British Officials In India -- Good And Bad

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British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 11-26-2006

I'm interested in any assessment/evaluations of British administrators people may care to provide. Who did the right thing, who did the wrong thing. And why?

To get the ball rolling.... My opinion of Sir Frederick Halliday. Purely a personal opinion based on extensive reading:

A pompous fool, who, during the events of 1857, misread pretty much every sign going, used the situation for personal aggrandizement (and that of his friends) and unfairly cast deep shadows on the careers of people like William Tayler and Dewan Mowla Baksh.

A case could perhaps be made for his (minor) contribution to the Islamic terrorism situation we face today.

Whatever, I'd rate him as a bad 'un. What do others think?

(I'm aware that many other, saints or sinners, may be more significant than Halliday. I, personally, just feel he is someone who should be noted as somewhat repulsive.... and appears to have got away with it)

But please, don't only note the bad ones..... Surely <!--emo& Smile

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British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 11-26-2006

Read this book: "THE MEN WHO RULED INDIA: THE FOUNDERS" by Philip Woodruff. Author himself was an ICS officer posted in India.

This book discusses lives and works of major British officials who served during Raj. Though a good reference in general, be cautious about the bias it carries and the propoganda. (Britishers were angels in general)

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 11-26-2006

About British Indian Civil Service in general.

QUOTEThe Ruling Caste
Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj

By David Gilmour
Farrar Straus Giroux. 381 pp. $27
Friday, March 24, 2006

Preface

During their brief momentous period of collaboration, Joseph Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop agreed that it was absurd that so much of the world should be ruled by Great Britain. In particular, the Russian leader told the Nazi Foreign Minister, it was 'ridiculous ... that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India'. He was referring to the men of the Indian Civil Service (ICS).

The statistic alone seems ridiculous. In 1901, when Queen Victoria died, the 'few hundred' numbered just over a thousand, of whom a fifth were at any time either sick or on leave. Yet they administered directly (in British India) or indirectly (in the princely states) a population of nearly 300 million people spread over the territory of modern India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh.

Stalin's grumble contained perhaps a touch of tacit admiration. More explicit praise came from earlier foreign leaders who, like him, had been in search of empires to rule. Bismarck thought Britain's work in India would be 'one of its lasting monuments', while Theodore Roosevelt told the British they had done 'such marvellous things in India' that they might 'gradually, as century succeeds century ... transform the Indian population, not in blood, probably not in speech, but in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as Rome did hers on Western Europe'.

It is not difficult to find foreign eulogies of British civil servants in India, from the French AbbÃ© Dubois, who in 1822 extolled their 'uprightness of character, education and ability', to the Austrian Baron HÃ¼bner who in 1886 ascribed the 'miracles' of British administration to 'the devotion, intelligence, the courage, the perseverance, and the skill combined with an integrity proof against all temptation, of a handful of officials and magistrates who govern and administer the Indian Empire'. Similar tributes can also be found in unexpected places in Britain. Lloyd George, the Liberal leader, lauded the Service as 'the steel frame' that held everything together, while John Strachey, the Labour minister, judged it the 'least corruptible ... ablest and ... most respectable of all the great bureaucracies of the world'.

The same words recur again and again, even from Indian nationalists and their newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century: impartial, high-minded, conscientious, incorruptible. The ICS may have had its critics-even within its own ranks-but about its elevated standards there was no argument. N.B. Bonarjee, a member of the Service but also an Indian nationalist, praised 'its rectitude, its sense of justice, its tolerance, its sense of public duty', as well as 'its high administrative ability'. After independence in 1947, the new nations of Pakistan and India each displayed pride in its traditions. While in Karachi a Government pamphlet proclaimed that the Pakistan Civil Service was the 'successor' of the ICS, 'the most distinguished Civil Service in the world', in Delhi the Home Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, used it as a model for the Indian Administrative Service, a body that played a crucial role in the integration and unification of the new state. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century retired members of the IAS were recalling the exploits of their British predecessors with almost embarrassing effusiveness.

The high reputation of the ICS was never reflected in the literature of the country where most of its members were born. This was no doubt partly because civil servants do not make exciting characters in fiction, even when they do much of their work on horseback. During the existence of the Raj they sometimes appeared in the novels of largely forgotten authors such as Alexander Allardyce, Flora Annie Steel, W. W. Hunter, Edward Thompson and A. E. W. Mason. More recently they have featured in the fiction of three winners of the Booker Prize, although not in any leading role except in J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, a historical novel about the Indian Mutiny. In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust the civil servant is a hapless figure whose wife has an affair with the local nawab, while in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown he is an uncomfortable liberal who disavows his predecessors and is limited to a brief appearance in a single volume of the Raj Quartet.

Scott's work, criticized both by Indian nationalists and by British conservatives, is a brilliant portrait of the Raj in its closing years. Yet it is limited not only in time but also in the range of its British characters, who (apart from some missionaries) are nearly all connected to the Army. Rudyard Kipling painted a fuller and richer picture of the Raj at its zenith, but this too is restricted in scope, mainly because he lived nearly all his time in the Punjab and left India at the age of 23. He also took most of his characters from the military (with a preference for NCOs and Other Ranks), and distributed his civilians in professions as diverse as forestry and engineering. Some of Kipling's few civil servants are strong men, dedicated paternalists obsessed with duty and the welfare of Indians. But others are pedantic or frivolous or impractical. In his story 'Tod's Amendment' he gave a 6-year-old boy more understanding of agricultural tenancies than the Legal Member of the Viceroy's Council.

Although Kipling was the principal chronicler of British India, the most enduring effigy of its administrators was carved by E. M. Forster in A Passage to India. The two writers approached the Subcontinent from angles that could hardly have been more different. Kipling was born in India and returned at the age of 16 to earn his living as a journalist in Lahore. Forster had already published most of his novels by the time he sailed for Bombay in search of India and Indian friendships. There was nothing in his background, character or outlook that predisposed him to look favourably on the Raj. Indeed several of his friends in the Bloomsbury Group had abandoned their traditional family links with imperial rule. They even persuaded one of their members, Rex Partridge, the son and nephew of ICS officials, to change his name to the less regal-sounding Ralph.

A Passage to India is a subtle and in certain ways sensitive work, a well-crafted drama with an evocative sense of place and some plausible Indian characters. But its author's loathing of the British in India-a feeling he confessed to in private-turned it into a tendentious political novel, at any rate for many of his contemporary readers. Kipling was fascinated by other men's professions and wrote numerous stories about work; so was Scott, who diligently carried out research into how the British had administered India. But Forster was seldom interested in writing about work; he preferred portraying people at their leisure or in their domesticity in Florence and the Home Counties. He did not see civil servants inspecting hospitals or canals but witnessed them relaxing at 'the Club', where he judged them philistine and stupid. Then he turned them into caricatures. His District Officer, Turton, is pompous and absurd and wants 'to flog every native' in sight as soon as there is a crisis; his memsahibs are even worse, crude stereotypes, compounds of nothing but snobbery and racial prejudice. Their actions are seldom more credible than their characters. Forster makes them react to an obscure incident in a cave as if it had been a minor massacre. They gather at the club and make semi-hysterical suggestions about calling out the Army, 'clearing the bazaars' and sending the women and children to the hills. There is almost nothing believable about the scene at the club or about the arrest and trial of Aziz, where Forster's ignorance of administration and judicial procedure let him down again. Yet these events, described in fiction and depicted in film, form one of the most abiding images of British India.

The principal historical portrait is a kinder one. Fifty years ago, a former civil servant, Philip Mason, published (under the pseudonym Philip Woodruff) his two volumes of The Men Who Ruled India, The Founders and The Guardians. They are the work of a wise man and a talented writer who wrote affectionately yet sometimes critically of a Service which had on the whole, he thought, justified its reputation for altruism and benevolent rule. Although regularly and unfairly denounced by post-colonial critics as hagiography, it is the work on the subject best known to non-academic readers.

Two historiograpical developments in the late 1970s changed academic attitudes towards the Service. The most important was the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's Orientalism, a hugely influential book that spawned legions of disciples, in India and elsewhere, who took it for granted that colonial rule was always evil and colonialist motives were invariably bad. The other was a sudden interest shown by a number of North American historians in demolishing the reputation of the ICS. In 1976 Bradford Spangenberg published a thesis claiming that the Service was obsessed with status and promotion and declaring that, as a result of his 'scrutiny of the characteristics and motivations of British officials', he had destroyed the 'myths' of its efficiency and 'self-sacrificial esprit de corps'. Although his 'scrutiny' generally and curiously eschewed the examination of civil servants' private papers, it was welcomed by other historians equally eager to demonstrate the self-interest and lack of altruism in the Service. It soon became normal to read American studies of British India without finding a decent motive ascribed to officials who had spent a good part of their careers digging canals, fighting crime and organizing famine relief.

Even the officers of the Indian Medical Service, men working (with a certain success) to combat malaria, plague and cholera, were accused of carrying out research 'driven by narrowly professional motives' and of trying 'to advance their careers at home by contributing to the advance of a universal medical science'. 10 How contributions to the advance of medical science can be regarded as inherently sinful is something of a mystery. Even odder is the implication that trying to advance one's career is an activity unknown to American historians.

The most significant contributions to the subject since Woodruff are The District Officer by Roland Hunt and John Harrison, which is outside my period, and Clive Dewey's Anglo-Indian Attitudes, which just touches the end of it. Dewey's study concentrates on two very different figures in the ICS, Malcolm Darling, a friend of Forster who also befriended Indians, and Frank Lugard Brayne, an Evangelical who attempted to transform his district by enforcing sanitary and agricultural improvements. The author took the two men to represent the Cult of Friendship and the Gospel of Uplift, two contrasting outlooks which, he argued, alternated as the dominant British attitude to India between the governorship of Clive and the viceroyalty of Mountbatten.

