The Debate on Brit Reparations for Colonialism

The Oxford Union/Social media debate on whether the British owe reparations to their former colonies is notable for the alarming display of Indian ignorance of basic facts and interesting in its timing. Items:

1. The British did not rule India for 200 years (as the Oxford debaters, including Shashi Tharoor, said repeatedly). Consider the following time-frame:

• 1757 The sham “Battle of Plassey” (won by bribery) began the colonial era 
• 1848 Punjab fell to the British. In 91 intervening years the British did not “rule India;” they took territories in the name of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi and subjected them to rapacious exploitation. They built the railways and telegraph to loot more efficiently. 
• 1857 Less than a decade after the fall of the Punjab a great national uprising almost unseated the British. In its aftermath Queen Victoria declared herself “Empress of India” and promised to be the people’s “ma-baap” but on the ground vengeful massacres continued for serveral years. The two decades after the uprising saw the worst famines in the country’s history, amidst which the British exported record quantities of food; they also convened a “Great Durbar” and feasted amidst the dying millions.
• 1885 To try and contain Indian fury, the Agriculture Member of the Viceroy’s Council propelled the founding of the Indian National Congress but the nationalists soon took it over. British “rule” would last just 62 years after that, with the bureaucrats in Delhi in steady political retreat most of the time. 

That timeline shows not only that the British did not rule in any legitimate sense of the word, they also did not control the whole or even most of the country for anywhere near 200 years.

2. The British did not unify India: The British themselves recognized the reality of Indian political unity by remaining Mughal tax collectors for most of their time in India. The country was also united more fundamentally by culture and world view; that was why Gandhi’s political message resonated nationally and mobilized the people. Contrary to its claim to have unified the country is the British record of creating a vicious and unprecedented religious divide.

3. Pre-British India had a range of industries: Social media scoffers at the concept of “deindustrialization” have asked what industries India had other than textiles. India had a wide range of other productive capacities. The highest valued was diamond processing, a uniquely Indian industry through most of history because no other country mined the gems until 1725, when a source was discovered in Brazil. Also widely renowned was the Indian ship building industry. Arab ships were built entirely in India. The country also led in metal work of many kinds, including of course, gold jewelry. The steel pillar near Qutb Minar in Delhi exemplifies the high quality India achieved in a field critically important in making weapons. Tipu Sultan’s use of rocketry against the British also demonstrated an unmatched mastery of other advanced technologies.

4. Toll of British “man-made famines”: Shashi Tharoor said 29 million Indians had perished in British created famines. Going by figures reported by British administrators themselves, the total is over 100 million. Indian estimates go much higher. This phenomenon should not be seen as an accidental by-product of looting. As in North America and Australasia, genocide was British policy.

The Matter of Timing

Shashi Tharoor has been a British spear-carrier for most of his career, so his performance in the Oxford debate needs some explanation. What led him to become so vocal a critic? I would like to think he’s been reading my blog, but having seen him in action for nearly five decades, that explanation is a non-starter. He has a self-serving political aim in mind.

What could it be?

Well, if we’re looking for clues, Sushma Swaraj’s current problems might be a good place to start. They originated in leaks from Britain and have led to calls for her replacement as Foreign Minister. The Times of India reported earlier this week that she had removed the label“Foreign Minister” from her Twitter account.

The Oxford debate was held in May, just about the time when Sushma Swaraj’s problems were surfacing. Shashi did not make public the tape of his speech at Oxford in May or shortly thereafter, when I presume he had it. And now, just as it goes viral, he stirs up a hornets nest in the Congress by criticizing Sonia Gandhi’s tactics in parliament.

Am I being over-imaginative, or does it seem as if he’s preparing to jump ship and bid for the Foreign Minister’s job?

“Not so fast!” you say: “what of the unfortunate Sunanda Pushkar matter?”

Ah yes. Point well taken. But then, a few million pounds distributed in the right quarters might lift that albatross from his political neck.

An Excellent Nobel Award

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi is excellent not just because of the merit of the recipients but in its timing, when the India-Pakistan border has been for weeks a ribbon of meaningless armed conflict and unnecessary death.

The award underlines the hope and promise of youth in an area where older generations on both sides of the border have failed miserably to understand the hatreds and violence of their common past, much less escape it.

If the two laureates work together, as Satyarthi has proposed in comments to reporters, it could mark an important new beginning for peace in the region.

In contemplating that scenario it is important to underline that anything they do together should be seen as more than an emotional phenomenon.

