Colonial History of India

03-28-2007, 07:59 AM

From vol 9 on dharampal.net emphasis in original.

QUOTEEnclosure in a letter from Sir R. Temple, dated February 18th, 1875.

From,
THE REVEREND J.ROBINSON.

To,
SIR RICHARD TEMPLE.
HONORED SIR,

Your HONOR having requested me to state in writing my personal opinion on the loyalty of the Natives of Bengal, I have very carefully weighed and considered the subject, and have the honor to submit the following statement, which I trust will meet with your Honor's approval.

Satisfactorily to define the present state of feeling among the Hindoos is no easy task. In comparing the tone they now assume with that evinced by them forty, or even thirty, years since, the difference is very striking. Under the rule of the Honorable East India Company, when their admission to posts of responsibility under the Government was a matter of special favor, and dependent entirely on the will of their superiors, they were polite, gentle, and unassuming. The style in which they spoke or wrote was one of great deference and modesty. They complained then, as now, of the private or official conduct of public officers, but it was in a tone of modest submission. This may have arisen from their long subjection to foreign powers. Yet from all that could be gathered they regarded the just and equitable rule of the British as an unspeakable blessing.

A new era seemed to dawn upon them when, within the last twenty or thirty years of the Company's rule, the advantages of a liberal education in English were offered them, the learning and civilization of the West were brought within their reach, and posts of honour and responsibility were held out to them as rewards of diligence.
They were apt and ready scholars, and the new impulse given them they were not slow to use. Their advancement was very marked, and the highest eucomiums were publicly paid to their intellectual abilities. There then appeared a change in their bearing, and one which was regarded by most Europeans as an improvement. It presented a contrast to their former servility. Unhappily they soon began to be puffed up with a sense of their abilities, and, rather over-estimating them, thought themselves in every way equal, and in some respects superior, to the authorities, to whom they were nevertheless compelled to be in subjection.

When, after the Mutiny of 1857, Her Majesty in the well known proclamation then issued declared that her subjects, of whatever race or creed, should be freely and impartially admitted to offices the duties of which they might be qualified to discharge, the Bengalees, already elated with the high praises accorded to their intellectual powers, began at once to assume a higher tone of independence. A free Press gave ample scope to the expression of their sentiments. Measures of Government were freely discussed, and men as well as measures were brought to their bar, and approved or condemned according to their judgement; their standard being in many cases their own shastras and the principles by which their early Hindoo kings were actuated. Their aspirations are high. The opinion so often expressed in private and public, that England governs India for India's good, is interpreted as meaning that England retains India only to instruct her children in the art of governing themselves, and as soon as they are competent, [the] reins of government will be resigned to them*. The proposition that all situations, whether executive or administrative, for which the Natives of India are found competent should be given to them in preference to European British subjects, born in England or India, has added not a little to their high expectation. They generally consider themselves quite competent for those posts already, and always complain when Europeans are preferred to themselves for situations of authority or responsibility. They watch with extreme jealousy the action of civil servants in every department, and regret that these offices are not filled by their educated men, who, they suppose, will administer justice with greater equity and superintend the finances with a stricter regard to economy. Suggestions have even been made that one of their more noted men should be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal*.

Of those of the Natives who have been raised to the office of Judge of the High Court, or have been made members of the Legislative Councils, they have been justly proud. Yet as the latter are appointed by the Presidents, only in a few cases have their nominations met with general approbation. In most cases these gentlemen have been spoken of as having but little independence of character and as timidly yielding to the opinion of others. They therefore consider that the time has come when their representatives should be chosen by themselves.*

Such opinions and such aspirations do not prove a want of loyalty. They may be regarded as the natural outcome of their almost sudden elevation from a state, not forty years ago, immeasurably inferior.

If, on the other hand, we turn to the Native periodicals as exponents of public feeling, it is scarcely possible to conclude otherwise than that the Natives are not loyal. The almost unavoidable impression is that they chafe under the necessity of their subjection to a foreign rule,* which they endure simply because they are not in a position to throw it off. The impression is rather strengthened than otherwise by the assertion frequently made that the Editors of the Native journals make use of strong language against the officers and the measures of Government, in order to secure a larger number of readers, whom they find principally in the public offices. Others there are, however, who apologise for their brethren, excusing this extravagance of diction as being merely the exercise of a newly-gotten power, which they have not yet learned to use discreetly.

At the same time it should be noted that in the public journals - Lord Northbrook is very rarely mentioned Her Majesty never I believe - but with the highest respect. This has led me to think that the strong language, sometimes s o freely indulged in, is mere vapid blustering by which the writers seek to give their readers an idea of their own importance and dignity as leaders of public thought and opinion; and that, whatever may be said to the contrary, there is a degree of truth in their frequent assertion that they are a loyal people. At the same time they may possibly mean that as they must be subject to a foreign yoke they prefer the rule of Britain to that of any other power.*

May it not, however, be necessary to guard against too lenient a judgement? And may it not be worthy of consideration whether the strong language so constantly and freely used against the authorities with impunity is not calculated to debase their rulers in the estimation of the people, and whether the p oison is not secretly working, producing a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction and discontent which may hereafter be attended with consequences both painful and troublesome ? The Hindoos of Bengal are, with the exception of a very small percentage, idolaters, and there can be no true fellow feeling between an idolatrous race and their Christian conquerors, from whom they are widely separated by long established institutions, which they hold more dear than life itself*. The laws prescribed by their rulers they may obey, and if appointed to judicial offices, they may discharge their duties strictly according to prescribed laws; but anything like true sympathy with Christians they are not likely to have while so far and unavoidably separated by superstitions. A small number have broken loose from the trammels of caste, and forsaken idolatry; but not acknowledging the Scriptures as the foundation of faith and practice, they are wanting in those high moral and religious principles which can emanate from no other source than Him who is the light of the world. I imagine, therefore, we must wait till the blessed truths of the Gospel have been universally received before we can see such evidence of hearty allegiance to the Queen as the Native Christians of India manifest.

In this I have not referred to the Mahomedans. They constitute a religious sect, who consent to submit to a foreign yoke, while their religion is not interfered with, until the advent of their long expected Imam, who will overthrow all other forms of religion*. In their mosques in Calcutta and all over Bengal, when the Khootba is read, blessings are invoked on the Mohamedan Badashah (Badshahi Islam), whoever that may be. If true to their principles, they cannot yield hearty allegiance to a Christian Queen.

I have thus endeavoured to state my opinion on this important subject. That the Hindoos of Bengal are loyal, I have always believed. Yet it has struck me that loyalty with them may not possibly be exactly what we understand by the term. With us it is a kind of constitutional thing, which we almost naturally entertain; with them, it may be merely an assent to British domination, as a conquered race.*

I have, &c.,
JOHN ROBINSON.
January 21st, 1875.

ramana · 04-06-2007, 11:53 PM

A set of articles on Britsh Empire

Articles on British Empire

Please post relevant articles in appropriate threads. Thanks, ramana

04-21-2007, 11:40 PM

for a decently good list (and write up) of most of the people who played a notable part in the indian freedom struggle, check out this site.

http://www.liveindia.com/freedomfighters/index.html

note the total lack of names from the southern states.

ramana · 04-29-2007, 09:04 PM

The Rupee in British India

dhu · 06-11-2007, 07:02 AM

**acharya** · (This post was last modified: 06-12-2007, 06:09 AM by acharya.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._F._Andrews

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Stephen%2..._Delhi%2C_India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quit_India_Movement

http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1942/420427a.html

QUOTE TEXT ISSUED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA OF THE ORIGINAL "QUIT INDIA" RESOLUTION DRAFTED BY MOHANDAS K. GANDHI AND REJECTED BY THE ALL-INDIA CONGRESS WORKING COMMITTEE IN FAVOR OF THE MODIFIED VERSION SUBMITTED BY PANDIT JAWAHARLAL NEHRU.

The Gandhi Draft Was Presented to the Committee on April 27, 1942

New York Times, August 5, 1942.

Whereas the British War Cabinet proposals by Sir Stafford Cripps have shown up British imperialism in its nakedness as never before, the All-India Congress Committee has come to the following conclusions:

The committee is of the opinion that Britain is incapable of defending India. It is natural that whatever she does is for her own defense. There is the eternal conflict between Indian and British interest. It follows that their notions of defense would also differ.

The British Government has no trust in India's political parties. The Indian Army has been maintained up till now mainly to hold India in subjugation. It has been completely segregated from the general population, who can in no sense regard it as their own. This policy of mistrust still continues, and is the reason why national defense is not entrusted to India's elected representatives.

