Letters To Be Cut Pasted

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-29-2009, 06:01 PM by Husky.)

4. Systematically introducing substance abuse and addiction (precisely what christianism did to the native populations of the Americas and Australia and colonised China)

Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:
QUOTEInstead of encouraging education, the Government encouraged drink. When the British came, India was a sober nation. "The temperance of the people," said Warren Hastings, "is demonstrated in the simplicity of their food and their total abstinence from spirituous liquors and other substances of intoxication.120 With the first tradingposts established by the British, saloons were opened for the sale of rum, and the East India Company made handsome profits from the trade.121 When the Crown took over India it depended on the saloons for a large part of its revenue; the license system was so arranged as to stimulate drinking and sales. The Government revenue from such licenses has increased seven-fold in the last forty years; in 1922 it stood at $60,000,000 annually- three times the appropriation for schools and universities.

"Miss Mayo tells us that Hindu mothers feed opium to their children; and she concludes that India is not fit for Home Rule. What she says is true; what she does not say makes what she says worse than a straightforward lie. She does not tell us (though she must have known) that women drug their children because the mothers must abandon them every day to go to work in the factories. She does not tell us that the opium is grown only by the Government, and is sold exclusively by the Government; that its sale, like the sale of drink through saloons, is carried on despite the protests of the Nationalist Congress, the Industrial and Social Conferences, the Provincial Conferences, the Brahmo-Somaj, the Arya-Somaj, the Mohammedans and the Christians; that there are seven thousand opium shops in India, operated by the British Government, in the most conspicuous places in every town;122 that the Central Legislature in 1921 passed a bill prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, and that the Government refused to act upon it;123 that from two to four hundred thousand acres of India's soil, sorely needed for the raising of food, are given over to the growing of opium124 and that the sale of the drug brings to the Government one-ninth of its total revenue every year.125 She does not tell us that Burma excluded opium by law until the British came, and is now overrun with it; that the British distributed it free in Burma to create a demand for it;126 that whereas the traffic has been stopped in the Philippines, England has refused,at one World Opium Conference after another, to abandon it in India; that though she has agreed to, reduce the export of opium by 10% yearly, she has refused to reduce its sale in India; that the Report of the Government Retrenchment Commission of 1925 emphasized "the importance of safeguarding opium sales as an important source of revenue," and recommended "no further reduction";127 that when Gandhi by a peaceful antiopium campaign in Assam had reduced the consumption of the drug there by one-half, the Government put a stop to his labors and jailed forty-four of his aides.128 She does not tell us that the health, courage and character of the Hindu people have been undermined through this ruthless drugging of a nation by men pretending to be Christians."
Christian Britain inflicted opium on the Chinese too:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3181326
The visible page summarises the general historical view of Opiated China.
QUOTEUnearthing Popular Attitudes toward the Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Late Qing and Early Republican Fujian
Joyce Madancy
Union College

It has long been axiomatic among historians of late imperial and early Republican China that opium was a plague on the Chinese people--sapping their willpower and stamina, weakening the military, draining the Qing treasury while padding the coffers of the colonial Indian government, and reinforcing China's international image as an empire in decline. The settlements with Great Britain following the Opium War of 1839-1842 and the Arrow War of 1858-1860 ultimately compelled China to drop its own long-standing legal restrictions against the importation of foreign opium and sparked the growth of a lucrative domestic opium economy that eventually extended throughout the Qing empire. By the turn of the twenthieth century, opium was perceived as having caused widespread social dysfunction, and the drug served as a powerful metaphor for China's political somnambulism in the age of Western imperialism. In short, China had developed a serious opium problem--and along with it, a public...

4.1 The modern political movement to take India back to the drunken illiterate stupour imposed by the erstwhile christian empire
The christian principle of "Instead of encouraging education, the Government encouraged drink", which the christian British introduced in India, is now being repeated by the inheritors of christian miseducation, such as the pseudo-secular Renuka Choudhary with her Pub Bharo, and the associated rise of the Pink Chaddi Campaign (initiated by christian Hindu-bashing writer for Tehelka, Nisha Susan, who started her "consortium of pub-going, loose and forward women" for such political purposes) and the increased pseudo-secular christian drive to push the non-culture of Valentine's Day more:
http://vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayAr...spx?id=399
Pursuing Sex: should we scrap the Sharda Act?
Sandhya Jain
22 Feb 2009

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-29-2009, 06:54 PM by Husky.)

5. Christian theft of India's wealth and land 

All the excerpts from Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:

5.1 India before Britain's christian colonialism
QUOTEThose who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus to-day will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France. "This wealth," says Sunderland,
"was created by the Hindus' vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized worldnearly every kind of creation of Man's brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty-had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods-the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silkwere famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones cut in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal-iron, steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture-equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering business men, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came."7

5.2 How the christians from Britain stole India
QUOTEIt was this wealth that the East India Company proposed to appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their intention to "establish . . . a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come." The company rented from the Hindu authorities trading posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, and fortified them, without permission of the authorities, with troops and cannon. In 1756 the Rajah of Bengal, resenting this invasion, attacked the English Fort William, captured it, and crowded one hundred and forty-six English prisoners into the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, from which only twenty-three emerged alive the next morning. A year later Robert Clive defeated the Bengal forces at Plassey with the loss of only twenty-two British killed, and thereupon declared his Company the owner of the richest province in India. He added further territory by forging and violating treaties, by playing one native prince against another, and by generous bribes given and received. Four million dollars were sent down the river to Calcutta in one shipment. He accepted "presents" amounting to $1,170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his favor and his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself. "When I think," he said, "of the marvelous riches of that country, and the comparatively small part which I took away, I am astonished at my own moderation."9 Such were the morals of the men who proposed to bring civilization to India.

His successors in the management of the Company now began a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India. They profiteered without hindrance: goods which they sold in England for $10,000,000 they bought for $2,000,000 in India. 10 They engaged, corporately and individually, in inland trade, and by refusing to pay the tolls exacted of Hindu traders, acquired a lucrative monopoly, The Company paid such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32,000 a shareP Its agents deposed and set up Hindu rulers according to bribes refused or received; in ten years they took in, through such presents, $30,000,000.13 They forged documents as circumstances required, and hanged Hindus for forging documents.14 Clive had set up Mir Jafar as ruler of Bengal for $6,192,875; Clive's successors deposed him and set up Mir Kasim on payment of $1,001,345; three years later they restored Mir Jafar for $2,500,825; two years later they replaced him with Najim-ud-Daula for $1,151,780.15

They taxed the provinces under the Company so exorbitantly that two-thirds of the population fled;16 defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates. It was usual to demand 50% of the net produce of the land. "Every effort, lawful and unlawful," says a Bombay Administration. report, written by Englishmen, "was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what was demanded."

...
"Everybody and everything," says the Oxford History of India, "was on sale."22 And Macaulay writes:
"During the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society. . . . The servants of the Company. . . forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. . . . Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. . . . Under their old masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English Government was not to be so shaken off. That Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization."23

5.3 The christian government of Britain takes the place of the plundering christian East India Company 
QUOTEBy 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven that the British Government took over the captured and plundered territories as a colony of the Crown; a little island took over half a continent. England paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at 10.5%), out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people.24 All the debts on the Company's books, together with the accrued interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law-i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.

... the expropriation of state after state from the native rulers by war or bribery, or the simple decree of Lord Dalhousie that whenever a Hindu prince died without leaving a direct heir, his territory should pass to the British; in Dalhousie's administration alone eight states were absorbed in this peaceful way. Province after province was taken over by offering its ruler a choice between a pension and war.26 In the seventh decade of the nineteenth century England added 4000 square miles to her Indian territory; in the eighth decade, 15,000 square miles; .in the ninth, 90,000; in the tenth, 133,000.27 John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth century alone England carried on one hundred and eleven wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops;28 millions of Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated themselves on conquering India without spending a cent.29 Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous, achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of a million square miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the expense.30

When at last in 1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted, they were suppressed with "medieval ferocity";31 a favorite way of dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits from the mouths of cannon.32 "We took," said the London Spectator, "at least 100,000 Indian lives in the mutiny."33 This is what the English call the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the Hindus call the War of Independence. There is much in a name.

<img src='http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Image caption: "An Execution in British India", painting by Vassili Verestchagin, ca. 1888, on the page "Mutiny Independence Delhi 1858 Massacre".
( http://www.harappa.com/lith/delhi2.html , http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg )

Let Englishmen describe the result. A report to the House of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804 stated: "It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company the condition of the people of India has been worse than before."34

...
F.J. Shore, British administrator in Bengal, testified as follows to the House of Commons in 1857:
"The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept."38 Such was the method of the British acquisition of India; this is the origin of the British claim to rule India today. And now, leaving the past, we shall examine the present, and show, point after point, how English rule is at this very moment, with all its modest improvements, destroying Hindu civilization, and the Hindu people.

5.4 Christianism taxes Hindus to death in their own land 
QUOTEIV. The Caste System in India

The present caste system in India consists of four classes: the real Brahmans-i.e., the British bureaucracy; the real Kshatryas-i.e., the British army; the real Vaisyas-i.e., the British traders; and the real Sudras and Untouchables-i.e., the Hindu people.

...
With a government responsible to England, not to India, it is natural that the power of taxation should be freely used. Though before the coming of the English the land was private property, the Government made itself the sole owner of the soil and charged for it a land tax or rental now equal to one-fifth of the produce.44In many cases in the past this land tax has amounted to half the gross produce, in some cases to more than the entire gross produce; in general it is two to three times as high as under pre-English rule.45 The Government has the exclusive right to manufacture salt, and adds to its sale-price a tax amounting to onehalf a cent per pound. When we remember that the average annual income in India is only $33, and recall the judgment of a missionary paper, The Indian Witness, that "it is safe to assume that 100,000,000 of the population of India have an annual income of not more than $5.00 a head,"46 we begin to understand how oppressive even these taxes may be, and how much they share in responsibility for the ill-health and emaciation of the Hindus.

A member of parliament, Cathcart Wilson, says: "The percentage of taxes in India, as related to the gross produce, is more than that of any other country."47 Until recently the rate was twice as high as in England, three times'as high as in Scotland. Herbert Spencer protested against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil."48 Another Englishman, the late H. Y. Hyndman, after detailing the proof that taxation in India was far heavier than in any other country, though its population is poorer, entitled his book The Bankruptcy of India. Sir William Hunter, former member of the Viceroy's Council; said in 1875: "The Government assessment does not leave enough food to the cultivator to support himself and his family throughout the year."49 Mr. Thorburn, one-time Financial Commissioner of the Punjab, said that "the whole revenue of the Punjab. . . is practically drawn from the producing masses."50 Since the enactment of the income tax this is no longer true.

I asked the guide at Trichinopoly how the people of India had found, three or four hundred years ago, the money to build the vast temples there and at Madura and Tanjore. He answered that the rajahs had been able to build these edifices despite the fact that they had taxed the people much less severely than the English were doing.

Against this terrible blood-letting the Hindus have no redress; their legislatures are impotent. And in the midst of the heart-breaking poverty engendered partly by this taxation, the Government treats itself, at staggering cost, to gigantic official buildings at Delhi, needlessly alien in style to the architecture of India; for seven months of every year it transfers the Capital, with all its machinery and personnel, to vacation resorts in the mountains, at an expense of millions of dollars; and from time to time it holds gorgeous Durbars, to impress the people who provide tens of millions for the ceremony." It pays to be free.

The result is that the national debt of India, which was $35,000,000 in 1792, rose to $105,000,000 in 1805; to $150,000,000 in 1829; to $215,000,000 in 1845; to $275,000,000 in 1850; to $350,000,000 in 1858; to $500,000,000 in 1860; to $1,000,000,000 in 1901; to $1,535,000,000 in 1913, and to $3,500,000,000 in 1929.52 Let these figures tell the tale.

5.5 Christianism's calculated economic destruction of Hindu India: destroying Hindu industry and wealth-generation
QUOTEV. Economic Destruction
The economic condition of India is the inevitable corollary of its political exploitation. Even the casual traveler perceives the decay of agriculture (which absorbs 85% of the people), and the destitution of the peasant. He sees the Hindu ryot in the rice-fields, wading almost naked in the mud of a foreign tyrant's land; his loin-cloth is all the finery that he has. In 1915 the Statistical Department of Bengal, the most prosperous of India's provinces, calculated the average wage of the able-bodied agricultural laborer to be $3.60 per month.78 His hut is of branches often open at the sides, and loosely roofed with straw; or it is a square of dried mud adorned with a cot of dried mud, and covered with mud and sticks and leaves. The entire house and furnishings of a family of six, including all their clothing, are worth $10.79 The peasant cannot afford newspapers or books, entertainment, tobacco, or drink. Almost half~his earnings go to the Government; and if he cannot pay the tax, his holding, which may have been in his family for centuries, is confiscated by the State.

If he is fortunate he escapes from the overtaxed land and takes refuge in the cities. Provided there are not too many other applicants, he may get work in Delhi, the capital of India, carrying away the white master's excrement; sanitary facilities are unnecessary when slaves are cheap. Or he can go to the factory, and become, if he is very lucky, one of the 1,409,000 "hands" of India. He will find difficulty in getting a place, for 33% of the factory workers are women, and 8% are children.80

In the mines 34% of the employees are women, of whom one-half work underground; 16% of the miners are children. In the cotton mills of Bombay the heat is exhausting, and the lungs are soon destroyed by the fluff-laden air; men work there until they reach a subsistence wage, and then their health breaks down.

More than half the factories use their employees fifty-four hours a week. The average wage of the factory workers is sixty to seventy cents a day; though allowance must be made for the inferior skill and strength of the Hindu as compared with the European or American laborer long trained in the ways of machines. In Bombay, in 1922, despite the factory acts of that year, the average wage of the cotton workers was 33 cents. In that same year the profit of the owners of those mills was 125%. This was an "off-year";in better years, the owners said, the profits were 200%. The workman's home is like his wage; usually it consists of one room, shared by the family with various animals; Zimand found one room with thirty tenants.81

Such is the industrial revolution that a British government has allowed to develop under its control, despite the example of enlightened legislation in America and England. The people flock to the factories because the land cannot support them; and the land cannot support them because it is overtaxed, because it is overpopulated, and because the domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out in winter their gleanings from the summer fields, have been destroyed by British control of Indian tariffs and trade. For of old the handicrafts of India were known throughout the world; it was manufactured-- i.e., hand-made--goods which European merchants brought from India to sell to the Westn In 1680, says the British historian Orme, the manufacture of cotton was almost universal in India,82 and the busy spinning-wheels enabled the women to round out the earnings of their men.

But the English in India objected to this competition of domestic industry with their mills at home; they resolved that India should be reduced to a purely agricultural country, and be forced in consequence to become a vast market for British machine-made goods. The Directors of the East India. Company gave orders that the production of raw silk should be encouraged, and the manufacture of silk fabrics discouraged; that silkwinders should be compelled to work in the Company's factories, and be prohibited, under severe penalties, from working outside.83 Parliament discussed ways and means of replacing Hindu by British industries. A tariff of 70-80% was placed upon Hindu textiles imported into free-trade England, while India was compelled, by foreign control of her government, to admit English textiles almost duty free.

Lest Indian industries should nevertheless continue somehow to exist, an excise tax was placed on the manufacture of cotton goods in India.84 As a British historian puts it:
"It is a melancholy instance of the wrong done to India by the country on which she has become dependent. . . . Had India been independent, she would have retaliated, would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation. This act of self-defense was not permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stranger. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms."85

And another Englishman wrote:
"We have done everything possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to the cruel selfishness of English commerce. . . . Under the pretense of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to receive the products of the steam-looms of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at merely nominal duties; while the handwrought manufactures of Bengal and Behar, beautiful in fabric and durable in wear, have heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their importation into England."86

The result was that Manchester and Paisley flourished, and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to prosperity was forcibly arrested in its development, and compelled to be only a rural hinterland for industrial England.

The mineral wealth abounding in India's soil was not explored, for no competition with England was to be allowed.87 The millions of skilled artisans whom Indian handicrafts had maintained were added to the hundreds of millions who sought support from the land. "India," says Kohn, "was transformed into a purely agricultural country, and her people lived perpetually on the verge of starvation."88 The vast population which might have been comfortably supported by a combination of tillage and industry, became too great for the arid soil; and India was reduced to such penury that to-day nothing is left of her men, her women and her children but empty stomachs and fleshless bones.

5.6 The railways: the means by which Britain's christianism carried away loot stolen from Hindu Bharatam
QUOTEIt might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade. If this seems doubtful, observe their operation. Their greatest revenue comes, not, as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers--the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more in one compartment. The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government has refused to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people; these loans to date total over $100,000,000. The Government guarantees a minimum rate of interest on railway investments; the British companies who built the roads ran no risk whatever. No play or encouragement is given to initiative, competition, or private enterprise; the worst evils of a state monopoly are in force. All the losses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.89 So much for the railways.

5.7 Estimating how much thieving christianism had stolen from wealthy Hindu India: reducing Hindus to abject poverty in order to fund the christian (illiterate, destitute, Dickensian) England
QUOTECommerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a merchant marine of their own;90 all Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, as an additional strain on the starving nation's purse; and the building of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus, is prohibited.91

To this ruining of the land with taxation, this ruining of industry with tariffs, and this ruining of commerce with foreign control, add the drainage of millions upon millions of dollars from India year after year-and the attempt to explain India's poverty as the result of her superstitions becomes a dastardly deception practised upon a world too busy to be well informed. This drain having been denied, it is only necessary to state the facts, and to introduce them with a quotation from a document privately addressed by the British government in India to the Parliament of England. "Great Britain, in addition to the tribute which she makes India pay her through the customs, derives benefits from the savings .0f the service of the three presidencies (the provinces of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay) being spent in England instead of in India; and in addition to these savings, which probably amount to $500,000,000, she derives benefit from the fortunes realized by the European mercantile community, which are all remitted to England."92

This is a general statement; let us fill it in. Consider first the drain on India through trade. Not merely is this carried in British ships; far worse than that, there is an astounding surplus of exports over imports. In the happy years of the Company there were such balances as $30,000,000 exports and $3,000,000 imports;93 latterly the indecency has been reduced, and the excess of goods taken from India over goods brought into India is now a moderate one-third. In 1927, e.g., imports were $651,600,000, exports were $892,- 800,000; the excess of exports, $241,200,000.94 Where goes the money that pays for this excess? We are asked to believe that it takes the form of silver or gold imported and hoarded by the Hindus; but no man that has seen their poverty can believe so shameless a myth. Doubtless there is some hoarding, above all by the native princes, for India cannot be expected to put full faith in a banking system controlled by foreign masters. But it is the officials, the merchants and the manufacturers (most of whom are British) who take the great bulk of this profit, and return it to their countries in one form or another. As an East Indian merchant said in a Parliamentary report in 1853, when this process of bleeding was on a comparatively modest scale: "Generally up to 1847, the imports were about $30,000,000 and the exports about $47,500,000. The difference is the tribute which the Company received from the country."95

Consider, second, the drain through fortunes, dividends and profits made in India and spent abroad. The British come as officials or soldiers or traders; they make their money and return to Great Britain. Let an Englishman, Edmund Burke, describe them--and intensify his description to-day in proportion to the growth of British positions, manufactures and commerce in India.
"They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England; nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to make a sudden fortune. . . . Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect ofnew flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India."96

Consider, third, the drain through salaries and pensions derived from India and spent abroad. In 1927 Lord Winterton showed, in the House of Commons,that there were then some 7500 retired officialsin Great Britain drawing annually $17,500,000 in pensions from the Indian revenue;97 Ramsay MacDonald put the figure at $20,000,000 a year.98 When England, which is almost as overpopulated as Bengal, sends its sons to India, she requires of them twenty-four years of service, reduced by four years of furloughs; she then retires them for life on a generous pension, paid by the Hindu people. Even during their service these officials send their families or their children to live for the most part in England; and they support them there with funds derived from India.99 Almost everything bought by the British in India, except the more perishable foods, is purchased from abroad.100 A great proportion of the funds appropriated' for supplies by the Government of India is spent in England.