It is an opportunity to focus attention in both countries not only on their common humanity but on the tragic history of colonial manipulation that split their shared culture and traditions.

In addition, the award points to two aspects of the misery of children in South Asia that highlight how India and Pakistan are victims of the same contemporary circumstances.

One is that the child labor that Satyarthi has spent his life trying to eradicate is rooted in the same bitter poverty that drove the Taliban to try and kill Malala; her bright insouciance threatened the only livelihood they have, the trade of opium and heroin.

The second is the genesis of that common economic reality in colonial rule.

Britain did not just drive what was once the world's most prosperous region into poverty; to protect the interests of its elite in the $60 billion Af-Pak opium/heroin trade and related money laundering it has sustained the murderous terrorism that has blocked or slowed development throughout South Asia.

Perhaps the most poisonous of its manipulations has been the harnessing of religion to the ugliest of human drives, fear, anger and hatred, the theme of India-Pakistan relations since Partition in 1947.

In celebrating Malala the teenage cherub espousing education for girls and Satyarthi the angel of enslaved children, we have the opportunity to address a whole range of dark issues emanating from post-colonial Britain.

What the Vodafone Case Says About India

At one level, it is very simple to explain the position of British phone giant Vodafone in India: because it paid abroad in black money for a lucrative property in the country, it claims that no taxes are owed.

How this situation developed is almost impossible to explain because much that needs understanding is buried in post-colonial debris of which most Indians, including our so-called political class and Intelligence agencies, seem blissfully unaware.

For example, how can we explain the lack of alarm that a British company has become the second largest player in the strategic Indian telecommunications market? No one seems concerned that Britain is the nerve center of the most intense international surveillance effort in history or that it has a long and consistent record of abusing every advantage it has ever been given in India.

To understand our political torpor it is necessary to look to the past and take into account the role of Indian financiers and agents in bringing on and sustaining colonial rule.

When the Europeans first ventured into Indian trade five centuries ago, they found a well-developed market system here, with local, national and international networks of commerce and finance. Indian bankers provided credit and insurance facilities, set exchange rates for a variety of gold and silver coinage from as far afield as Greece and China, and set the terms of trade. European traders found it impossible to operate without Indian partners to help negotiate the system, both to get the loans they needed and to actually buy the supplies they shipped back to Europe.

In the 17th and 18th Centuries the largest and most influential Indian banking houses were run by Marwaris from Rajasthan and Chettiars from Tamil Nadu. Numerous accounts by Portuguese, Dutch, British and French traders attest to their heavy dependence on the support of those houses and on a variety of other Indian agents to trade in the country’s principal marts.

By all accounts, the wealthiest banks in that period were two Marwari houses. One, established by the jeweler turned merchant-banker, Virji Vora operated a pan-Indian network out of Surat (the main Mughal port); it dominated for a 50-year span ending in 1670. The other, founded by a Patna saltpeter trader Hiranand Shah in the last quarter of that Century, became by the early 1700s under his descendants Fateh Chand and Mahtab Rai in Bengal, India’s formally acknowledged “Jagat Seth” (world banker).

While these merchants had excellent business acumen, they had little political sense. That was not a serious failing as long as the Mughal Empire was strong, but after Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739 they were increasingly at sea.

The lack of strategic sense is nowhere clearer than in Jagat Seth Mahtab Rai’s disastrous decision to lend Robert Clive the money with which to bribe Mir Jafar to run away from the 1757 “Battle” of Pilashi (Plassey). He probably thought of it as a convenient way to get rid of the arrogant new Nawab of Bengal, the teenage Suraj-ud-Dowlah; he foresaw neither his own swift ruin and ignominious murder nor the severe famine British oppression would let loose in Bengal, killing some seven million people, a third of the total population.

Throughout British rule in India such death tolls from the famines they created were frequent; yet, amazingly, the many Indian financiers and agents that made colonial rule possible never seem to have had the least compunction about what they were doing to their own people. The nationalist movement drove them into the shadows but they continued to serve the darkest British ends, including arranging for mass communal violence and Partition. (Neither would have been possible without Indian financiers and dalals.)

In the absence of any post-colonial accounting, those who thrived under British rule became part of  independent India’s power structure, and they continued to be wedded to their old paymasters regardless of national repercussions. That continuity is the key to understanding how Vodafone arranged to sneak into India and then was able to pretend that it was the injured party.