Japan's quarrel is not with India. She is warring against the British Empire. India's participation in the war has not been with the consent of the representatives of the Indian people. It was purely a British act. If India were freed, her first step would probably be to negotiate with Japan.

The Congress is of the opinion that if the British withdrew from India, India would be able to defend herself in the event of the Japanese, or any aggressor, attacking India.

The committee is, therefore, of the opinion that the British should withdraw from India. The plea that they should remain in India for the protection of the Indian princes is wholly untenable. It is an additional proof of their determination to maintain their hold over India. The princes need have no fear from an unarmed India.

The question of majority and minority is the creation of the British Government, and would disappear on their withdrawal.

For all these reasons, the committee appeals to Britain, for the sake of her own safety, for the sake of India's safety and for the cause of world peace, to let go her hold on India, even if she does not give up all her Asiatic and African possessions.

This committee desires to assure the Japanese Government and people that India bears no enmity, either toward Japan or toward any other nation. India only desires freedom from all alien domination. But in this fight for freedom the committee is of the opinion that India, while welcoming universal sympathy, does not stand in need of foreign military aid.

India will attain her freedom through her non-violent strength, and will retain it likewise. Therefore, the committee hopes that Japan will not have any designs on India. But if Japan attacks India, and Britain makes no response to its appeal, the committee will expect all those who look to the Congress for guidance to offer complete non-violent non-cooperation to the Japanese forces, and not to render any assistance to them. It is no part of the duty of those who are attacked to render any assistance to the attacker. It is their duty to offer complete non-cooperation.

It is not difficult to understand the simple principle of nonviolent non-cooperation:

First, we may not bend the knee to an aggressor, or obey any of his orders.

Second, we may not look to him for any favors nor fall to his bribes, but we may not bear him any malice nor wish him ill.

Third, if he wishes to take possession of our fields we will refuse to give them up, even if we have to die in an effort to resist him.

Fourth, if he is attacked by disease, or is dying of thirst and seeks our aid, we may not refuse it.

Fifth, in such places where British and Japanese forces are fighting, our non-cooperation will be fruitless and unnecessary.

At present, our non-cooperation with the British Government is limited. Were we to offer them complete non-cooperation when they are actually fighting, it would be tantamount to bringing our country deliberately into Japanese hands. Therefore, not to put any obstacle in the way of the British forces will often be the only way of demonstrating our non-cooperation with the Japanese.

Neither may we assist the British in any active manner. If we can judge from their recent attitude, the British Government do not need any help from us beyond our non-interference. They desire our help only as slaves.

It is not necessary for the committee to make a clear declaration in regard to a scorched-earth policy. If, in spite of our nonviolence, any part of the country falls into Japanese hands, we may not destroy our crops or water supply, etc., if only because it will be our endeavor to regain them. The destruction of war material is another matter, and may, under certain circumstances, be a military necessity. But it can never be the Congress policy to destroy what belongs, or is of use, to the masses.

Whilst non-cooperation against the Japanese forces will necessarily be limited to a comparatively small number, and must succeed if it is complete and genuine, true building up of swaraj [self-government] consists in the millions of India wholeheartedly working for a constructive program. Without it, the whole nation cannot rise from its age-long torpor.

Whether the British remain or not, it is our duty always to wipe out our unemployment, to bridge the gulf between the rich and the poor, to banish communal strife, to exorcise the demon of untouchability, to reform the Dacoits [armed bandits] and save the people from them. If scores of people do not take a living interest in this nation-building work, freedom must remain a dream and unattainable by either non-violence or violence.

Foreign soldiers: The committee is of the opinion that it is harmful to India's interests, and dangerous to the cause of India's freedom, to introduce foreign soldiers in India. It therefore appeals to the British Government to remove these foreign legions, and henceforth stop further introduction. It is a crying shame to bring foreign troops in, in spite of India's inexhaustible man power, and it is proof of the immorality that British imperialism is.

06-23-2007, 07:26 PM

Battle of Plassey
QUOTEHe (Clive) was also appointed Governor of Bengal in 1765, and made Baron of Plassey in 1762. After becoming addicted to opium, Clive committed suicide in 1774. Incidentally, Clive bought land in Ireland and named part of it, Plassey. Today, this is where the University of Limerick stands.

**acharya** · (This post was last modified: 06-26-2007, 07:46 AM by acharya.)

SPECIAL ON 150 YEARS OF 1857

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=190&page=37

Did Moscow play fraud on Marx?âIV
Marx welcomed British conquest of India
By Devendra Swarup

QUITE naturally, with this adverse view of Indiaâs social and religious systems, Marx was ready to welcome any effort to overthrow them and he saw the British conquest of India in that light. In his view England was âcausing a social revolution in Hindustan, â¦..Whatever may have been the crime of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolutionâ (Historical Writings, p. 597). He was happy that âthese small stereotype form of social organism have been to the greater part dissolvedâ¦â and in his view the dissolution of âthese small semi-barbarian, semi-civilised communities, by blowing up their economic basisâ has âproduced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.â (ibid, p. 596). He was overjoyed to see that âEngland has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstruction yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts of particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu and separates Hindustan ruled by Britain from all its earlier traditions, and from the whole of its past history.â (ibid, pp. 592-93).

Quoting a poem of German poet Goethe, Marx expresses his conviction that any crumbling of an ancient world must be accompanied by some torture and bloodshed. (p. 597).

Marx does not see in the British conquest of India a catastrophe or an act of imperialist exploitation, rather he welcomes it for two reasons. One, it is Indiaâs destiny to be invaded and conquered. Marx is convinced that ââ¦the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least, no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders, who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society, (ibid, p. 598). And for these foreign invasions and conquests, India has to blame herself not the invaders because, Marx believes, âA country not only, divided between the Mohammedan and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste, a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest?â (ibid, p. 598).

For Marx, âthe question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Britain.â (p. 598). And, of course, Marx stands for conquest by Britain, because, he says, âArabs, Turks, Tartars, Moghuls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hinduised, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects.â (ibid, p. 599) (Here Marx is contradicting himself because earlier he had painted a very degenerate, stagnant picture of the Hindu society.) Exhibiting his Euro-centric approach Marx says: âThe British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to the Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society.â (ibid, p. 599).

In fact, in Marxâs view, âEngland has to fulfill a double mission in India, one destructive, and the other regeneratingâthe annihilation of old Asiatic society and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.â (ibid, p. 599). For him, the introduction of steam had brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europeâ¦ and âthe day is not far distant when â¦ that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.â (p. 600)

Marx gives us a list of works of regeneration begun by the British rulers in India. They are:

a. political unityââUnity imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.â (p. 599)

b. creation of the native army

c. the free press

d. introduction of steam and railway, and above all,

e. emergence of an English educated class of Indians.

Describing this class, Marx writes: âFrom the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly, educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science (p. 600). Here, Macaulay is speaking through Marx. Sometimes it is difficult to separate an Europhile imperialist from a ârevolutionaryâ Marx. When Marx says: âThe introduction of rail roadsâ¦ will afford the means of diminishing the amount and the cost of the military establishments.â (ibid, p. 601) is he not supporting the military rule of Britain?

Perhaps, out of his intense hatred for Indian civilization and pride for Western civilisation, we find Marxâthe ârationalâ and ârevolutionaryââspeaking the language of a Christian missionary. Castigating the British government for not propagating Christianity in India, Marx says: âWhile they combated the French Revolution under the pretext of defending âour holy religionâ, did they not forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in India and did they not, in order to make money out of the pilgrims streaming into the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the temple of Juggernaut? These are the men of Property, Order, Family and Religion!â (ibid, p. 604).

Marx believed that âthe railway system willâ¦ become in India, truly, the fore runner of modern industry. (ibid, p. 602) and âModern industry resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rests the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian powerâ (p. 602). Again, time has proved Marx a false prophet, because expansion of railway network all over the country during the last one-and-a-half century, has instead of obliterating the institution of caste, only strengthened it.

To sum up, Marxâs perception of India in 1853, just before the 1857 Revolt, was:

* Indiaâs social, economic and religious institutions based on village communities and caste are stagnant, semi-barbaric and decadent. They ought to be destroyed completely.

* Indiaâs economic system resting on agriculture and cottage industry should be dissolved and give way to modern large-side industrialization.

* Inferior Asiatic civilization must be supplanted with the superior Western civilization. India should be annexed to the Western world.

* British conquest of India is a blessing for India. Britain has double mission to fulfill, one, to destroy the old and second, to build new.