As early as 1783 Edmund Burke predicted that the annual drain of Indian resources to England without equivalent return would eventually destroy India.101 From Plassey to Waterloo, fiftyseven years, the drain of India's wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at two-and-a-half to five billion dollars.102 He adds, what Macaulay suggested long ago, that it was this stolen wealth from India which supplied England with free capital for the development of mechanical inventions, and so made possible the Industrial Revolution.103

In 1901 Dutt estimated that one-half of the net revenues of India flowed annually out of the country, never to return.104 In 1906 Mr. Hyndman reckoned the drain at $40,000,000 a year. A. J. Wilson valued it at one-tenth of the total annual production of India.105 Montgomery Martin, estimating the drain at $15,000,000 a year in 1838, calculated that these annual sums, retained and gathering interest in India, would amount in half a century to $40,000,000,000.106 Though it may seem merely spectacular to juggle such figures, it is highly probable that the total wealth drained from India since 1757, if it had all been left and invested in India, would now amount, at a low rate of interest, to $400,000,000,000.106

Allow for money reinvested in India, and a sum remains easily equivalent to the difference between the poorest and the richest nations in the world. The same high rate of taxation which has bled India to perhaps a mortal weakness, might have done her no permanent injury if the wealth so taken had all been returned into the economy and circulation of the country; but bodily withdrawn from her as so much of it was, it has acted like a long-continued transfusion of vital blood.

"So great an economic drain out of the resources of the land," says Dutt, "would impoverish the most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced India to a land of famines more frequent, more widespread and more fatal, than any known before in the history of India, or of the world."107

Sir Wilfred Scawen Blunt sums it up from the point of view of a true Englishman:
"India's famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land values (i.e. raising the valuation and assessment) has not been altered. The salt tax. . . still robs the very poor. . . . What was bad twenty-five years ago is worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India's food to alien mouths. Endemic famines and endemic plagues are facts no official statistics can explain away. . . . Though myself a good Conservative . . . I own to being shocked at the bondage in which the Indian people are held; . . . and I have come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the country at the present rate, the inhabitants, sooner or later, will have to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing left for them to eat."108

Husky · (This post was last modified: 05-03-2009, 04:55 PM by Husky.)

5.8 Why Hindus are poor: it's not due to Hindu Dharma, it is because of christianism. More on how christian Britain had reduced wealthy, healthy Hindu Bharatam to poverty, sickness, malnourishment, famine and mass-death.

Jabez T. Sunderland, The New Nationalist Movement in India (1908), for The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/08oct/nationmo.htm - name correctly rendered as Jabez T. Sunderland, same as how Durant referred to him.
(Article also at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/190810/na...st-india/3 where Sunderland's surname has been wrongly rendered as 'Sutherland')
found via Rajeev2004.blogspot

QUOTEWhat is the cause of these famines, and this appalling increase in their number and destructiveness? The common answer is, the failure of the rains. But there seems to be no evidence that the rains fail worse now than they did a hundred years ago. Moreover, why should failure of rains bring famine? The rains have never failed over areas so extensive as to prevent the raising of enough food in the land to supply the needs of the entire population. Why then have people starved? Not because there was lack of food. Not because there was lack of food in the famine areas, brought by railways or otherwise within easy reach of all. There has always been plenty of food, even in the worst famine years, for those who have had money to buy it with, and generally food at moderate prices. Why, then, have all these millions of people perished? Because they were so indescribably poor. All candid and thorough investigation into the causes of the famines of India has shown that the chief and fundamental cause has been and is the poverty of the people,âa poverty so severe and terrible that it keeps the majority of the entire population on the very verge of starvation even in years of greatest plenty, prevents them from laying up anything against times of extremity, and hence leaves them, when their crops fail, absolutely undoneâwith nothing between them and death, unless some form of charity comes to their aid. Says Sir Charles Elliott long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, "Half the agricultural population do not know from one halfyear's end to another what it is to have a full meal." Says the Honorable G. K. Gokhale, of the Viceroy's Council,"From 60,000,000 to 70,000,000 of the people of India do not know what it is to have their hunger satisfied even once in a year."

And the people are growing poorer and poorer. The late Mr. William Digby, of London, long an Indian resident, in his recent book entitled "Prosperous" India,shows from official estimates and Parliamentary and Indian Blue Books, that, whereas the average daily income of the people of India in the year 1850 was estimated as four cents per person (a pittance on which one wonders that any human being can live), in 1882 it had fallen to three cents per person, and in 1900 actually to less than two cents per person. Is it any wonder that people reduced to such extremities as this can lay up nothing? Is it any wonder that when the rains do not come, and the crops of a single season fail, they are lost? And where is this to end? If the impoverishment of the people is to go on, what is there before them but growing hardship, multiplying famines, and increasing loss of life?

Here we get a glimpse of the real India. It is not the India which the traveler sees, following the usual routes of travel, stopping at the leading hotels conducted after the manner of London or Paris, and mingling with the English lords of the country. It is not the India which the British "point to with pride," and tell us about in their books of description and their official reports. This is India from the inside, the India of the people, of the men, women, and children, who were born there and die there, who bear the burdens and pay the taxes, and support the costly government carried on by foreigners, and do the starving when the famines come.

What causes this awful and growing impoverishment of the Indian people? Said John Bright, "If a country be found possessing a most fertile soil, and capable of bearing every variety of production, and, notwithstanding, the people are in a state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances are there is some fundamental error in the government of that country."

One cause of India's impoverishment is heavy taxation. Taxation in England and Scotland is high, so high that Englishmen and Scotchmen complain bitterly. But the people of India are taxed more than twice as heavily as the people of England and three times as heavily as those of Scotland. According to the latest statistics at hand, those of 1905, the annual average income per person in India is about $6.00, and the annual tax per person about $2.00. Think of taxing the American people to the extent of one-third their total income! Yet such taxation here, unbearable as it would be, would not create a tithe of the suffering that it does in India, because incomes here are so immensely larger than there. Here it would cause great hardship, there it creates starvation.

Notice the single item of salt-taxation. Salt is an absolute necessity to the people, to the very poorest; they must have it or die. But the tax upon it which for many years they have been compelled to pay has been much greater than the cost value of the salt. Under this taxation the quantity of salt consumed has been reduced actually to one-half the quantity declared by medical authorities to be absolutely necessary for health. The mere suggestion in England of a tax on wheat sufficient to raise the price of bread by even a half-penny on the loaf, creates such a protest as to threaten the overthrow of ministries. Lately the salt-tax in India has been reduced, but it still remains well-nigh prohibitive to the poorer classes. With such facts as these before us, we do not wonder at Herbert Spencer's indignant protest against the "grievous salt-monopoly" of the Indian Government, and "the pitiless taxation which wrings from poor ryob nearly half the products of the soil."

Another cause of India's impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures, as the result of British rule. When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia but in all the leading markets of Northern Africa and of Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part they are gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which they were carried on are now largely or wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by them have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India's markets. She could not find entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured the market for her own goods. India would have protected herself if she had been able, by enacting tariff laws favorable to Indian interests, but she had no power, she was at the mercy of her conqueror.

A third cause of India's impoverishment is the enormous and wholly unnecessary cost of her government. Writers in discussing the financial situation in India have often pointed out the fact that her government is the most expensive in the world. Of course the reason why is plain: it is because it is a government carried on not by the people of the soil, but by men from a distant country. These foreigners, having all power in their own hands, including power to create such offices as they choose and to attach to them such salaries and pensions as they see fit, naturally do not err on the side of making the offices too few or the salaries and pensions too small. Nearly all the higher officials throughout India are British. To be sure, the Civil Service is nominally open to Indians. But it is hedged about with so many restrictions (among others, Indian young men being required to make the journey of seven thousand miles from India to London to take their examinations) that they are able for the most part to secure only the lowest and poorest places. The amount of money which the Indian people are required to pay as salaries to this great army of foreign civil servants and appointed higher officials, and then, later, as pensions for the same, after they have served a given number of years in India, is very large. That in three-fourths if not nine-tenths of the positions quite as good service could be obtained for the government at a fraction of the present cost, by employing educated and competent Indians, who much better understand the wants of the country, is quite true. But that would not serve the purpose of England, who wants these lucrative offices for her sons. Hence poor Indian ryots must sweat and go hungry, and if need be starve, that an ever-growing army of foreign officials may have large salaries and fat pensions. And of course much of the money paid for these salaries, and practically all paid for the pensions, goes permanently out of India.

Still Jabez T. Sunderland, The New Nationalist Movement in India (1908), for The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/08oct/nationmo.htm
(Also at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/190810/na...st-india/4
where his name is misspelled as Sutherland)
QUOTEPerhaps the greatest of all the causes of the impoverishment of the Indian people is the steady and enormous drain of wealth from India to England, which has been going on ever since the East India Company first set foot in the land, three hundred years ago, and is going on still with steadily increasing volume. England claims that India pays her no "tribute." Technically, this is true; but, really, it is very far from true. In the form of salaries spent in England, pensions sent to England, interest drawn in England on investments made in India, business profits made in India and sent to England, and various kinds of exploitation carried on in India for England's benefit, a vast stream of wealth ("tribute" in effect) is constantly pouring into England from India. Says Mr. R. C. Dutt, author of the Economic History of India (and there is no higher authority), "A sum reckoned at twenty millions of English money, or a hundred millions of American money [some other authorities put it much higher], which it should be borne in mind is equal to half the net revenues of India, is remitted annually from this country [India] to England, without a direct equivalent. Think of it! One-half of what we [in India] pay as taxes goes out of the country, and does not come back to the people. No other country on earth suffers like this at the present day; and no country on earth could bear such an annual drain without increasing impoverishment and repeated famines. We denounce ancient Rome for impoverishing Gaul and Egypt, Sicily and Palestine, to enrich herself. We denounce Spain for robbing the New World and the Netherlands to amass wealth. England is following exactly the same practice in India. Is it strange that she is converting India into a land of poverty and famine?"Once again, it goes to show that it was christianism that "converted India into a land of poverty and famine", not Hindu Dharma as criminal christian history-rewriting now pretends.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 03:43 PM by Husky.)

5.9 Christianism (Britain, Russia, France) steals diamonds and gems from Hindus while inflicting famines on them

http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/sep/23sld1.htm
QUOTEA rare black diamond called Black Orlov, or Eye of Brahma, has gone on public display for the first time in Britain.
Removed from an idol in India over two centuries ago, it now ranks among the world's most famous gems. The stone is currently on display, along with a replica of the world-famous Koh-i-Noor, at an exhibition on diamonds at London's Natural History Museum.

http://www.mapsofworld.com/referrals/metal...pe-diamond.html
QUOTEThe Blue Hope Diamond is believed to carry a curse as the discovery of the stone was the outcome of a theft. It is believed that several centuries ago, a French jeweler named Tavernier made a trip to India. From a temple in India, he stole a large blue diamond from the forehead of the statue of the Hindu goddess, Sita.
...
The exquisite Hope Diamond is placed in the National Gem Collection in the Smithsonian Institution, in the National Museum of Natural History. The diamond has an estimated value of $200,000,000 - $250,000,000.America is now in illegal possession of a diamond worth a quarter of a billion that rightfully belongs to Hindus. Even while sitting on stolen property, they're hypocritically awarding 8 oscars to christian Danny Boyle's slumdog propaganda film and simultaneously express wonder out of convenient ignorance about how on earth Indians got to be so poor. Note how America has still not returned the Hope Diamond to Hindus but is instead awarding an anti-Hindu movie made by a christian who didn't know anything about India and had never been to the country. Same old christian policy.

India had a great many diamond mines, as many books from the period of christian Britain's tyrannical occupation of Bharatam testify (even children's storybooks - for example, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess - make reference to this). Christianism made sure all of Bharatam's diamond mines were looted completely, just like islamism had previously run off with quite a few Indian diamonds, gems and precious metals (generally from Temples).

http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/bahadur_h...stones/page_094
Book: Bahadur. A Handbook Of Precious Stones
QUOTESome famous Indian diamonds
No account of diamonds will be complete without an account of some of the large and famous Indian diamonds, which earned a world wide fame and possessing a special interest. The following are the most important stones:â

1. Koh-i-noor.âSome legends are in vogue about its great antiquity even 5,000 years ago. But for the period up till 1304 A.D. no information is available. It is said that in 1304 A.D. Alauddin took it from the king of Malwa. It remained with the Moghuls till 1526, when Ranjit Singh got it from Ahmed Shaw at Lahore. When the Punjab was annexed by the British all the State jewels of Lahore were confiscated by the East India Co. On 3rd June, 1850, it reached Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, the weight being 186 carats. When it was with Aurangzeb, it had a weight of 793 carats. This reducÂtion was due to the unskilfulness of Hortensio Borgio, a Venetian lapidary who had been entrusted with its cutting. This enraged the emperor so much that Borgio was disÂpossessed of all his property and with great difficulty escaped with his life. The atone had the form of an irregular rosette. It was again recut in 1852. The present weight is 106 1/16 carats and the stone is of considerable beauty. It is supposed to have been found at Kollur.

2.Â Â The Great Moghul.âTavernier states that he saw this stone at the court of Aurangzeb and it weighed at that time 787-1/2 carats, and also .got confounded with Koh-i-noor. Tavernier has recorded two large stones, and hence it is thought that the two are only convertible names. Another theory refers the stpne to be cut into three by Borgio: (i) the Koh-i-noor, (ii) the Great Moghul and the third went to some petty chief. When cut it came to 240 carats. The subsequent history of the Great Moghul is a complete blank, and is supposed to have been lost or destroyed. It is presumed'to have been found at Kollur about 1650.

3.Â Â Pitt or Regent.âThough not the largest, it is conÂsidered to be the most perfect and beautiful diamond in existence, remarkable alike for its shape, proportion and fine water. Its original weight was 410 carats. It is supposed to have been found at Partial in 1701. The stone pame into the hands of William Pitt, Governor of Madras. It was cut to a perfect brilliant, weighing 163-7/8 carats. Subsequently it was purchased by the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France, for Â£135,000. It has been treasured as one of the most beautiful and valuable of the jewels belonging to the French nation. This diamond was stolen from the Garde-Meuble in 1792, but came back in a mysterious fashion. The republic then pledged it to a Berlin merchant from whom it was again redeemed. The Emperor Napolean I used to wear it in the pommel of his sword and always considered it to be the key-stone to all his future greatness. It was shown in the French Exhibition of 1855.

4. The Orloff or Amsterdam diamond.âThis stone is reported to have formed one of the eyes of a Hindu God, and was stolen away by a French Grenadier-of Pondicherry, who passed as an incognito Brahmin. It was first sold to an English sea-captain for Rs.20,000 who in turn sold it to a Jew for Rs. 1,20,000. It passed again to another hand from whom in or about 1772, it was bought by Prince Orloff for presentation to Catherine II for Rs.9 lakhs, and a life annuity of Rs.40,000 and the grant of a Russian nobility to the seller. There is also a legend that it was one of the stones taken away by Nadir Shaw from the Moghuls.
The stone in its outlines resembles Tavernier's Great Moghul, but there is the difference in weight. Another story says that it was brought to Russia and placed in the Russian Imperial sceptre weighing 194-1/4 carats. Like the
Koh-i-noor, it has the underside flat, and is rose cut. Water is of any yellowish tinge. Its size is that of a pigeon's egg. It is the largest of diamond in the Russian crown jewels. It is a stone of the finest water, pure and has a brilliant lustre.

5.Â Â The Sancy.âIts early history is not traceable. It was sold by the King of Portugal to Baron de Sancy, and hence known as the Sancy. It was in his family for more than a century, then with James II of England and afterÂwards with Louis XIV. It was lost in the French Revolution of 1792 and found again. It was bought by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy of Bombay for Rs.2 lakhs. It is almond shaped, of very fine water, and weighs 53-1/2 carats. The cut is evidently Indian and the stone is covered all over with tiny facets.

6.Â Â The Nizam.âThis stone was found at Golconda and weighed 340 carats (afterwards 277 carats). It was broken in the year of the Indian Mutiny. It is now presumed to be in the possession of the Nizam.

7.Â Â The Florentine Brilliant.âThe Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Austrian Yellow was valued at Rs. 10-1/2 lakhs. It was double rose cut and weighed 139-1/2 carats. Charles the Bold had three diamonds of great beauty and value. The history of the two is confused with one another, and the third is the Sancy already referred to. After passing

8. The Pigott diamond.âThis stone was taken away from India by Lord Pigott about 1775 and passed through several hands. It is brilliant cut and weighed 82-1/4 carats. It was once sold for Rs 3-1/4 lakhs.

9. The Hope diamond.âThis beautiful diamond was believed to have been taken from India. It has a steely or greenish blue colour, an extremely rare tint in diamonds, a brilliant lustre and a fine play of colours. It has been known since 1830, and its original weight was 112-3/16 carats, but the present weight is only 44-1/4 carats. It was found at the Kollur mines, stolen from an Indian temple by Tavernier in 1642 and sold by him to Louis XIV in 1668. It finally came into the hands of Thomas Phillip Hope. The stone is supposed to have brought ill-luck in its train. It figured a great deal in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

10. The Great table of Tavernier.âIt was seen by him in 1642. According to him it weighed 242-3/16 carats and that it was the largest diamond he had seen in India in the hands of dealers. His offer of Bs.4 lakhs for this stone was rejected.

11. Dariya-i-noor.â'River of Light'âIt was rose cut and weighed 186 carats. It appears to have been captured by Nadir Shaw at Delhi and now is the largest diamond in the Persian collection.

Husky · 03-08-2009, 05:37 PM

5.10 The christian genocide after the War of Independence ('Sepoy Mutiny')

While Will Durant's source (the London Spectator) estimated that the christian British took "at least 100,000 lives in the mutiny", it's not clear what that 'at least' entails, nor whether it was over and done with at that point.

One writer has estimated that the toll could be as high as 10 million, since the sadistic christian revenge on Indians for standing up to the foreign genocidal maniacs did not look to have stopped with the immediate reprisals:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,...24,00.html
QUOTE1857 mutiny revisited
Friday August 24, 2007, The Guardian
India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years

Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.

...
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.

His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed - either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.

The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died."

There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children."

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 03:22 PM by Husky.)