However, the collaborators who paved Vodafone's way into the country were not the old dalal breed but two young entrepreneurs, Shashi and Ravi Ruia, whose father, Nand Kishore, had come from Marwar to Madras in 1956 to trade in iron ore. After his sudden death in 1969 the Ruia brothers, both then in their early twenties, expanded their business interests rapidly; that happened just as Britain was consolidating its post-colonial money laundering empire and finding many new clients among Indian businessmen.

In India, the face of that new empire was HSBC, the Hong Kong bank set up in the 19th Century by British drug traffickers; it took over Bombay's Mercantile Bank in 1959 and became the country’s primary conduit for black money.

All who made use of its facilities became vulnerable to blackmail, and to understand how that pertains to the Vodafone case we have to look briefly at how the British used their new clout to take control of Indian mass media.

They had begun the process before independence by arranging to sell the Times of India to a trusted comprador family, and in the decade that followed other financiers who had thrived under colonial rule took over all major publications. Even when there was no change in ownership, as in the The Hindu, British clout soon became evident in editorial content.

In newer media organizations the links were far more overt. The India Today Group emerged from a collaboration of “Lord Thomson of Fleet” and a Punjabi financier who had been neck deep in colonial British intrigues. NDTV was founded by the Anglo-Indian son of an employee of the British multinational Metal Box, and it has yet to cut its umbilical cord to the BBC.

All this led to Indian “elite” media reflecting, at best, a highly Anglo-centric worldview and at the worst becoming conduits for outright British propaganda – recent examples include the Purulia Arms Drop documentary on Times Now, and the vicious anti-Sri Lankan films on Headlines Today.

Not surprisingly, Britain’s devoted – or blackmailed – Indian claque raised no alarms as Vodafone made its stealthy entry into India.

To see just how many times the alarms could have been sounded, we have to return to the story of Shashi and Ravi Ruia, who had in 1976 reconstituted their father's company as ESSAR (S & R, their first name initials).

In 1992 ESSAR teamed up with Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Whampoa, a company that traces its origins to an opium “Dispensary” in Guangzhou established in 1828 by A.S. Watson, under which name it is now the world’s largest retail chain.

A.S. Watson is now part of a conglomerate that takes its name from two other British opium related enterprises, the Hongkong and Whampoa Dock Company and the John D Hutchison Company. Hutchinson Whampoa is now controlled by Chinese billionaire Li Shi-feng who has repeatedly been cited in American media, citing Intelligence sources, as closely linked to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He got his controlling share in the company from HSBC.

That dispensation of Opium Era goodies to the Chinese paved the way to the “One Country-Two Systems” deal that Margaret Thatcher negotiated in returning Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It cut the corrupt Chinese political-military elite into Britain’s global criminal empire and gave enormous new heft to the “all-weather” alliance between Beijing and Britain's narco-terrorist proxy in Pakistan.

Much of this information has been in the public domain for over two decades, but none of it was reported in Indian media as ESSAR – in the wake of a sudden financial crisis – helped Hutchinson Whampoa enter the Indian market.

In May 2007, Vodafone paid $11.1 billion in black money for the Chinese company’s 67 per cent share in Hutchinson-ESSAR, beating out Reliance Communications, the Hinduja Group and ESSAR itself (which had the remaining 33 per cent of the company).

If the UPA government had not been so riddled with corruption, it could have stopped the transaction altogether on the grounds of national security (as the United States did in preventing a Hutchinson Whampoa takeover of the telecommunications firm Global Crossing). But with moral flakes like Kapil Sibal and Palani Chidambaram representing Indian interests that was never in the cards. The demand for $2.6 billion in taxes was the most assertive action the government dared to take.

Our Brit-proxy media have presented even that demand, and the retrospective law affirming its legality, as deep injury to “investor sentiment” abroad.

Not once has any Indian news organization looked at the dire implications of allowing a massive British company into the innards of our communications system. Not once has anyone complained at Vodafone’s temerity in trying to bully its way out of obeying Indian laws.

As far as our mass media are concerned, we could be back in the days when there was no one to observe or comment on Robert Clive’s insulting offer of a pension of Rs. 1250 to the scion of the Jagat Seth family that he had robbed of uncounted crores.

That is no overblown comparison. Our contemporary merchant princes are being every bit as dumb as the ill fated Jagat Seth. And it is not just the Ruia brothers.

Mukesh Ambani blindsided the Indian government and public in selling an $8 billion stake in Indian offshore gas to BP (British Petroleum), the most predatory oil company in the world; he consummated the transaction in the British Prime Minister's office.