* Britain has started the process of regeneration by giving India (a) political unity (b) free press Â© introducing steam, electric telegraph and railway (d) building a native army, and finally (e) by creating a new English educated class imbued with Western science and administrative acumen. The process of regeneration has just begun, it should be carried further and not reversed.

(To be continued)

âIndian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders, who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.ââKarl Marx

âEngland has to fulfil a double mission in India, one destructive, and the other regeneratingâthe annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.â â Marx

07-31-2007, 04:33 AM

The role of Louis Mountbatten in Indonesia
Radha Rajan

QUOTEthe media has cleverly latched on to the most unimportant aspect of the edwina-nehru affair - speculating on whether the affir was platonic, physical or sexual, studiously ignoring so as not to embarras NDTV 24+7'S first family by raising doubts about Nehru's political immaturity/integrity.

The media chooses not to persist with the point that mountbatten used his wife to get Nehru to serve Empire interests - forst by getting the king to remain head of the new indian state until 1950, then not allowing the army to throw out the pakistani invaders and retrieb\ve occupied territory and lastly carrying j&k to the UN. gandhiji's wilful 'moha' for Nehru which drove him to thrust this man down the nation's throat, Nehru's wilful villainy in allowing his dalliance with edwina to serve our national interests great ill, stand exposed because neither gandhi nor nehru who ran the INC despotically informed the INC of the mountbatten's villainous role in Indonesia. Perhaps they did not know - even more unforgivable than villainy in a leadership, not knowing.

I present below excerpts from my monograph on "Religious demography in Indonesia and the making of East Timor" which i presented as a paper in delhi in october 2003 at a seminar organized by India First Foundation in which i have described the villainy of mountbatten and the UN in indonesia. pl read if you care about this nation and the fiction that goes in the name of history writing and then do your own research. i wld be very surprised if these facts told any of you a different story than what it tells me. The role that the UN played particularly with the renville agreement, its role in iran jaya, we were idiots, we continue to remain idiots. by 'we' i mean educated hindus.Â regards, RR

THE BRITISH IN INDONESIA AS TRADERS

The British acknowledged that Indonesia was to the Netherlands what India was to the British â a status symbol, the golden goose and the ultimate product of military might. The British were therefore never very serious about colonising Indonesia or retaining it as a colony even on the one or two occasions when their presence was mandated in the archipelago by turn of events in their own history. In 1579 Sir Francis Drake arrives in Ternate after raiding Spanish ships and ports in America. The choice of Ternate as his point of visit is significant because Ternate was an important Portuguese trading post. The Sultan of Ternate and his people were hostile in the extreme to the Portuguese particularly after the small-pox pandemic in Ternate in 1558. The Portuguese are supposed to have poisoned and killed the Sultan of Ternate in 1570 and his successor, Sultan Babullah not only expels the Portuguese from Ternate, forcing the Portuguese to build a fort in Tidore but the Sultan of Ternate keeps the Portuguese under siege in their fort in Tidore for five years until 1575 with no help for the Portuguese coming either from Melaka or Goa.

Within a year of Drake's visit to Ternate in 1579, Portugal falls under Spanish crown. In 1585, the Sultan of Aceh sends a letter to Queen Elizabeth I of England and in 1587 Sir Thomas Cavendish visits Java. This is the beginning of British interest in the Indonesian archipelago. On December 31, 1599, Queen Elizabeth charters the English East India Company. In 1602, Sir James Lancaster leads an expedition to the archipelago and the East India Company sets up a trading post in Aceh. By 1611, the English have set up posts in Jepara, Jambi and Makassar. British economic interests in Indonesia is centered in the Malay province â in Melaka (which the British acquired from the Dutch in return for Bencoolen in Sumatra),Â in Peneng where the British set up a trading post to guard its trade route en route to China, and in North Borneo â Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei.Â British economic interest in the rest of Indonesia wanes gradually through the seventeenth century and by towards the end of the seventeenth century, except for the Malay province, the British have left the field clear for the Dutch VOC in Indonesia.

THE BRITISH IN INDONESIA AS OCCUPATIONAL FORCE

The British return to Indonesia again only in the beginning of the nineteenth century, in 1811 to be precise as a result of the Napoleonic wars. The Netherlands was occupied by French troops in 1795, and a French protectorate established. The new government abolished the VOC by allowing its charter to lapse in 1799. VOC territories became the property of the Dutch government. In 1808 Louis Bonaparte, who had been made king of the Netherlands by his brother Napoleon, appointed Herman Willem Daendels as governor general of the Dutch possessions. But in 1811, a year after the Netherlands had been incorporated into the French empire, the British occupied Java. In August 1811, they seized Batavia (Jakarta) and a month later received the surrender of French forces. At the outset of the Napoleonic Wars, the British government had promised the Dutch government-in-exile that at the end of the war occupied territories would be returned to the Netherlands and true to its promise,Â Dutch authority was reestablished in the Indonesian archipelago in 1816.

It was History repeating itself in 1945. The British were back again in Indonesia after Japan's surrender, this time under Admiral Louis Mountbatten as the Supreme Allied Commander. And this time too it did not seem as though the British desired to hold on to Indonesia. The British and Australian forces arrive in Indonesia only in September, nearly one month after Japan officially surrenders to allied forces. But even before Louis Mountbatten assumes charge in Indonesia, Van Mook, the Dutch Lieutenant General of the Indies meets Mountbatten in Ceylon and asks him to instruct the Japanese to crush the infant Republic of Indonesia. Mountbatten agrees! When Rear Admiral Patterson arrives in Jakarta on September 16, he declares that the British mission and his mandate are "to maintain law and order until the time that the lawful government of the Netherlands East Indies is once again functioning". Indonesia's new-found independence, it was clear, was seriously threatened not just by the Dutch but also by the British and the Australians.

Dutch soldiers who had been arrested and interned by the Japanese were set free and Dutch, British and Australian forces fan out across the Indonesian nation, into every island and province. Arrayed against them is Sukarno's new Republic, the youth of Indonesia and the Sultans and Rajas, all of whom openly declared their support for the Republic of Indonesia. Fighting escalates between the Republican youths and the foreign occupying forces. Japanese forces were deeply divided over the issue of support to the new Republic.Â While individual Japanese officers and soldiers covertly helped the republican youth with arms, ammunition and weapons, the official position of the Japanese forces asked to stay on in Indonesia by the British to maintain law and order, was to crush the nationalist movement. One Japanese admiral handed over Surabaya to the Dutch but gave away his weapons to the republicans. The Japanese push the republicans out of Semarang and Bandung and hand over the cities to the British.

THE BRITISH HAND INDONESIA BACK TO THE NETHERLANDS

The Battle of Surabaya marks a turning point in the British agenda for Indonesia. In October, the 49th Indian infantry arrives in Surabaya and the British air-drop leaflets asking the republicans to surrender within 24 hours. Sukarno and Hatta too arrive in Surabaya and Major-general Hawthorne from Jakarta. Sukarno, Hatta, Mallaby and Hawthorne sign a cease-fire agreement. Within five hours of the truce, in the raging battle on the streets of Surabaya between British troops and the Indonesian troops and ordinary people of Indonesia, Mallaby is killed. The British bomb Surabaya as punishment killing thousands of Indonesians. The British also strafe civilians on the highway. But the British are confronted by fierce resistance and fighting by Indonesians determined to protect their independence and their republic. November 9,Â the British 5th Indian Division lands at Surabaya. November 10, Indonesian counterattack in Surabaya begins and fighting continues for three weeks. Not surprisingly 600 Indian troops defect from the British and join the Indonesians. The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin calls upon the Dutch to begin talks with the Republic and to negotiate. But the Dutch are not prepared to relinquish control of their colony and declare their unwillingness to negotiate.

The Dutch gradually begin to take control of not only the eastern territories under Australian control but also British controlled areas too. In July 1946, the Allies turn over all of Indonesia except Java and Sumatra, to the Dutch.

The Dutch send their first proposal to Sutan Syahirir, Indonesian Prime Minister for a 'democratic partnership' between the Netherlands and Indonesia, but does not offer independence. Syahirir publicly responds to the offer in March demanding of the Dutch that they accept the reality of the Indonesian republic and recognize it. But in secret negotiations with the Dutch, Syahirir accepts Republican control over just Java, Sumatra and Madura while agreeing to a political union with the Netherlands under the Dutch crown. This secret agreement forms the basis for the British-brokered Linggajati agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands East Indies. The agreement provided for a Netherlands-Indonesian Union under the Dutch crown. In return, the Dutch agreed to recognize republican rule on Java, Madura and Sumatra, while the Dutch retained control of the entire east - the "Great East" consisting of Sulawesi, Maluku, the Lesser Sunda Islands, and West New Guinea. The agreement was signed on May 25, 1947.

LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN CREATES MALAYSIA FROM INDONESIA

The British had effectively throttled the flowering of the New Indonesian Republic. Mountbatten had breathed life into the defeated Dutch government in Indonesia and tied it around the republic's neck as a mill-stone. The Linggajati Agreement shattered the Republic's vision of an Indonesia Raya, the Greater Indonesian nation. The last of the British leave Indonesia by November 1946, leaving the fledgling nation at the mercy of the Dutch. For their part, the British leave Indonesia leaving the thorn of British Malaya (Malay province) behind. The British do not relinquish control of Melaka, Penang, and North Borneo until 1957. Indians in the forefront of the Indian Freedom Movement had already failed to learn their first lesson when they allowed without protest, Louis Mountbatten to assume charge as the last Viceroy of India before independence and later made him the first Governor-General of India. The result of this monumental folly was not only the partition of India and the coming into being of the obscenity called Pakistan but the festering wound of J&K, the unresolved question of the Princely states, and also the direction into which Nehru, enamored with Edwina Mountbatten which fact was utilized to the full by Louis Mountbatten to get Nehru to accede to all his demands, led the infant post-independent Indian state.Â It is therefore not surprising that after the British finally surrender control of the Malay province in 1957, the province becomes the new nation-state ofÂ Malaysia with the active connivance of the British government.

On November 20, 1961, Malaya officially informs the Indonesian government of the plans for the new Malaysia and two years later, on July 9, 1963 , Malaya and Britain sign final agreements in London to have the nation of Malaysia founded on August 31. Sukarno is furious. His dream and conception of the Greater Indonesian nation had been effectively broken by Malaysia's secession from the Indonesian State. East Timor would be the next to go.Â

THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA

The UN comes into being in 1945 and ironically, the UK, Australia and Netherlands, the principal wreckers of the independence of Indonesia in August 1945, are founding members of the UN and signatories to the UN Charter. The Charter of the United Nations was signed on 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and came into force on 24 October 1945. The Statute of the International Court of Justice is an integral part of the Charter. What does the UN Charter say?

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth ofÂ the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.

Considering that the actions of Britain, the Netherlands and Australia in 1945 and 1946, as occupational forces in Indonesia, was aimed at the singular objective of reversing the independence of Indonesia and reverting it to Netherlands colonial control and administration,Â the UN remained remarkably sang-froid at the brazen violation of its Charter by the three founding member countries. The best that the UNSC could do in 1947, after two years of Netherlands and British and Australian atrocities against the Indonesian people, and after the 'police action' by the Netherlands colonial government in violation of the Linggajati agreement, was to timidly call for cease-fire on August 1, 1947. The UN does not declare the continuing presence of the Dutch in Indonesia or the continuing British control of the Malay province or British Malaya, to be illegal and violative of the UN Charter. It calls for cease-fire instead as though Indonesia is a party to the hostilities instead of being the victim of continued western and colonial aggression.

Instead of asking the Netherlands to withdraw from Indonesia immediately and unconditionally and instead of asking the United Kingdom to withdraw from British Malaya, the UN sets up a 'good offices commission' in October 1947 to find a 'settlement' in Indonesia. 'Settlement' effectively made the Netherlands a legitimate party in the negotiations. This was to legitimise colonialism and legitimise, in the process, the refusal by European colonial powers to withdraw unconditionally from their colonies. The ambivalence of the UN in dealing with violations by powerful western nations had a lesson for our leaders at the time. This is the second lesson we failed to learn and continued to repose faith in the UN to deal effectivelyÂ with Pakistan's aggression and occupation of Indian territories in 1947.

Bodhi · (This post was last modified: 08-04-2007, 10:35 AM by Bodhi.)

India: the Empire strikes back 
From Raj to riches: as India celebrates 60 years of independence, acclaimed historian William Dalrymple salutes a country returning to its pre-colonial wealth.

When I moved back to India with my family four years ago, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometres from the boom town of Gurgaon on the south-western edge of Delhi. From my road I could see in the distance the rings of new housing estates, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier was billowing winter wheat.

The first time I lived in Delhi, in the late 1980s, Gurgaon was a semi-rural Haryana market town, with a single large Maruti car plant to one side; it was home to no more than 100,000 people.

Now it had become a city of several million; some said three million, some said more - the speed of growth was so enormous that it was difficult to obtain accurate figures. Either way, Gurgaon was now home to a population almost equal to that of my native Scotland.

Here an increasingly wealthy middle class had suddenly taken root in an aspirational bubble of fast-rising shopping malls, espresso bars, restaurants and multiplexes. These new neighbourhoods, most of them still half-built and ringed with scaffolding, were invariably given such unrealistically enticing names as Beverly Hills, Windsor Court, West End Heights - an indication, perhaps, of where their owners would prefer to be and where, in time, they might eventually migrate.

Four years later, Gurgaon has galloped towards us at such a speed that it now abuts the edge of our farm and the proudly-touted "largest mall in Asia" is arising a quarter of a mile from my house.

What was farmland and a pool for water buffaloes when I moved in is now a mass of cranes, flanked by billboards advertising the latest laptops and iPods. There are still no accurate figures but the population has probably topped five million.

The speed of the development of Gurgaon is breathtaking to anyone used to the plodding growth rates of western Europe: the sort of construction that would take 25 years in Britain comes up here in five months, even if, at the end of it, the "luxury" flats will probably only have electricity for a couple of hours a day and the water supply will be intermittent at best.

The speed of change in Gurgaon reflects that of the growth of the Indian economy in general: economic futurologists all agree that China and India will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global economy.

The various intelligence agencies estimate that China will overtake America between 2030 and 2040, while India will overtake the US by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms. Measured by purchasing-power parity, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third largest economy in the world.

Incredibly, India now trains a million engineering graduates a year (against 100,000 each in America and Europe) and stands third in technical and scientific capacity - behind the US and Japan, but well ahead of China.

Today India's IT sector alone annually earns the vast sum of almost $25 billion, mostly in export earnings. With an average growth rate over the last decade of 6 per cent and current growth of 9 per cent, it is little wonder that average incomes are doubling every 15 years: the number of mobile-phone users has jumped from 3 million in 2000 to 100 million in 2005; the number of television channels from one in 1991 to more than 150 last year.

It is a similar picture on India's roads: in the early 1990s, as India was starting to relax import and investment restrictions on foreign manufacturers, there were only six or seven makes of car.

More than 90 per cent of them were Hindustan Ambassadors, the Indian- made version of the 1950s Morris Oxford - effectively clumpy vintage cars. Now the new six-lane highways are full of sleek and speedy Fiats, Fords, Mercedes-Benz and even the odd Porsche and Bentley.

So extraordinary is all this to us today, particularly to those who knew the sluggish India of 20 years ago, that it is easy to forget how little of it would have surprised our ancestors who sailed there with the East India Company. The idea of India as a poor country is relatively recent: historically, South Asia was always famous as the richest region of the globe, whose fertile soils gave two harvests a year, and whose mines groaned with minerals.

Ever since Alexander the Great first penetrated the Hindu Kush, Europeans fantasised about the wealth of these lands, where the Greek geographers said that gold was dug up by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins, and where precious jewels lay scattered on the ground like dust.

In Roman times, there was a dramatic drain of Western gold to India. This is something the Greek historian Strabo comments on with great anxiety in his writings - an image graphically confirmed by the recent finds of huge Roman coin hoards around Madurai in Tamil Nadu and a large Roman coastal trading post near Pondicherry.

At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, the south Indian Pandyan Kings even sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the latter's balance of payments problems. Even today, the English "pepper" and "ginger" are loan words from Tamil - respectively, pippali and singabera, testaments to the spice trade that was once a staple of this lucrative Indian export traffic.

It was similar legends of India's extraordinary wealth that drew the merchant adventurers of the Company eastwards. They came not as part of some Tudor aid project, or on behalf of a charitable Elizabethan NGO, but as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the vast riches of the fabled Mughal Empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world.

What the Poles are to modern Britain - economic migrants in search of better lives - the Jacobeans were to Mughal India.

At their heights, the Mughal Emperors were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. The Great Mughals ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh and great chunks of Afghanistan.

Their armies were all but invincible, their palaces unparalleled and the domes of their many mosques glittered with gold. For their contemporaries in distant Europe, they were potent symbols of power and wealth. The word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded today with connotations of this, even when it is divorced from its original Indian context.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown larger and richer even than Constantinople and, with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris.

