.” Britain profited enormously from what Durant calls the “rape of a continent.” It was, as Durant put it, “the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.”

India’s share of world GDP before the British occupation was 23 per cent, a share greater than the whole of Europe combined. When the British left India, India’s share of world GDP had fallen to below 3 per cent. Not to mention the destruction of the Indian crafts and cottage industries by enforced British factory-produced goods, that left millenia-old traditions of arts and crafts decrepit, and a majority of the population unemployed and living in abject poverty.

Before the British occupation, India was a wealthy economy. It had the second-largest GDP in the world, after China, while Britain was a poor feudal kingdom. The invasion and occupation of India, resulted in Britain becoming the richest country in the world, while India became one of the poorest. So far did the British imperial culture of thievery, rapacity and rapine go.

Education and healthcare for the 250 million Indians under British occupation was almost non-existent. This, considering India was home to the oldest university in the world, and its philosophical, medical and artistic traditions stretched back thousands of years. Indian agricultural produce and foodgrains went to feed British stomachs and boost British stocks and reserves, while there were recurring famines in India. Between 30 and 35 million Indians perished in famines alone, some of which can be termed as man-made. In the 1943 Bengal famine, over four million Indians died.

Indians were also transported from their native lands to places as far as Fiji, Guyana and South Africa, to work in fields and mines. Almost an instance of the slave trade being imposed on Indians.

Besides, the British practised apartheid in India. Indians were not permitted in British-only restaurants, the transport system practised segregation, where Indians were made to sit at the back of trains. British establishments barred Indians from memberships with humiliating signs like `Indians and dogs not allowed.’

Britain also sought to divide India on religious and casteist grounds, favouring the Muslim community in order to discourage Hindu nationalism, even as India had a history of religious syncretism. In 1947, when the sub-continent was divided into India and Pakistan, on the eve of its independence, there was murder, rape and lynching between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. About two million people were killed in this homicidal fury. And 17 million people were uprooted from their native lands. The communal divide in India, was a fire that the British encouraged and stoked, through its insidious divide and rule policy.

Even today, Indian jewels are proudly displayed in British museums and on the British crown. Britain is still withholding the loot it stole from India with a supercilious self-confidence. Leave alone paying back India, there is no sign of even an apology forthcoming.

The racist former Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, once said “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion . . . Let the Viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample Gandhi into the dirt.” He also called Indians men of straw. Did Churchill ever wonder that it was these `men of straw’ who valiantly fought two wars for Britain? More Indian soldiers died in the two wars than British soldiers. In the Second World War alone, 2.5 million Indians sacrificed their lives fighting for Britain, in a war that was not theirs.

Niall Ferguson in his 2003 book Empire, argues that British imperialism gave the world the admirable assets of language, education, banking, representative assemblies, and the concept of liberty, and that India, “the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule”. Do British intellectuals who hark back to the good old days of British imperialism, and the good it did to countries like India, ever reckon that, at the time of independence from Britain, India had a literacy rate of just 16 per cent and its life expectancy was a mere 27 years?