Paul Scott became so interested in the mechanics of the Raj that he even contemplated writing a non-fictional account of its working routines. He wished that the last British generation in India would stop reminiscing about tigers and elephants and the smell of dung fires, and tell him how their curious administration had functioned. 'How did it work?' There was 'nothing more maddening', he told a retired civil servant, 'than the lack of printed evidence of how men like you actually spent their day. From chota bazri to sundown. Minute by minute, hour by hour.'

This book does not pretend to explain how the administration worked. That would require a study not only of Stalin's 'few hundred' but of the hundreds of thousands of Indian subordinates who were employed in the various different services. But it does aim to show what the senior men did, how they worked and how they lived from chota bazri to sundown, from apprenticeship to the Collector's bungalow and, in some cases, to Simla and Government House. It takes them from background and recruitment through their careers to their retirement; it describes their work and their ambitions, their thoughts and their beliefs, their leisure time and their domestic existences. I have attempted to explain why they went to India, what they did when they got there, and what they thought about it all. While mindful of recent post-colonial scholarship, I have tried to be unprejudiced in assessing their strengths and weaknesses, their successes and failures. If I have been incapable of doing so without irony, I hope at least that I have been fair.

My approach has been an individual's on individuals, coming to the institution through its members, not the other way round. That is why some sections deal exclusively with a single official, notably Alfred Lyall, whose life is chronicled from training to retirement. I began doing research on the ICS fifteen years ago, while working on a biography of Lord Curzon, and since then I have come across hundreds of people writing or being written about in private papers. The experience has led me to appreciate the diversity within the structure. Despite my admiration for Dewey's work, I find that few of the people I have investigated fit comfortably into one or other of his categories: most of them have bits of both Darling and Brayne.

No doubt this view places me in Dewey's categories of 'unreconstructed liberal' or empiricist who denies the importance of ideologies and the Zeitgeist. Of course I am aware that there was a civil service ethos imbibed at Haileybury or Oxford and later reinforced in the provincial capitals of Bombay, Lahore and elsewhere. Similar ideas percolated in the clubs and in the secretariats. But always there was the diversity encouraged by diverse circumstances. The experience of Madras was very different from that of the Punjab; men in obscure districts did not see things in the same way as their colleagues in Calcutta. Ultimately officials in India had to live on their own resources, their lives determined by individual temperaments, environment and experience- and by the eternal problems of human relationships.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style...rulingcaste.htm

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - acharya - 11-29-2006

Hunger strike

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/histor...rticle_continue

Sukhdev Sandhu on Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire - by Mike Davis

Saturday January 20, 2001
The Guardian

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis
464pp, Verso, Â£20
Buy it at a discount at BOL

Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?

Article continues
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. Drought and monsoons afflicted much of China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt and India. The death tolls were staggering: around 12m Chinese and over 6m Indians in 1876-1878 alone. The chief culprit, according to Davis, was not the weather, but European empires, with Japan and the US. Their imposition of free-market economics on the colonial world was tantamount to a "cultural genocide".

These are strong words. Yet it's hard to disagree with them after reading Davis's harrowing book. Development economists have long argued that drought need not lead to famine; well-stocked inventories and effective distribution can limit the damage. In the 19th century, however, drought was treated, particularly by the English in India, as an opportunity for reasserting sovereignty.

A particular villain was Lord Lytton, son of the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night...") after whom, today, a well-known bad writing prize is named. During 1876 Lytton, widely suspected to be insane, 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 of lucullan excess at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation "happiness, prosperity and welfare".

Lytton believed in free trade. He did nothing to check the huge hikes in grain prices, Economic "modernization" led household and village reserves to be transferred to central depots using recently built railroads. Much was exported to England, where there had been poor harvests. Telegraph technology allowed prices to be centrally co-ordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns. Relief funds were scanty because Lytton was eager to finance military campaigns in Afghanistan. Conditions in emergency camps were so terrible that some peasants preferred to go to jail. A few, starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism. This was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature's response to Indian over-breeding.

It used to be that the late 19th century was celebrated in every school as the golden period of imperialism. While few of us today would defend empire in moral terms, we've long been encouraged to acknowledge its economic benefits. Yet, as Davis points out, "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947". In Egypt, too, the financial difficulties caused to peasants by famine encouraged European creditors to override the millennia-old tradition that tenancy was guaranteed for life. What little relief aid reached Brazil, meanwhile, ended up profiting British merchant houses and the reactionary sugar-planter classes.

The European "locusts" did not go unchallenged. Rioting became common. Banditry increased. In China, drought-famine helped to spark the Boxer uprising. In Europe, the fin de siÃ¨cle was largely an opportunity for pale-faced men to wear purple cummerbunds and spout rotten symbolist poetry; for colonized peoples it genuinely seemed to presage mass extinction. It was, says Davis, "a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labour, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and disease."

Davis's attention to the importance of environment may recall the work of the Annales school of historians, but he is far more radical than any of them. His writing, both here and in such classic books as City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, is closer to that of Latin American intellectuals such as Ariel Dorfman and the Urguayan, Eduardo Galaeno, who for decades have spotlighted capitalism's casual abuse of the third world and who have sought to champion the poor and dispossessed. Such commitment, forcefully and lucidly expressed, is unfashionable these days.

"Class" may be passÃ© in academic circles, yet the catalogue of cruelty Davis has unearthed is jaw-dropping. A friend to whom I lent the book was reduced to tears by it. Late Victorian Holocausts is as ugly as it is compelling. But, as Conrad's Marlow said in Heart of Darkness : "The conquest of the earth, which means the taking away from those who have a different complexion and slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much."

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - acharya - 11-29-2006

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s19040.htm

The wartime Bengal Famine has become a 'forgotten holocaust' and has been effectively deleted from our history books, from school and university curricula and from general public perception. To the best of my knowledge, Churchill only wrote of it once, in a secret letter to Roosevelt dated April 29th 1944 in which he made the following remarkable plea for help in shipping Australian grain to India: 'I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.' Churchill's six-volume 'History of the Second World War' fails to mention the cataclysm that was responsible for about 90% of total British Empire casualties in that conflict but makes the extraordinary obverse claim: 'No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.'

I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made.

A return from the current annual mortalities of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 per year that obtained in British India in 1947 would yield a Third World excess mortality in 2050 of a staggering 200-million persons per year.

"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.

http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2002_02_10_...nc_archive.html

Mike Davis' Victorian Holocausts was to me a real eye opener. This in spite of the fact that I have read about the history of British India, one of the areas treated in the book. It is really an indictment of the way history is presented by mainstream historians and an indictment of journalists, who perpetuate the myth of the beneficial effects of British domination in various parts of the world. Just recently, Niall Ferguson, the noted British historian was quoted as saying that on the whole, British rule has been good for the countries affected. It is probably fair to say that Davis' book makes it clear that any beneficial effects of British rule, in India for example, were accidental. The book is admirably written and researched. It is especially noteworthy that there is no exaggerated language used, such as in more well-known holocaust literature, in describing the horrendous occurences in the various parts of what we now know as the third world. Finally, throughout my reading of the book, I could not help recall the fact that Queen Victoria, the icon of beneficial, benign British rule was presiding over much of these horrific happenings. This book has been long overdue. I highly recommend this book to all who are interested in "real history" rather than national mythologies.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-01-2007

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How romantic ? <!--emo& Tongue

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QUOTERomantic side of 'Chacha Nehru'
6/30/2007 3:27:43 PMÂ Premendra Agarwal -www.newsanalysisindia.com
Pt Nehruâs youngest sister Krishna Nehru Hutheesing said that Pt Nehru was westerned cultured little dictator.Â The CIA documents paint Nehru as a naÃ¯ve and romantic statesman who trusted the Chinese which turned into Indo-China War. Photo of Lady Mountbatten and Nehru lighting cigarettes of each other tells the truth.

In my school life I saw a poster hanging on the wall of my class with a quote of Netaji Subhash Bose: âInstead of cigarette, I want to see pistol in the hands of the studentsâ There are contiuious alleations that Nehru might had some involvement in the death of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. If Netaji was alive Nehru couldn't be Prime minister of India.

When Jawahar talks in his sleep, he speaks in English: Mahatma Gandhi 

"How un-Indian the greatest Indian leader and first Prime Minister is," reflects his sister, telling of his upbringing amid a wealthy family that sent to England for its clothes (Nehru wore European suits until his micros); of Nehru's longstanding passion for chocolate cake, pies and ice-cream sundaes; and of his continuing preference for English friends (like Lord and Lady Mountbatten) . "It was Gandhi who once jokingly said, 'When Jawahar talks in his sleep, he speaks in English.'

Edwina Mountbatten affairs with Pt Nehru 
Lady Mountbatten reportedly had affairs with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and American actor-singer Paul Robeson. A lot of attention is paid passim to Nehru's affair with Edwina Mount- batten, resulting in the fact that " Nehru's daughter Indira hated her.And both Mountbatten daughters have candidly acknowledged that their mother had a fiery temperament and was not always supportive of her husband when jealousy of his high profile overbore a sense of their having common cause. Mountbatten himself carried on affairs with lovers of both sexes and that he was widely known in the military as "Mountbottomâ

âWhile her husband, appointed the last viceroy of India , hammered out the terms of India 's independence and partition, she experienced a passionate union of souls with Nehru, the great unfulfilled love of her life. Morgan ( Agatha Christie ) had unique access to the hundreds of letters Edwina and Nehru wrote to each other until her death in 1960.â Written in the book â Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Ownâ

Nehru's romance with Kashmir 
As the media report of Feb 11, 2007 a special and rare exhibition photosâ Pt Nehru was held on in the Jammu University's campus. The exhibit is titled 'Nehru in Kashmir' and is based on the works of Veteran photographer Sati Sahni There is also a rare photo of Pt Nehru with his friend Lady Edwina Mountbatten in March 1949, at Chashmashahi Guest House as he is explaining the breathtaking beauty of Dal Lake from a vantage position.

âNehru: A Tryst with Destinyâ
I recall a review of the book âNehru: A Tryst with Destinyâof Stanley Wolpert which said: details Nehru's personal life, including the early death of his wife and his long affair with Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the last British viceroy of India . There are the love letters between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, and other private papers "still locked away by foolish heirs and self-appointed guardians." Still, he convincingly goes beneath Nehru's exalted image to reveal some pesky demons.