"The city is second to none either in Asia or in Europe," said Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate, "with regards either to size, population, or wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who foregather there from all over Asia. There is no art or craft useful to human life which is not practised there. The citadel alone has a circumference of three miles."

It was, in terms of rapid growth, instant prosperity and unlimited opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.

What changed all this was quite simply the advent of European colonialism. Following Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498, bypassing the Middle East and conquering the centres of spice production in South Asia, European colonial traders - first the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British - slowly wrecked the old trading network and imposed with their cannons and caravels a western imperial system of command economics.

It was only at the very end of the 18th century that Europe, for the first time in history, had a favourable balance of trade with Asia. At the same time, the era of Indian economic decline had begun and was most precipitous in the region around the British headquarters in Calcutta.

As the 18th century historian Alexander Dow put it: "Bengal was one of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the worldâ¦ We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners."

This was certainly the view of Edmund Burke, who impeached Warren Hastings, India's first Governor General, charging him with oppression, corruption, gross abuse of power and ruthlessly plundering India.

On February 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness the members of the House of Lords troop into Westminster Hall to sit in judgement on Hastings.

Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators were said to have changed hands for as much as Â£50. In the audience was Sarah Siddons, the great society actress (and courtesan), as well as Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, the novelist Fanny Burney, the Queen, two of her daughters and most of the ambassadors in London.

For all the theatre of the occasion - and, indeed, one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Sheridan - this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III. It was the nearest the British ever got to putting the Empire on trial and they did so with Edmund Burke, one of their greatest orators, at the helm, supported by the similarly eloquent Charles James Fox.

Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India - or as Burke put it in his opening speech: "Cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without nameâ¦ crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men, in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence - in short everything that manifests a heart blackened to the very blackest; a heart dyed in blackness; a heart gangrened to the coreâ¦ We have brought before you the head, the captain general of iniquity - one in whom all the fraud, all the tyranny of India are embodied."

When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by the rapacious tax collectors the British employed - "They were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the peopleâ¦ they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies" - Mrs Sheridan "was so overpowered that she fainted and to be carried from the hall".

Hastings was in many ways the wrong target for Burke's Parliamentary offensive and, after a trial lasting nearly 10 years, he was eventually acquitted on all charges.

But it is worth recalling the damage that the Company undoubtedly did to the flourishing economy of India as the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence dawns amid unprecedented excitement at India's rapid rise towards its projected superpower status.

Today, academics, historians and economists are fiercely divided between those who believe European colonial rule brought great benefits to India and those who believe Britain put India into irreversible political and economic decline.

Given the complex and emotive issues involved, it is hardly surprising that there is little neutral territory in this politically super-charged debate: did Western mercantile-imperialism bring high capitalism and free trade to India, as supporters such as historian Niall Ferguson would have us believe; or did it irrevocably destroy millennia-old trading networks?

Did it bring democracy to a part of the world inured to despotism and tyranny; or did it remove political freedom of expression from lands with long traditions of debate and public expression of dissent, as argued by the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen?

Did the British Empire bring in constitutional guarantees of the freedom of the individual; or promote slavery, exploitation, indentured labour and forced migration? Did the British bring just governance and irrigate the deserts, or did they plunder natural resources, drive a number of species to extinction and preside over a succession of famines that left many million dead while surplus grain was being shipped to Britain?

Most important of all, did the British promote religious tolerance, or did they instead sow the seeds of religious conflict with cynical policies of sectarian divide and rule - thus laying the scene for the politico-religious divisions we see around us and what Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntingdon would have us believe are today's civilisational clashes?

There are no easy answers to any of these questions. Looking back at the role the Europeans have played in South Asia until their departure in August 1947, there is certainly much that the West can unambiguously be said to have contributed to Indian life: the Portuguese, for example, brought that central staple of Indian life, the chilli pepper; while the British brought that other essential staple, tea, as well as the far more important innovations of democracy and the rule of law, along with the railways, all of which have helped India rise again to greatness.

In the light of so much post-colonial disapproval, it is also worth remembering the impeccable reputation Victorian rule in India (if not that of the Company) once enjoyed, even from Britain's fiercest critics.

Bismarck thought Britain's work in India would be "one of its lasting monuments". Theodore Roosevelt agreed that Britain had done "such marvellous things in India" that they might "transform the Indian populationâ¦ in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as Rome did hers on Europe".

The French traveller AbbÃ© Dubois extolled the "uprightness of character, education and ability" of British officials in India, while the Austrian Baron HÃ¼bner ascribed the "miracles" of British rule to its administrators' "devotion, intelligence, courage, and skill combined with an integrity proof against all temptation".

It is also true that factors such as cricket and the English language have been crucial to India's modern success, cultural indicators that in their different ways set Indian eyes looking westwards to the rising power of Britain, and later the US, and away from the declining Islamo-Persianate culture of Central Asia and the Middle East, a world that would go into ever greater cultural and economic decline as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

In the days that followed the fall of the Mughals after the great Indian Mutiny of 1857, this turning away from the old cultural moorings and the reorientation of India towards the West caused heartbreak to the old Urdu- and Persian-speaking elites.

As the poet and critic Azad wrote: "The glory of the winners' ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs - even their dress, their gait, their conversation - a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them."

Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or the US, that today has given the country's anglicised elite such easy access to the jobs and opportunities of the Western economy.

Nevertheless, for all this we British should keep our nostalgia and self-congratulation over the Raj within strict limits. For all the irrigation projects, the great engineering achievements and the famous imperviousness to bribes of the officers of the Indian Civil Service, the Raj nevertheless presided over the destruction of Indian political, cultural and artistic self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves.

In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 per cent of the world's GDP, while India was producing 22.5 per cent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 per cent, while India had been reduced for the first time to the epitome of a Third World nation, a symbol across the globe of famine, poverty and deprivation.

Today in India, the dramatic increase in wealth that we see on all sides is less some sort of economic miracle - the strange rise of a once impoverished wasteland, as it is usually depicted in the Western press - so much as things slowly returning to the traditional pattern of global trade in the pre-colonial world. Last year, the richest man in the UK was for the first time an ethnic Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, and our largest steel manufacturer, Corus, has been bought by an Indian company, Tata.

Extraordinary as it is, seen from the wider perspective the rise of India and China is merely nothing more than a return to the ancient equilibrium of world trade. Today, we Europeans are no longer the gun-toting, gunboat-riding colonial masters we once were, but instead are reverting to our more traditional role: that of eager consumers of the much celebrated luxuries and services of the East.

William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jht.../ftindia104.xml

**acharya** · 08-18-2007, 02:54 AM

http://soc.world-journal.net/indianoceansb-intro.html

We earlier pointed out on this website that while the British Empire and the USA may have had their relative rise and fall at different times during the 20th Century, they have marched along a similar route, and to similar tunes. Like for example the claim to be civilising dependent peoples. But for whatever the complaints of the left and the colonial nationalists about the nastier aspects of late British imperialism (such as torture in Kenya, or police brutality in the West Indies), the empire grappled with its Kiplingesque ârecessionalâ with a fair degree of grace and a decent sense of timing. And although not necessarily Americaâs imperial retreat (example Iraq), might at times be, less easy and smooth. But imperialistic intentions is one, capitalism is another: both empires rose and spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and foreign investment, dubbed âfree tradeâ by the British and âglobalizationâ by the USA. And although not insisting on a similar approach by British Colonialism and the strategic defense by the US with its expansionist war in Iraq, we earlier indicated how the US can learn from past experiences. See Case Study:

The business success of the British India Company and many of its freebooting (in the business sense of the word), employees can be traces back to a Mughal imperial decree of 1717, which granted a suspension of tariff for some Company trade under limited conditions. This situation set the tone for the systematic misuse of also other grants, treaties, agreements, and understandings, each of which-for example in the case of the Diwani grant of 1765 Âbecame the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade, revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same time also violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament of England. And there were also the debates over the relative sovereignty of different Indian rulers, some of which had been prearranged. (Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 1993, p.120.)

Even one British sea captain, Captain Rennie, wrote about the injustice accorded the nawabs by various agents of the Company just after the fall of Calcutta : "The injustice to the Moors conÂsists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as merÂchants-to protect and judge what natives were our servants, and to trade custom free-we under that pretence protected all the NaÂbob's servants that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom free, to the great prejudice of the Nabob's revenue; nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought into our districts from the very people that permitted us to trade custom free, and by numbers of impositions caused eternal clamour and complaints against us at Court."( H. V. Bowen, ReveÂnue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773, 1991, pp. 64-66.)

