British loot of India. Should India not demand reparations ?
Madhu Kishwar had invited me to her channel to talk about the above topic, after I had tweeted that 2 tribes in Namibia filed some years ago a class action suit against Germany for atrocities during its colonial rule there from 1885-1918. Germany got summons from the court for pre-trial negotiations. After several rounds, Germany apologised and agreed to pay compensation. This article is meant as input for further research on what can be done to get tangible justice.
Ms Wirth is a native of Germany. For long, she was convinced that every Indian knows and treasures his great heritage. She noticed that there seemed to be a concerted effort to prevent even Indians from knowing how valuable this ancient Indian heritage is, so she started to point out its unique values.
Most Westerners and even many Indians consider British colonial rule in India as ‘having been good for the natives’. The British looked after the natives, didn’t they ? They built the railways, gave them English education, laws, institutions, isn’t it ? The so-called ‘benevolent’ British rule in India is a carefully crafted false narrative and needs to be corrected. Those responsible for unspeakable atrocities need to be held accountable. (I focus here only on the British colonialism, but the French and especially the Portuguese colonialism in India was equally inhuman and prior to this, the Muslim invasions and Moghul rule). The truth needs to come out and justice needs to be done for the millions of Indians who were treated as subhuman, who were impoverished, humiliated and with no pangs of conscience, killed or left to die.
Testimonies about how bad the situation was in India
Just to give you a taste of how bad the situation in India was, I will quote here from Will Durant’s ‘A case for India’. He landed in India in 1930 at the age of 45. He had been studying the civilisations of the world, had read a lot about India’s great ancient civilisation, and wanted to get a direct feel of it, so he came for a visit. And he was shocked. He was so shocked that he felt, he needed to put his project about civilisations on hold and let the world know what was happening in India. He never thought a Nation can let its subjects sink to such misery.
After going back to America he wrote a small book which can be downloaded from the net : ‘A case for India’.
Here is part of the introduction : “I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding by England throughout 150 years. I began to feel that I came upon the greatest crime in all history … I know how weak words are in the face of guns and blood, how irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of empires and gold. But if even one Hindu, fighting for freedom far off there on the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem sweet to me. For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather do today than be of help to India.” (Oct.1, 1930)
Shashi Tharoor, in his book ‘Inglorious Empire’ gives a similar account : “Burke, in his opening speech at the impeachment of Hastings, also accused the East India Company of ‘cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence. He described in colourfully painful detail the violation of Bengali women by the British-assigned tax collectors”.
Tharoor writes further : In an extraordinary confession, a British administrator in Bengal, FJ Shore, testified before the House of Commons in 1857 : ‘The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian Nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort’.
The salary of the Secretary of State for India in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to the average annual income of 90,000 Indians.
Yet at the end of his speech in Oxford in 2015, in spite of having made a convincing case for reparations by detailing how brutal the British were in India, Tharoor ‘generously’ said that he is not in favour of financial reparations but just saying ‘sorry’ would go a far far far longer way, and he personally would be content with 1 British Pound a year as reparation for the next 200 years.
Why would he say this ?
Rajiv Malhotra, who undoubtedly did great work for the Hindu cause, inexplicably also does not want to give the British even a little financial pain. In his speech in the British Parliament, he called those Indians who want reparations ‘rabble rousing, overemotional and bombastic people, just looking for instant populism’.
Basically, Malhotra conceded defeat before fighting, since he felt that Britain will anyway never admit guilt and pay compensation. He said this in front of British parliamentarians, whose facial expressions are interesting to watch, “Let me tell you, Britain will never give even a small amount of money as a symbolic thing and come up with ‘we are guilty, we are ashamed’ and all that. It’s not going to happen”.
Why would he do that ?
Doesn’t he feel that integrity demands Britain owns her crimes and that his countrymen deserve justice ? For example those millions who were starved to death due to forced cultivation of opium, indigo and massive food export to Britain or those shipped out as indentured labour to plantations around the world, replacing the slaves after the abolition of slavery in 1833 ?
Doesn’t he feel that it should be rubbed into the
British that India is ‘poor’ and not number 1 economy only because of them ?