CIA on Romantic Pt Nehru 
CIA documents on the India-China border dispute that were declassified on June 28, 2007 offer insights on how the US intelligence agency viewed the former Soviet Union and China in the darkest days of the Cold War.

Caesar-Polo- Esau papers
One set of documents called the Caesar-Polo- Esau papers deal extensively with the communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and China , and the American reading of their policies. Suicidal slogan of âHindi Chini bhai bhaiâ is still going on by the unholy alliance of Communists and Congress.

In the three chapters dealing with the India-China border spat, CIA analysts suggest that Beijing and its then premier Zhou en LaiÂ consistently fooled Nehru and India through procrastination and dissembling.

The CIA documents paint Nehru as a naÃ¯ve and romantic statesman who trusted the Chinese. They claim the Indian leader kept disagreements on the border issue out of the public domain to maintain his relationship with Chou.

Here it is notable that Nehru also remarked on Americans like that. Nehru still "admires Britain more than any other nation," Mrs. Hutheesing reports, and respects and admires some Americans. But Nehru thinks Americans are generally "a very rich, childish and naive people, still in their infancy so far as diplomacy go."

The Chinese plan to dupe Nehru had actually been in operation right through the 1950s, the CIA says. 'In New Delhi in November-December 1956, Chou sought to create the impression with Nehru that Beijing would accept the McMahon line, but again his language was equivocal, and what he conceded with his left hand, he retrieved with his right.'

Such was Nehru's trust of China and Zhou , the CIA says, that he dismissed a letter from then Burmese premier Ba Swe, warning him to be cautious in dealing with Zhou. Nehru declared Zhou to be an honourable man.

Not Casear but little dictator Nehru 
Anonymous Confession: Mrs. Hutheesing quotes revealingly from an article, Nehru wrote anonymously about himself in 1937. Disguising himself in the third person, Nehru wrote:

"â¦ Jawahar, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is, ultimately, slave to the heart . . . A little twist and Nehru might turn dictator, sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy . . . Jawahar has all the makings of a dictator in himâvast popularity, a strong will, ability, hardness, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient . . . In this revolutionary epoch, Caesarism is always at the door. Is it not possible that Jawahar might fancy himself as a Caesar?"

Mrs Hutheesing is convinced that power "has not corrupted Jawahar," but "has had the effect of perhaps coarsening him to some extent. He was always inclined to be a little dictatorial . . . but nowadays he brooks no criticism and will not even suffer advice gladly. He is highly conscious of his place in history . . . Jawahar is ambitious for India. Whether his one-man control . . . has made him a benevolent despot is a matter of opinion." Nehru's sister concludes: "In the eyes of the world, he is undoubtedly the only man in India who can guide and control her destiny in these difficult times. Nevertheless, there is danger for him and for India if he is spoiled too much with adulation.

In his own words, 'It must be checked. We want no Caesars!' "

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-01-2007

From History of economy.Economy of salary

"Venice take for it self the control of the Black Sea in the 4th crusade.This bring to Venice the full control of land trade whit India."
"Our subject require detail study of flux of precious metals in Europe,because only like this we could explain the changes which bring the birth of the modern world.The bigest events in this subject are:discovery of America and conquest of India by english.
Succes of italian republics didt take long .Muslims expansion lead to braking of trade routes whit India.Fight for finding new roads to India has start it.In search for India ,Columb descover America,which bring in Europe huge quantites of gold.
The country who enjoy the most by this flux of gold was Spain.The import of gold was enormous-8 milion coins in 1599,10 milion in 1600,7 milion in 1604,14 milions in 1605,10 milions in 1610.
The gold that enter in circulation was 12 times more then all pre-existent quantity.Production from America was 80 milion anualy from 1600 to 1700,180 milions betwin 1750 and 1800, and 250 milions betwin 1800-1810.
But this gold enter in wrong hands.Spanish could use it propely and ,just like ancient Rome,who let his loose the gold in favour of the Orient,spanish let it escape to Holland and England.IN 17 century Spain job was very simple.She take the gold from America and distributed to others.To bad for Spain.
Spain produce little from it:the spiled whit blood gold,serve only for alimentation of Spain vanity and make spanish people even less suitable for trade and production.
But the fate which defeated ancient Rome make the same for Spain and it was in danger to do the same to nordic countries.The precious metal,which was bring whit the cost of so many shamefull savages against amerindians,Take the road to Asia,just like the roman gold before it.
From imemorial times,oriental custome was to gather gold,and from the moghul king dress in Golonda diamonds to the last poor peasent,each indian has his secret treasure,keeping it for the bad days.Year after year,from when Pizzaro kill the inca king Atahualpa and looting his gold,a torent of precious metal came from America to Europe and from Europe to India.Here ,the gold disapierd as if the earth him self swalow it,living no trace.
Soon Englang start to feel a shortage of gold.In fact the all continent.Determined by this gold shortage,apear for the first time Bullion,s school,which advice the stoping of gold exports.But whit all this prohibition of gold export(in France and England),the cash was less and less in Europe.In Wilhelm 3 ruling,the lack of cash was so big,that jull-makers from London lead a petition to parlament in 9 april 1690.In this petition was mention that in ports ,ready for export are 286162 silver onces and 89949 dollars in pieces of 8,The traders are not in doubt that not only the company of Oriental Indies,but also the jewish traders have bought huge quantites of metal for export each one pence and half above the legal price.
But whit all the protests and parlament laws,the gold become less and less.No matter how MANY TAXES ENGLAND AND OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES PUT ON GOLD ,IN ORDER TO KEEP IT IN EUROPE,THE BUYING POWER OF INDIA WAS INFINIT BIGGER,and from that reason ,whit all prohibition,waves of gold take the way of Asia whit fatal impetuozity.Europe remain whitout cash;her stock was swaloed by the Orient just like thoose of ancient Rome.
The solution was the conquering India and bringing the gold back in Europe.France has tried but Englang give the big shot.In Plassey battle in 1757,India is concuered,and what spanish do it in America,the english repeat now in Bengal.The gold was take from the indians whit cost of the most atroceos murders.
The secret treasures,of milion of people-say Brooks Adams-was take by english and transported to London,just like ancient romans transported in Italy,the richness of Greece and Minor Asia.Burke estimated the quantity looted at 40 milion pounds.
About Clive,is no limit for the growth of his richness,except his own moderation.The treasures of Bengal was open before him.Huge masses of coins,and here you could see the florins and ducats of which the venetians had buy the textiles and colonials of the Orient.Clive walking betwin masses of gold,diamonds and silver and was free to take anything he want to.
Adam describe in his book,The taking of Calcutta,how Clive defeated the nabab army,and he was ready to punish them,if the civilians wouldnt intervine.Folow long negociations,in which Clive show a more then oriental duplicity in it.In a single ship Clive send 0.8milion pounds from which keep it for him self 0.3milion pounds.But the sums taked by Clive are insignificant compared whit mass looting that folow his leaving.The english officers of Bengal was so rapacious and iresponsable,their only wish was to looted as fast as posible the indigens and fled quikly back in England,for expose there their richness.
The english guverment in Bengal-say Macaulay-was so bad that it was a danger for existence of society it self.The ancient roman proconsul,which looted a roman province for a year or two,in which to build marble palaces,to drink from chihlimbar cupes,to enjoy the song of exotic birds,to expose gladiators and herds of girafs;the vice-king of Spain,who let in his back the cursess of Mexic and Lima,for entering in Madrid in a long line of golden chariots and horses dress in silver-are now overpass by the english."

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-01-2007

QUOTE(Mudy @ Jul 1 2007, 07:12 AM)side of 'Chacha Nehru'[/b]
6/30/2007 3:27:43 PMÂ Premendra Agarwal -www.newsanalysisindia.com
Pt Nehruâs youngest sister Krishna Nehru Hutheesing said that Pt Nehru was westerned cultured little dictator.Â The CIA documents paint Nehru as a naÃ¯ve and romantic 

NO wonder.Seems that all political liders in the world,from Africa to Malasya,and even famous islamic terorists make in their younghood some studies in a prestigios university from Europe or US.It could be a new(old)tactic of neo-colonialism? Is more cheap to educate in the proper way the liders of a country then to enslave whit visible force the whole country.Thats my theory.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-02-2007

QUOTE(Honsol @ Jul 1 2007, 10:04 PM)NO wonder.Seems that all political liders in the world,from Africa to Malasya,and even famous islamic terorists make in their younghood some studies in a prestigios university from Europe or US.It could be a new(old)tactic of neo-colonialism? Is more cheap to educate in the proper way the liders of a country then to enslave whit visible force the whole country.Thats my theory.[right][snapback]70679[/snapback][/right]You mean like the 'School of the Americas', the US centre for training South and Central America dictators and torturers? http://www.soaw.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=112
Mmmm, quite possible. After all, the country that has loudly been advertising how it's in Iraq for such high and noble reasons as bringing 'Democracy to Iraq' is rather more unkind (to put it extremely lightly) to nations far closer to home...

QUOTEeven famous islamic terorists make in their younghood some studies in a prestigios university from Europe or USEven so, in islam's case, the religion births faithful islamis of OBL's character - and worse - with or without the aid of western brainwashing. Mohammed (islami PEACE be upon it), Aurangzeb, Timurlane and the other genocidal terrorists of old didn't require European or American training to become what they became. The dream of global Islamic PEACE (jehad) guided them. As it still guides many illiterati in India and elsewhere.
That's not to ignore the wondrous contribution of these prestigious universities in breeding those loveable terroristas - all they do is 'merely' remind their islamic attendees what these need to do for their precious islam. And that easily sets the ball in motion: butterfly of a school flaps its wings in the NW and a tsunami of terrorism breaks forth in the world at large - meanwhile the guilty centres of education bat their eyes innocently. Oh, and of course each one gets another medal for being a centre of excellence and moral uprightness: Hateward, the University of Chicanery, and other such lovely places...