For the British, the fall (their loss) of Calcutta was short-lived, reversed by the victory at Plassey in 1757. Plassey itself was not a major military victory-despite the reputation it subsequently received around the putative military genius of Robert Clive-so much as it was the negotiated outcome of the decision by Mir Jafar the nawab of Bengal, to conspire with the English, by making Clive a high ranking âservantâ(mansabdar) of the Mughal emperor. Yet by 1757, the British had begun on a trajectory of military conquest and occupation that gave them control, at least for a time, not just of growing swaths of India, but of Indian history too.

Where Robert Clive conquered Bengal, it was Warren Hastings who first seriously began to rule it. And his first act was to undertake direct management of revenue collecÂtion in Bengal rather than relying on the nawab. To do this, he had to devise an entirely new revenue system, establishing direct administration over local agencies and landlords. Hastings also instituted new systems of civil and criminal law, crafted on the basis of a thorÂough study of indigenous systems of justice.

Nevertheless he would later be put on trial in England , found guilty of misuse of power, following which Hastings is said to have taken his own life. (For details see N.B.Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 2006.)

By the time Hastings returned to London in 1785, he had changed the fundamental nature to colonial rather than metropolitan considerations when starting to project its vision across the Indian ocean, soon that of Britain's Indian empire. And little over a century later, it was the colonial British Indian empire that fought the first Gulf War of the twentieth century against the precolonial Ottoman Empire. The Indian soldiers who were sent out to fight played both a global and an Indian Ocean role and they understood the difference as we will see.

Yet it was this huge asymmetry in economic power relations on a world scale that led Indian and Chinese intermediary capitalists to build their own lake in the stretch of ocean from Zanzibar to Singapore. Highly specialized capital and labor flows connected different parts of the Indian Ocean rim. Innitially investigated by Ashin Dasgupta, who in Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), concluded that: Intimations of "modernity" in the Indian Ocean interregional arena are discernible as early as the sixteenth century. It was K. N. Chaudhuri however who posed the question: "Is the 'Indian Ocean' as a geographical space the same as Asia?" His answer, following Braudel, was to draw a distinction between a physical unit and a human unit. "Asia as a continent," suggesting that the Indian Ocean was a more meaningful human unit for historical analysis. (Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean:An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1985, p. 4, ibid see also chapter 5.)

09-04-2007, 11:44 PM

British scientists tested mustard gas on Indian soldiers: Report
QUOTEGuardian News Service: Hundreds of soldiers were used in experiments. Illnesses caused by carcinogen not tracked.

British military scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers into gas chambers and exposed them to mustard gas, documents uncovered by this reporter have revealed.

The Indian troops were serving under the command of the British military at a time when India was under colonial rule.

The British military did not check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed any illnesses. It is now recognised that mustard gas can cause cancer and other diseases.

Many suffered severe burns on their skin, including their genitals, leaving them in pain for days and even weeks. Some had to be treated in hospital.

The trials have been thrown into the spotlight by newly discovered documents at the National Archives in London which have shown for the first time the full scale of the experiments.

The experiments took place over more than 10 years before and during world war two in a military installation at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan.

They were conducted by scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire, England, who had been posted to the sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese.

The Indian tests are a little-known part of Porton's huge programme of chemical warfare testing on humans. More than 20,000 British soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare trials involving poison gases, such as nerve gas and mustard gas, at Porton between 1916 and 1989. 

Many of these British soldiers have alleged that they were duped into taking part in the tests, which have damaged their health in the years after the trials.

The reports record that in some cases Indian soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of an Indian sepoy (a private) slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face.

The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to produce a casualty on the battlefield.

In 1942 the Porton scientists reported that there had been a "large number" of burns from the gas among Indian and British test subjects. Some were so harsh that they had to be sent to hospital. "Severely burned patients are often very miserable and depressed and in considerable discomfort, which must be experienced to be properly realised," wrote the scientists.

Other soldiers were hospitalised for a week after they were sent into a gas chamber wearing "drill shorts and open-necked, khaki, cotton shirts" to gauge the effect of mustard gas on their eyes.

The trials had started in the early 1930s when Porton scientists wanted to find out if mustard gas inflicted greater damage on Indian skin compared with British skin. More than 500 Britons and Indians were exposed tomustard gas.

Alan Care, a lawyer representing British troops tested at Porton, said: "I would be astonished if these Indian subjects gave any meaningful consent to taking part in these tests, particularly as they were conducted duringthe days of Empire. No one would have agreed ... if they knew beforehandwhat was going to happen."

Porton officials have argued that trials took place in a different era, during a conflict, and so their conduct should not be judged by today's standards.

The Ministry of Defence could not say whether the Indian soldiers were volunteers in the experiments. It said: "The studies undertaken at the Chemical Defence Research Establishment in India included defensive research, weapons research and physiological research. These studies supported those conducted in simulated conditions in the UK in a different environment."

Chemical warfare

Porton Down, founded in 1916, is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. Until the 1950s Porton developed chemical weapons such as mustard gas and nerve gas. In the 1940s and 1950s Porton also devised biological weapons, chiefly anthrax bombs.

Today Porton's primary task is to develop defensive equipment to shield the British armed forces against chemical and biological weapons. Porton believes that the British armed forces are equipped with some of the bestdefensive equipment in the world.

Porton has always recruited members of the armed forces to take part in experiments. The most controversial resulted in the death of airman Ronald Maddison in 1953 when liquid nerve gas was dripped on to his arm. An inquest in 2004 found that he had been unlawfully killed.

Last year the government paid compensation to three servicemen who had been given LSD without their consent.

09-16-2007, 09:56 PM

QUOTE(ben_ami @ Apr 21 2007, 11:40 PM)for a decently good list (and write up) of most of the people who played a notable part in the indian freedom struggle, check out this site.

http://www.liveindia.com/freedomfighters/index.html

note the total lack of names from the southern states.
[right][snapback]67623[/snapback][/right]


Your entire post history consists of slyly insinuating something about South Indians....I'll hope for the best and assume you're disappointed at the website and not the South Indian contribution to the independence movement. I'll post this for your knowledge.

QUOTECHENNAI : As the 150th anniversary of the landmark revolt in 1857 against British rule was celebrated on Friday in New Delhi with much fanfare, the South Indian History Congress (SIHC) has voiced its concern over the sidelining of South Indian rebellions before 1800.

The association is set to release a book on `South Indian Rebellions before and after 1800' on Sunday at a ceremony co-hosted by Madras Book Club and Centre for Contemporary Studies.

Compilation of papers

The founder-president of Centre for Contemporary Studies S. Gopalakrishnan said the book was a compilation of papers presented by eminent historians at a symposium held recently.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan, who has compiled the book, said there were several anti-British rebellions before 1857 in south India led by stalwarts such as Marudanayagam, the Marudu brothers, Kattabomman, Kittur Rani Chennama in Karnataka and Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy.

Agreeing that the revolt in 1857 was the major turning point in the history of the Indian freedom movement, SIHC's general secretary B.S. Chandrababu said the significant contribution of revolts in South India such as Vellore Mutiny of 1806 and South Indian Rebellion (1800-1801) must not be ignored.

The members of the SIHC demanded that a balanced projection of Indian history of independence be provided in the evaluation of the freedom movement.

Mr. Chandrababu said the South Indian revolts against the British rule must also be included in history books to create awareness among the younger generation.

The book, which contains papers by historians such as S. Muthiah and K.Rajayyan, also carries several photographs, including those of the tomb of Marudunayagam and pictures of Marudu brothers and Kittur Rani Chennama.

The Centre for Contemporary Studies plans to organise a national seminar on South Indian revolts in Chennai shortly under the aegis of Indian Council of Historical Research.

The SIHC, which was founded in 1979, has about 700 members across the southern states.

Bharatvarsh · 09-17-2007, 01:02 AM

ben ami is just some clown who fancies himself to be a sanskrit scholar but thinks "Ram, Bhim etc" are Sanskrit pronounciations even after shown to be wrong from a sanskrit dictionary, as HH said before sometimes it is better to kill with silence than talk to some people, you might get better results talking to a brickwall.

As for freedom fighters, I will only mention two, Vanchinathan Iyer and Alluri Sitaramaraju, there are others besides them, its not my fault some people can't do any reading beyond the gov't sponsored "secular" history.

10-18-2007, 01:44 AM

Satyagraha and India"s freedom Movement

QUOTEIt is a common belief in India and in the Western world that Gandhi through his non-violence Satyagraha has gave India independence from the British rule. The truth is somehow very different.