Testimonies how rich India was
Let me quote Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeran, a German historian (1760-1842) : “India has been celebrated even in the earliest times for her riches”. The wealth, splendour and prosperity of India had made a strong impression on the mind of Alexander the Great, and that when he left Persia for India, he told his army that they were starting for that ‘Golden India’ where there was endless wealth, and that what they had seen in Persia was nothing compared to the riches of India.
The writer of the article ‘Hindustan’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica also remarks that India ‘was naturally reputed to be the seat of immense riches’.
Even in 1700 AD, after the colossal, painful loot by Muslim invaders, India was still rich, Aurangzeb was as wealthy as all the European kings together. The common Hindus had suffered greatly. They were highly taxed, their temples destroyed, their knowledge burned, humiliated and beheaded in millions.
For these crimes also acknowledgement & reclamation is needed and it seems to come now slowly in the form of reclaiming ancient temples – sadly, against a lot of resistance by Indian converts to Islam, whose forefathers in all likelihood converted under great duress and who are now fully brainwashed into their new belief (also fostered by the British), which includes seeing Hindus as ‘the worst of creatures’(Q98.6) …
Now first to the question : How exactly did the British manage to drain India’s enormous wealth ?
Prof. Utsa Patnaik, JNU Prof., studied this question for decades. She came to the figure of 45 trillion $ by using the commodity export surplus as measure and applying an interest rate of 5%.
What the East India Company did, was brutal, criminal extortion. She explained it in an op-ed article
Prof. Patnaik writes, that even as recently as from 1900 till 1928, India had after America, the second largest merchandise export surplus.
Further she says, ‘Indians were deprived of every bit of the enormous purchasing power they had earned over 175 years. Not even the colonial Government was credited with any part of India’s huge gold and forex earnings against which it could have issued Rupees. This sleight of hand, namely, paying producers out of their own taxes, made India’s export surplus unrequited and constituted a tax financed drain to London’.
Mass consumption was squeezed for export. This export included opium to China and Indigo, which caused terrible famines, in which it is estimated, some 25 million Indians perished. Each one dying a slow death.
In 1904, food grain consumption was 210 kg, by 1946, it was down to 137 kg. “Indian masses suffered a severe nutritional decline and India inherited a festering problem of unemployment and poverty”, Prof. Patnaik says.
And from then on, the world knew about India only that it was ‘a very, very poor country’…What mindset does it need to do this to a people ?
When will humanity realise that we all come from the same source ? That we all have a right to be here on
earth ? Sadly, this common sense is not common. Many of those who have been taught by their religion (this applies to all Abrahamic religions) that they are superior, have no qualms to treat others as inferior and subhuman.
Here are excerpts of an eyewitness account, a Dutch Merchant by name of Jacob Haafner, who was in Madras during the famine of 1871, translated by Jacob de Roover of the University of Ghent, Belgium. He describes at first, how those starving people looked. I instead give a photo of the famine in Madras in 1876.
Jacob Haafner writes :
…. One saw thousands of such human beings walk around, young and old, man and woman. With their last strength, they had come to the square for alms from the rich, but the doors remained shut, so that one after the other collapsed. Dead bodies and those dying lay on top of each other as on a battlefield, from all sides one could hear the crying of the suffering; begging they raised their hands to the inhumane Englishmen on their balconies, who stood there revelling with their whores, and who made the hunger on the square even more unbearable because of the food they held in their hands.
These Christians, who pride themselves on their humanitarian religion … alas, talking, singing or whistling they walked through the dead and the dying, with that rude and hurtful arrogance so characteristic of them. From their carriages and palanquins, they looked down on the perishing natives with a look of contempt, while the latter were lying in the dust, struggling with death, or convulsively breathing their last.
Attitude of today’s British Politicians towards India
After knowing about all these crimes, how does it feel, when British Parliamentarians criticise India for its ‘far right Government’ as Nadia Whittome did after the recent India visit by Boris Johnson ?
If anything, the Modi Government is more left than right, if left means to look after the poor foremost. (Those categories right and left don’t apply to India, as Hinduism is not blind belief and ‘conservative’ but basically scientific.)