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-17-2007

QUOTE'Edwina influenced Nehru on Kashmir': Hicks 
Pioneer.com
PTI | New Delhi
Lord Mountbatten "used" his wife Edwina, who shared a "deep emotional love" with Jawaharlal Nehru, to influence India's first Prime Minister to refer the Kashmir issue to the United Nations, according to Pamela Hicks, the last Viceroy's daughter.

"That is true and he did use her like that. But he certainly wasn't going to throw her, he didn't say to her go become the Prime Minister's lover because I need you to intercede. It was a by-product of this deep affection," Pamela said in an interview to in the programme Devil's Advocate to be aired on CNN-IBN.

She was replying to a query on whether Lord Mountbatten used the Edwina-Nehru relationship to influence him in the handling of the Kashmir issue.

Hicks, who has recounted the relationship between Nehru and her mother in the book India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power, said it was possible that Edwina's influence played a crucial role in Nehru's decision to refer Kashmir to the UN.

"I think it could have been my father, just in dry conversation might have been able to get his viewpoint over. But with my mother translating it for Panditji and making, you know, appealing to his heart more than his mind, that he should really behave like this, I think probably that did happen," she said.

This was in reply to a question on whether Nehru decided to refer Kashmir to the UN under Lord Mountbatten's advice and whether this was an area where Edwina's influence could have been particularly useful.

"Yes, I think so," Hicks said on whether her father had a bit of influence on Nehru through Edwina


So Kashmir problem was created by morally weak Nehru, who was just following his lover, at the end his sexual desire cost India three war and counting, loss of thousands of Indian lives and counting.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - acharya - 10-18-2007

Did the British Pauperize India?

The Condition of England debate also set the terms in which many Indians and British looked at the Condition of India. As in the case of the discussion about England, the debate in India was concerned with the impact of modern civilization, and particularly the administration of the British, on the poverty of India. Whether true or not, the sense among many Indians and British that the moral and economic condition of India had declined gave much urgency to the controversy. This debate extended for half a century from the 1870s onward. One individual influential in this dispute was Dadabhai Naoroji, âan older Parsi merchant who lived in London and acted as an informal ambassador for the nationalist cause for half a century.â[27] Naoroji had argued that though the British made a solemn promise to bring wealth and contentment to India, they had gone back on their word. In an essay entitled âThe Poverty of India,â he demonstrated that the extent of poverty in India under the British had increased rather than decreased.[28]

Ideas about the decay of Indian economic and moral life were naturally reflected in the discussions on the Chingleput district. Both British officials and members of the local population in Chingleput had claimed that the area had been in a decayed condition since the end of the eighteenth century. However, not until 1871 did Dadabhai Naoroji, using statistics taken from government sources, concern himself with the problem, arguing that the problem involved the âcontinuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country.â During that time, then, local debates in Chingleput became specifically articulated with national and international controversies.[29] Indeed, the Chingleput discourse rested on Naorojiâs demonstration in 1871 that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 a year.[30]

Both in 1866 and in 1876â78, serious famines struck South India; the Bellary famine of 1866 and the famine of 1876â78 were both widely documented by photographers. William Digby, a journalist who had edited the Madras Times, also attempted to illustrate the growing pauperization of India through his book entitled India for the Indiansâand for England. [31] Another author named Seymour Keay wrote a series of articles in Nineteenth Century entitled âThe Spoliation of India.â[32] Partly in reaction to the work of Digby and Keay, Samuel Smith, a liberal MP from Lancashire and friend of Naoroji, wrote a series of articles in the Contemporary Review following his second trip to India.[33]

Smithâs ideas, like those of Keay and Naoroji, helped to focus awareness on the fact that some educated Indians felt that Britain had pillaged India and continued to drain it of its resources. This thought contrasted dramatically with the presumption in Britain that India was âimmensely indebtedâ to the British, who had converted a âland of anarchy and misrule into one of peace and contentment, that poverty is giving place to plenty, and a low, corrupt civilization to one immensely higher.â Smith went on to shock Englishmen with the discovery that âinstead of contentment one finds in many places great dissatisfaction, and a widespread belief that India is getting poorer and less happy.â[34] Moreover, he argued that the poverty in India âis extreme and more acute than what we witness in Europe.â[35] British culture and the government desire for excise income were ârapidly spreading drunkenness among the people of Bengal in order to supply revenue to the Government.â[36] Smith also identified ânot a little frictionâ between ânative opinionâ and official views. The Indians, said Smith, âthink that the English officials stand between them and their just rights and claims.â[37] However, he noted that âno such complaintâ had been lodged against âthe British Nationâ as such. There was, he stated, âa strong belief in their justice and good faith, and the constant desire of the Indian people is to get access to them, in order to lay their complaints before that august tribunal. They fully believe that if the British Parliament and people were made acquainted with their grievances they would remedy them. It is almost touching to see the simplicity of their faith.â[38] In other words, the British middle-class ideals of justice and good faith had also been consensually supported and created in India by British and Indians from all levels of society. At the same time, however, some British and Indians blamed England for the impoverished state of India. The âloyaltyâ invoked by both Smith and Naoroji formed part of the same project, the same invocation to which Crole referred in his account of the low-caste boatmen in the fight against the French in the middle of the eighteenth century. Fervent belief in these ideals by Indian writers and thinkers made British policy in India seem particularly galling.

The tension between the two approaches was critical to the claims made by both British commentators like Keay and many Indians and led to great participation in the project to create a kind of âtruthâ regarding what had been pursued by the British rulers and others since the last decade of the eighteenth century. As part of the same enterprise to which Smith subscribed, Naoroji himself wrote in the Contemporary Review a year later:

Now, I have no complaint whatever against the British Nation or British rule. On the contrary, we have every reason to be thankful that of all the nations in the world it has been our good fortune to be placed under the British nationâa nation noble and great in its instincts; among the most advanced, if not the most advanced, in civilization; foremost in the advancement of humanity in all its varied wants and circumstances; the sources and fountainhead of true liberty and of political progress in the world; in short, a nation in which all that is just, generous and truly free is most happily combined.[39]

Gauri Viswanathan has recently argued that the introduction of literary study in place of religion by the British operated a veiled mechanism of social control to keep Indian society governable without the use of violence.[40] Viswanathan, however, describes this as a willed activity by a state that was fragile and therefore unusually vulnerable. By the end of the nineteenth century, she argues that this kind of literary study became used as a way to show Indians their subservient and appropriate social role in the colonial society established by the British. Viswanathan quotes essays written by two Bengali students in Calcutta in 1843 to show that British strategies of social control had effectively subdued and overpowered them and that therefore the policy of the government was effective. However, the process of creating a discourse involves both the rulers and the ruled. For example, in one of the passages quoted from an essay by Nobichunder Dass, a student at Hooghly College in Calcutta, a principal object of this education in India is identified as the creation of knowledge about future society, a project in which many Indians from all social levels also eagerly participated. Whether in the countryside or in urban environments, the general project to create a modern state incited people to discourse. As one of those participants, Nobichunder wrote

The English are to us what the Romans were to the English; and as the English are the children of modern times, and command more resources and power than the Romans, we derive great advantage. The facility afforded to communication by the use of steam has enabled the English to govern our country with great prudence and vigilance, they do not appear to be at any time at risk of forbearing in the glorious work which they had commenced, of improving the native mind and condition, but prosecute it with honour to themselves and favour to their subjects, till they are styled the regenerators of India.

It may be argued that this one-way, top-down kind of social control and creation of knowledge through British education provoked Naoroji to say what he did. In reality, it formed another case of multiauthorship among many millions of Indians, Europeans, and others. There is much evidence to show other Indian writers acting and writing along the same lines at this time as part of this general dialogic project. Social values and policy reinforced one another in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the late 1890s, when the two serious famines in South India âcast serious doubts on official estimates of increasing prosperityâ in India, the value of British idealsâof justice, humanity, and fairnessâsuddenly became problematized, helping to fuel the debate over the impoverishment of India to an even greater extent.[41] W. S. Caine, an MP speaking on the Indian Famine Commission Report in 1902, referred to this fact when he spoke of the âevidence of the horrible poverty of the agricultural people of India, the evidence of recurring famine with ever-increasing intensity.â[42] During that time, a substantial discussion in the press and in government circles questioned whether India was becoming poorer as a result of its connection with Britain (and by inference from its association with modern civilization generally). It is partly in this connection that Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote his utopianist booklet entitled Hind Swaraj in 1908.[43] William Digby, an editor of the Madras Times who had penned an account of the famine in 1876â78, also said that âLord Macaulay, Mr. Grant Duff, and others believe that when the English tongue alone is spoken, and the Christian religion is generally professed, the difficult problems which are characteristic of European countries will be encountered in India.â[44] Digby also noted that one unnamed individual had pointed out that âif India becomes Christianised, if all the people become converted to what the missionaries teach, a Poor Law will be a necessary consequence.â This was true, he said, because in Europe all the poor were supported by the state while in India the poor were taken care of by the people themselves.[45] He thus pointed to the great disadvantages in bringing western modes of government and social organization to India, particularly the notion of the stateâs responsibility for the poor. However, in an address in 1900, in terms very similar to the debate between the anti-abolitionists and the factory reformers in early nineteenth-century England, Naoroji observed that âIndian Natives were mere helots. They were worse than American slaves, for the latter were at least taken care of by their masters, whose property they were.â[46] Even W. W. Hunter, director general of statistics to the government of India, in his book Englandâs Work in India, wrote that âforty millions of the people of India habitually go through life on insufficient food.â[47]

The comparative nature of these assessments of Indian poverty helped to raise the stakes in the debate. Statements by intellectuals and writers of comparative wealth in India and elsewhere also produced much oversensitivity among government officers.[48] The debate involved a considerable number of individuals, ranging across a diverse spectrum including W. H. Moreland, whose India at the Death of Akbar did not appear until 1920, and S. Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar, whose Memorandum on the Progress of the Madras Presidency during the Last Forty Years of British Administration, commissioned by Lord Connemara, the governor of Madras, appeared in 1893.[49]

Many officials in the Indo-British administration sought to defend the governmentâs policies in the face of attacks by individuals such as Naoroji. For instance, the former governor of Madras Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff wrote articles in 1886 to that effect, answering the views of Samuel Smith.[50] Grant-Duffâs articles were answered in turn by Naoroji himself.[51]

Grant-Duff and others sought to discount the legitimacy of Indian complaints. Grant-Duff, for instance, argued that Smith had depended unnecessarily on the âpushing talkers of the big towns, full of the last new âcleverisms,â just sharp enough to repeat the parrot cries of European mischief-makers, and to be ingeniously wrong on most subjects.â[52] Grant-Duff admitted that âthere is in many parts of India frightful poverty, but is there not the same and even worse, in our own country?â[53] For Grant-Duff, the question was not so much whether India was getting poorer but rather who was making those claims and what their unstated goals were. âWhat the pert scribblers in the native press, and the intriguers of the Presidency townsâ wanted were âincreased opportunities for themselvesâGovernment employment and political changes, which may increase their personal importance.â[54] âThe only possible question,â he said, related to the relative benefit obtained âbetween the rule of the Englishman and of the Brahmin, the Aryan of the West and the Aryan of the East.â Grant-Duff wondered whether Samuel Smith would âdo a good turn to the 254 millions of natives if he were to hand them over to a much greater extent to Brahmin domination?â[55] Much better to have rule by the British than rule by even the most educated Indians.