6. Christianism knows no Democracy, Freedom of Speech or Human Rights (and can't/won't honour its word)

All the excerpts from Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 3:

6.1 Dying for the christian empire: Indian soldiers forced to fight and die elsewhere to win christianism's wars

QUOTEThe suspension of the Revolutionary movement enabled England to reduce the Indian army to 15,000 men.6 The total number of Hindus who were persuaded, often by means amounting to compulsion, to fight for England in the war, was 1,338,620, being 178,000 more than all the troops contributed by the combined Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.7 None of the Hindu soldiers was granted a commission, however brave he might have proved himself to be.8 Yet they gave a good account of themselves in France, in Palestine, in Syria and Mesopotamia; a British historian speaks of "the brilliant performances of the Indian contingent sent to France in 1914 at a critical time in the Great War";9 and some say that it was the Hindu troops who first turned back the Germans at the Marne.10 Indian soldiers were sent even to China to fight unwillingly against their Asiatic brothers; the Legislature at Delhi questioned the Government about this, but the Government refused to answer.11 It has been one of the many misfortunes of the Hindus, who are called unfit for selfdefense, that they have been considered admirable military material to fight for any others except themselves. Never had a colony or a possession made so great a sacrifice for the master country. Every Hindu conscious of India looked forward hopefully now, as a reward for this bloody loyalty, to the admission of his country into the fellowship of free dominions under the English flag.

6.2 'Democracy' in christianism 
QUOTENever had a colony or a possession made so great a sacrifice for the master country. Every Hindu conscious of India looked forward hopefully now, as a reward for this bloody loyalty, to the admission of his country into the fellowship of free dominions under the English flag.

Indeed, in 1917, when the position of England in the War was critical, and enthusiasm for the cause of democracy needed stimulation, Mr. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, made the following announcement in the House of Commons:
"The policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire. They have decided that substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as possible, and that it is of the highest importance as a preliminary to considering what these steps should be that there should be a free and informal exchange of opinion between those in authority at home and in India. His Majesty's Government have accordingly decided, with His Majesty's approval, that I should accept the Viceroy's invitation to proceed to India to discuss the matters with the Viceroy and the Government of India, to consider with the Viceroy the views of local Governments, and to receive with him the suggestions of representative bodies and others. I would add that progress in this policy can only be achieved by successive stages. The British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian peoples, must be judges of the time and measure of each advance, and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom new opportunities of service will thus be conferred and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility."

Shortly thereafter Mr. Montagu visited India, and in collaboration with the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, drew up the "Reforms" known by their names. The Secretary wished to carry out his promises liberally, but the Viceroy proved to be an obstinate conservative; 12 these things might do, he said, a generation or two hence. Nor did the Government in London encourage Montagu; the War over, it regretted his promise and sought devices and phrases that would break it while seeming to keep it. Lloyd George, then Premier, declared with unstatesmanlike clarity that Britain intended always to rule India, that there must always remain in India a "steel frame" of British power and British dominance.13 Some time previously, Lord Curzon had written: "British rule of the Indian people is England's present and future task; it will occupy her energies for as long a span of the future as it is humanly possible to forecast."14 And Lord Birkenhead was to say, in 1925: "I am not able in any foreseeable future to discern a moment when we may safely, either to ourselves or India, abandon our trust."15 The last word observed the best traditions of imperialistic hypocrisy.

Therefore the reforms fell far short of what Montagu had hoped for. They established, first, the system of "Dyarchy," by which each province would have two ministries, one responsible to the provincial legislature, and having no powers of any account, the other responsible only to the British authorities, and having all the fundamental powers.16 Any act of the provincial legislature could be overruled by the Governor, and any act of the Governor, if he considered it necessary to the interests of the Empire, could be passed by decree over the heads of the legislature.17

A similar arrangement castrated the Central Assembly; here too the only right was to speak; all authority remained with the Viceroy. He was empowered to enact any measure which might seem necessary to him, even if it must be over a unanimous adverse vote of the Assembly; he could collect taxes which the Assembly had refused to vote; he controlled the expenditures, taxation and defense, and was free to pay salaries and pensions denied by the Assembly. When this remarkable form of progressive self-government reached England, a member of Parliament, Dr. Rutherford, said of it: "Never in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India's invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution.18

The Tories19 have answered that it would have been unwise to give more power to legislatures elected by so illiterate a people-forgetting that one-fifth of the Assembly, and one-half of the upper house, the Council of State, were named by the British Government; that the lower house was elected by a franchise open to one out of two hundred and fifty in the population, and the Council was (half) elected by a franchise still further whittled down.

6.3 Christianism's earlier slumdog propaganda: pretending Hindus are the aggressors and muslims the victims
QUOTEFinally, the voters were divided into sectarian groups- Hindus, Moslems, Christians, Europeans, etc.; they were given representation bearing little relation to their numbers; and each candidate presented himself not to all the citizens in his community, but only to his fellow sectarians. As Josiah Wedgwood, then a Member of Parliament, said of the Reforms, "The very idea of India vanished from the Bill, to be replaced by the disunited communities of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Mahratta, Brahmin, non-Brahmin, Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian, and English."20 It was claimed that such a plan was necessary to protect the Moslems from the Hindus, who outnumber them almost: five to one; in practice, however, it is the Hindus who need protection from the Moslems. The actual result was the increasing division of India into a score of hostile groups. It was a result admirably suited to an alien ruler, who no doubt had not intended it. It is only a coincidence that Lt.-Col. John Coke, Commandant at Moradadad, advised the British Government, shortly before it took over India from the Company: "Our endeavors should be to uphold in full force the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions and races, not to endeavor to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian Government"; to rule your subjects, divide them. It was another coincidence that the British Governor of Bombay, in 1859, sent to his Government this word of counsel: "Divide et impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours." It was also a coincidence that Sir John Strachey wrote: "The existence, side by side, of hostile creeds among the Indian people is one of the strong points in our political position in India."21 A government must not be held responsible for the inadvertent honesty of its representatives.

6.4 'Freedom of speech' and 'human rights' in christianism: Britain enacts the rules of the christian Spanish Inquisition in India
QUOTEAgainst the Reforms no Hindu could do anything except protest by tongue or pen. But that was a right not guaranteed to him; the Reforms "did not insure to the Hindus freedom of speech, or of assembly, or of the press; or the right of trial in open court; or the privilege of habeas corpus; or any other of the essential rights and privileges which are the foundations and indispensable guarantees of liberty, justice, and law."22

When protests were tried, and the Hindu press began to voice its suspicion that India had been deceived, the Government at Delhi issued, in 1919, the Rowlatt Acts, re-imposing upon India all those restrictions of assembly, press and speech that had been in effect during the War. The Acts proclaimed that hereafter the Government might arrest without notice or warrant any suspected person, and detain him without trial as long as it liked; that such trial as might be given, was to be in secret, before not a jury but three judges appointed by the Government; that the accused need not be told the names of his accusers, nor of the witnesses against him; that these should not be required to confront him; that the accused must not be allowed the right of engaging a lawyer to defend him; that he must not call witnesses in his behalf; that usual legal procedures might be abrogated; and that no appeal would be permitted. 23 An Indian scholar showed that these were almost precisely the rules of the Spanish Inquisition.24 The Acts were later repealed.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 03:27 PM by Husky.)

7. Loyal to the empire: supporters of christianism's genocide and oppression

7.1 'Good Natives': Indian christians swear love and fealty to Britannia and christianism

http://www.hinduwisdom.info/FirstIndologists.htm
QUOTE... in 1853, Reverend J. Tucker addressed the Select Committee on Indian Territories, citing the progress made in native conversions through missionary schools, and through âcordial support and assistance to missionary proceedingsâ of civil and military government individuals. He was particularly proud to present a letter written by the Tinnevelly Congregation of Indian Protestant Christians. It read in part:

"To Her Most Gracious Majesty Victoria,
By the Grace of God,
Queen by the Grace of God,
Queen of Great Britain and Defender of the Faith

We, native Christians â¦ have embraced the Christian religion in number of 40,000 persons, presume to approach the feet of your Gracious Majesty, with all humility and reverence, presenting this humble memorial.

We desire to acknowledge in your Majestyâs presence that we, your humble subjects, and all our fellow-countrymen, placed by the providence of Almighty God under the just and merciful rule of the English Government, enjoy a happiness unknown to our forefathers in the inestimable blessings of peace. â¦ by the gratitude we feel, we humbly acknowledge it to be our delightful duty, heartily and incessantly, to beseech Almighty God, the King of Kings, to âendure our Gracious Queen plenteously with heavenly gifts, to grant her health and wealth long to live, to strengthen her â¦ and finally, after this life, attain everlasting joy and felicity.â

Incalculable are the benefits that have accrued â¦ we who are Christians are bound to be especially grateful for having received â¦ the privilege of ourselves learning the true religion and its sacred doctrines, and of securing it for our sons and daughters â¦

â¦ Our countrymen (seeing) the vast number of boys and girls, children of Christian, Heathen, Mohammedan and Roman-catholic parents, learning gratuitously both in Tamul and English, at the expense of English missions, repeat their ancient proverbs, and say, âInstruction is indeed the opening of sightless eyeballsââ¦

A photo of an Indian family converted to christianism. The contrast with the victims of the famines is quite stunning (no wonder they went on about the 'gratitude they feel' to the 'just and merciful rule of the English Government'):

<img src='http://hinduwisdom.info/images/Christian_family.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Caption: A South Indian converted Christian family.
( http://hinduwisdom.info/images/Christian_family.jpg )

Also from http://hinduwisdom.info/FirstIndologists.htm
QUOTE"Every additional Christian," declared Lord Halifax, the Secretary of the State, "is an additional bond of union with this country and an additional source of strength to the Empire." "They are doing for India," as Lord Reay introducing a deputation of Indian Christians to the Prince of Wales, said "more than all those civilians, soldiers, judges and governors whom your Highness has met;" "They are the most potent force in India," declared Sir MacWorth Young.

And so the effort to civilize India, to secure it for the British Empire, to gather it up as the rich harvest for the Church proceeded as a joint endeavor: the civil servants helped by many devices, including among these their "religious neutrality": "the soldiers of the Cross" reinforced each other's efforts; and the scholars helped working to "undermine" and "encircle" and thereby prepare the way for "the soldiers of the Cross" to finally storm" the strong fortress of Brahminism".

(source: Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas - By Arun Shourie ASA Publications ASIN 8190019945 p.109-132).

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-20-2009, 04:05 PM by Husky.)

7.2 Dinesh D'Souza: Indian christian traitor, wrote "Two Cheers for colonialism"

Dinesh D'Souzaâchristian apologist for genocideâwrote the following which he would have learnt at catholic/christian school (or alternatively, this is all his christian education could have led him to conclude):
http://www.r21online.com/2002/06/two-cheer...olonialism.html
QUOTE"My conclusion is that against their intentions the colonialists brought things to India that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the descendants of colonialism. It is doubtful that non-Western countries would have acquired these good things by themselves. It was the British who, applying a universal notion of human rights, in the early nineteenth century abolished the ancient Indian institution of sati-the custom of tossing widows on the funeral pyre of their dead husbands. There is no reason to believe that the Indians, who had practiced sati for centuries, would have reached such a conclusion on their own. Imagine an African or Indian king encountering the works of Locke or Madison and saying, "You know, I think those fellows have a good point. I should relinquish my power and let my people decide whether they want me or someone else to rule." Somehow, I don't see this as likely.

Colonialism was the transmission belt that brought to Asia, Africa, and South America the blessings of Western civilization. Many of those cultures continue to have serious problems of tyranny, tribal and religious conflict, poverty, and underdevelopment, but this is not due to an excess of Western influence but due to the fact that those countries are insufficiently Westernized. Sub-Saharan Africa, which is probably in the worst position, has been described by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as "a cocktail of disasters." But this is not because colonialism in Africa lasted so long but because it lasted a mere half-century. It was too short to permit Western institutions to take firm root. Consequently after their independence most African nations have retreated into a kind of tribal barbarism that can only be remedied with more Western influence, not less. Africa needs more Western capital, more technology, more rule-of-law, and more individual freedom."

Dinesh has been studying the discredited catholic hagiographies for too long and so has started to assume that the christian propensity for mythmaking and history-rewriting can make inroads into unconverted people's knowledge of history as well. Tragically, he is to be disappointed, as that only works on christians and such sorts - those who like to 'believe', in spite of all the facts to the contrary.

The facts are:

a. It wasn't the British that taught Hindus democracy.

Historian Will Durant writes in Chapter 1 of The Case For India:
QUOTEIndia was the ...mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy.
An example.
(Original from the media outlet now presided over by christian-marxist N.Ram www.hindu.com/fr/2008/07/11/stories/2008071151250300.htm)
QUOTE(Bharatvarsh @ May 23 2009, 08:12 PM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEConstitution 1,000 years ago

T.S.SUBRAMANIAM

A perfect electoral system existed, inscriptions found in Uthiramerur reveal.

Photos: S. Thanthoni
<img src='http://www.thehindu.com/fr/2008/07/11/images/2008071151250303.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
OUTSTANDING DOCUMENT: The mantapa of the Vaikuntaperumal temple.

It may be hard to believe that nearly 1,100 years ago, a village had a perfect electoral system and a written Constitution prescribing the mode of elections. It was inscribed on the walls of the village assembly (grama sabha mandapa), which was a re ctangular structure made of granite slabs. âThis inscription, dated around 920 A.D. in the reign of Parantaka Chola, is an outstanding document in the history of India,â says Dr. R. Nagaswamy, former Director, Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, referring to Uthiramerur in Chingleput district.

âIt is a veritable written Constitution of the village assembly that functioned 1,000 years ago,â Dr. Nagaswamy says in his book, âUthiramerur, the Historic Village in Tamil Nadu.â The book, in both Tamil and English, has been published by the Tamil Arts Academy, Chennai.

Dr. Nagaswamy says: âIt [the inscription] gives astonishing details about the constitution of wards, the qualification of candidates standing for elections, the disqualification norms, the mode of election, the constitution of committees with elected members, the functions of [those] committees, the power to remove the wrong-doer, etcâ¦â <img src='http://www.thehindu.com/fr/2008/07/11/images/2008071151250302.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
And that is not all. âOn the walls of the mandapa are inscribed a variety of secular transactions of the village, dealing with administrative, judicial, commercial, agricultural, transportation and irrigation regulations, as administered by the then village assembly, giving a vivid picture of the efficient administration of the village society in the bygone ages.â The villagers even had the right to recall the elected representatives if they failed in their duty!

It has a 1,250-year history

Uthiramerur has a 1,250-year history. It is situated in Kanchipuram district, about 90 km from Chennai. The Pallava king Nandivarman II established it around 750 A.D. It did exist earlier as a brahmin settlement. It was ruled by the Pallavas, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Sambuvarayars, the Vijayanagara Rayas and the Nayaks. It has three important temples, the Sundara Varadaraja Perumal temple, the Subramanya temple and the Kailasanatha temple. Plans are under way for the conservation and restoration of the Kailasanatha temple, which is in ruins.

All the three temples have numerous inscriptions â those of the great Raja Raja Chola (985-1015 A.D.), his able son, Rajendra Chola and the Vijayanagar emperor Krishnadeva Raya. Both Rajendra Chola and Krishnadeva Raya visited Uthiramerur.

Uthiramerur, built as per the canons of the agama texts, has the village assembly mandapa exactly at the centre and all the temples are oriented with reference to the mandapa.

R. Vasanthakalyani, Chief Epigraphist-cum-Instructor and R. Sivanandam, epigraphist, both belonging to the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, said that while village assemblies might have existed prior to the period of Parantaka Chola, it was during his period that the village administration was honed into a perfect system through elections. âAbout 1,100 years ago, during the period of Paranataka Chola, Uthiramerur had an elected village panchayat system, which was a step ahead of the modern day democratic system,â she said.

According to Dr. Sivanandam, there were several places in Tamil Nadu where inscriptions are available on temple walls about the prevalence of village assemblies. These villages included Manur near Tirunelveli, Tiruninravur near Chennai, Manimangalam near Tambaram, Dadasamudram near Kanchipuram, Sithamalli and Thalaignayiru near Thanjavur, Jambai near Tirukovilur and Ponnamaravathy near Pudukottai. âBut it is at Uthiramerur on the walls of the village assembly (mandapa) itself, that we have the earliest inscriptions with complete information about how the elected village assembly functioned,â said Dr. Sivanandam. It is learnt that the entire village, including the infants, had to be present at the village assembly mandapa at Uthiramerur when the elections were held, pointed out Vasanthakalyani. Only the sick and those who had gone on a pilgrimage were exempt.

<img src='http://www.thehindu.com/fr/2008/07/11/images/2008071151250301.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
The Tamil inscriptions elaborate on the election procedure followed several centuries ago.

There were committees for the maintenance of irrigation tanks, roads, to provide relief during drought, testing of gold and so on. Sivanandam himself has written a book in Tamil called, âThe Archaeological Handbook of Kanchipuram district,â (published by the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology in 2008) in which he says the original sabha mandapaâs superstructure was made of timber and bricks. After the superstructure collapsed and only the base of the mandapa made of granite slabs remained, Kulotunga Chola I built a Vishnu temple on the base towards the end of the 11th century.