Our media reported that Ambani then asked for police protection but showed no interest in explaining why. They also reported with the same strange lack of curiosity, the statement by the then Oil Minister Verrappa Moily that he had been threatened, as had his predecessors. No one made a connection between those strange reports and the new UPA policy of "freeing" gas prices that exposed the entire Indian economy to rampant inflationary pressures.

The Vodafone case is thus just the tip of an iceberg of British temerity.

More than six decades after our formal political independence India continues to be trapped in a network of British criminalities that range from relentless proxy wars and economic subversions to the threat of biological-bacteriological assault (on which I will elaborate in a later post).

Understanding History: 1. Colonial Constructs

What passes for “history” today is an intellectual construct of the colonial era that originated in the effort by Europeans to explain their sudden global dominance.

It appeared to them that they were innately superior in many ways, one being a unique sense of the past. Beginning with the German theorist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), it became a fashion to assert that only Europeans had a sense of history. Herder saw societies in China, India and the Americas as experiencing change but not possessed of the capacity to perceive it as cumulative development; their past was thus not history in the European sense.

Europeans acknowledged Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 to 425 BC) as the “Father of History” for his chatty account of how Greece and Persia became enemies. (It began, he says, with the reciprocal kidnappings of nubile princesses.) A younger contemporary, Thucydides (460 to 400 BC), departed from tradition by not mentioning the Olympian gods as active participants in human affairs (the Peloponnesian War), and got credit for being the first to separate history from religion.

The “historiography” that Europeans developed from those roots involved a “science of history” dealing with the use of evidentiary sources, and a “philosophy of history” exploring its nature and aims. The European mainstream moved towards the belief that the “real past” was unknowable because knowledge of it was inescapably limited: at best, an individual historian could make an honest assessment of the evidence available, and leave overall truths about the past to emerge over time.

In the 1930s the widely influential Oxford Professor R. G. Collingwood put history at a yet farther remove from reality with the argument, in The Idea of History, that the dead past and the living present were separate in Nature, and were brought together only in the human imagination. At one point in his disquisition, he wrote, “The historian cannot have certain knowledge of what the past was in its actuality and completeness … The past in its actuality and completeness is nothing to him; and as it has finished happening, it is nothing in itself; so his ignorance of it is no loss.”

 A subset of thinkers, most prominently Karl Marx (1818-1883), conceived an even narrower frame for history, rooting it in the process by which a society generated wealth: those who controlled “the means of production” viewed the past in the perspective of their own “class interests.” Marx saw societies developing along a predictable line. The “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer tribal society gave way with the coming of agriculture to the dominance of those who controlled the use of land (feudalism); when the wealth generated from land reached a certain tipping point “bourgeois capitalism” emerged, followed by the imperialism of those who used capital to control all other means of production. Violent revolution would then destroy capitalism (and the entire class of capitalists), usher in “socialism,” followed by the equitable heaven of advanced communism.

Thus, while mainstream European historians groped around in the past like blind men examining an elephant, each declaring his or her own perception, and every successive generation of scholars generated revisionist views reflecting their different personal and social perspectives, Marxists developed a firmly deterministic sense of the historical process. In reality, both Marxist and mainstream European historians tended to be obedient not to their declared principles but to the prevailing power structure of their societies; they differed mainly in hiding/declaring their role as ideological instruments.

While Europe was evolving its peculiar historiographies, its intellectual elite developed a smug sense of superiority towards India that reflected the prejudices of Christian missionaries and the gossip of traders. John Locke (1632-1704) was typical, dismissing India’s rich philosophical tradition (ironically, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding), with a passing reference to “the poor Indian philosopher” who believed the world was held up by an elephant, and when asked what supported the elephant, said it was a turtle which stood on something he knew not what.

The East India Company compounded European ignorance of India by publishing a six-volume History of British India by James Mill (1773-1836), a London journalist who wrote his opus without ever visiting the country or knowing any of its languages.

Mill trashed Indian history as a “monstrous and absurd” concoction of legends and myths. In fact, said he, Indian society “presented a very uniform appearance during the long interval from the visit of the Greeks [under Alexander] to that of the English.” Their “annals … from that era till the period of the Mohomedan conquests, are a blank.” Believing that the “meritorious researches of the modern Europeans,” were responsible for what we know about the Indian past, Mill declared:

“We cannot describe the lives of their kings, or the circumstances and results of a train of battles. But we can show how they lived together as members of the community, and of families; how they were arranged in society; what arts they practiced, what tenets they believed, what manners they displayed; under what species of government they existed; and what character, as human beings, they possessed.”