Could these Indians know anything about either India or Britain? Grant-Duff wondered how any Indians to whom Smith had spoken and who âmade no complaintâ about the âBritish nationâ could even know what that âBritish Nationâ represented:

A very few of them [Indians] have been able to cross the seas without ensuring their own damnation, have been received in England as strange and interesting creatures, petted, and made cub lions of.â¦Every English-speaking ânativeâ who finds his way to London is as interesting to the home-keeping Briton as is a mango in Pall Mall. In Bombay or Madras a mango is a mango.[56]

Grant-Duff argued that British rule had brought wealth and food to a needy India. He nevertheless admitted that âthere is in many parts of India frightful poverty.â[57] Grant-Duff also wrote, âThe question worth answering is: Do the Indian masses obtain, one year after another, a larger or smaller amount of material well-being than the peasantry of Western Europe? Speaking of the huge province of Madrasâ¦and I have visited every district in itâI think they do.â[58]

According to the critics of this opinion, the main problem related to British intentions. In the first of his rebuttals to Grant-Duff, Naoroji claimed that in 1833 and again in 1858 the British had pledged to make India prosperous.[59] He also claimed that they had not fulfilled those promises. Part of this controversy had occurred fifteen years earlier. In 1870, Grant-Duff as a member of the Commons had asked another member, Sir Wilfred Lawson, in the debate on opium, âWould it be tolerable to enforce a view of morality that was not theirs, which had never indeed been accepted by any large portion of the human race, we should grind an already poor population to the very dust with new taxation?â[60]

A year later in 1871, Grant-Duff, who had been the under secretary for India, focused on the contrast between the per capita annual income of a person in Britain (thirty pounds) with that of India (two pounds). Grant-Duff had concluded at that time that âeven our comparative wealth will be looked back upon by future ages as a state of semi-barbarism. But what are we to say of the state of India? How many generations must pass away before that country has arrived at even the comparative wealth of this?â[61] Grant-Duffâs estimates were also accepted by the viceroy Lord Mayo, who said, âWe are perfectly cognizant of the relative poverty of this country as compared with European States.â[62]

So long as they felt that they could set the terms of the debate on the Condition of India, British administrators were not defensive. However, when these critical statements were made by educated Indians, the accusations became intolerable. Naoroji had calculated that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 and that in Madras it was a mere rupees 18.[63] Naoroji in his 1887 article on âViews about Indiaâ wrote that according to Sir George Campbell the bulk of the people of the Madras presidency were paupers. Naoroji also quoted the views of W. R. Robertson, agricultural reporter to the government of Madras, who called the condition of the agricultural laborer âa disgrace to any country [and that] the condition of the agricultural population of Ireland is vastly superior to the condition of the similar classes in this country.â[64] These comments and ideas appear to have sensitized officers of the Madras government, particularly a subcollector named Mullaly in the Chingleput district.

What most offended the officials of the British government in India was Naorojiâs comparisons of India with other parts of what we would now call the developed world: âThe question at present is, Why, under the management of the most highly paid services in the world, India cannot produce as much even as the worst governed countries of Europe. I do not mean to blame the individuals of the Indian service. It is the policy, the perversion of the pledges, that is at the bottom of our misfortunes.â[65] What is important in this debate is that Naoroji sought to invoke the value prized by administrators as the essential ingredient in the claims that the British had gone back on their word. Thus, the dialogue leveled two accusations against the British: they had impoverished India, and they had done so in direct contravention of their own pledges.
â¢ â¢ â¢
Had the British Impoverished Chingleput District?

Against this background, and specifically against this Naorojiâs rebuttal, Subcollector Mullaly of the Chingleput district sought to show that in that area of India, the Mirasidarsâ agricultural Padiyals were being deprived of rights that the British had pledged to them. Moreover, Mullaly believed that the mandate of the government assured these Padiyals of a right to their houses. Let us look at the strategies that Mullaly and others followed to recreate the villages of Chingleput through the same sort of utopian urge that had characterized not only Place but also the Mirasidars, the tenants, and the Padiyals of the district.

Some time in 1888, the government of India sought to address what it defined as the problem of overpopulated tracts, apparently in response to a suggestion made by W. W. Hunter. As a result, the Indian government sent a resolution to all provincial governments asking them to review the measures taken for relief in these areas. This inquiry, said Hunter, encompassed some 250 districts in British India.[66] Then on 19 October 1888, the government of India sent a resolution to all provincial governments requesting a report on the condition of what it defined as the lower classes of the population and on relief operations in these overpopulated tracts. This formed part of the inquiry set in motion by Lord Dufferin, the viceroy of India, on âthe condition of the lower classes of the population.â

The inquiry resulted in a government of India resolution stating that the condition of âthe lower classes of the agricultural population is not one which need cause any great anxiety at present.â[67] This assertion could be maintained only with difficulty. For instance, one of the reports to the Madras governmentâs inquiries had argued that the Chingleput district was in a bad state. To this report by Collector Lee Warner the Madras government took exception. They argued that âthe condition of the people [of the Chingleput district]â¦had markedly improved within the past ten yearsâ since the time of the decision to recognize the swatantrams of the Mirasidars and carry out the tax reassessment. Lee Warner had forwarded two documents, including one from Reverend Adam Andrew, a missionary of the United Free Church of Scotland Mission in Chingleput town, reporting the results of inquiries into living conditions and wages of the paraiyar Padiyals in Chingleput.[68] Lee Warner pointed out that the âwages ordinarily earned by the people are extremely low and that a large proportion of the population lives from hand to mouth, is badly housed, ill clothed, and compelled to be satisfied with a nutriment far below the sufficiency diet agreed upon by doctors as a necessity for life.â Lee Warnerâs references to âscientific standardsâ for health and poverty emerged from the Condition of India discussion, which referred to the need for state intervention to protect the health of the poor. In rebuttal, the Board of Revenue in Madras agreed that the condition of the lower classes in the Chingleput district may not have been very satisfactory but said that â this is mainly due to the general poverty of the soil.â[69] The Board did not feel that anything that Lee Warner had written or submitted had shown that âany large proportion of the population suffers from a daily insufficiency of food.â[70]

According to the governments of both India and Madras, Britain had restored order to India and had âemancipatedâ the âslaves.â Therefore âslaveryâ could no longer exist. Through the work of the emancipation laws and the working of British culture, the bad aspects of the master-slave relationship had been removed and the good qualities of a landlord-laborer association had been retained. This individual and unilateral attempt aimed somehow to ban the âslaveâ category in favor of a category and terminology that used by turns âpanchama,â âdepressed classes,â âHarijan,â âscheduled classes,â and âAdi Dravidaâ or original Dravidian.

Indians and British during this period thus pursued a grand project to create knowledge about both âIndianâ and âBritishâ values. That project involved converting the Tamil paraiyars into ancient inhabitants of India by eliminating the âslave/paraiyarâ signification and implanting a new signification of the paraiyars as the original Dravidians of India. As the âslavery categoryâ was obliterated, the âAdi Dravidaâ or âOriginal Dravidianâ category was summoned up in its stead.[71] This complex procedure of eradicating the âslaveâ sign and transforming it into âthe original Dravidiansâ is a process still underway. The result of actions taken by both Europeans and Indians, this activity and documentation helped to create knowledge about those considered to be the ancient inhabitants of South India. It continued work initiated by a wide variety of forces already at work in the land before the westerners arrived. These ideas had been argued by Ellis even in the early part of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the sensitivity of Christian missionaries had in the nineteenth century recruited converts from a variety of subcastes such as paraiyars and other âpanchamas.â A sensitivity began developing among Hindu intellectuals, who wrote in the press about the difficulties of the paraiyars. Paraiyar leaders, largely Christian, used a journal called The Paraiyan to state how they perceived their present and past conditions. A significant number of British officers of the government also documented the positions of various populations of India in ancient times. British writers to the London press also contributed to this process.[72]

What appears to have united these disparate efforts at this historical point in time was the new susceptibility of the government of India and the provincial governments to assure both the world and themselves that India was not poor or disorderly and that no slaves remained there. Within this context, the discussions that had been proceeding in the Chingleput district over the previous century formed the basis of much new knowledge created about the way the past helped create future society.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 03-12-2008

I thought we had a thread on colonial looting of India. Will park it here for now..
QUOTEhttp://www.dailypio neer.com/ indexn12. asp?main_ variable= EDITS&file_name=edit4% 2Etxt&counter_img= 4Â

Apologists for British rule

Shridhar Pant

In his article, "The British bled us, but we always forget that" (March 3), Mr Dina Nath Mishra has referred to Will Durant's book, analysing how the British destroyed India's industry, farming and education. Ironically, there are many Hindus who praise the British for their 'benevolent' rule.