The village sabha mandapa, with its invaluable inscriptions, is now called Vaikuntaperumal temple. Dr. Nagaswamy says: âThe village assembly of Uttaramerur drafted the Constitution for the elections. The salient features were as follows: the village was divided into 30 wards, one representative elected for each. Specific qualifications were prescribed for those who wanted to contest. The essential criteria were age limit, possession of immovable property and minimum educational qualification. Those who wanted to be elected should be above 35 years of age and below 70â¦â

Only those who owned land, that attracted tax, could contest. Another interesting stipulation, according to Dr. Nagaswamy, was that such owners should have possessed a house built on legally-owned site (not on public poromboke). A person serving in any of the committees could not contest again for the next three terms, each term lasting a year. Elected members, who suffered disqualification, were those who accepted bribes, misappropriated othersâ property, committed incest or acted against public interest.
http://pseudosecularism.blogspot.com/2008/...-years-ago.html
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QUOTE(Bharatvarsh @ May 23 2009, 08:34 PM)"February 2, 1939Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Systems of Governance
Nowadays people want the modern type of democracy- the parliamentary form of government. The parliamentary system is doomed. It has brought Europe to its present sorry passâ¦. [In India] one should begin with the old Panchayat system in the villages and then work up to the top. The Panchayat system and the guilds are more representative and they have a living contact with people; they are part of the peopleâs ideas. On the contrary, the parliamentary system with local bodies-the municipal councils-is not workable: these councils have no living contact with the people; the councilors make only platform speeches and nobody knows what they do for three or four years; at the end they reshuffle and rearrange the whole thing, making their own pile during their period of power."

http://www.esamskriti.com/essay-chapters/I...urobindo-5.aspx

"Water is one of the more serious problem areas of India and many other parts of the world. There was an ancient Indian system of talabs (water tanks) in every village. They were designed to collect and store rainwater for irrigation and for drinking. It was a function of the village panchayat to maintain and administer these water tanks. However, under colonial rule, village governance was subverted or abandoned, since the goal was to maximize tax collection through a network of British-appointed âdistrict collectorsâ. As native social structures were abandoned, many talabs went into disuse or misuse. Today, satellite pictures show only traces of what was once a massive network of man-made lakes."

http://www.indianscience.org/
[right][snapback]97674[/snapback][/right]

As for Dinesh D'Souza's preposterously insupportable claim that christian Britain's rule was civilising and brought 'human rights' and 'democracy' to India, the tyrannical nature of christian British reign in India was already seen in Will Durant's writings on the subject (in Section 6, post 46 above). Next to that, the following contains a British man's statements on the erstwhile totalitarian christian British empire, which summarise what its rule was truly like:

http://www.hinduwisdom.info/ConversionII.htm
Henry Mead author of The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and Its Consequences (1858)
QUOTE"the measureless folly of our ruleâ in India, a rule based, he declares, on âtorture and lawlessness, and the perpetual suffering of millionsâ. He traces in excruciating detail the system of torture employed by tax collectors of the raj and asserts that âunder Christian sway,â the peasant population of India has been reduced almost to a state of âultimate wretchednessâ The British have imposed on India, he concludes, âa system of rule which is wholly destructiveâ
And what total ridiculousness for Dinesh D'Souza to say that the autocratic British could ever have instilled in Indians the idea of democracy. Does Dinesh imagine this was by example? The christian invaders wouldn't even allow Indians self-rule - in spite of all the money and the blood they stole from India - until they were finally ousted. No one asked them to come, no one wanted them to stay - in fact, Indians (though apparently not the rather ignorant, infatuated and grateful converts) most particularly wanted the lethal alien christian parasites to Quit India ('will of the majority'), but it took ages for the said christian infection to finally get the message and begone.

b. It wasn't the British that first banned Sati (and they did it purely for christian reasons), Hindu princely governments had already started discouraging the practice some decades before. Koenraad Elst writes in his article Sati en andere zelfdoding (Sati and other suicide):

QUOTE...neither the written mentions of Sati, nor the eyewitness accounts drawn up by unbiased witnesses in tempore non suspecto ['in times above suspicion'] (especially British colonials), leave any doubt that in principle and usually also in practice itâs about voluntary self-immolation.

...the ban on Sati by the British was established in 1829 not as a ban on a particular form of murder (superfluous, because of its inclusion in the general ban on murder), but as a ban on suicide, namely from the christian taboo on suicide...
...
In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the Brahmanas (although they too practised Sati in British Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.?), Manu and Yajnavalkya among others, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu Dharmashastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.
...
Of more import for the biased westerner is rather, that also the unsuspectable British shared the opinion that the widows involved carried out their Sati voluntarily. Before the British rule banned this practice in 1829 on Lord Bentinckâs initiative, it had a report drawn up with the significant title: âThe Report on Hindu Widows and Voluntary Immolationsâ. H.T. Colebrooke, H.H. Wilson, Jonathan Duncan and other British authorities advised against a legal ban on Sati, because this ritual does not occur under duress/coercion.
...
That the British forbade the practice of Sati, was not a measure against murder, but against suicide. As was and is known, suicide is forbidden in christianism; in some countries there was even the death penalty for attempts at suicide. In India however, people have always judged it differently.
...
Around 1800, about thirty years before the British administrator Lord Bentinck issued a ban on Sati in Bengal, the Hindu governments in some princely states had already issued orders to discourage Sati, in particular the Maratha government in Sawantwadi and the Brahmana government in Pune. With this, they concretised the anti-Sati policy of the Maratha queen Ahalyabai who passed away in 1795. Even within the Hindu tradition there has been, at least since Medhatithiâs commentary on the Manu Smriti (900 C.E.?), always a stream that rejected Sati. The Shakta or Tantra stream was very explicit in this.
Compare the voluntary nature of Sati (which is suicide) with the largescale christian torture and murder of women on charges of witchcraftâmurder, because it was entirely against the will of the victims. The figures of christianism's genocide of Europe's womenfolk once again run in the millions:
http://secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=articles&id=176
QUOTEIn "The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power" by Barbara G. Walker the number of witches slaughtered was estimated by scholars to be 7 to 9 million also. Will Durant, in his 12 volume History of Civilization sets the figure also at 7 to 9 million.

c. The christians of Britain didn't even approve of 'the universal notion of human rights' when it finally cropped up inside its own boundaries. Instead, christianism's god-ordained class-system militated against it. Even the book The Rights of Man by their own fellow Englishman Thomas Paineâwhich advocated universal human rights in the face of the debilitating and entrenched christian class-system of Britainâwas proscribed in Britain and he was persecuted for writing it.

http://www.cygnus-study.com/pagepaine.html
QUOTEOnce in England, Thomas Paine wrote the well known book, "Rights of Man". In the book he wrote that all people were of the same mother and as such deserved the same equal treatment. He wrote that the upper ruling class was there by birth and not through some feat or divine placement. Needless to say, this text caused BIG trouble in the monarchy of England.
...
Immediately upon publication in England, the Rights of Man was suppressed. The author was indicted. Those who published it and those who sold it were arrested. To avoid arrest and probable death, Paine left England. However, his ideas had left their mark on the nation and the English people today enjoy a freedom that stems back to those who rallied around Paine's text.
The book naturally became popular in revolutionary France where its admirable contents for Equality were appreciated. (Note that Thomas Paine was a Deist and also wrote The Age of Reason which exposed the myths, fallacies, lies and outright falsehood of christianism.)

d. "The blessings of Western civilization" referred to by the christian Dinesh D'Souza is a Goebbelsian lie. As is his statement that christianism ('westernisation') wasn't the cause of the strife, poverty and misery of the colonised nations. All the data collated here so far, including from Will Durant's The Case for India, is an uninterrupted sequence of indictments of the atrocities of christian colonialism (aka genocide) of Bharatam under the British. The christian Portuguese were no better: the Goan Inquisition and destruction of Temples and Hindus was but more of the same 'blessings' that christian 'civilisation' brings.

For more information, however, see the description of Gert von Paczensky's book Teurer Segen - Christliche Mission und Kolonialismus (Costly blessing - Christian mission and colonialism) at http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4e.htm#MissionsColonialism

e. Dinesh D'Souza's typically christian racist nonsense against Africans is also filled with monumental falsehoods, needless to say. For how much christianism (in the form of christian colonialism) is to blame for the ethnic conflict, warfare, genocide, famines and poverty of Africa, see:

- http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4b.htm#Congo on the christian colonisation of the Congo by catholicism (see below), which reduced the Congolese to abject poverty and resulted in the genocide of "10 million Congolese" (Guardian, 2005). Other African nations colonised/enslaved by christianism were not much better off.

Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen (1931): 
QUOTEA population of about two millions was converted by a stroke of the pen into a nation of slaves, under the control of officials whose brutalities beggar description. The Belgian Secretary of State wrote to the Governor-General that the officials "must neglect no means of exploiting the forests," and they did not. They were paid a bonus on the rubber and ivory collected, and at the point of the rifle and to the crack of the whip the natives were driven forth to collect what was required.

Villages were raided, the natives seized, and released in order to collect the ivory and rubber. Nearly fourteen million pounds' worth of goods was forced from the natives in seven years. If the people refused or rebelled, or failed to bring in what was required, punishment--death or mutilation, or death and mutilation--followed. Some few travellers and missionaries sent home to England and America reports of the atrocities--reports that were discreetly shelved.

The native troops employed proved their zeal in bringing back to their officers the severed hands of those who had been murdered--in one case 160 hands, in other cases fifty or eighty. This, said our own Consul, was not the native custom; it was "the deliberate act of the soldiers of a European administration...obeying the positive orders of their superiors." The photographs published in Mark Twain's book of the children so treated place the fact of the mutilations beyond doubt.
...
Whole districts were depopulated. Of eight villages with a population of over 3,000, only ten persons were left. Of another district the population dropped in fifteen years from 50,000 to 5,000. The Bolangi tribe, formerly numbering 40,000 sank to 8,000. King Leopold, it is calculated, netted a profit of between three and five millions sterling, and could call God to witness the purity of his motives and his desire to promote civilisation.
- http://faculty.vassar.edu/tilongma/Church&Genocide.html Christian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda, a paper by Timothy Longman, Vassar College. Revision of paper originally prepared for Conference on Genocide, Religion, and Modernity. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, May 11-13, 1997.
This paper describes how christianism invented the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic categories and then how christianism created the ethnic conflict, kept on stoking it until it reached a crescendo, and how christianism ultimately orchestrated the Rwandan Genocide. Naturally, the faithful Catholic and Protestant churches of Rwanda participated in the actual massacres as well (see the end of http://freetruth.50webs.org/D3.htm#Africa ).

- In fact, see all of the brief (and obviously incomplete) history of christianism in Africa at http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4b.htm

Considering all the above, it must be that when Dinesh D'Souza speaks of the benefits bestowed by colonialism, he is speaking only of his own christian brethren and converted ancestors in India who would ultimately have been the sole recipients of these benefits. (For example, Britain kept giving huge swathes of Hindu Temple lands to christian churches, thus making them now into "the largest landowners in India after the government", see http://hamsa.org/interview.htm ). No wonder those sharing in the loot are grateful.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 06-20-2009, 04:14 PM by Husky.)

7.3 Karl Marx, the idol of the communists, also declared British rule was beneficial.

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
QUOTEQUITE 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).
...
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
Indian communists' loyalties have also been consistently anti-Indian.

7.4 Manmohan Singh, the unelected Prime Minister of India and friend to foreign tyrannies, congratulates Britain on its christian genocide of Hindu Bharatam.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/artic...165516.cms
QUOTEThe Raj was beneficial: Manmohan
LONDON: Fifty-seven years after Independence, Manmohan Singh has become the first prime minister in Indian history to salute the British Raj, its "beneficial effects (for colonised India) and its record of good governance".

Singh, who was speaking at Oxford as he received an honorary degree in civil law from the University's chancellor Chris Patten, broke with India's tradition of entrenched, inflexible resistance to bending the knee to its former imperial master.

...Singh's extraordinary remarks, which saluted the British contribution to India's current, admirable system of "constitutional government, a free press, a professional service, modern universities and research laboratories"...
Before being accorded political power by India's current christian colonial (catholic) Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh used to be some school teacher. No doubt he enjoyed a very christian 'education' (oxymoron), like Dinesh D'Souza. "Free press", "constitutional government" indeed. Section 6 above, quoting from Will Durant's The Case For India, already shows the unwanted Manmohan Singh up for the fearless ignoramusâor, more likely, the frightful liarâthat he is. No wonder that Manmohan Singh under the modern-day christian colonial tyrant from Italy (Sonia Gandhi), declared that Muslims must have "first claim on resources" in India, thereby echoing the policies of the christian British 'benefactors' before him, and which is also predictably mirrored in the typically christian fiction of Danny Boyle's slum of a movie "Slumdog Millionaire".

And with this, the 'great mystery' of where India's poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and ignorance - i.e. the 'slumdog' image - come from, ought to be wholly unravelled. It is not Hindu Dharma (as christian propaganda has tried its best to present it as, in order to push away the undeniable guilt from christianism itself), because Hindu Dharma has a record of universal education, and caring for the whole community and nation's welfare.
So, no.
The actual culprit is simply the ideology that has similarly terrorised the Americas (where it burnt down libraries and decimated the populations with disease and violent genocide), Africa and Asia (where the record is the same): it is christianism.

Shambhu · (This post was last modified: 03-09-2009, 11:51 PM by Shambhu.)

The genesis of the term "Hindutvawaadi"
(or Hindu Fundamentalist or Hindu Fascist ..etc)

In the course of Indian history, India has been severely manhandled.
1. During invasion and "rule" by muslims: The slaughter of tens of millions of Hindus, the burning of Hindu Universities and libraries, the razing of tens of thousands of temples, rapes of Hindu women...

2. During British rule: The mass starving of millions of Hindus, the looting of massive amounts of wealth, the subversion of the History of India to dehumanize and degrade Hindus (myths planted into the Indic psyche include: the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory, the 'Brahmins are bad' theory, 'Christianity always has turned the other cheek' theory, ..)

3. During the Gandhi-Nehru till present: The denial of facts in 1 and 2. The institutionalization of muslim and christian appeasement.

The people who cannot handle this truth have resorted to the time-trusted method of rationalizing to all this to themselves: they say that the people who want to tell the truth are crazy. They call them Hindutawaadis (or Hindu Fundamentalist or Hindu Fascist ..etc).

This need for labelling people "Hndutvawaadi" is Chapter 1 of trying to understand what is happening in India.

dhu · 03-15-2009, 12:12 AM

formatted for youtube

QUOTEidiot, This is not just collapse of the economy,this is a collapse of the foundation of America ie genocidal christianity and all the downstream derived imperial propaganda systems eg americanism

the proof is in the video i posted, search joseph atwill on youtube

titus flavius destroyed the temple, jesus predicted the destruction and thrashed jews in their temple. Jesus on golgotha -empty skull. titus on thecoe- enquiring mind. bible=anti-semitic. titus=killer of jews. bible written in greek

dhu · 03-15-2009, 02:09 AM

QUOTEidiot moron do you have a point or are you going to nag me some more. jesus christ is the alterego of the roman emperor titus flavius who destroyed the jewish temple. that is why the bible is so anti-semitic. got that idiot

Husky · 04-11-2009, 01:40 PM

Inserted the following into post 40. This is the first time I came across the following on Churchill:

http://christianaggression.org/item_displa...S&id=1137486332
QUOTEWinston Churchill - A Christian Bigot at Heart
Posted January 17, 2006
hinduvoice.co.uk

In fact, many of the views he (Churchill) held were virtually Nazi. For example, as Home Minister he had advocated euthanasia and sterilisation of the handicapped. In his own racial hierarchy, blacks were down below all others, Indians too were markedly inferior to Europeans. Even Italians did not have the character to rule themselves, which was why Churchill believed they needed a dictator, and therefore applauded Mussolini.

The extent of Churchill's racism can be gleaned by many extracts from his speeches. For example, in 1937 he said "I do not admit...that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia...by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place." Thus justifying one of the most brutal genocides and mass displacement of people in history. He also had hatred for Indians "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." By `beastly religion' he was of course talking about Hinduism.

Husky · 05-08-2009, 05:33 PM

Related to post 38 (which was on christian famines):

Islamic famines: Famines in Bharatam caused by islam (the religion of 'peace', etcetera)

http://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html "The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs" states that:
QUOTEIn Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31(thirty one) serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17(seventeen) in the 2000 years before British rule.
1. QUOTE(Bharatvarsh @ May 4 2009, 11:10 PM)
Here is some stuff about peasants under Muslims:
http://voiceofdharma.com/books/tlmr/ch7.htm
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEPeasants and Agriculturists

The condition of the peasantry in India, up to the fourteenth century, was not bad. Contemporary Indian writers and foreign travellers do not generally talk about poverty; on the contrary they give an impression of the wellbeing of the tillers of the soil. Alberuni (eleventh century) has said many things about the Hindus, but nowhere does he say that the people were living in suffering or want. Minhaj Siraj, Ibn Battuta, Shihabuddin Abbas Ahmad, the author of Masalik-ul-Absar, Al-Qalqashindi, the author of Subh-ul-Asha, Amir Khusrau and Shams Siraj Afif (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries), even talk of the prosperity of the people. Even Barani is impressed with their wealth and conveys this impression when he feels delighted at the action of contemporary Muslim rulers against rich landlords and cultivators.4 The decline of the political power of the Sultanate in the fifteenth century, saw a general recovery of people's strength and prosperity in good measure.

But by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conditions are quite different. They change to such an extent that almost all foreign and many Indian writers are struck by the crushing poverty of the Indian peasant and do not fail to write about it. Athanasius Nikitin, Varthema, Barbosa, Paes, Nuniz, Linschoten, Salbank, Hawkins, Jourdain, Sir Thomas Roe, Terry and a host of others, all talk of the grinding poverty of the Indian people. It will serve no purpose to cite from each one of them, but one or two quotations may be given as specimens to convey the general trend of their impressions. Pelsaert, a Dutch visitor during Jahangirï¿½s reign, observes: ï¿½The common people (live in) poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woeï¿½ their houses are built of mud with thatched roofs. Furniture there is little or none, except some earthenware pots to hold water and for cookingï¿½ï¿½5 Salbank, writing of people between Agra and Lahore of about the same period, says that the ï¿½plebian sort is so poor that the greatest part of them go naked.ï¿½6 These two quotations would suffice to show how miserable the common people in the middle of the seventeenth century were. These and many others that follow lead one to the inescapable conclusion that the condition of the peasantry in India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had considerably deteriorated.

It is pertinent to ask how the peasant during this period was reduced to such straits. India of the medieval times was mainly agricultural, and histories and legends of the times do not tire of singing in praise of the wealth and glory of the Great Mughals. Then how did the peasant become so miserably poor? Were there any ideas and actions of rulers which led to the impoverishment of the agriculturists? Also, were there any ideas of the peasants themselves which taught them to reconcile themselves to their lot and did not prompt them to fight against their economic disablement? Contemporary chronicles do betray the existence of such ideas. That these have not yet been analysed by historians, does not mean that these ideas were not there. An attempt is being made here to discover such ideas and assess their effects.

To find the roots of the miserable condition of the agriculturists in the seventeenth century, one has naturally to look back to earlier times and, indeed, at the very nature of the Muslim conquest of India beginning with the thirteenth century. In the history of Muslim conquest, a unique phenomenon was witnessed in India. Contrary to what happened in Central Asia, Persia or Afghanistan, India could not be completely conquered, nor could its people be converted to the Islamic faith. On the other hand, a ceaseless resistance to the Muslim rule in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is clearly borne out by the records of the times. If Muslim chroniclers gloat over unqualified victories for their Turkish kings, there are a large number of inscriptions of Hindu kings who too lay exaggerated claim to military successes.7 One thing which is clear beyond doubt is that throughout the Sultanate period (and also the Mughal period), there was stiff resistance to Muslim rule, and in one region or the other of the country, the authority of the Sultanate was being openly challenged.

Naturally, the Muslim kings gave much thought to finding some means to suppress the recalcitrant elements. Besides other things, one idea that struck Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316) was that it was ï¿½wealthï¿½ which was the ï¿½source of rebellion and disaffection.ï¿½ It encouraged defiance and provided means of ï¿½revoltï¿½. He and his counsellors deliberated that if somehow people could be impoverished, ï¿½no one would even have time to pronounce the word ï¿½rebellionï¿½.ï¿½8 How was this to be done? The Ulama would not have found it difficult to suggest a remedy. It is laid down in the Hidaya that when an ï¿½infidel countryï¿½ is conquered, the Imam can divide it among the Muslims. He can also leave it in the hands of the original inhabitants, ï¿½exacting from them a capitation tax, and imposing a tribute on their lands.ï¿½ If the infidels are to lose their lands, their entire moveable property should also be taken away from them. In case they are to continue with cultivating the land, they should be allowed to retain ï¿½such a portion of their moveable property as may enable them to perform their business.ï¿½9 In India the conquered land was divided among Muslim officers, soldiers and Ulama in lieu of pay or as reward. Some land was kept under Khalisa or directly under the control of the regime. But in all cases the tiller of the soil remained the original Hindu cultivator. As an infidel he was to be taxed heavily, although a minimum of his moveable property like oxen, cows and buffaloes (nisab) was to be left with him.10 The principle of the Shariah was to leave with him only as much as would have helped him carry on with his cultivation, but at the same time to keep him poor and subservient.