According to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, during whose regime India became free, the creation of the INA( Indian National Army) and mutiny the RIN ( Royal Indian Navy) of February 18â23 1946 made the British realise that their time was up in India. An extract from a letter written by P.V. Chuckraborty, former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, on March 30 1976, reads thus:

âWhen I was acting as Governor of West Bengal in 1956, Lord Clement Attlee, who as the British Prime Minister in post war years was responsible for Indiaâs freedom, visited India and stayed in Raj Bhavan Calcutta for two days. I put it straight to him like this: "The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?â In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhiâs 1942 movement, Attleeâs lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, "Minimalâ.â

ramana · 10-25-2007, 10:09 PM

Book Reveiw; Pioneer, 25 Oct., 2007
QUOTEFrom Raj to Swaraj

More than Gandhi and Nehru, it is the imposing figure of Churchill that dominates Peter Clarke's book, writes MV Kamath 

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Peter Clarke, Allen Lane, Â£25

It would be unfair to compare Peter Clarke's book, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, with Stanley Wolpert's Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India and Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. Wolpert focusses specifically on Britain and India, whereas Clarke deals with Britain in its last days as an imperial power, with special reference to its relationship with the US, which was keeping it alive during the final years of World War II. It is doubtful whether Britain would have survived without the financial as well as other assistance given to it by America under 'Lend Lease'. Or, for that matter, without India's massive contribution both in men and money. The Army that Britain raised in India was larger than all the forces raised by all other Commonwealth countries put together. And the money that Britain owed to India at the end of the war was a massive Â£1,300 million!

Winston Churchill, that mean and mealy mouthed character who hated India and was to say that he had not become "the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire", was to comment cheekily on Britain's debt to India. He is quoted as saying, "We are now in their (India's) debt -- is Â£1,200 million the figure? -- which we owe to them for the privilege of having saved them from conquest by the Japanese." He forgot -- though Clarke in his text doesn't -- that apart from raising a huge Army to protect British interests everywhere, India also sent foodgrain to Britain at the cost of its own people, of whom three million died in the Great Bengal Famine. 

Churchill happens to be the central figure in this book, which deals with a whole range of events pertaining to World War II -- the talks at Potsdam and Yalta and Churchill's discussions with US Presidents FD Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. Also figuring prominently is Palestine. Clarke merely puts India's demand for independence in the context of Anglo-American relations and what Britain owed to America. As he put it: "The British Empire was a central issue in the financial negotiations (between the US and the UK) because of the sterling balances. That meant above all India, because Britain owed more to India than to the rest of its sterling creditors."

In the circumstances, Britain was doing no particular favour to India by conceding independence to it. And even while granting freedom, it took care to see that India became part of the Commonwealth, an event which took places in 1949.

Britain's decrepitude had been foreseen in India by MN Roy, who used to argue in the 1940s that no debtor nation can rule over a country it owed money to. That was Roy's argument against the Quit India Movement. Roy was emphatic that India should support the war effort precisely on these grounds. It is strange that Clarke does not even mention Roy.

Clarke gives credit to Sir Stafford Cripps for hastening India's Independence and not Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill at the end of the war. According to Leopold Amery, then Secretary of State for India, Attlee's attitude hardly differed from that taken by Churchill, namely that Britain cannot hand India over to Indian capitalists and exploiters!

Attlee was later to change his mind because he realised that Britain just could not hold on to India. Britain had become a bankrupt state and by the beginning of February 1946, prospects were so bad that electricity was not available for industrial production in England for most of the time, coal stocks could hardly meet the requirements of 10 days and two million workers had been laid off.

Britain could not, at that time, concede freedom to a unified India because the Muslim League under Mohammed Ali Jinnah's guidance had terrorised it into submission to its will. As Clarke says, "The British Government for all its sympathies with the Congress was simply unprepared to impose a military settlement in the absence of consent from the Muslim League, which was now bent on achieving Pakistan at all cost."

Clarke notes that Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had come to "tacitly accept'' the inevitability of Partition "breaking from Gandhi's tutelage". Gandhi was opposed to Partition. Clarke thinks that this was wrong on the part of the Mahatma to do so. According to him, Gandhi's "failure to rise to the political challenge in 1946 emerges as the most significant missed opportunity in the whole story". And then again he writes: "Even if Partition had eventually come in India, it surely need not have come in the way it did in 1947. In the final months Gandhi's response was heroic on a personal level, but that need not blind us to the degree of his own responsibility for engendering the situation." Still further he goes on to say, "Gandhi's incapacity to abide any imperfect solution was fatal in the final attempt to reach a negotiated settlement."

That is being very unfair to Gandhi. It was Britain that encouraged Jinnah to ask for Partition. When Jinnah called for "Direct Action Day", which led to large-scale killings in Calcutta, the British Government should have had him arrested and placed behind bars. The responsibility for Partition rests heavily on Britain.

As for the book, it is not India-specific but deals in great detail with Palestine during the last 1,000 days of the British Empire. With King George having to drop the "I" in his title "RI", Britain's imperial role had come to an end rather unremarkably.



Acharya, I was right in thinking that an unknown factor of Indian independence was a bargain between US and UK with the understanding that the US would take over the role of the UK in India. I got that from the vast number of books written since 1865 by the US elite and their deep interest in studying India as revealed by teh contents of the large number of books in Google. It just doesnt make sense why would US elite study India that early on?

Also your thinking of UK complicity in Direct Action is also being remarked by the reviewer.

Also my admiration of Gandhi has shot up more after this review. He knew the importance of a united India better than the others. A divided India unless we solve the Pakistan problem will always hinder the rise of India.

Need to think about this.

**acharya** · 11-10-2007, 06:17 AM

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article....7&storyID=28434

QUOTE
Religion and Foreign Policy: Politics By Other Means
by Conn Hallinan

Religion has long played a role in the Westâs relationship to the rest of the world, but more as a way to divide populations than convert them. Ireland and India are cases in point.

England invaded Ireland in 1170, but for the first 439 years it was a conquest in name only. In 1609, however, James I founded the Plantation of Ulster, imported 20,000 Protestant settlers and introduced religious strife as a political tactic. By favoring Protestants over the native Catholics in politics and economicsâthe so-called Ulster Privilegeâthe English pitted both groups against one another.

The tactic was enormously successful, and England used it throughout its colonial empire. Nowhere were the British so successful in transplanting the Irish model than in India.

But in Indiaâs case it was unnecessary to import a foreign religion. The colonial authorities had Indiaâs Muslim and Sikh minorities to use as their wedge. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann argues in âIndian Summer,â it was the British who defined Indiaâs communities on the basis of religion: âMany Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.â

Muslims and Sikhs were favored for the few civil jobs and university slots open to Indians, a favoritism that generated tensions among the three communities, just as it had in Northern Ireland. The colonial regimes exploited everyone in both countries, but for some the burden was heavier. When communities in both countries fell to fighting over the few crumbs available to them, the British authorities stepped in to keep order, sadly shaking their heads about the inability of people in both countries ever to govern themselves.

While Sir John Davis was describing the Irish as âdegenerateâ with the âheart of a beast,â Lord Hastings was arguing that âthe Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to animal functions and even in them indifferent â¦ with no higher intellect than a dog.â

Lest one dismiss the above characterizations as typical 19th Century colonial racism, Winston Churchill once commented, âI hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.â

Churchillâs intolerance, however, had a very practical side to it. As prime minister he once said that he hoped that the tension between Hindus and Muslims would remain âA bulwark of British rule in India.â

ramana · 12-06-2007, 10:54 AM

Colonial Legacy- Myths and Popular beliefs

dhu · (This post was last modified: 02-03-2008, 09:05 AM by dhu.)

QUOTEMerchant adventurer
Tristram Hunt
...
When it came to selling Britain, there was little shift from the Blair years. Maybe less militarism and neo-Christian liberal interventionism, but the same kind of post-imperial, post-industrial identity that has been forged over the past decade. A hundred and fifty years ago, of course, it was all very different. As the British empire accelerated towards its apogee, Whitehall was beginning to take over the running of India in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny and a brief truce had been called in the Second Opium War. British policy then was about hammering open the interiors of India and China for cotton and drugs and, in the words of Queen Victoria, "to protect the poor natives and to advance civilisation". The Royal Navy shelled a passage along China's ports to fend off French competition and secure the East India Company's opium monopoly. Whereas today British ministers pay their dutiful respects to China's ancient civilisation, in the 1850s our army was happy to burn and loot its way through Beijing.