Hindus have suffered the tyranny of both Muslim and British rulers. The basic difference between the two was that while loot, forced conversion and massacre were the chief concerns of Muslim rulers, the British looked for economic exploitation and colonisation. The only similarity between the two was that they were attracted to India because of its wealth.

Swiss writer Bejoran Landstorm in his book, The Discovery of India, writes, "There were many routes and means but the objective always was only one -- to reach the famous India that was overflowing with gold, silver, valuable pearls and stones, pleasant eatables, spices, clothes." Lord Clive, as reproduced by Lala Lajpat Rai in, England's Debt to India, had once observed: "India is the unparalleled store of wealth, the country that will rule India will become the richest country of the world." In 1842, by when Indian industry was declining, Captain J Kampwell wrote, "Even the best iron of England did not compare with the inferior quality iron of India."

Brooks Adams in his book, Law of Civilisation and Decay, writes, "The wealth stocked for centuries by crores of people was taken away to London by the British, like the wealth of the Greek and Pontius was usurped by the Romans." He quotes Lord Macaulay, "After the Plassey war (1757) over 900 boats were used to transfer the gold and silver coins from Murshidabad to Calcutta." Obviously this treasure finally landed in Britain. It is this capital that helped Britain develop its industry.

The apologists for British rule claim that it brought peace and order to India. One must remember Mahatma Gandhi's comment on the issue: "The peace established by the British in India is worse then warfare."

The colonial rule in India ended in 1947, but with Jawaharlal Nehru at the helm, a nexus between Macaulayian and Marxist academia perpetuated the English domination. With the advent of globalisation, our distrust for traditional culture continues.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 03-12-2008

From Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
QUOTE"In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England. The year was 1577. . . ."

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 03-18-2008

Apologists for Brits have always used laying railway lines in India as their pet arguments in support of the British Raj.

Here's inconclusive proof that they had best intentions of Indians in mind when they laid out those railway line:
<img src='http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v130/indiaforum/BritsTrain.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
See how neat, trim and healthy looking these Indians are after getting some exercise.

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - dhu - 05-05-2008

Colonialism and Nationalism
by Manju Gupta

Raj to Swaraj: A Textbook on Colonialism and Nationalism in India, Ram Chandra Pradhan, Macmillan, pp 463, Rs 275.00

This book by a scholar and social activist who taught for four decades at Ramjas College, Delhi University, is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the British conquest of India and its consequences in the different aspects of the conquered peopleâs life. Part II deals with the mainstream of the national movement. Part III deals with the sectional and minor streams of the national movement. The armed revolutionary movements constitute the subject matter of Part IV which also has a section on the INA led by Subhas Chandra Bose and the RIN rebellion. Part V contains all the constitutional plans and negotiations, right from the Cripps Mission to the Mountbatten Plan.

The gradual occupation of India by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries was more than a âmere amazing and even bizarre actâ in world history, says the author. How could not India either at the central or the regional level successfully resist the British aggressive attempts? Was something wrong with our polity or economy which could not prevent British occupation of India? Though divergent views are expressed, consensus is seen on the main reasonââthe central striking power of the Mughals had considerably weakened, leading to the emergence of a number of regional powers. The dynamics of these regional powers facilitated gradual occupation of the entire country by the British.â

The major regional states of the 18th century were Hyderabad, Bengal and Awadh. The East India Company set up by a Charter with the purpose of conducting trade, on learning of Indian textiles, decided to enter India. It faced a major challenge from three European powers, namely Portugal, Holland and France whom the British eliminated one by one. Then followed British occupation of India despite stiff resistance from Bengal and Awadh. British machinations and superior military might coupled with the mutual recriminations and rivalries of the regional powers led to the latterâs decline.

The British rule had a far-reaching impact on Indian agriculture, particularly the introduction of zamindari, ryotwari and mahalwari systems of land revenue fixation and collection. Commercialisation of agriculture was another major change brought about by the British. They began to concentrate on the export of those Indian agricultural goods which would be useful as the raw materials for the British industries. The long-term consequences of this were rural indebtedness, fragmentation of landholdings and emergence of new classes of rural India, leading to disruption of the old village systems, destroying its social as well as its economic fabric.

British rule had a disastrous effect on the industrial structure of India. With the industrial revolution in England, the British turned India into a captive market for their furnished goods and also as suppliers of raw materials for their own factories. British rule on the socio-cultural life created inequalities and infirmities. It created a new class of landless labour by smashing the traditional system of production and creating a new institution of private property in land through the zamindari system.

The Indians responded through armed resistance, including the 1857 rebellion, social-religious reformation and a new spirit of nationalism. The author describes the founding of the Indian National Congress and its policies and programmes; the partition of Bengal; the swadeshi movement; the freedom struggle; the Home Rule; the Khilafat and non-cooperation movements; the Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements and Mahatma Gandhiâs contribution to the freedom struggle.

This book is different to other books in its theme as it is devoid of ideological biases that continue to bedevil authors of such a subject. It thus avoids extremes of sentimentalism and ideology-based criticisms.

(Macmillan India Ltd, 2/10 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110 002.)

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - acharya - 07-06-2008

India And UK-US Bush Wars

By Gideon Polya

22 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org

Faced with horrendous, man-made mass mortality, humanity has an obligatory course of action summarized by the acronym CAAAA (C4A), namely Cessation of the carnage, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance that this kind of event will never be repeated. This is precisely the course of action adopted by the Germans in 1945 and demanded by a horrified world in the face of the awful realities of the Jewish Holocaust (6 million victims including 1.5 million children).

Unfortunately, the C4A protocol has not yet been applied to Anglo-American imperialism.

Thus in 1997 on a visit to India, Queen Elizabeth II Acknowledged the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (over 1,000 Punjabis gunned down by the British Army near the Golden Temple) but did not offer an Apology. Indeed the British have NEVER Apologized for anything they did during their appalling 2 century mis-rule of British India. While every Briton knows of the (largely fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta story that has demonized Indians for over 2 centuries, very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British e.g. the 1769/1770 Great Bengal Famine (that killed 10 million, 1/3 of the over-taxed population of Bengal); further successive famines that killed scores of millions (the annual death rate in 1877 in British labour camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%; see: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/
how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/); cholera epidemics spread by British mercantilism (that killed about 25 million Indians in the 19th century); extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics); and the man-made, World War 2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims, huge civilian and British military sexual abuse of starving women, a 1941-1951 Bengal demographic deficit of over 10 million â and all of this largely deleted from British history, in part because it may have been due to a deliberate British âscorched earth policyâ).

THE BIG PICTURE of the impact of the British in India can be best assessed by measuring avoidable mortality (technically, excess mortality) which is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/). The annual death rate in India as recently as 1920 was about 4.8% (see: http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm) but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9% (still about 2 times greater than it should be for a country with Indiaâs demographics). As a useful yardstick, the annual death rate of sheep on Australian sheep farms is about 2.5% i.e. the British were treating Indians like animals. Using a baseline âexpectedâ annual death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an âactualâ pre-1920 value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality was about 0.6 billion (1757-1837), 0.5 billion (1837-1901 i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947 i.e. from the turn of the century until Indian Independence). Thus one can estimate that British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable) mortality totalling 1.5 billion â surely one of the greatest crimes in all of human history. The carnage did not end with the post-WW2 British departure from India and its other colonies egregiously crippled by colonial abuse â thus the avoidable mortality in the mostly Third World British Commonwealth countries during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1953 to the present) has totalled about 0.7 billion.

The above figures are no doubt very surprising to English-speaking people of the British Commonwealth and elsewhere, and for good reason â these ugly, genocidal realities have been religiously deleted from British history and from general public perception (as in George Orwellâs â1984â). We live in âpolitically correctâ times in which Anglo-Celtic societies (the US, the UK and the âWhiteâ former British colonies) decry racism but simultaneously IGNORE the intrinsic racism of First World-dominated globalization and of violent UK-US âdemocratic imperialismâ in Iraq and Afghanistan â a phenomenon best described as âpolitically correct racism (PC racism). However ignoring CAAAA (C4A) and ignoring historical realities simply has meant more of the same â history ignored yields history repeated.

On the occasion of the Third Anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq it is timely to note the human and economic cost of the Bush Wars â 2.7 million excess deaths and a cost to the US of US$1-2 trillion (see: http://www.newsvine.com/uk , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/ ,

http://www.aljazeerah.info/21%20o/Bush%20Wars%20h
ave%20cost%202.7%20million%20lives%20&%20$
1-2%20trillion%20By%20Gideon%20Polya.htm).

The latest UN and UNICEF data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) â and this largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling 0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance (76% market share by 2002).

Remarkably, lying, racist, holocaust-denying, Anglo-American and Australian mainstream media not only ignore the horrendous Iraqi and Afghan death toll from the on-going Anglo-American Bush Wars, they ALSO ignore the huge number of collateral, war-related drug deaths in âWhiteâ Anglo-Celtic countries. There seems little hope for the Asian victims of Anglo-American violence â and indeed for the Third World in general â when Anglo-American mainstream media ignore the carnage inflicted on their OWN KIND.

Nevertheless there IS hope if an indignant world takes resolute action over the crimes of UK-US-Australian democratic imperialism (democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism). Lying, racist mainstream media should be boycotted; the world should be INFORMED about Coalition excesses; Coalition citizens should vote out and prosecute the war criminals; and international sanctions and boycotts should be applied to the racist, criminal Coalition countries. Until there is CAAAA (C4A), i.e. Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance of non-repetition of these crimes, all the Coalition countries deserve the active âfree market choiceâ disapprobation of the âdecent worldâ â ANYONE apprised of Coalition war crimes who buys goods and services from Coalition countries is clearly COMPLICIT in these gross abuses of humanity.

http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:vneU4...clnk&cd=2&gl=us

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - dhu - 07-23-2008

QUOTEBritain used Indian troops as guinea pigs
2 Sep 2007, 0001 hrs IST,Rashmee Roshan Lall ,TNN

LONDON: Indian soldiers serving under the British Raj were used as guinea pigs to test the effects of poison gases on humans by scientists from the world's oldest chemical warfare research installation here in the UK, according to newly-released archival documents.