Bare Subsistence

According to W.H. Moreland ï¿½the question really at issue was how to break the power of the rural leaders, the chiefs and the headmen of parganas and villagesï¿½ï¿½11 Sultan Alauddin therefore undertook a series of measures to crush them by striking at their major source of power-wealth.12 But in the process, leaders and followers, rich and poor, all were affected. The king started by raising the land tax (Kharaj) to fifty percent. Under rulers like Iltutmish and Balban, it does not seem to have been above one-third of the produce. Furthermore, under Alauddinï¿½s system all the land occupied by the rich and the poor ï¿½was brought under assessment at the uniform rate of fifty per centï¿½. This measure automatically reduced the chiefs practically to the position of peasants. The king also levied house-tax and grazing tax. According to the contemporary chronicler Ziyauddin Barani, all milk-producing animals like cows and goats were taxed. According to Farishtah, animals up to two pairs of oxen, a pair of buffaloes and some cows and goats were exempted.13 This concession was based on the principle of nisab, namely, of leaving some minimum capital to enable one to carry on with oneï¿½s work.14 But it was hardly any relief, for there were taxes like kari, (derived from Hindi word Kar), charai and Jiziyah. The sultans of Delhi collected Jiziyah at the rate of forty, twenty and ten tankahs from the rich, the middleclass and the poor respectively.15

In short, a substantial portion of the produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for sustenance. For the Sultan had ï¿½directed that only so much should be left to his subjects (raiyyat) as would maintain them from year to yearï¿½ without admitting of their storing up or having articles in excess.ï¿½ Sultan Alauddinï¿½s rigorous measures were taken note of by contemporary writers both in India and abroad. In India contemporary writers like Barani, Isami and Amir Khusrau were inclined to believe him to be a persecutor of the Hindus. Foreigners also gathered the same impression. Maulana Shamsuddin Turk, a divine from Egypt, was happy to learn that Alauddin had made the wretchedness and misery of the Hindus so great and had reduced them to such a despicable condition ï¿½that the Hindu women and children went out begging at the doors of the Musalmans.ï¿½16 The same impression is conveyed in the writings of Isami and Wassaf.17 While summing up the achievements of Alauddin Khalji, the contemporary chronicler Barani mentions, with due emphasis, that by the last decade of his reign the submission and obedience of the Hindus had become an established fact. Such a submission on the part of the Hindus ï¿½has neither been seen before nor will be witnessed hereafter.ï¿½ In brief, not only the Hindu Zamindars, who had been accustomed to a life of comfort and dignity, were reduced to a deplorable position, but the Hindus in general were impoverished to such an extent that there was no sign of gold or silver left in their houses, and the wives of Khuts and Muqaddams used to seek sundry jobs in the houses of the Musalmans, work there and receive wages.18 The poor peasants (balahars) suffered the most. The fundamentalist Maulana Ziyauddin Barani feels jubilant at the suppression of the Hindus, and writes at length about the utter helplessness to which the peasantry had been reduced because the Sultan had left to them bare sustenance and had taken away everything else in kharaj (land revenue) and other taxes.19

But there was much greater oppression implicit in this measure. It was difficult to collect in full so many and such heavy taxes. ï¿½One of the standing evils in the revenue collection consisted in defective realization which usually left large balances,ï¿½20 and unrealised balances used to become inevitable. Besides, lower revenue officials were corrupt and extortionate. To overcome these problems, Sultan Alauddin created a new ministry called the Diwan-i-Mustakhraj. The Mustakhraj was entrusted with the work of inquiring into the revenue arrears, and realizing them.21 We shall discuss about the tyranny of this department a little later; suffice it here to say that in Alauddinï¿½s time, besides being oppressed by such a grinding tax-structure, the peasant was compelled to sell every maund of his surplus grain at government controlled rates for replenishing royal grain stores which the Sultan had ordered to be built in order to sustain his Market Control.22

After Alauddinï¿½s death (C.E. 1316) most of his measures seem to have fallen into disuse, but the peasants got no relief, because Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq who came to the throne four years later (C.E. 1320) continued the atrocious practice of Alauddin. He also ordered that ï¿½there should be left only so much to the Hindus that neither, on the one hand, they should become arrogant on account of their wealth, nor, on the other, desert their lands in despair.ï¿½23 In the time of Muhammad bin Tughlaq even this latter fear turned out to be true. The Sultanï¿½s enhancement of taxation went even beyond the lower limits of ï¿½bare subsistence.ï¿½ For the people left their fields and fled. This enraged the Sultan and he hunted them down like wild beasts.24

Still conditions did not become unbearable all at once. Natureï¿½s bounty to some extent compensated for the cruelty of the king. If the regime was extortionist, heavy rains sometimes helped in bumper production. Babur noted that ï¿½Indiaï¿½s crops are all rain grownï¿½.25 Farming in north India depended upon the monsoon rains coming from the Bay of Bengal. Artificial irrigation was there on a very limited scale, for irrigation ï¿½is not at all a necessity in cultivating crops and orchards. Autumn crops (Kharif season) grow by the downpour of the rains themselves; and strange it is that spring crops (Rabi season) grow even when no rain falls.ï¿½ Young trees are watered during two or three years ï¿½after which they need no more (watering)ï¿½26 as the ground gets soaked with rain in the monsoon season. Ibn Battuta gives a detailed description of the crops grown in India and adds: ï¿½The grains that have been described are Kharif grains. They are harvested 60 days after sowing. Thereafter Rabi grains like wheat, barley and massoor are sown. These are sown in the very same field in which Rabi grains (are harvested). The soil of this country is very fertile and is of excellent quality. Rice is sown three times in the year. Production of rice is the largest in the country. Sesame and sugar-cane are also sown with Kharif.ï¿½27 Shams Siraj Afif writes that when, during the monsoon season, ï¿½there were spells of heavy rains, Sultan Firoz Tughlaq appointed officers to examine the banks of all the water courses and report how far the inundations had extended. If he was informed that large tracts had been made fertile by the spread of waters, he was overwhelmed with joy. But if any village went to ruin (on account of floods), he treated its officials with great severity.ï¿½28

But the basic policy of impoverishing the people, resulted in crippling of agricultural economy. By the Mughal period the condition of the peasantry became miserable; if there was any progress it was in the enhancement of taxation. According to W.H. Moreland, who has made a special study of the agrarian system of Mughal India, the basic object of the Mughal administration was to obtain the revenue on an ever-ascending scale. The share that could be taken out of the peasant's produce without destroying his chances of survival was probably a matter of common knowledge in each locality. In Akbarï¿½s time, in Kashmir, the state demand was one-third, but in reality it came to two-thirds.29 The Jagirdars in Thatta (Sindh) did not take more than half. In Gujarat, according to Geleynsen who wrote in 1629, the peasant was made to part with three-quarters of his harvest. Similar is the testimony of De Laet, Fryer and Van Twist.30 During Akbarï¿½s reign, says Abul Fazl, evil hearted officers because of sheer greed, used to proceed to villages and mahals and sack them.31 Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shahjahan when, according to Manucci, peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand.32 Manrique writes that the peasants were ï¿½carried offï¿½ to various markets and fairs, (to be sold) with their poor unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children all crying and lamentingï¿½ï¿½33 Bernier too affirms that the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children, who were carried away as slaves.34 Here was also confirmation, if not actually the beginning, of the practice of bonded labour in India.

In these circumstances the peasant had little interest in cultivating the land. Bernier observes that ï¿½as the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsionï¿½ the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductiveï¿½ The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and valueï¿½ without leaving me the means (even) to drag my own miserable existence? - The Timariots (Timurids), Governors and Revenue contractors, on their part reason in this manner: Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds, and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single momentï¿½ Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscondï¿½ï¿½35 The situation made the tax-gatherer callous and exploitative on the one hand and the peasant fatalistic and disinterested on the other. The result, in Bernierï¿½s own words, was ï¿½that most towns in Hindustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched material; that there is no city or town (that) does not bear evident marks of approaching decay.ï¿½36 Wherever Muslim despots ruled, ruin followed, so that, writes he, similar is the ï¿½present condition of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, the once wonderful plain of Antioch, and so many other regions anciently well cultivated, fertile and populous, but now desolateï¿½ Egypt also exhibits a sad pictureï¿½ï¿½37

To revert to the Mughal empire. An important order in the reign of Aurangzeb describes the Jagirdars as demanding in theory only half but in practice actually more than the total yield.38 Describing the conditions of the latter part of the seventeenth century Mughal empire, Dr. Tara Chand writes: ï¿½The desire of the State was to extract the economic rent, so that nothing but bare subsistence. remained for the peasant.ï¿½ Aurangzebï¿½s instructions were that ï¿½there shall be left for everyone who cultivates his land as much as he requires for his own support till the next crop be reaped and that of his family and for seed. This much shall be left to him, what remains is land tax, and shall go to the public treasury.ï¿½39

Conditions could not always have been that bad. There were steps taken from time to time to help cultivation and ameliorate the condition of the agriculturists. Shamsuddin Iltutmish constructed a large tank called Hauz-i-Shamsi. Traces of Alauddin Khaljiï¿½s Hauz-i-Khas and Firoz Tughlaqï¿½s irrigation canals still exist. Similar steps taken in Mughal times are also known. But such steps in aid of the development were taken because these could offer better means of increasing the revenue. Some steps which looked like helping the agriculturists, sometimes resulted in their perpetual penury. For example, a very common administrative measure of the medieval times was to advance loans to peasants to help them tide over their difficulties. But the important ideal entertained by rulers can be best summarized in the words of Sher Shahï¿½s instructions to his Amils: ï¿½Be lenient at the time of assessment, but show no mercy at the time of collection.ï¿½ This was, on the face of it, a good principle. But even Sher Shah Suri, renowned for his concern for the wellbeing of cultivators, was much more keen about the benefits to be drawn by his Afghan clansmen from the lands they administered. He sent his ï¿½good old loyal experienced servantsï¿½ to districts which yielded good ï¿½profitsï¿½ and ï¿½advantagesï¿½ and after two years or so transfered them and sent ï¿½other servants like them that they may also prosper.ï¿½40 It was of course the peasant who paid for this prosperity.

Collection of Arrears

We have earlier referred to the problem of collection of arrears. When agriculture was almost entirely dependent on rainfall and land tax was uniformally high, it was not possible for the peasants to pay their revenue regularly and keep their accounts ever straight with the government. The revenue used to fall into arrears. From the study of contemporary sources it is almost certain that there were hardly any remissions - even against conversion to Islam. Muslim rulers were very keen on proselytization. Sultan Firoz Tughlaq rescinded Jiziyah for those who became Muhammadan.41 Sometimes he also instructed his revenue collectors to accept conversions in lieu of Kharaj.42 Rajas and Zamindars who could not deposit land revenue or tribute in time had to convert to Islam.43 Bengal and Gujarat provide specific instances which go to show that such rules prevailed throughout the Muslim-ruled regions.44 But remissions of Kharaj were not allowed. On the other hand arrears went on accumulating and the kings tried to collect them with the utmost rigour. In the Sultanate period there was a full-fledged department by the name of the Diwan-i-Mustakharaj. The work of this department was to inquire into the arrears lying in the names of collectors (Amils and Karkuns) and force them to realize the balances in full.45 Such was the strictness in the Sultanate period. Under the Mughals arrears were collected with equal harshness. The system then existing shows that the peasants were probably never relieved of the ï¿½burdenï¿½ of arrears. In practice it could hardly have been possible always to collect the entire amounts and the balance was generally put forward to be collected along with the demand of the next year. A bad year, therefore, might leave an intolerable burden for the peasants in the shape of such arrears. These had a natural tendency to grow It also seems to have been a common practice to demand the arrears, owed by peasants who had fled or died, from their neighbour. And peasants who could not pay revenue or arrears frequently became predial slaves.46

In short, between the thirteenth century when armies had to march to collect the revenue,47 and the seventeenth century when peasants were running away from the land because of the extortions of the state, no satisfactory principle of assessment or collection except extortion could be discovered. The situation became definitely worse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as attested to by contemporary historians Jean Law and Ghulam Hussain. It is this general and continued stringency that was the legacy of the Mughal empire and the Indian Muslim states which continued under the British Raj.

Another idea of the rulers of medieval India was to keep the prices of commodities of everyday necessity low. This idea too emanated in the time of Alauddin Khalji. It was either his own brain-child or that of his courtiers and Ulama. His passion for incessant conquests and constant invasions of Mongols had rendered maintenance of a large army unavoidable. Even if he had recruited the large number of soldiers on a moderate salary, the entire treasure of the state would have been exhausted in five or six years.48 Alauddin, therefore, decided to cut down the salary of soldiers; but to prevent their falling victim to economic distress,49 he also decided to reduce the prices of commodities of daily use.

To the contemporary chronicler these prices were quite low and fluctuation, not even of a dang (small copper coin), was ever allowed whether in seasons of drought or of plenty. Indeed the ï¿½lowï¿½ and ï¿½fixedï¿½ prices in the market were ï¿½considered to be one of the wonders of the age.ï¿½ But ï¿½when a husbandman paid half of his hard earned produce in land tax, some portion of the remaining half in other sundry duties, and then was compelled to sell his grain at cheap ratesï¿½ to the governments,50 it does not speak well of the general condition of the peasantry in those days.ï¿½51 They could never have been happy in selling their grain cheap in the open market nor to the government itself at fixed rates without making profit. Profit is the greatest incentive to production, but it was completely checked by Alauddinï¿½s market regulations and the peasants seem to have lived a life of monotony and low standard.

Without caring to understand that low prices cripple production and impoverish the producer, many sultans after Alauddin Khalji took pride in competing with him in keeping prices low. But their actions led not only to the impoverishment of the peasantry but also of shopkeepers and businessmen. Shams Siraj Afif feels jubilant at describing and listing the low prices during the reign of Firoz Tughlaq, claiming that while Alauddin had to make strenuous efforts to bring down the prices, in the time of Firoz Tughlaq they remained low without resorting to any coercion.52 ï¿½Like Alauddin, Sikandar Lodi also used to keep a constant watch on the price-levelï¿½ in the market.53 Abdullah, the author of Tarikh-i-Daudi, says that ï¿½during the reign of Ibrahim Lodi the prices of commodities were cheaper than in the reign of any other Sultan except in Alauddinï¿½s last daysï¿½, and adds that whereas in Alauddinï¿½s time the cheapness of prices was maintained through compulsion, force and dire punishments, in Ibrahimï¿½s reign prices remained low ï¿½naturally.ï¿½54

So Alauddin Khalji had pioneered the idea of maintaining prices of necessaries at cheap rates. It was followed by his successors up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, without perhaps caring for its implications on the condition of the peasantry. Historians of Sher Shah affirm that he was indebted to Alauddin in laying down his agrarian policy and Akbar adopted many measures of Sher Shah. During the Mughal period prices by and large went up,55 although as late as in the reign of Aurangzeb, sometimes the prices reported were regarded as exceptionally cheap. But since the land revenue accounted for by far the larger portion of the peasantï¿½s surplus produce, it is obvious that this increase must have wiped out any possible advantage that the peasantry might have obtained through a rise in the prices.56

Besides these handicaps, the peasant suffered because there were no clear ideas about a regular commissariat service to maintain supply-line for the army during a campaign. There is evidence that camp-markets were sometimes established for the convenience of soldiers.57 There are also situations on record when the soldiers were encouraged to loot the peasants to obtain grain.58 Sher Shah took appropriate measures to see that agriculturists were not harassed by an army on march, but Babur noted that on the news of the arrival of an army the peasants used to leave their land, flee for life and establish themselves elsewhere. Encouragement to soldiers to loot was inherent in khums tax, through which the state obtained as its share one-fifth of the booty collected by the troops, while four-fifth was left with the soldiers.

And above all, one fact is clear in the chronicles of medieval India - any measures against the higher classes ultimately affected the peasants, because any loss to the former was surreptitiously transferred to the peasants. For, as Sir Thomas Roe (1615-19) wrote, the people of Hindustan lived ï¿½as fishes do in the sea - the great ones eat up the little. For first the farmer robs the peasant, the gentlemen robs the farmer, the greater robs the lesser and the King robs all.ï¿½59 Bernier corroborates the conclusion when he writes: ï¿½In eastern countries, the weak and the injured are without any refuge whatever; and the only law that decides all controversies is the cane and the caprice of a governor.ï¿½60

Of all the ideas, motivations and actions mentioned above leading to the impoverishment of the peasantry, the one of leaving ï¿½nothing but bare subsistenceï¿½, was the most atrocious. Writing about the times of Aurangzeb, Dr. Tara Chand rightly observes that ï¿½the policy (of leaving) bare subsistence was suicidal for it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It left no incentive for increasing the production or improving the methods of cultivation.ï¿½61 Consequently, there was a progressive deterioration in the living standards of the peasantry as decades and centuries passed. As said earlier, Alberuni, Barani, Ibn Battuta and Shams Siraj Afif talk about the prosperity of the people right up to the fourteenth century. R.H. Major in his translation of the works of Nicolo Conti, Athnasius Nikitin, Santo Stefano etc.,62 only refers to the poverty of the Indian peasant in the fifteenth century. But Babur in the sixteenth century witnessed extreme poverty; he repeatedly talks about langoti as the only apparel and khichri as the only food.63 Witnesses for the seventeenth century are unanimous in observing extreme poverty of the peasantry.

Resistance of the Peasantry

The idea of leaving only the bare minimum to the peasant and collecting the rest of his hard-earned produce in land revenue and other taxes, remained the basic policy of the rulers during the medieval times. Some chroniclers were aware of its evil effects. Shams Siraj Afif, writing in the days of Firoz Shah Tughlaq (1351-88) says that ï¿½Unwise regulations had been made in former reigns, and the raiyyats and subjects were oppressed in the payment of revenue. Several writers told the author of this work that it was the practice to leave the raiyyat one cow and take away all the rest.ï¿½64 Such a policy proved counter-productive. It not only harmed the agriculturists but also the Muslim regime, for, in place of minimising opposition, it actually encouraged resistance. In the unequal struggle between the poor peasantry and the mighty government carried on over a long period of time the tillers of the soil ultimately lost. But not without stiff resistance. Hindu Zamindars as the leaders and the peasants as their followers, both fought against the unjust demands of the king. Under Alauddin himself the Khuts and Muqaddams (Zamindars) avoided to pay taxes, did not care for the summons of the Diwan-i-Wazarat or Revenue Department, ignored to call at his office and paid no heed to the revenue officials.65 And the peasants, finding continuance of cultivation uneconomic and the treatment of the regime unbearable, left the fields and fled into the jungle from where they organized resistances. In this confrontation Zamindars played the role of leaders and the peasants joined under their banner.

