Colonial History of India

[acharya]

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

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
Religion and Foreign Policy: Politics By Other Means
by Conn Hallinan


Religion has long played a role in the West’s 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 economics—the so-called Ulster Privilege—the 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 India’s case it was unnecessary to import a foreign religion. The colonial authorities had India’s Muslim and Sikh minorities to use as their wedge. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann argues in “Indian Summer,” it was the British who defined India’s communities on the basis of religion: “<span style='color:red'>Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”</span>

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 “degenerate” with the “heart of a beast,” Lord Hastings was arguing that “the Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to animal functions and even in them indifferent … with no higher intellect than a dog.”

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

Churchill’s 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 “A bulwark of British rule in India.”


<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->