The Indian soldiers suffered severe burns from the gas as part of the trials, which started in the early 1930s and lasted almost through to Indian independence.

The trials were part of a study by British scientists to ascertain if the poison gas inflicted greater damage on coloured skins than on white Caucasians. The scientists had been posted to the Indian sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese.

Several-hundred Indians were part of the trials, according to documents released by the UK's National Archives. It is unclear if the Indians were told about the potentially serious medical implications of the trials before they were sent into the gas chambers by the scientists from Porton Down, the UK's chemical warfare research laboratory.

On Saturday, The Guardian newspaper quoted a lawyer representing British soldiers similarly tested at Porton Dwon to say, "I would be astonished if these Indian subjects (of the Empire) gave any meaningful consent to taking part in these tests, particularly as they were conducted during the days of Empire. No one would have agreed...if they knew beforehand what was going to happen".

Mustard gas is now a recognised carcinogencic substance and the Indians suffered severe burns. Some British servicemen, recruited over time to take part in similar experiments, recently won compensation for being duped into being treated as guinea pigs.

The tests on the Indians, before and during World War II, are seen to be part of a deadly programme of identifying the exact amount of poison gas that could prove deadly on the battlefield. The British scientists, who recorded in the documents that several Indians suffered so severely they had to be hospitalised, reported a "large number" of burns.

Many of the Indians, who were sent into the gas chambers wearing no more than "drill shorts and open-necked khaki cotton shirts" to gauge the effect of mustard gas on the eyes, also had to be hospitalised after the experiment.

The revelation is seen to be a shocking afterword to the lengthy accounts of British colonial behaviour in India.

But in a sign the British authorities are unwilling to entertain claims for compensation from the affected Indian soldiers or their heirs and successors, officials are quoted to say the trials took place in a different era and the studies in India "included defensive research...(and) supported those conducted in simulated conditions in the UK in a different environment".

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - Guest - 07-24-2008

Just so i dont come across as uniformly anti Britsh (which i am not) i would like to mention Arthur Cotton

General Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton (15 May 1803 Oxford â 25 July 1899 Dorking) was a British general and irrigation engineer.

Cotton devoted his life to the construction of irrigation and navigation canals through the Empire of India, which was only partially realised. He entered the Madras Engineers in 1819, and fought in the First Burmese War. Cotton was knighted in 1861.

Sir Cotton was hated by his administrative superiorsâthanks to his loving attitudes towards the people of India[2]. At one point impeachment proceedings were initiated by his superiors for his dismissal[3]

Going through the famine and cyclone-ravaged districts of Godavari, Cotton was distressed by the sight of famished people of the Godavari districts[4]. It was then that he put in process his ambitious plans to harness the waters of the mighty Godavari for the betterment of the humanity.

John Henry Morris in Godavari [5] writes about the work of Sir Cotton thus: "The Godavari anicut is, perhaps, the noblest feat of engineering skill which has yet been accomplished in British India. It is a gigantic barrier thrown across the river from island to island, in order to arrest the unprofitable progress of its waters to the sea, and to spread them over the surface of the country on either side, thus irrigating copiously land which has hitherto been dependent on tanks or on the fitful supply of water from the river. Large tracts of land, which had hitherto been left arid and desolate and waste, were thus reached and fertilized by innumerable streams and channels."

[SIZE=7]In 1878, Cotton had to appear before a House of Commons Committee to justify his proposal to build an anicut across the Godavari[6]. A further hearing in the House of Commons followed by his letter to the then Secretary of State for India shows about his ambitiousness to built the anicut across the Godavari. His final sentence in that letter reads like this: My Lord, one day's flow in the Godavari river during high floods is equal to one whole years' flow in the Thames River of London[7]. Cotton was almost despaired by the British Government's procrastination in taking along this project.

That Government of India's plans to interlink rivers was long envisioned by Cotton is a fact[8].

He was regarded so highly by the peasantry that ballads were sung about Cotton Dora Garu

He complained that the policy of the British government when it came to public works was 'do nothing and obstruct all proposals to do something',
Known as âApara Bhageerathaâ, he had sacrificed his life for providing irrigation water to thousands of farmers in the two districts, which are now called the rice bowl of Andhra Pradesh. Sir Arthur Cotton had done much for the nation, particularly for the farmers of delta areas.
Storage reservoir

During the construction of the barrage across the Godavari, Sir Arthur Cotton struck upon the idea of constructing a storage reservoir at Purushottamapatnam in the 1850s. This is where the State government plans to construct the Polavaram project.

âWe have records in the Cotton Museum underlining the need for a storage tank for the Dhawaleswaram Barrage that could be constructed near Purushottamapatnam, which is at the mouth of Sripada Sagar,â said M. Venkateswara Rao, Chief Engineer of the Indira Sagar project.

There are some 3,000 statues of Sir Arthur Cotton in the two districts, which reflect the popularity he enjoys among farmers.

âNow, we see much water going waste into the sea. But for the engineering prowess of Sir Arthur Cotton, this region would have been in the grip of drought,â said Bhaskar Reddy of Dulla village in Kadiam constituency. Mr. Reddy performs âabhishekamâ with milk to the bronze statue of Sir Arthur Cotton he put up in front of his house.

Irrigation offices in this delta area remember Sir Cotton by putting a photograph and a poem dedicated to the great engineer under it.

âThe magnitude of work, the quickness of execution and the productivity of engineers working in the 1850s can best be realised when juxtaposed with similar works executed after technological advances, mechanisation, modern management practices and improved communication facilities,â wrote A. Krishnaswamy, IAS Special Administrator, Sir Arthur Cotton Barrage, in his foreword to the 1987 reprint of the monograph âThe engineering works of the Godavari Deltaâ by George T. Walch, a retired chief engineer for irrigation, Madras, published in 1896.

Sir Arthur Cotton , truly a man for all seasons

<img src='http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dav4is/images/CottonAT.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - dhu - 03-03-2009

Some details on British sexual colonialism:

QUOTE("Acharya")Acharya:

Interesting tid-bit about Indians being allowed in British messes.Â I wish there was a book detailing all the small b@s**** done by the Brits.Â Â A consolidated book of all the lvoe and care bestowed on us.Â I don't think such a book exists.

By the way, you wrote "After WWII the Allied powers went and changed all the book material and media quotes from past colonial leaders to make it more politically correct in the entire world."Â What is your basis of this claim?Â Â Surely, if the record would exist and can pulled out.Â Â Are you sure your facts are correct?

Some forums are planning to document all the available details about colonial project.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1747
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s19040.htm
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE
I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made.

A return from the current annual mortalities of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 per year that obtained in British India in 1947 would yield a Third World excess mortality in 2050 of a staggering 200-million persons per year.

"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.

Just recently, Niall Ferguson, the noted British historian was quoted as saying that on the whole, British rule has been good for the countries affected. It is probably fair to say that Davis' book makes it clear that any beneficial effects of British rule, in India for example, were accidental.


This is the book to start with. The amount of details and references should be enough to cover decades of data.


Late Victorian Holocausts: El NiÃ±o Famines and the Making of the Third World (Paperback)
by Mike Davis (Author)

# Paperback: 470 pages
# Publisher: Verso (July 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1859843824
# ISBN-13: 978-1859843826


Apologists for Brits have always used laying railway lines in India as their pet arguments in support of the British Raj.

Here's inconclusive proof that they had best intentions of Indians in mind when they laid out those railway line:
<img src='http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v130/indiaforum/BritsTrain.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
See how neat, trim and healthy looking these Indians are after getting some exercise.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8

QUOTEhttp://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27...its-holocausts/

Why do so few people know about the atrocities of empire?

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th December 2005

In reading the reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first of course is the anachronistic brutality of the countryâs laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for âdenigrating Turkishnessâ, which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action which could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the countryâs foremost novelist for mentioning them.

As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the European Union have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.

Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians(1). These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered âto discourage relief works in every possible wayâ(2). The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited âat the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.â The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched âa militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.â The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the governmentâs export policies, like Stalinâs in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.

Three recent books - Britainâs Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps(3). Most of the remainder - over a million - were held in âenclosed villagesâ. Prisoners were questioned with the help of âslicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.â(4) British soldiers used a âmetal castrating instrumentâ to cut off testicles and fingers. âBy the time I cut his balls off,â one settler boasted, âhe had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socketâ(5). The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked âprovided they were blackâ(6). Elkinsâs evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria(7). Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had âfailed to haltâ when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what Iâm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our ârelative lack of interest in Stalin and Maoâs crimes.â(8) But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for âthe vast majority of its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good. â¦ the British gave up their Empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutionsâ(9)(presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that âthe British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe.â(10) (Compare this to Mike Davisâs central finding, that âthere was no increase in Indiaâs per capita income from 1757 to 1947â³, or to Prasannan Parthasarathiâs demonstration that âSouth Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.â(11)) In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that âthe empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic.â The Victorians âset out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve.â(12)

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be ignored, denied or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain âpromotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britainâs basic benevolence. â¦ Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show âexceptionsâ to, or âmistakesâ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence.â(13) This idea, I fear, is the true âsense of British cultural identityâ whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkeyâs accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up its newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

2. An order from the lieutenant-governor Sir George Couper to his district officers. Quoted in Mike Davis, ibid.

3. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britainâs Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Jonathan Cape, London.

4. Mark Curtis, 2003. Web of Deceit: Britainâs Real Role in the World. Vintage, London.

5. Caroline Elkins, ibid.

6. Mark Curtis, ibid.

7. David Anderson, 2005. Histories of the Hanged: Britainâs Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. Weidenfeld, London.