Another Parliamentarian made the outrageous insinuation that India plans a genocide of its Muslims. The British must not get away with this. Yet they seem to be sure that Indians either don’t know what they did to the country or they are ‘polite’ and won’t mention it.
Meanwhile, the British play the role of ‘guardians of human rights’ and keep especially a close watch on India … like placing in its Open Doors watch list, India among the top 10 countries with the greatest persecution of Christians. It’s shameless. Indeed, a spokesperson for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office told the ABC, when asked about reparations for Aboriginals, “We are doing our utmost to address modern day discrimination and intolerance”.
Examples of reparations payments
Let’s come to the point that Britain, and the Company, were not at all opposed to reparations. In fact, they demanded them, for example after China lost the opium war, Hongkong had to be handed over and a sum be paid by China.
Britain and the other Allies also demanded reparations from Germany after WW1. The sum was so high, 33 billion $, that it devastated Germany’s economy. Germany paid reparations for WW1 till 2010.
The most well-known reparations are those paid by Germany to the victims of the Holocaust. Germany paid directly for the survivors and also generally to the state of Israel, so far over 80 billion $. The payments are still ongoing, and have recently been extended to include spouses of holocaust survivors who have already died.
Where could India start ?
It would make sense to start with the British Museum and the crown jewel. The mood in Europe, except maybe Britain, is coming round to the view that those treasures in European museums, should go back to where they came from.
David Cameron’s reaction in an interview to NDTV in 2010 is out of touch. However, it seems Indians so far didn’t put pressure, not even for the Kohinoor.
When asked in 2010, will you give back the Kohinoor ? Cameron replied, “This is a question I have NEVER been asked before …”, and adds, that the British Museum would be empty. What an argument. It’s like a thief saying, if I return the stolen things, my own house will look bad.
Another important issue are the ancient manuscripts which were looted, even by missionaries. India needs to know which texts are there in the university libraries and which of those texts are unique and not available in India. These need to be given back.
Another obvious injustice, which easily can be addressed, is that Britain received reparations from Germany for the 2 World Wars, but nothing of that went to India. India paid a huge amount and supplied a huge amount of goods, guns and animals for Britain’s wars, apart from sending 3 million soldiers, 150,000 sacrificing their lives for a war, they had nothing to do with. India not only deserves a memorial for the Indian soldiers in England, but definitely its financial share.
Yet most important of all, since those bankers and merchants, like Rothschild, and also the directors of the company, who lived like kings, were mainly responsible for the massive suffering of the Indian masses, should not THEY, respectively their families, pay back what they looted ? If they had integrity and a conscience, they would do so. But do they have a conscience ?
It seems Karma is catching up with Europe in our times. But will it also catch up with those topmost families, who ruthlessly forced Indians into abject poverty and starvation due to their insane greed and who became insanely rich ? So rich, that it is said that they can buy everyone who is for sale and influence not only the economy but also politics worldwide.
Some 15 years ago, an Indian, Sanjeev Mehta, bought the East Indian Company. I was surprised that an Indian would want to trade under this name which brings up terrible memories in India and other former colonies, and probably nostalgia in Britain.
However, it may turn out to be a boon that Mehta, who is well aware of the enslavement of India by the Company, has the reprinting rights of all records and library material. A detailed study of what has been looted, who exactly has profited, where the riches went, is needed.
It will expose those families who, without any pangs of conscience, humiliated, enslaved, tormented, starved and killed other humans for their own greed.
Reparations need to be demanded from them
At the same time, British politicians need to be humbler in dealing with India, keeping in mind their crimes and the unforgivably racist attitude of their former PM Winston Churchill, who said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”.
As a first step, at least a preferential trade agreement from Britain would only be logical, after their massive loot.
(Courtesy : Excerpts from an Article under the same Title by Ms Maria Wirth on mariawirth.com, 10.7.2024)
Doesn’t Malhotra feel that it should be rubbed into the British that India is ‘poor’ and not number 1 economy because of them ?
British politicians need to be humbler in dealing with India, keeping in mind their crimes and the unforgivably racist attitude !