Ibn Battuta describes this scenario. ï¿½The Muslims dominate the infidels,ï¿½ writes he, ï¿½but the later fortify themselves in mountains, in rocky, uneven and rugged places as well as in bamboo groves (or jungles)ï¿½ which serve them as ramparts. Hence they cannot be subdued except by powerful armies.ï¿½66 The story of the resistance of the Hindus to Muslim dominance and injustice is repeated by many contemporary writers. Ziyauddin Barani says that if the Hindus ï¿½do not find a mighty sovereign at their head nor behold crowds of horse and foot with drawn swords and arrows threatening their lives, they fail in their allegiance, refuse payment of revenue and incite a hundred tumults and revolts.ï¿½67 Similar is the testimony of Amir Khusrau, Ibn Battuta, Vidyapati and the Muslim chroniclers of the fifteenth century.68 In the fifteenth century, when the Sultanate of Delhi had grown weak, the tillers of the soil evaded, more than ever, payment of land tax, and revenue could be collected only through army sorties in regular yearly or half-yearly expeditions.69 Such resistance continued throughout, for the Indian peasant had his own survival strategies. These comprised mainly of two options - to fight with determination as far as possible, but, if resistance proved of no avail, to flee and settle down elsewhere. Medieval Indian society, both urban and agrarian, was to some extent an armed society. In cities and towns the elite carried swords like walking sticks. In villages few men were without at least a spear or bow and arrows, and they were skilled in the use of these arms. In 1632, Peter Mundy actually saw in the present day Kanpur district, ï¿½labourers with their guns, swords and bucklers lying by them while they ploughed the groundï¿½.70 Similarly, Manucci described how in Akbarï¿½s days the villagers of the Mathura region defended themselves against Mughal revenue-collecting officers: ï¿½The women stood behind their husbands with spears and arrows, when the husband had shot off his matchlock, his wife handed him the lance, while she reloaded the matchlock.ï¿½71 The countryside was studded with little forts, some surrounded by nothing more than mud walls, but which nevertheless provided centres of the general tradition of rebellion and agrarian unrest. Armed peasants provided contingents to Baheliyas, Bhadauriyas, Bachgotis, Mandahars and Tomars in the earlier period, to Jats, Marathas and Sikhs in the later.

But as the people put up a continual resistance, the Muslim government suppressed them ruthlessly. In this exercise the Mughal emperors were no better than the pre-Mughal sultans. We have often referred to the atrocities of the Delhi sultans and their provincial governors. Abul Fazl, Bernier and Manucci provide detailed accounts of the exertion of the Mughals. Its summing up by Jahangir is the most telling. In his Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi he writes:

ï¿½I am compelled to observe, with whatever regret, that notwithstanding the frequent and sanguinary executions which have been dealt among the people of Hindustan, the number of the turbulent and disaffected never seems to diminish; for what with the examples made during the reign of my father, and subsequently of my own, there is scarcely a province in the empire in which, either in battle or by the sword of the executioner, five or six hundred thousand human beings have not, at various periods, fallen victims to this fatal disposition to discontent and turbulence. Ever and anon, in one quarter or another, will some accursed miscreant spring up to unfurl the standard of rebellion; so that in Hindustan never has there existed a period of complete repose.ï¿½72

ï¿½In such a society,ï¿½ observes Kolf, ï¿½ï¿½the millions of armed men, cultivators and otherwise, were its (governmentï¿½s) rivals rather than its subjects.ï¿½73 This attitude was the consequence of the Mughal governmentï¿½s policy of repression. As an example, the exploits of one of Jahangirï¿½s commanders, Abdullah Khan Uzbeg Firoz Jung, can provide an idea of the excessive cruelty perpetrated by the government. Peter Mundy, who travelled from Agra to Patna in 1632 saw, during his four daysï¿½ journey, 200 minars (pillars) on which a total of about 7000 heads were fixed with mortar. On his way back four months later, he noticed that meanwhile another 60 minars with between 2000 and 2400 heads had been added and that the erection of new ones had not yet stopped.74 Abdullah Khanï¿½s force of 12,000 horse and 20,000 foot destroyed, in the Kalpi-Kanauj area, all towns, took all their goods, their wives and children as slaves and beheaded and ï¿½immorteredï¿½ the chiefest of their men.75 Why, even Akbarï¿½s name stands besmeared with wanton killings. In his siege of Chittor (October 1567) the regular garrison of 8000 Rajputs was vigorously helped by 40,000 armed peasants who had shown ï¿½great zeal and activityï¿½. This infuriated the emperor to massacre 30,000 of them.76

In short, the Indian peasant was clear in his mind about meeting the onslaughts of nature and man. Attached to his land as he was, he resisted the oppression of the rulers as far as his resources, strength and stamina permitted. If conditions went beyond his control, he left his land and established himself in some other place. Indeed, migration or flight ï¿½was the peasantï¿½s first answer to famine or manï¿½s oppression.ï¿½ Baburï¿½s description of this process may be quoted in his own words: ï¿½In Hindustan,ï¿½ says he, ï¿½hamlets and villages, towns indeed, are depopulated and set up in a moment. If the people of a large town, one inhabited for years even, flee from it, they do it in such a way that not a sign or trace of them remains in a day or a day and a half. On the other hand, if they fix their eyes on a place in which to settle,ï¿½ they make a tank or dig a well; they need not build houses or set up walls, khas-grass abounds, wood is unlimited, huts are made and straightaway there is a village or a town.ï¿½77

Similar is the testimony of Col. Wilks about South India. ï¿½On the approach of a hostile army, theï¿½ inhabitants of India bury underground their most cumbrous effects, andï¿½ issue from their beloved homes and take the directionï¿½ sometimes of a strong fortress, but more generally of the most unfrequented hills and woods.ï¿½ According to Amir Khusrau, ï¿½wherever the army marched, every inhabited spot was desolatedï¿½ When the army arrived there (Warangal, Deccan), the Hindu inhabitants concealed themselves in hills and jungles.ï¿½78 This process of flight seems to have continued throughout the Mughal period, both in the North and the South. Writing of the days of Shahjahan, Bernier says that ï¿½many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so execrable a tyranny, abandon the country and sometimes fly to the territories of a Raja because they find less oppression and are allowed a greater degree of comfort.ï¿½79

To flee was a good idea, when it is realized that this was perhaps the only way to escape from the cruel revenue demand and rapacious officials. Some angry rulers like Balban and Muhammad bin Tughlaq hunted down these escapists in the jungles, others clamped them in jails, but, by and large, the peasants did survive in the process. For, it was not only cultivators alone who fled into the forests, but often even vanquished Rajas and zealous Zamindars. There they and people at large organized themselves to defend against the onslaughts of the regime. For it was not only because cultivation was uneconomic and peasants left the fields; it was also a question of saving Hindu religion and Hindu culture. Under Muslim rule the two principal Muslim practices of iconoclasm and proselytization were carried on unabated. During the Arab invasion of Sind and the expeditions of Mahmud of Ghazni, defeated rulers, garrisons of captured forts, and civilian population were often forced to accept Islam. The terror-tactics of such invaders was the same everywhere and their atrocities are understandable. But even when Muslim rule had been established in India, it was a matter of policy with Muslim rulers to capture and convert or disperse and destroy the male population and carry into slavery their women and children. Minhaj Siraj writes that Sultan Balbanï¿½s taking of captives, and his capture of the dependents of the great Ranas cannot be recounted.80 In Katehar he ordered a general massacre of the male population above eight years of age and carried away women and children.81 Muhammad Tughlaq, Firoz Tughlaq, Sikandar Lodi, Sikandar Butshikan of Kashmir, Mahmud Beghara of Gujarat and emperor Aurangzeb were more enthusiastic, some others were lukewarm, but it was the religious duty of a Muslim monarch to capture people and convert them to Islam.

In these circumstances the defeated Rajas and helpless agriculturists all sought refuge in the forests. Forests in medieval India abounded. Ibn Battuta says that very thick forests existed right from Bengal to Allahabad. In his time rhinoceroses (gender) were to be found in the very centre of the Sultanate, in the jungles near Allahabad. There were jungles throughout the country. Even the environs of Delhi abounded in forests so that during the time of Balban, harassed Mewatis retaliated by issuing forth from the jungles in the immediate vicinity of the south-west of Delhi, attack the city and keep the king on tenter-hooks.82 When Timur invaded Hindustan at the end of the fourteenth century, he had learnt about this resistance and was quite scared of it. In his Malfuzat he notes that there were many strong defences in India like the large rivers, the elephants etc. ï¿½The second defence,ï¿½ writes he, ï¿½consists of woods and forests and trees, which interweaving stem with stem and branch with branch, render it very difficult to penetrate the country. The third defence is the soldiery, and landlords and princes, and Rajas of that country, who inhabit fastnesses in those forests, and live there like wild beasts.ï¿½83

Growth of dense forests was a cause and effect of heavy rains. Forests precipitated rainfall and rains helped in the growth of forests. Therefore, like forests, rains also helped the freedom loving ï¿½wild-beastsï¿½ living in the jungles in maintains their independence and culture. It is truly said that in India it does not rain, it pours. The rainfall in the north and the northeastern India - Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal, including eastern Bengal (now Bangla Desh) and parts of Assam (the Hindustan of medieval times) - is in the following order: The average annual rainfall in U.P., Bihar and Bengal is 100 to 200 cms. (40 to 80 inches), in eastern Bengal and Assam it is 200 to 400 cms. and in some parts above 400 cms. (80 to 160 and above 160 inches). In all probability a similar average obtained in the medieval period also. Medieval chroniclers do not speak in quantitative terms: in their language ï¿½rivulets used to turn into rivers and rivers into seas during the rainy season.ï¿½ The situation is best depicted by the sixteenth century conqueror Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur himself in his memoirs Tuzuk-i-Baburi or Babur Nama. He writes about Hindustan: ï¿½Sometimes it rains 10, 15, or 20 times a day, torrents pour down all at once and rivers flow where no water had been.ï¿½84 Such intensity of rainfall had rendered precarious the grip of Turkish rulers in many parts. For example, the government at Delhi could not always maintain its hold on Bengal effectively. There were very few roads and hardly any bridges over rivers in those days, and the almost primitive medieval communication system used to break down during the rainy season. Local governors of the eastern region - Bihar and Bengal - did not fail to take advantage of this situation and used to declare independence. Governor Tughril Beg of Bengal ï¿½depended on the climate and waterlogged soil of the province to wear out the Delhi forces,ï¿½ for three years (1278-81).85 Bengal almost remained independent till the middle of the sixteenth century.

In short, heavy rains and thick forests affected the mobility of the governmentï¿½s army, leaving the refugees safe in their jungle hide-outs and repulse any intrusion. Ibn Battuta describes how people used to fight behind barricades of bushes and bamboo trees. ï¿½They collect rain waterï¿½ and tend their animals and fields, and remain so strongly entrenched that but for a strong army they cannot be suppressed.86 Babur confirms this: ï¿½Under the monsoon rains the banks of some of its rivers and torrents are worn into deep channels, difficult and troublesome to pass through anywhere. In many parts of the plains (because of rains) thorny jungle grows, behind the good defence of which the peopleï¿½ become stubbornly rebellious and pay no taxes.ï¿½87 It was because of this that Muslim conquest could not penetrate the Indian countryside nor Muslim rule affect it. If there was any fear of attack, the villagers just fled and re-established themselves elsewhere, or returned after the storm was over.</div>
2. QUOTE(Bharatvarsh @ May 4 2009, 11:19 PM)http://bojilkolarov.voiceofdharma.com/offensive.html
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEThe latter, in addition to the Jiziya were taxed with some other unjust taxes. The tax over the Hindu worshippers was again introduced. Only at the time of the solar eclipse in 1703 and the connected ritual of purifying bathing in Ganga, the authorities collected 300 thousand rupees [14].

The trade duties and the tax on the cattle was 2.5% for Muslims and 5% for Hindus, and for the gardens 16.6% and 20% [13]. The traders Hindus were forced to realize their trade using third persons.

This unbearable tax oppression brought to considerable pauperization of the village population and to mass famine. In Gujarat the famine was spread in 1659-1669 and Sind â in 1694-95. During the big famine from 1702-1703 over two million people perished in Deccan alone.
This could actually be book material if someone comes out with, a survey of all the major famines in recorded Indian history just like Mike Davis did with those under Brit rule. I have no doubt that most of these famines would fall under Brit & Muslim rule.</div>

Husky · (This post was last modified: 09-22-2009, 10:17 PM by Husky.)

This actually belongs in the christobrits thread.

1. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/09/ama...d-has-been.html
QUOTEAmartya rothschild has been bullshitting?
(Oh what an unforeseen surprise...
Good name for him BTW.)
sep 17th, 2009

why are we not surprised that the govt of india has suppressed data that would expose the rothschild boy's hollow theories?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rajan

http://www.bowbrick.org.uk/famine.htm

r

Posted by nizhal yoddha at 9/17/2009 03:38:00 AM 1 commentsLots of links at http://www.bowbrick.org.uk/famine.htm which all show Rotten Amartya Sen-Rothschild to be a liar. Christomoronism "secularism"/communism are all the same, all one.

2. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/09/kkk...ve-reminds.html
QUOTEThursday, September 17, 2009
kkkangress fake austerity drive reminds me of limey propaganda about 'prosperous british india'
sep 17th, 2009

read and weep. digby lays out the cruel facts.

William Digby, 1901, Prosperous British India: a revelation from official
records, London, T. Fisher Unwin
http://tinyurl.com/m2othh (Google book for full download 646 pages).
Posted by nizhal yoddha at 9/17/2009 03:54:00 AM 1 comments

3. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/09/lim...umbers-and.html
QUOTESunday, September 20, 2009
limey colonial loot, the actual numbers and digby's/naoroji's books
sep 20th, 2009

thanks to dr kalyanaraman

Colonial loot, impoverished India, Industrial revolutionLink contains text, tables and supporting docs.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 08-17-2010, 07:43 PM by Husky.)

A link to go with post 40 of this thread:

apparently an E&P article on Winston Churchill, that genocidal maniac from Angleterre -

beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/188592/

Winston ChurchillÃ¢â¬â¢s Plan for Post-war India

Husky · (This post was last modified: 05-16-2012, 10:23 PM by Husky.)

http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2012/04/i...white.html

Quote:Monday, April 30, 2012imperial secrets: the black history of white conquest -- what the brits usually dont tell you about their exploits

apr 30th 2012 CE

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/04/23/dark-hearts/

Quote:Dark Hearts

April 23, 2012

We British have a peculiar ability to blot out our colonial history.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th April 2012

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the right-wing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects(1), and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations(2), is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies" while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined"(3).

The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law. Ã¢â¬Â¦ Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria."(4) Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly ten years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya(5). She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the [color="#FF0000"]1950s[/color] was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, then conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors Ã¢â¬â both rebels and loyalists Ã¢â¬â and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and the other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

[color="#0000FF"]Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintained, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died(6).

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.[/color]

[color="#800080"](The British had the stomach to perpetrate it - never got punished for it and instead went on to multiply to produce offspring conveniently oblivious of any ancestral guilt. I'm sure they can handle reading the sordid details about their grand "accomplishments". It's the Kikuyu victims and their descendants who need to skip the next paragraph, because it concerns what was done to their own kind.)[/color]

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound(7).

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons(8). This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.

No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process."(9)

The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues."(10) The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.

What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s(11) and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates(12,13), British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18...ial-crimes

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18...et-archive

3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...mpire.html

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...ringe.html

5. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Random House, London.

6. Caroline Elkins, as above.

7. Caroline Elkins, as above.

8. Caroline Elkins, as above.

9. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/daniel...re-missing

10. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...mpire.html

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

12. See for example John Newsinger, 2006. The Blood Never Dried: a people's history of the British empire. Bookmarks, London.

and

13. Mark Curtis, 2007. Unpeople: Britain's secret human rights abuses. Vintage, London

Posted by nizhal yoddha at 4/30/2012 09:54:00 PM Reactions:

1 comments:

Sujeev said...

Here is Monbiot continuing on the topic of imperialism....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...tional-law

5/01/2012 11:52 AM

Post a Comment

If you look up the original at the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities), the comments are illuminating as to mindset. Proves that unless there's accounting for genocide, there is simply no widespread sense of guilt in the perpetrating population. If the perpetrators get away with it, they will not just be ignorant or in denial, but justify their actions in some way while minimising the nature of the crime (e.g. catholic nazis of Croatia) or the best excuse of all: saying the crimes are too remote to be relevant (yet hypothetical Oryan ancestors of millennia ago are treated as relevant as if they existed and existed yesterday. Curious. But the difference is between who they don't want to remember themselves as actually having been/being, and who they want to see themselves as being. And further still: what they don't want others to remember them as and who they want others to see them as.)

The crime, lack of justice, ignorance, and genetic continuity (in being allowed to multiply instead of doing time) made them who they are today.

At least one comment noted the obvious:

Quote:DWearing

23 April 2012 8:43PM

Quote:The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom".....

That's just too close to "Arbeit macht frei" to pass without comment.

"Arbeit macht frei" -> "Labour liberates". IIRC, hung over the entrance of some famous nazi concentration camp(s) in Europa.

But note that the British did ^that^ to the targeted Africans in the 1950s apparently. That's like years after the war with the nazis was over. Yet no Nuremberg Trials for the Brits. And people say "British empire" as if it's a respectable thing and whisper "nazism"/"Third Reich" as if it's uniquely hideous.

One of the other comments by some Brit male introduces the token African ex-girlfriend who preferred Britain's "civilizing" force in Africa. Where have I heard this before. Probably she'd like the "2 Cheers For Colonialism" book by D'Souza, India's own christian apologetist for christoBritish genocide.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 05-16-2012, 10:25 PM by Husky.)

The following excerpt is from one chapter in a well-read children's novel aimed at early high school teens by a famous NL writer who is well-known for the detail and accuracy to history in her works of historical fiction: though she may invent (some) fictitious characters, they're always set amongst real history and real characters and a real sense of time. (As a point of comparison: English language "serious" historical fiction takes far more liberties with history than such NL authors do. Actual history-writing is better in mainland Europe in general.)

A relevant portion's translated below to show:

1. the everyday existence of dowry in 14th century christian Europe. This is not only before christoeurope invaded/colonised India, it's about a part of Europe that didn't colonise India.

2. that dowry - as everyone already knows - was always heavily demanded by the church whenever anyone (especially women) entered it. Families paid, as christoconverts in India still do, to get their daughters taken up by convents as nuns. The same was true among Romans when Rome was converted to christianism. Dowry to enrich the church's coffers is a longstanding christoEuropean tradition. The novices already worked everyday for their upkeep - completing tasks and chores for their church - and yet their families were expected to pay their way too, so can't argue that it's for supporting the nuns.

3. that all the low-level opinions on daughters that (Indian and foreign) christians ascribe to unconverted Indians is actually described as being the norm in Europe in the following.

I've left out identifying markers such as for placenames and character names, but these are described in <>. Inserts to clarify bits implicit from the sentence in the original are in []. The rest of the translation is as in text. As literal as possible. And the original is indeed written in the present tense - so that's been retained in the translation even when this sounds weird in English, whereas it's not so weird in NLs - despite the story taking place in the 14th century in NW Europe.

Quote:[...]

She wants to think about the insane fact that she has been engaged since the last few days.

She's now 15 years old. Her parents think it's time that a suitable husband is sought for her and 3 days ago father brought up the name of <character name>, the 17-year old son of a rich broker. That shocked <her> terribly.