8. Max Hastings, 27th December 2005. This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not Shaka Zulu. The Guardian

9. Andrew Roberts, 13th July 2004. We Should Take Pride in Britainâs Empire Past. The Express.

10. Andrew Roberts, 16th January 2005. Why we need empires. The Sunday Telegraph.

11. Prasannan Parthasarathi, 1998. Rethinking wages and competitiveness in Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India. Past and Present 158. Quoted by Mike Davis, ibid.

12. John Keegan, 14th July 2004. The Empire is Worthy of Honour. The Daily Telegraph.

13. Mark Curtis, ibid.

QUOTEThus in 1997 on a visit to India, Queen Elizabeth II Acknowledged the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (over 1,000 Punjabis gunned down by the British Army near the Golden Temple) but did not offer an Apology. Indeed the British have NEVER Apologized for anything they did during their appalling 2 century mis-rule of British India. While every Briton knows of the (largely fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta story that has demonized Indians for over 2 centuries, very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British e.g. the 1769/1770 Great Bengal Famine (that killed 10 million, 1/3 of the over-taxed population of Bengal); further successive famines that killed scores of millions (the annual death rate in 1877 in British labour camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%; see: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/
how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/); cholera epidemics spread by British mercantilism (that killed about 25 million Indians in the 19th century); extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics); and the man-made, World War 2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims, huge civilian and British military sexual abuse of starving women, a 1941-1951 Bengal demographic deficit of over 10 million â and all of this largely deleted from British history, in part because it may have been due to a deliberate British âscorched earth policyâ).

THE BIG PICTURE of the impact of the British in India can be best assessed by measuring avoidable mortality (technically, excess mortality) which is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/). The annual death rate in India as recently as 1920 was about 4.8% (see: http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm) but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9% (still about 2 times greater than it should be for a country with Indiaâs demographics). As a useful yardstick, the annual death rate of sheep on Australian sheep farms is about 2.5% i.e. the British were treating Indians like animals. Using a baseline âexpectedâ annual death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an âactualâ pre-1920 value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality was about 0.6 billion (1757-1837), 0.5 billion (1837-1901 i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947 i.e. from the turn of the century until Indian Independence). Thus one can estimate that British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable) mortality totalling 1.5 billion â surely one of the greatest crimes in all of human history. The carnage did not end with the post-WW2 British departure from India and its other colonies egregiously crippled by colonial abuse â thus the avoidable mortality in the mostly Third World British Commonwealth countries during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1953 to the present) has totalled about 0.7 billion.

The above figures are no doubt very surprising to English-speaking people of the British Commonwealth and elsewhere, and for good reason â these ugly, genocidal realities have been religiously deleted from British history and from general public perception (as in George Orwellâs â1984â). We live in âpolitically correctâ times in which Anglo-Celtic societies (the US, the UK and the âWhiteâ former British colonies) decry racism but simultaneously IGNORE the intrinsic racism of First World-dominated globalization and of violent UK-US âdemocratic imperialismâ in Iraq and Afghanistan â a phenomenon best described as âpolitically correct racism (PC racism). However ignoring CAAAA (C4A) and ignoring historical realities simply has meant more of the same â history ignored yields history repeated.

On the occasion of the Third Anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq it is timely to note the human and economic cost of the Bush Wars â 2.7 million excess deaths and a cost to the US of US$1-2 trillion (see: http://www.newsvine.com/uk , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/ ,

http://www.aljazeerah.info/21%20o/Bush%20Wars%20h
ave%20cost%202.7%20million%20lives%20&%20$
1-2%20trillion%20By%20Gideon%20Polya.htm).

The latest UN and UNICEF data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) â and this largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling 0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance (76% market share by 2002).

Remarkably, lying, racist, holocaust-denying, Anglo-American and Australian mainstream media not only ignore the horrendous Iraqi and Afghan death toll from the on-going Anglo-American Bush Wars, they ALSO ignore the huge number of collateral, war-related drug deaths in âWhiteâ Anglo-Celtic countries. There seems little hope for the Asian victims of Anglo-American violence â and indeed for the Third World in general â when Anglo-American mainstream media ignore the carnage inflicted on their OWN KIND.

Nevertheless there IS hope if an indignant world takes resolute action over the crimes of UK-US-Australian democratic imperialism (democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism). Lying, racist mainstream media should be boycotted; the world should be INFORMED about Coalition excesses; Coalition citizens should vote out and prosecute the war criminals; and international sanctions and boycotts should be applied to the racist, criminal Coalition countries. Until there is CAAAA (C4A), i.e. Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance of non-repetition of these crimes, all the Coalition countries deserve the active âfree market choiceâ disapprobation of the âdecent worldâ â ANYONE apprised of Coalition war crimes who buys goods and services from Coalition countries is clearly COMPLICIT in these gross abuses of humanity.

Anglo-American Wartime Violation of Indian, Iraqi and Afghan Women

National self-love and "history ignored yields history repeated."

by Gideon Polya

Different societies naturally enough think well of themselves and do not care to reveal "skeletons in the cupboard". Indeed we are all familiar with the adage "The victor writes history".

However "rubbing out" or "whitewashing" history in relation to man-made mass mortality and gross human rights violations has the serious consequence that the probability of recurrence is greatly increased. Thus we all know the aphorism attributed to George Santayana that "History ignored yields history repeated."

In the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, the German people acknowledged the immense crime, apologized, made amends and committed themselves to a non-violent and human rights-conscious future. While post-war Japan committed itself to peace, cultural sensitivities have limited public awareness of the Japanese war-time atrocities (e.g. through censored history in school). In recent years, Germans opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq whereas a Japanese military contingent is still in Occupied Iraq.

Anglo-Americans have a high opinion of their societies. Thus the under-stating English say jokingly that "God is an Englishman", the Australians refer to their "Lucky Country" and the Americans talk of "God's Own Country". However, as decribed below, gross, large-scale, war-time sexual abuse of starving women in British-ruled India has been "rubbed out" of history - and half a century later we see "history repeated" with horrendous violation of Iraqi women through huge, avoidable infant mortality that constitutes Anglo-American passive genocide.

Mass violation of starving women in 1940s British India
In the period 1943-1946, a man-made, market-forces and resulting famine killed an estimated four million Bengalis in British-ruled India, the worst of it occurring in 1943-1944. According to Amartya Sen (1998 economics Nobel Laureate, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University and now at Harvard), prosperous, war-time Calcutta sucked food out of a starving countryside - those who could not afford the four-fold increase in the price of rice simply perished.

Civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls involved some 30,000 victims in Calcutta alone and probably hundreds of thousands in total throughout British-ruled Bengal. The sexual abuse of starving women and girls via the British Military Labour Corps demands comparison with the "comfort women" abuses of the Japanese Imperial Army at the same time [1, 2].

Children were the most vulnerable to this famine but among children and young people there are sex-related demographic differences consistent with sexual exploitation of famine victims. Thus a nearly two-fold increase in the percent mortality increase of males as compared to females in the age groups of 10-15 and 15-20 has indicated that females had a major additional survival option of sexual submission. Similarly, a greatly decreased ratio of females to males in the 10-15 year age group among destitutes in Calcutta has been interpreted in terms of female prostitution [3].

Greenough [1] has recorded the testimonies of female famine victims forced into sexual submission or prostitution by famine circumstances. There was a major military presence in Bengal at the time, since military campaigns were being conducted against the Japanese in Assam, Burma and the coastal Arakan region south of Chittagong. Service through prostitution in the British Military Labour Corps represented a major avenue of survival for single females or women desperate to keep their children alive. Greenough has reproduced an account of a mother forced into prostitution with the Military Labour Corps in order to keep herself and her child alive; after withdrawing for obvious reasons, she returned to âserviceâ but ultimately succumbed to disease [1].

Bhowani Sen has described the impact of the famine on families and women:

âThe whole life of the people was disrupted. Parents were forced to throw their children and babies on the roadside in the hope that somebody might pick them up and feed them. Husbands were forced to leave their wives and the whole family at the mercy of events. Women were forced to sell themselves and enter brothels. Out of the 125,000 destitutes who came to Calcutta, it is estimated that about 30,000 young women joined brothels to be able to continue their breathing" [4].

Another contemporary observer described the disaster as follows:

âan unprecedented famine in Bengal gathered about two million people to their forefathers, drove countless more to utter destitution, sent innumerable women to brothels and sapped the very life-force of the province for generations to come" [5].

The abuse of scores of thousands of enslaved âcomfort womenâ by Japanese soldiers in the conquered lands of the Second World War has been exposed [6]. The similar abuse of Bengali women on a similar scale during that conflict is a well-kept secret in the English-speaking world.

Allied racism and contempt for Bengalis is revealed by the account of an appalled American officer who had to stop his soldiers amusing themselves (in rail transit through starving Bengal to Assam) by using paddy field peasants (âwogsâ in their speech) and their livestock as target practice [7].

Not just the famine-associated abuses of women have been deleted from history - the Bengal Famine itself has been largely "rubbed out" of British history and has become a "forgotten holocaust" largely removed from general public perception [2, 8]. Author Colin Mason has condemned this lack of acknowledgement as an indictment of all subsequent British Governments [8].

However the big picture is even worse. In 1769-1770 British colonial rapacity caused the Great Bengal Famine that killed 10 million people (a third of the population) and this was followed by two centuries of repeated horrendous famines and epidemics in this rich land culminating in the World War 2 Bengal famine [2, 8].

In 1971 the US-armed and US-backed West Pakistan military overthrew the democratic election results that had threatened democratic Bengali political domination of Pakistan [8-10]. The military killed as many as 3 million (some 80% being adult males in what has been described as one of the worst male-specific "gendercides" in history) [10]. The West Pakistan military also raped an estimated 300,000 Bengali women [8-10].

It gets even worse. The US and Australia are among the worst greenhouse gas polluters of the world and the neo-liberal, blinkered, reactionary governments of both countries have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Global warming and rising sea levels are set to devastate deltaic regions such as Bengal - indeed two years ago over half of Bangladesh was under water from monsoon run-off [2, 11].

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British Officials In India -- Good And Bad - dhu - 05-06-2009

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A crawling Hindu of yesterday
(1919) 

Dyer's crawling order
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