The money from the opium sales helped to pay for Britain's fiendishly expensive outlay at Brown's next port of call, India. Rather than vying for foreign investment in the UK, Britain, by the 1880s, had ploughed Â£270m into Indian infrastructure - near one-fifth of its entire investment overseas. But none of that found its way into the Indian export sector. As even the staunchly pro-imperial Niall Fergsuon admits, "The free trade imposed on India in the 19th century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition."

Barbarians capitulate

Always attentive to the contradiction, Marx and Engels thought the ultimate benefits of capitalist imperialism - the forcible introduction of backward, Asiatic peoples into the revolutionary slipstream of history - far outweighed any temporary brutalities by British troops in Beijing or Lucknow. As the Communist Manifesto put it, "The cheap prices of its [capitalism's] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." Engels, the Manchester mill-owner, spoke with positive relish of India's "native handicrafts . . . finally being crushed by English competition" as his own company benefited from the elimination of Indian calico exports and the forcible opening up of south Asian markets. India and China were there to be plundered by the British commercial-imperial complex.

Times have certainly changed when British prime ministers hurtle through Beijing and Delhi trying to lure sovereign funds into the UK. In one sense, this is an obvious story of the rise and fall of great powers: a salutary readjustment to Britain's pre-imperial marginality and, with it, something of an appeal to a mercantile, buccaneering Elizabethan identity. That age of Drake, Frobisher and Gresham, with its Court and City, was pleased to strike any bargain and happy to entertain the most unethical money-making ventures.
...

02-03-2008, 09:54 AM

One of the murkiest chapters in the history of the colonial rule in India is the kaala paani. The Andamans were then known as the Devil's Islands of the British Raj. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal are over 1200 km south of Kolkata and east of Chennai. The British chose them in order to isolate political prisoners physically, socially and politically. Conditions in these islands were most unhealthy and led to high rate of mortality. The prisoners were put to the hardest labour possible such as clearing jungles, cutting wood, preparing bricks and lime.

They were treated worse than criminals. Boden Kloss, an English observer has recorded with intense feeling of sadness, "Prisoners were set free on nearby Viper Island - to make friends, one supposes, with poisonous snakes. Who knows how many lived?" To be sent there was considered to be a living death and hence it came to be known as Kaala Paani (lit: black waters).

During the First War of Independence of 1857, the British resolved to ship out freedom fighters, whom they called 'mutineers' from the soil of the mainland to distant islands and isolate them. A noting in Home Judicial, OC No. 21 dated 15 January 1858 states, "It has been determined by the Right Hon'ble the Governor-General in Council to establish a penal settlement on the Andaman Islands, for reception of the first instance of convicts sentenced to imprisonment, and to transportation for the crimes of mutiny and rebellion and for other offences connected therewith."

The first batch of freedom-fighters reached Port Blair on 10 March 1858 from Calcutta. Their number was 200. About the first batch, it is reported that four Punjab mutineers died on the way before reaching Andamans and within three months of their arrival 64 of them died in hospital. Some of them were executed. The second batch of 171 convicts from Karachi came by the ships, the 'Roman empire' and 'Edward' in April 1858. By May 1864, the number of convicts grew to 3294. As the number of prisoners deported from the mainland started increasing to the staggering figure of 9603 by 1874, it became difficult to check their 'patriotic indiscipline' . An Order No. 423 dated 30 September 1893 was issued by the British administration for the construction of a bigger and well secured jail as a 'matter of great urgency' to dehumanize these freedom-fighters. The Jail was sanctioned at an estimated cost of Rs. 517352 (1893 prices!). Some half-starved 600 prisoners were used as forced labour for the construction of the Jail that was meant to imprison themselves and their fellow countrymen. Constant vigil was kept on these labour prisoners during the construction work so that no revolt was organized by them. It was for this reason that the target of three years took thirteen years for the completion of its construction. The Cellular Jail was thus completed in 1906 and the number of prisoners it housed had swelled to 14086! Situated on the sea coast in the north-eastern portion of Port Blair, the Cellular Jail was the first hair-raising sight for the deported prisoners arriving in ships coming to Port Blair.

Like an octopus having eight arms to catch its prey, the Cellular Jail had seven protruding arms or wings from the central watchtower. Each wing had three floors with 698 cells. Each cell measured 4.1 by 1.9 metres, just enough for one convict. These small cells gave the Cellular Jail its name. All the seven wings of the Cellular Jail had a meeting point at the central watchtower for entry and exit. Each cell had separate iron bolts and locking devices outside, beyond the reach of the prisoner's hand. Though there was no chance of an escape, there was constant vigil by 21 wardens; seven on each floor facing their respective wings. There were sentries in the central watchtower.

The prisoners would be made to walk through the well guarded first iron-bar entrance. As the gate would be unlocked and pulled, it would make a terrible sound like the jaws of death ready to swallow a new arrival. After this first gate was a second one. Between the two gates was a thick wall. It was covered with gruesome instruments nailed to the wall. These were the terrible instruments of punishment and torture. Some of the instruments of torture in the Cellular Jail were as follows:

1. Handcuffs - to be used on the wrists in front or behind; the prisoners would also be made to remain standing for hours at a stretch with their hands tied to handcuffs hooked to a wall above his height(standing handcuffs punishment). The prisoners were kept in this position from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. and from 12 noon to 5 p.m. They were not allowed to answer nature's call while undergoing this punishment. Many would pass urine and stools when it became impossible to control their urge. They would then be punished for soiling their clothes and the prison! This inhuman punishment was administered for a week at a stretch.

2. Link fetters- composed of a chain and ankle rings; the length of the chain being two feet and the total weight being 3 pounds. The bars were stiff and unbending; riveted to the prisoner's feet and hung up to his waist. As the bars were stiff, the prisoner could not bend his legs throughout the period of punishment which could extend for months.

3. Cross bar fetters - composed of single bar for the purpose of keeping the legs apart and ankle rings; length of the bar being 16 inches and the total weight being two and a half pounds. Under this sentence, the prisoner could not bring his feet or legs close to each other. He had to walk, sit, work and sleep with feet and legs stretched out. This punishment could continue at a stretch for weeks!

4. Canes, thick and long

5. Bayonets

6. Rifles

7. Shackles

8. Thick long ropes

9. Leather whips fastened to a stiff handle

10. Oil mill or kolu; the prisoners would be yoked like bullocks to the metal bar and made to push it around in a circle so that dried coconut pieces kept in a central receptacle would get crushed and oil would drip; total oil required to be thus extracted would be thirty pounds.

To minimize the chances of communication between the convicts and to isolate them from each other, the construction of the Cellular Jail was made such that the front portion of each wing faced the back side of the other wing at a sufficient distance. There were no dormitories in the Cellular Jail. On arrival in the Cellular Jail, convicts would be placed in solitary confinement for six months. This helped to tone down their vigour and vitality and demoralize them. Thus the Cellular Jail was a prison within a prison!

From the early period of the 20th century onwards, jails in India were packed with young revolutionaries. The most feared among them were sent for Kaala paani to the Cellular Jail. Among those who served time here were revolutionaries of :

Â· The Alipore Bomb Case

Â· The Chittagong Armoury Case

Â· The Nashik Conspiracy Case

Â· The Lahore Conspiracy Case

Â· The Nadia Conspiracy Case

Â· The Gadar Party heroes

Â· The Khulna Conspiracy Case

Â· The Rumpa Peasants' Revolt

Most of them were charged under section 121 of the Indian Penal Code (1860), namely "waging of War against the King of the British Empire".

The 1941 earthquake caused considerable damage to the Cellular Jail. During the Japanese occupation, further damagae was caused to the building which resulted in demolition of four wings of the Cellular Jail. Presently, there are only three wings that stand as a silent monument to those unheard and unlisted heroes who perished in its soil and made the land fertile for the freedom of our motherland!

After Independence, there was a proposal by Pandit Nehru to turn the Cellular Jail into a hospital. One suspects that Nehru had a deep-seated animus against the revolutionaries. His daughter Prime Minister Shrimati Indira Gandhi however proved worthy in this regard. When a proposal to beautify the Cellular jail reached her, she made the following observation, "The main point of the preservation of the Jail is to maintain its gaunt severity. This should be the most effective and poignant memorial of all. New memorials, statues, gardens and youth camps will detract from the atmosphere of the original Jail, which we seek to preserve, and will obviously have an artificial look. These proposals should therefore be dropped. Instead of all this paraphernalia, roll call of freedom-fighters, inscribed on metal plaques might be put up at an appropriate place. We are in no position to incur the additional expenditure which the expert team's recommendations would necessitate. The matter should be re-examined so that construction of new buildings is avoided" (Letter no. 30/130/69, ANL dated 12 December 1971).

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