[...]

"If the <prospective groom's> family discover what kind of character our <daughter> has, it's but the question if they would still want her," she heard her mother say now. It sounds bitter, but <the girl> suddenly holds her breath. Yes, consider: *that* would be a way out! She lies quietly listening, and then hears her mother ponder: "<Another male name>, the son of the Guildmaster <family-name> also has an eye on <the girl>. Maybe...."

"[I'll have] None of <guildmaster's family>," rages the father. "That one demands too high a dowry. The <broker family> [constantly] send the most profitable business my way and demand only half [the dowry] of what the <guildmaster family> want for <my daughter>. She will marry <the broker's son> and that's the end of it!"

<The girl> quickly hides her head under her cover and forces her tears back.

[...]

She knows that her parents never loved her. But do they even love each other? <Her> mother was of course also married out to the most profitable match; she wasn't asked for her opinion. Who knows, she might have as much a dislike for her husband as <the protagonist Girl> has of <her intended, the broker's son>. In any case, <she> has never noticed anything of affection between her parents. Mrs <Girl's mother> quietly goes about her business, speaks little, never laughs. Is she unhappy, or merely proud?

[color="#0000FF"]<The Girl's> birth must have been a disappointment to merchant <Girl's dad>, because he'd been hoping for a successor and got a daughter. Daughters are worthless, they only cost money. The most use you get from a daughter is to marry her out to a befriended business-family, to make the bonds [between business families] even stronger. Moreover, it took another 3 years before the next child came, <the Girl's brother's name>. This time a boy, fortunately![/color] Her father had hardly considered <the Girl> again/after that. Mother had entrusted the care of the little daughter to the <servant name> and she had but little time to give to the child. And so, the <Girl> had grown up: neglected by her father, treated coolly by her mother. The sole person with whom she found a little friendship and happiness was <male name>, the old servant to look after the horses. He had taught her how you should handle horses. The stable's still the only place where <the Girl> can count on some sympathy and understanding. She's learnt little beyond that. She's spent 2 years at school with the nuns to learn to count and especially: learning to pray. Her father found any more than that to be unnecessary. But she speaks good French, which she has picked up in town and also at school. French is the trade-language, and even the most ignorant <inhabitant of this Belgian town> can more or less express themselves in that language. Beyond that...

Beyond that, she's nothing more than a well-dressed maidservant, destined to marry a boy whom she rather wishes into the other end of the world. Everything in <the Girl> rebels against that prospect. And once more the impossible thought of a flight turns up...

[...]

To <the Girl>, France is the land of great wonder. There the people are gallant and beautiful. There they're not of the pedestrian ways of the Flemish. There the sun always shines and the farmers sing at their work; there lie cities, much greater, richer and mightier than <her own Belgian town>. There the wine-grapes ripen, the minstrels sing, and the king is honoured as a saint. Whoever wants to be happy, ought to go to France.

Or so <the Girl> thinks, at any rate. And that is curious, because it's precisely the <inhabitants of her Flemish town> who have little reason to be well-disposed to the French king (who's also *their* king). The great Flemish townships had long fought for independence and, at first, even with much success. At <Flemish placename or battle named after place>, the Flemish had brought on a terrific defeat to the French cavalry [literally "army of knights"] and that battle is still called the ["Golden trail battle"????]. But thereafter the French king had been able to subject the rebellious Flemish people again and the [Flemish] cities were punished severely.

Still, the Flemish remained unwilling. And that is no wonder, because the trade-interests of the <inhabitant's of the Girl's Flemish town> were dependent on the import of English wool, the best in the world. All of <this Flemish town> lives off of it. That's why the town chose the side of the English when the English king Edward III was seeking allies because he was preparing for a war with France. [It was] Because this Edward III was of the opinion that it was he who had the right to the French throne and not Phillippe VI of Valois, who now reigned in Paris.

Maybe <the Girl> is dreaming of France precisely because her father, the cloth-merchant, is so favourably disposed towards the English. At home she always hears her parents swear at France. She would rather hear them swear at <the broker's son (her intended fionce)>, in place of [their swearing at] King Phillipe and his entire band of knights.

Thus dozing about <famous French province> and the lovely France, <the Girl> finally falls in sleep.

[...]

[Next day, while trying to purchase onions, the Girl meets the broker's son - who is well-known to her - and tries to ignore him. He taunts her and threatens to beat her up regularly each morning once they're married - which is set to happen in about a year's time - as he claims that will make her obedient. She promises to stab him if he ever tries anything, and ends by telling him he ought to be an executioner rather than a broker.]

[...]

Raging, she marches and arrives home 10 minutes later, without the onions. When her father comes home for his afternoon meal, he appears to already be aware [of what had transpired].

"<Girl's name>! You have been arguing in the middle of the street with <the broker's son> like a typical mean [low-bred] maid," he yells. "What possesses you child? The <Broker's family> might not even want to take you up in their family next. But I warn you! If that happens, you will be sorry." [Note: her dad had previously sent her to bed black and blue - with her mother's approval - for losing some money when sent on a shopping errand.]

With the courage of desperation, <the Girl> yells: "<The broker's son> has promised to beat me up every morning once I'm married to him. I told him that the daughter of cloth-merchant <her father's surname> is not served by this/not brought up for this."

That [comment] reaches its mark. Mother looks at her dismayed, father frowns. His family pride has been hit.

"Is that true?"

"It's true, father. <The broker's son> said that with a face as if he was already looking forward to the beatings. That boy is mad. Who'd say such a thing... to his fioncee."

"I don't want such things spoken of at table," mother says quickly. She has turned pale. Which memories have surfaced in her?

"Father, I can't marry <the broker's son>. I hate him," <the Girl> yells.

"Silence!" her mother demands sternly.

"You will marry <the broker's son> and that's an end on it," her father says implacably. "But there's no hurry; you're [both] still children and argue like children. You will see that in a year or two <the broker's son> would be completely changed." <The Girl> snorts. She doesn't believe in that[/such a] change. Once a vicious sneak, always a vicious sneak, she thinks. It's *in* him, it's his character.

"I'd as lief go into a convent," she whispers. She almost chokes on a fishbone.

"A convent life wouldn't suit you," her mother says quickly, her eyes fastened on her tin plate.

No, certainly not! [i.e. "a convent life would certainly not suit"] <The girl> can't even think of being locked up forever [as would happen to nuns in a convent]... But at this moment it seems to her the only way out. "Anything is better than marrying an executioner," she screams at the top of her voice.

"Eat," her father says gruffly. <The Girl> is already ducking, because she expects an outburst of fury after all her impertinence. To her surprise, it doesn't come. Instead, father looks broodingly at the table and messes about with the buttersauce. And suddenly <the Girl> understands! The convent of the <Convent name or name of nuns> would gladly accept the daughter of a well-to-do merchant.

But the abbess ["mother superior" type] would certainly demand a dowry as great as that of the <guildmaster family> for <the Girl's> entry into the convent. And her parents don't intend to settle much money on that troublesome daughter of theirs. They want to get rid of her, but as inexpensively/cheaply as possible. That's why <the broker's son> is the appointed groom. Sold to the least demanding, <the Girl> thinks, grinding her teeth. So that's my life, the future of a free citizen's/burgher's daughter.

[...]

Further notes: the work is not a romance - minus for a brief bit in passing - it's just plain historical fiction with the twin purpose of teaching history (which is clearly the author's passion) in an entertaining setting. The author's purpose with the work is, as usual, to paint the time and place and introduce famous historical events. (The author's historical fictions are recommended by history teachers for a purpose.) The above excerpt is from a work that's IIRC mostly about a famous war and its famous battles in that period of history, the real way the aristocratic knights and peasant footsoldiers fought their battles: the conceitedness and snobbishness of the French aristocracy, the cheating of the English with their terrorist guerilla warfare - this work isn't going to get translated into English any time soon, I suspect. Also: the complete contempt with which the aristocracy treated the peasants/serfs and all in between and how this was ultimately considered gawd-ordained, the utter and pervasive misery and grime in that time in christian medieval Europe, the reality of the scale of impact of disease/epidemics, etc. Other things that get covered: superstition, maltreatment, church twohandedness/hypocrisy (powergreed versus pretence of piety), christian-instilled bigotry, even a very brief illustration of the ready nature of christian pogroms against Jews (on the slightest of pretexts). Clearly, this book is not going to be translated for Indian children studying in christian schools in India etc, despite Indian christian schools' preference for "western" literature... I think there's a reason people in the christianising world - both among the missionary and in the 3rd world being converted - stick studiously to the English language and strictly avoid translating mainstream works from other European languages. English really is the language of christianism. And of all the European languages, English seems to have the least offensive (and least effective) literature vis-a-vis christianism. In the comparison, translations of the above and other NL authors' works can be found in most other European languages - most everything except English, in fact. "Curious." Either native English speakers think their native literature is the only kind worthwhile or there's some other reason for their selective translations (or absence of any translation*) of famous works in other languages.

(* The thus-far total avoidance of Deschner's works comes to mind as an example of the latter.)

Husky · (This post was last modified: 08-08-2012, 10:59 PM by Husky.)

Text extracted from a scribd doc found at haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aspx?PageID=16257&SKIN=C

Personally I find it more legible in some html style format. And easier to search.

Just 10 pages*, and SRG tends to write in an easy-to-read style.

(*18 pages of giant font size.) [color="#800080"]My interruptions in purple.[/color]

Quote:Francis Xavier SJ - The Man And His Mission

Sita Ram Goel

Voice of India

2/18 Ansari Road

New Delhi Ã¢â¬â 110002

St. Xavier's College And Its Namesake

St. Xavier's College at Calcutta is celebrating this year, 1985, the125th anniversary of its foundation. It was entirely due to British patronage that it had become prominent to start with. A self-alienated section of India's upper class had preferred to send its scions to this institution. Later on, when this class came to power in progressive stages, St. Xavier's became its privileged alma mater. Small wonder that its old students should vie with each other in singing hallelujahs to its historical role.

The Society of Jesus which runs this college has utilised this year's celebrations for eliciting high encomiums for the services rendered by its protÃÂ©gÃÂ©. Many dignitaries from several walks of life have paid their tributes to it in language which gentlemen generally lavish on such occasions.

One wonders, however, if anyone has cared to know or make known the life-story of the man whose name the college carries. Everyone seems to have assumed that Francis Xavier was a saint Ã¢â¬â a word which invokes instantaneous reverence in Indian hearts, associated as it is with names like Kabir and Guru Nanak, Namadev and Tukaram, Ravidas and Mirabai, Chaitanya and Tulsidas. It does not occur to an average Indian that the same word can have quite a different meaning in a different cultural milieu.

It would, therefore, be appropriate that some significant facts about Francis Xavier and his mission be presented to our people. These facts are found in his biographies published by the Church which he served so zealously to the end of his days. Let us remember that Xavier's is no ordinary name. He is held by the Roman Catholic Church as the Apostle of the Indies and the Patron Saint of the East. He is cited by all Christian writers as the model missionary. There are many institutions in different parts of India which take considerable pride in naming themselves after him.

Brief Biography

His full Spanish name was Francois de Jassu Y Xavier. He was born in 1505 in Navarre, a hilly tract of the Pyrennes. His father, Juan de Jassu, was in the employment of the King of Arragon. But he took his surname from his mother who was a heiress of the houses of Azpilqueta and Xavier. One of his sisters held a high post in the court of Queen Isabella of Castile.

Xavier went to Paris for his higher education. There he came under the influence of another illustrious Spaniard, Ignatius of Loyola, and was one of the six pioneers who founded the Society of Jesus on15th August 1534. This new Catholic order consisted of men who were neither secular priests nor religious monastics. It was confirmed by Pope Paul III in 1540 and soon became the main missionary arm of the Roman Catholic Church after the commencement of the Counter Reformation.

King Joao III of Portugal was a great Catholic enthusiast and wanted to spread his faith in the East which had been mandated to his kingdom by Pope Alexander VI under the Padroado in 1493 CE.Portuguese pirates had made quite a headway in the Indian Ocean after Vasco da Gama sailed into Calicut in 1498. They had seized Goa in 1510 and made it the headquarters of their projected Christian empire in the East. In 1539 King Joao III requested the Pope to recommend some person of extraordinary devotion who could supervise and strengthen the mission. The Pope consulted Ignatius Loyola who forwarded the name of Xavier. He was appointed as the Royal Inspector of Missions with the right to correspond directly with the King. At the same time, the Pope made him an apostolic nuncio, which was a very high office normally bestowed upon the Pope's ambassadors to emperors.

Xavier left Lisbon on April 7, 1541 and landed in Goa on May 6,1542. He was received very warmly by Alfonso de Sousa, the Portuguese governor, who fixed for him an annual salary of 4000 gold fanams. This was quite a sum in those days. But Xavier could not look kindly at the sort of life the Portuguese were leading in Goa. He had little hope that they would be useful for the spread of Christianity. During the few months he spent in Goa, he founded the College of St. Paul for training native missionaries. This step of his has been hailed as a stroke of genius by all historians of Christian expansion in the East. Xavier, they say, was the first to train native talent for planting Christianity in foreign lands. The Dutch, the French and the British who trained native mercenaries for conquering and consolidating their empires in the East came much later.

In October, 1542 Xavier landed on the Coromandel Coast where the Portuguese had established themselves between 1518 and 1530.Earlier, the Paravas engaged in pearl fishery had been enslaved by the Arab pirates who took away the best part of their earnings. The Portuguese had promised help to the Paravas if the latter agreed to get baptised. The Paravas had thought they were choosing the lesser evil when they formally embraced Christianity in 1534. Little did they know that they were choosing another set of pirates as their new masters. The Portuguese proved no better, if not worse, than the Arabs. They extracted heavier taxes from the poor fishermen. One of these taxes was 4000 gold fanams to be paid annually for the slippers of the Queen of Portugal. But Xavier paid no attention to their material plight. He was more concerned about their spiritual condition. He found that they were still making and worshipping the images of their old Gods and Goddesses. He had to exert himself considerably between 1542 and 1545 in order to Ã¢â¬Åclean upÃ¢â¬Â the Coromandel Coast.

Meanwhile, in 1544 he saw an opportunity for his mission in the quarrel between the princes of Travancore. Each faction was keen on securing Portuguese help in order to win. The Governor of Goa deputed Xavier to the court of the Tiruvadi Raja of Quilon. The Raja promised financial help and freedom to convert the fishermen along the Malabar Coast, provided the Portuguese sided with him. The missionary made a deal and immediately moved to the coastal villages. Fishermen who refused to be baptised or apostatised at a later stage were told flatly that the Portuguese would prevent them from fishing and confiscate their boats. On his way back to Goa, he met Miguel Vaz, Vicar General of the Indies in Cochin.

Now Xavier could look farther a field. He had a large territory to cover in the East, inspecting missions and exploring effective methods of conversion. He landed in Malacca in September, 1545and spent the next two years in neighbouring lands. It was during this journey that he ran into Anjiro (Yajiro), a Japanese who had committed murder in his native land and was living abroad as a fugitive from justice. Anjiro led Xavier to believe that the religion of Japan was very close to Christianity and that the Japanese people were ready to receive the Gospel. Xavier took Anjiro to Goa in 1548 and had him trained as a missionary. It was neither the first nor the last time that the Church was using a common criminal to carry out its errands. The history of the Church provides many such instances.

Xavier and Anjiro landed at the port of Kogoshima in Japan. Xavier had been authorised by the Pope to go there as the latter's apostolic nuncio. Japan at that time was divided among 250 local rulers over whom the Emperor at Miyako had little control. They had also heard about the rising Portuguese power and some of them were eager to secure foreign help in local feuds. One of them received Xavier very kindly and gave him freedom to preach. But Xavier discovered very soon that Anjiro had misled him. The mystic doctrine of Buddhism with which he was faced was very different from his own monotheistic theology. Moreover, the Buddhist monks were not so unorganised as to let their people fall an easy prey to an alien faith. In his desperation, he denounced the Buddha as a devil and told the people that their monstrous sin of Paganism put their souls in peril. The people did not relish his rhetoric and showed considerable resentment. Xavier did the best he knew under the circumstances. He went to Miyako to converse with and convert the Emperor as a first step to christianise the people. This had been the patent pattern in Europe since the days of Constantine in the fourth century CE. A Christian king would marry his daughter to a promising Pagan king in the neighbourhood. She would help the missionaries to baptise him. He in turn would declare that in his domain Paganism was punishable with death. But unfortunately for Xavier, the Emperor of Japan was fully satisfied with his ancestral religion and refused to meet the missionary from a foreign land. Xavier came back to Goa in 1551 having wasted twenty-seven months in Japan. The few Japanese he had managed to convert went back to Buddhism soon after.

(Actually almost all of that blue bit - down to the eventual proscription of the native ancestral heathen religion, with serious repercussions sometimes - was how Buddhism scored several Asian countries as well (and various parts of a few countries, at times only temporarily under Buddhism's sway). Missionising religion tactic for doing *replacement*. It's the top-down conversion strategy.

BTW, it's not "mean" or "unfair" to observe such historical facts.)

Xavier had heard a lot about China during his travels and decided to try his doctrine in that land. So he set out for China in 1552. But before he could reach the mainland, he died on a rock island off the Kwantung Coast on December 2nd that year. He had sent out a message to the Portuguese in the immediate neighbourhood to send a ship for his rescue. But no Portuguese thought of him so highly asto undertake the exertion. He gave up the ghost with only a Chinese servant to look after him.

It was only in February 1553 that at the behest of the higher authorities the Portuguese dug out his body. They brought it back to Goa on March 14, 1554. He was buried in the Church of St. Paul. Rome proclaimed him a saint in 1664. In 1664 his body was removed to the Church of Bom Jesus. In 1665, a special chapel was built inside the church. The church was itself raised to the status of a basilica minor by an apostolic decree in 1946. Dictionaries tell us that a basilica is a Roman Catholic church with honorific privileges.

His decaying body lies encased in a crystal glass coffin enclosed with a silver casket made by Goan artists. It is exposed for veneration at frequent intervals. The first exposition took place in 1782. Until1952 the votaries could kiss the body and earn merit. The practice was then stopped. It was feared that the holy relic might fall apart at the touch of such tremendous devotion.

Destroyer Of Hindu Temples

Xavier was inspired by the iconoclastic zeal of the monotheistic creeds. He had inherited a long-established tradition of destroying non-Christian temples wherever the Christian Church had managed to come on top. The Christian monks living a life of piety and penance in well-endowed monasteries had been particularly fond of this pastime. Aided by frenzied mobs, the monks had destroyed thousands of non-Christian temples all over Europe, West Asia and North Africa as the faith spread in different directions and powerful kings became crusading converts. Records have survived about two Hindu temples in Taron on the Upper Euphrates being destroyed by St. Gregory in 304 CE. These temples had 18 to 22 feet high images of Gods. The images were smashed after the fierce resistance offered by the Hindu colony at Taron had been overcome (ref. Osmond de Beauvoir Priauix, Indian Travels of Apollonius of Tyna and the Indian Embassies to Rome, London, 1873). A similar destruction was witnessed in Central America as soon as the Spanish missionaries arrived on the scene.