He endorsed the view that the “sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions incident to barbarians,” were “so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust us by the uniformity of their appearance, and it is rather fortunate for letters that they are buried in silence and oblivion.” In that respect, there was “perhaps but little to regret in the total absence of Hindu records.” Mill’s ignorant views came to be standard throughout Europe.

 Even observers with a high regard for India saw it as having no history. The German philosopher Hegel declared in his History of Philosophy how surprising it was that “a land so rich in intellectual products, and those of the profoundest order of thought, has no History.” India, he said, “has not only ancient books relating to religion, and splendid poetical productions, but also ancient codes; the existence of which latter kind of literature has been mentioned as a condition necessary to the origination of History – and yet History itself is not found.”

Marx explained that lack of history in terms of what he called the “Asiatic mode of production.” Toiling away in the library of the British Museum, never having set foot anywhere in Asia, he pontificated on the “unchangeableness of Asiatic societies” brought on by the “simplicity” of the village economy. Except for the tithe paid to the larger structure of the state, villages consumed what they produced, and were not involved in the exchange of commodities; they remained “untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.” Indian society, Marx declared, “has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”

D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966), the avowedly Marxist Indian historian has pointed out how wrong that assessment was: “the greatest periods of Indian history, the Mauryan, the Satavahana Gupta, owed nothing to intruders” yet marked “the formation and spread of the basic village society or the development of new trade centres.” He also questioned Marx’s explanation that a lack of historical sense arose from the “Asiatic mode of production,” noting China’s “great annals, court and family records, inscriptions, coins,” and archeological excavations that provided a chronology “virtually undisputed from 841 BCE down.”

Most Marxist historians have not let such facts get in the way of the Master’s theory, and India became in their view the archetype of the “timeless East.”

To be continued

Taking up the blog again

After several months away from this blog I'm impelled to take it up again, as much to help me remember what I am going through as to comment on what's been happening.

Perhaps I should begin by explaining this book that Im writing.

It began as an effort to write an honest book about the United Nations. Everything I've read on the topic is biased. Those who support the organization as an item of faith bend over backwards to avoid mentioning its numerous problems; those who are against it for ideological reasons, focus only on the problems. Both viewpoints are equally dishonest; my book was to be a corrective.

After a year of research and writing, I came to the conclusion that the book would have to be broader than originally planned. I could not explain what had happened to the UN without telling of the major national actors that have shaped its work. Research in that direction led me to the conclusion that I could not describe contemporary world affairs without coloring in the historical background. And that, in turn, led to the insight that the colonial era never really ended.

After World War II, as the world segued into the Cold War, European colonial empires faded into the political background, free to deal with their territories as they wished. Contrary to the popular impression there was no rapid and smooth decolonization. Britain manipulated India into an enormously destructive partition (one million killed, 14 million rendered refugees in their own land), creating Pakistan as a weak and vulnerable country that it could use to manipulate South Asia and the Islamic world; it supported bloody opposition to independence by settler colonists in Rhodesia and Kenya, and engaged constructively with the apartheid regime in South Africa. France fought bloody wars in Algeria and Indochina, and established indirect colonial rule in its sub-Saharan African territories. The Portuguese fought long and bloody wars in Angola and Mozambique, as did Spain in Western Sahara; the Dutch fought briefly to try and retake Indonesia.

The net result of this process was that the enormously destructive record of the colonial era went largely unexamined, and the world it shaped was accepted as the foundation on which the United Nations was built. Three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the countries charged with special responsibility to keep the peace of the world, were the largest of the colonial Powers: Britain, France and the Soviet Union (nee Russian empire). China was represented by a rump, Taiwan, and after 1972, by another major empire, that of the Manchus, reconstructed as a totalitarian dictatorship. The United States, the only member of the five dedicated to the spread of democracy, was forced by the exigencies of the Cold War to do just the opposite; it supported colonial Europe down the line. The history of the UN is thus one of prolonged struggle to realize the democratic and liberal ideals of its Charter against strong opposition from its most powerful members.

In the long struggle to escape the colonial era, India on the side of the global South (developing countries) and Britain as the predominant colonial strategist, have played key roles. My book therefore came to focus on the relationship between the two countries: my working title for it is "Escaping the British Raj." Subsequent posts will tell of this work in progress in bits and pieces; a coherent narrative will emerge in the book itself.