Xavier lived up to this tradition of the Church on the Coromandel Coast. He discovered that, though baptised in 1534, the Parava fisherman could hardly be called Christians in practice. Some of them still made their living by making images of Hindu deities. All of them were worshipping these Ã¢â¬Åevil spiritsÃ¢â¬Â. According to the History of Christianity in India published by the United Theological Seminary, Bangalore, in 1982: Ã¢â¬ÅWhen the boys informed him that someone had made an idol, he went with them and had it broken into a thousand pieces. In spite of all his advice someone persisted in making idols, he would have them punished by the patangatis (heads of Parava villages) or banished to another village. One day when he heard that idols had been worshipped in the house of a Christian, he ordered the hut to be burned down as a warning to others (ref. Volume 1).

Later on, he mounted the same iconoclastic campaign on the Malabar Coast. According to the same History, Ã¢â¬ÅWhen the whole village was baptised, Xavier would get them to pull down their village temple and break into small pieces the idols it contained.Ã¢â¬Â He did this at a time the Tiruvadi Raja of Quilon had given him 2000 fanams to build churches. The poor fishermen were in no position to resist him because the Portuguese pirates were always at hand to assist the missionary.

Xavier took great delight in what he had done in Malabar. On February 8, 1545, he wrote to the Society of Jesus: Ã¢â¬ÅFollowing the baptisms, the new Christians return to their homes and come back with their wives and families to be in their turn prepared for baptism. After all had been baptised, I order that the temples of the false Gods be pulled down and idols broken. I know not how to describe in words the joy I feel before the spectacle of pulling down and destroying the idols by the very people who formerly worshipped them.Ã¢â¬Â One of Xavier's colleagues in this mission of christianising the Hindus was Miguel Vaz, the Vicar General of India appointed by Rome. In consultation with Xavier he wrote a long letter to the King of Portugal in November 1545. The letter outlined a forty-one point plan for spreading the Ã¢â¬Ålight of Christianity.Ã¢â¬Â Point No. 3 reads as follows: Ã¢â¬ÅSince idolatry is so great an offence against God, as is manifest to all, it is just that your Majesty should not permit it within your territories and an order should be promulgated in Goa to the effect that in the whole island there should not be any temple public or secret; contravention thereof should entail grave penalties; that no official should make idols in any form, neither of stone, nor of wood, nor of copper, nor of any other metal; Ã¢â¬Â¦ and that persons who are in charge of St. Paul's should have the power to search the houses of the Brahmins and other Hindus, in case there exists a presumption or suspicion of the existence of idols there (JosephWicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. 1).Ã¢â¬Â On March 8, 1547 the King ordered his Viceroy at Goa that all Hindu temples should be destroyed forthwith.

(Note: Oh look. Contrary to what so many anti-Hindu pseudo-nationalists claim, the British didn't invent the bunch of related heathen people ["Hindus"] as being related. Not sure if the very word "Hindus" was used in the original from which Goel did the translation, but the grouping in itself is something. Plus the statement of "Brahmins and other Hindus" recognises that Brahmanas belong with the others ["Hindus"] - the only reason that brahmins got mentioned separately is because the christian Portuguese hated them with a vengeance since the christian Portuguese considered these to be an obstacle to mass conversions of the "other Hindus", as seen in the next section). Further, this is Goa: where there appears to have been little if anything of the other Indic religions. Moreover the defining "crime" referred to was the presence of "idols" in the houses of these suspects [the "Hindus"].)

The Portuguese friars and priests had been destroying Hindu temples in Portugal's Indian possessions for quite some time past. Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque, published from Lisbon in 1915 onthe basis of old records, carries a report from Andre Corsali stationed at Cochin in 1515. He writes that an ancient and magnificent temple on the island of Divari had been demolished in1515 and its sculptures defaced. In 1534 when Goa was made a bishopric many Hindu temples had been destroyed under the new policy described as Rigour of Mercy. A list of 156 temples which had been destroyed in Goa in 1541 is provided in Tomba da Ilha des Goae das Terras de Salcete e Bardes by Francisco Pais published in 1952,again on the basis of old records. The Hindu leaders of Goa had passed a Ã¢â¬Åvoluntary resolutionÃ¢â¬Â that the income from lands assigned to these temples could be used for the maintenance of churches and missions. The arrival of a mighty missionary like Xavier gave an added impetus to the campaign.

What followed in Goa and other Portuguese possessions in India has been very well documented by Christian historians in India. According to the History of Christianity in India, Vol. 1, 280 Hindu temples were destroyed in Salsette and another 300 in Bardez. The count for temples destroyed in Bassein (Vasai), Bandra, Thana and Bombay are not available. Missionary records, however, refer tomany famous Hindu temples being converted into churches at these places. A beautiful Hindu temple in the Elephanta Caves was turned into a chapel. Many temples were pulled or burned down on theislands of Seveon (Butcher's Island) and Neven (Hog Island). Even private temples in Hindu homes were prohibited and Ã¢â¬ÅtransgressorsÃ¢â¬Â were severely punished.

The Hindus in these places tried to circumvent the Ã¢â¬ÅlawÃ¢â¬Â by taking away their images to places outside Portuguese territories or building temples of their Gods in neighbouring lands. The missionaries discovered this Ã¢â¬ÅHindu trickÃ¢â¬Â very soon. The Portuguese authorities promulgated a law that Hindus found financing temples outside or going on pilgrimages to these temples were to be punished with heavy fines including confiscation of property.

Such were the first fruits of Xavier's mission in the East. The mission was by no means an individual enterprise. It represented the spirit which has moved the Christian Church at all stages of its history.

Advocate Of Forced Conversions

Use of force for Ã¢â¬Åsaving soulsÃ¢â¬Â has been the standard method employed by the Christian Church in many parts of the world whenever and wherever it enjoyed power. Force was replaced by fraud when the Church came to be discredited in the West. But that is another story. During the period when the Portuguese seized a number of places in India, the Church was all powerful. And Xavier was one of its mighty missionaries. He could not fall behind in employing this favourite method of his Holy Mother the Church.

In a letter dated 20th January 1548, Xavier wrote to another Jesuit, Fr. Simao Rodrigues, that, Ã¢â¬ÅAccording to my experience, the only effective way to spread religion in India is for the King to proclaim by means of an edict to all his officials in India that he shall put trust only in those who will exert themselves to extend the reign of religion by every means in their power. The King must definitely order them to exert themselves with zeal to multiply the number of Christians in Cape Comorin [Kanyakumari] in order to attract to the faith of Jesus Christ the island of Ceylon, and to muster all the piouspeople, be they members of our Society [the Jesuits] or other that may seem fit for propagating religion.... If the King publishes such an edict and treats severely those who disobey it, a great number of natives will embrace the faith of Jesus Christ; otherwise no success can be expected.Ã¢â¬Â

Xavier followed it up with a direct letter to the King of Portugal. He wrote: Ã¢â¬ÅBe pleased to order that, every time the Viceroy and the Government write, they set forth to you the present religious conditions giving the number of converts and their kind, the possibilities of converting more people and the means to be employed to do it. Be pleased to order that, regarding religion, only letters by those officials will be considered: that should in the country or province where they exercise authority no rise in the number of converts be evident under their administration, since it is evident that this number can at any time and in any country increase infinitely when the rulers are in favour of their conversion. Your Highness will hold them responsible and punish them, this being solemnly declared in the very chapters by which they are vested with authority. Ã¢â¬Â¦ So long as the viceroys and governors of India do not under the influence of fear of losing their properties and their offices when not labouring for the conversion of a great number of infidels, your Majesty should not expect that a great fruits from the evangelical preachings in India, except that a great number come for baptism and that those already baptised make any religious progress.Ã¢â¬Â

In another letter addressed to the Society of Jesus in Paris, he held the Brahmins to be the biggest hurdles in the way of Christianity. According to him, Ã¢â¬ÅThere is in these parts among the pagans a class of men called Brahmins. They are as perverse and wicked a set as can anywhere be found, and to whom applies the psalm which says: 'From a unholy race, and wicked and crafty men, deliver me, Lord. 'If it were not for the Brahmins, we should have all the heathens embracing our faith.Ã¢â¬Â

(Christianism and islam weren't the first among those who regarded themselves competition who felt such resentment about the same matter, nor even the first to do something about it.)

His co-worker, Miguel Vaz, had already presented a forty-one point plan to the King of Portugal in November, 1545 for the forcible conversion of Hindus. Vaz had gone to Lisbon immediately after and returned to Goa in 1546. Neither he nor his mentor, Xavier, lived to see the implementation of policies prescribed by them. But the Portuguese authorities in India were empowered by successive Portuguese kings to pursue those policies with utmost rigour.

The story of how anti-Hindu laws were enacted in Portuguese territories over a period of time is long. In summary form, it consists of 1) banishing Brahmins on pain of being made prisoners on the galleys; 2) confiscating the properties of those Hindus who sent their families to neighbouring lands for fear of conversion; 3) prohibiting the performance of Hindu rites and ceremonies; 4) banning Hindu priests and preachers from doing their religious duties; 5) compelling Hindus to attend church services and listen to Christian doctrines; 6) depriving Hindus of their traditional rights and privileges in village communities; 7) forcing the baptism of Hindu orphans; and 8) ordering Hindus not to ride on horseback or in palanquins. The laws were so designed as to humiliate the Hindus in every conceivable manner.

Simultaneously, many privileges and protections were extended to persons who embraced Christianity. Converts were exempted from land-tax for a period of fifteen years. Slaves of infidels were set free as soon as they accepted baptism. The wives and daughters could inherit ancestral property provided they joined the Church. In case of a man who died without a male child, his property could be claimed by the nearest relative who became a convert. A wife who became a Christian could claim a part of her husband's estate during the latter's lifetime. Sons and daughters who became Christians in their father's lifetime could claim one third of his property. Of course, Christian converts were given top priority in public appointments. Offices held by Hindus were frequently taken away from them and given to Christian converts.

Instigator Of The Goa Inquisition

Ã¢â¬ÅGoa is sadly famous for its Inquisition, equally contrary to humanity and commerce. The Portuguese monks madeus believe that the people worshipped the devil, and it is they who have served him.Ã¢â¬Â Ã¢â¬â Voltaire

Soon after his arrival in India, Xavier had seen that Christianity sat very lightly on most of the converts. They had been baptised under pressure. The Church was in a hurry. It had neither the time nor the inclination to use methods of peaceful persuasion. The neo-Christians who were mostly Hindus but also some Jews and Muslims were continuing with their earlier mores. Most of them were worshipping in the old ways in private.

Xavier knew that the Church had an effective method of bringing such people to book. He had a first hand knowledge of the Inquisition as it was functioning in Spain since 1481 and Portugal since 1536. Pope Sixtus had issued a bull on November 1, 1478,authorising the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain. It had started its operation on January 2, 1481. It had burned 2,300 persons and imposed various other penalties on 17,000 others in the very first year of its work. In 1483, the Pope appointed Thomas de Torquemeda as Inquisitor General of Spain. During his regime, 8,800persons were burned at the stake and 96,504 were punished in various other ways including long terms of imprisonment and confiscation of property. Another bull had been issued by another Pope on December 15, 1531 instituting the Inquisition in Portugal. It was also taking a heavy toll of lives and limbs of the Ã¢â¬ÅhereticsÃ¢â¬Â.

In a letter addressed to the king of Portugal on May 16, 1545, Xavier exhorted: Ã¢â¬ÅThe second necessity for the Christians is that your Majesty establish the Holy Inquisition, because there are many who live according to the Jewish law, and according to the Mahomedan sect, without any fear of God or shame of the world. And since there are many spread all over the fortresses, there is the need of the Holy Inquisition and of many preachers. Your Majesty should provide such necessary things for your loyal and faithful subjects in India.Ã¢â¬Â(Joseph Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. IV, Rome, 1956).The Inquisition could not be established immediately in Goa due to difficulties between the Portuguese King and the Pope. But the Jesuits kept on pressing for it till it was instituted in 1560.Meanwhile, Joao de Barros, a yonger contemporary of Xavier, had written a book, Decades of Asia, which was first published in 1552.

Regarding people of the East who had passed under Portuguese rule, he said: Ã¢â¬ÅBut as regards Muslims and Heathens, who are outside the law of Jesus Christ, which is the true law that everyone has to keep under pain of damnation to eternal fire Ã¢â¬â if these are condemned in their souls, being the principal part of them, their bodies which are animated by those souls cannot plead the privileges of our laws, since the adherents of those creeds are not members of the evangelical congregation, even though they may be our neighbours as rational beings and though they may live to be converted to the true Faith.Ã¢â¬Â (This passage can be found on page 100 of a book, Joaode Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia, written by C.R.Boxer and sponsored by the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa. It has been published from New Delhi in 1981. It gives a clear conception of what a humanist means in Christian parlance and how a Christian historian is expected to process Asian history). The Inquisition in Goa was a logical corollary.

The Inquisition was housed in an old palace of the earlier Sultans of Goa. But its jurisdiction was spread all over Portuguese possessions in India and the East. Its ostensible purpose was to bring to book heretics and apostates from Christianity. But in effect its weight fell most heavily on the Hindu population. Most Hindus who had agreed to be baptised had done so out of fear. Refusal was likely to result in loss of life, property and honour. It was natural that privately they detested Christianity and did not adhere to its prescriptions. Most of them worshipped in their old way in secret. Quite a few of them got caught by the fathers of the various Christian orders who had flocked to every nook and corner of Portuguese territories and who spied on the enslaved population.

The Goa Inquisition functioned from 1560 to 1812 when it was wound up. Details of tortures it inflicted in its dungeons are available in the account of Dr. Charles Dellon, the French traveller who was its prisoner for three years from 1674 to 1677. His account has been supplemented by Dr. Claudius Buchanan's Christian Research In India published in 1812. He had an opportunity to visit Goa in 1808 and himself saw the Great Hall of Inquisition, the procession of prisoners and the place where victims were burnt alive.

But the number of persons burnt, tortured and punished otherwise is not known. Keeping in view the number of victims of other Inquisitions, the number must have been quite large. No record has ever been published. In a letter dated December 20, 1812, the Viceroy of Goa wrote to the King of Portugal that, Ã¢â¬ÅThe papers which comprised the archive of that tribunal were found to be a vast mass. I am informed that in them exist papers relating to all the suits tried by the Holy Office since its inception, and if they are not guarded with all care, therein would be found motives to defame, even falsely, all the families in the state and these would provide occasions to feed the enmities and intrigues which so abound in this country. Ã¢â¬Â¦ As I am persuade that it is not expedient that they should be seen by any person it appears meet to me that it would be appropriate to burn them.Ã¢â¬Â (Antonio Baiao, A Inquisicao de Goa, Lisbon, 1945, Vol. 1). The Viceroy was directed not to burn the record and Fr. Tomas de Noronha was appointed to select some otherwise important materials from it. It is not known whether any selections were ever made and what finally happened to the record.

Society Of Jesus

Xavier was a leading light of the Society of Jesus which is credited with great achievements in India and elsewhere over the years. It would, therefore, be pertinent to know something about this organisation which continues to function in most parts of India at present. The fathers of this Roman Catholic order flaunt the letters SJ After their names and are known as Jesuits.

The Jesuits had not relished this name when it was first conferred on them by Etienne Pasquier, the famous French professor at the University of Paris. In his book, Le Catechisme de Jesuites, he had written that, Ã¢â¬ÅI call them by the name of Jesuits, the members of the Society of Jesus, because the nefarious sentiments which animate them in their dealings with the world are unworthy of the holy name of Jesus.Ã¢â¬Â Another French philosopher, Pascal, had denounced them for their principle that the end justifies the means, their casuistry, their lust for wealth, their pretension to be the cultural leaders of Europe, their political activities aimed at world domination and their incurable fanaticism. The Jesuits had appealed to the Pope to condemn Pascal who had to shut his mouth as a consequence. But before he became silent he pronounced that, Ã¢â¬ÅWhat I said is condemned by Rome but what I have condemned is condemned by the human conscience.Ã¢â¬Â Of course, Pascal could not imagine that Christian conscience has never been the same as human conscience.

Since then many studies have appeared documenting the crimes committed by the Jesuits, including assassinations. It is small wonder that the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary defines the word Jesuit as Ã¢â¬Åa crafty person; an intriguer; a prevaricator.Ã¢â¬Â In Peter Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, the synonyms for the word Jesuit are Ã¢â¬Ådeceiver, imposter, pretender, knave, liar, hypocrite, rogue, swindler, humbug, cheat, casuist, dishonest, seducer, addicted to sophistry.Ã¢â¬Â The reputation of Jesuits everywhere had become so tarnished over the years that Pope Clement IV was forced to suppress the Society of Jesus in 1773. He died soon after. It was widely suspected that he was poisoned by the Jesuits. They continued to enjoy the protection of some powerful European potentates like Empress Catherine of Russia till they were revived in August, 1814 by Pope Pius VII in spite of Pope Clement's pronouncement that no succeeding pope would have the power to do so. The French Revolution, particularly the treatment meted out by Napoleon Bonaparte to two successive popes, had created a serious situation for the Catholic Church and it was thought that only a ruthless organisation like the Society of Jesus could rescue the Church.

Since then the Jesuits have never looked back. The Jesuit General in Rome has often been described as the Black Pope. Not only because he wears the black robes of his office but on account of the power he wields over the Catholic Church with the help of his order. Jesuit methods may have become sophisticated because no state in the world is now prepared to use its coercive power at their behest. But this sophistication means no more than that force has been replaced by fraud. For the rest, Jesuit methods still carry the stamp put upon them by their initial inventors among whom Francis Xavier was one of the foremost. Louis Vuillot who died in 1883 has summed up these methods in the following words: Ã¢â¬ÅWhen we Catholics are in a minority, we demand freedom in the name of your principles; when we Catholics are in the majority we deny freedom in the name of our principles.Ã¢â¬Â

Conclusion

The hard facts stated above about one of the leading Ã¢â¬ÅsaintsÃ¢â¬Â of the Christian Church can be checked by anybody in any library of Christian lore. Yet the Church has never disowned Francis Xavier nor denounced the heinous crimes which he inspired in this part of the world. On the contrary, the Church has held him in the highest regard and continued to dedicate to his name one Christian institution after another. This is because the Church knows no definition of saintliness other than service to the cause of spreading its tentacles. Scratch any Christian saint and you will find the same sort of man as Francis Xavier, masked under a variety of myths. Some of these saints did practice pieties like fasting, walking with bare feet, living on bread and water, flagellation, etc. But what all of them lacked was the spirit of humanism and universality which have been the hallmarks of saintliness in the Indian tradition. The Buddha had said that only the prithaka-jana (the unregenerate ones) praised him for his pieties and that the qualities which distinguished him as Buddha were samadhi (highest state of spiritual experience) and prajna (wisdom born of universality).

The fact that the Christian Church should hail as saints persons like Francis Xavier and employ an organisation like the Jesuits speaks volumes about the character of Christianity as a religion. India should stop being beguiled by the similarity of words like Ã¢â¬ÅsaintÃ¢â¬Â used in common by us as well as Christianity and delve a little deeper into the doctrine, organisation and history of the Church in order to find out the truth.

Ã¢â¬â

Sita Ram Goel, New Delhi, April 1985

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