There is a 15-minute video on YouTube that everyone interested in pre-1947 Indian history of which India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are all equal stakeholders, must watch. It is a speech by Shashi Tharoor in London recently. There were seven other speakers and the former Indian State Minister for Foreign Affairs and current Chairman of the parliamentary Standing Committee was the last but one to speak. In 15 minutes, through sheer brilliance that perhaps he alone could muster, Shashi Tharoor bared the two hundred years of British rule of India as no better no worse than a naked loot for which he demanded reparations.
The Shashi Tharoor video reminded me of the Third UN Conference for Industrial Development (UNIDO III) Conference that was held in New Delhi in 1980. The developing nations or former colonies of the western countries were pressing hard - in fact, many of them pleading with the developed nations - to create a US$ 3.0 billion Common Fund to help "reduce the vulnerability of poorer commodity producers, processors and/or traders arising from their dependency from one or more primary commodities." The developed countries were not only unwilling to commit to that Fund, many among them were upset about the idea of such a fund.
When Mrs. Gandhi spoke at the UNIDO III, she had personified the sufferings of hundreds of millions who had faced every form of human injustice in the colonial era for centuries. She stated that the US$ 3.0 billion Common Fund the developing nations were seeking was a pittance compared to what the developed nations as colonisers in Africa, Asia and Latin America had looted. That was the strongest case made for the sufferings of the colonies in the hands of the European colonisers that should have made their descendants hang their heads in shame and seek forgiveness from the descendants of those their forefathers had plundered and looted.
That, of course, did not happen. Instead, the descendants of the looters have had the cheek to rub salt into the wounds of the former colonies after they had become independent by assuming they had the right to lecture them on all issues and among them were also issues of morals, ethics and human rights! The absurd distortions of history has been possible, first, because the West or the colonisers also had in their hands the means of writing and interpreting history to suit their interests and hide their misdeeds. Second, they had successfully created in the colonies a new breed of "Brown Sahibs" who ruled the colonies after they had left and in whom they had inculcated the mindset to govern the same way they had governed as the colonisers. Thus these "Brown Sahibs" instead of holding the colonisers for all sorts of crimes against their forefathers and for all their plunder and looting have gratefully thanked the British colonisers for giving them their education, legal and political systems!
Shashi Tharoor has given a few examples of the despicable nature of the colonial experience that volumes written on the subject could not have underlined. When the British took over India, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent. When they left, it was 4.0 per cent! He called India the "milking cow" for the British economy and highlighted the fact that colonisation, for example, turned Indian weavers, the best in the world before the British came, into beggars. He also highlighted the humungous contributions of India, both in men and money, to the two World Wars and underlined that India paid the British handsomely for being oppressed in all conceivable ways.
Sir Winston Churchill's claim to greatness has been unquestioned. FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) had called him the greatest leader of the last century. After viewing of Shahsi Tharoor's video, it would be crystal clear that FDR's eulogy could be true only for the Europeans and the Americans that he saved from falling into the evil hands of Hitler and the Nazis. The same Sir Winston was largely responsible for the 4.0 million Bengalis who died in the 1943 Bengal Famine because he had diverted food grains from the famine-stricken people to "build stockpiles for "sturdy Tommies and Europeans". When the British Indian Government had pleaded the case of the poor Bengalis, Sir Winston had "peevishly" written on the margins of the file "why hasn't Gandhi died yet!"
Karl Marx had predicted that Capitalism would end through class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the establishment of a classless society or Communism. That did not happen. Leading capitalist countries, namely England and Germany, blunted the class struggle and defeated it by providing the proletariat with economic benefits from their plunder of the colonies in the era of imperialist capitalism. Instead armed with the theory of communism, it was in Russia at first and then in China that communism emerged mainly through the efforts of the communist party. Thus illegal British and European colonisation of Asia, Africa and Latin America was responsible for saving Western Europe from becoming communist.
Shashi Tharoor underlined the great historical injustice about which the western world has been in denial let alone take responsibility - that the colonial powers, led by Great Britain, have never been asked to pay reparations for the plunder, loot and destruction of the countries they colonised. The principle of reparations in history is nevertheless well established. Germany has paid reparations for holocaust survivors. The USA has paid reparations to Japanese Americans and the Red Indians, Austria to the Jews who suffered in the Second World War and Canada to the Eskimos. The Chinese have not stopped seeking reparations from the Japanese for the destructions the latter caused by its occupation of China during the last Great War.
Shashi Tharoor was aware that the actual financial tag for reparations for colonial exploitation would be incomprehensible and would open a Pandora's Box of claims because other European nations are equally guilty of exploitation and degradation of colonies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Thus in the Indian case, he wanted Great Britain to accept the principle of reparation as an acknowledgement of its guilt and responsibility and did not ask the price to match the loot and plunder. Thus he wanted Great Britain to pay India a pound a year for the next 200 years as a token of acknowledgement of guilt and a sincere expression of regret for colonising India.
That would be the first step to correct a historical injustice of astronomical proportions that the colonies suffered under colonisation - injustice comparable to what slaves suffered under the system of slavery. Further it would deter these countries from the audacity with which they have been distorting and interpreting history. Shashi Tharoor gave an example of one such audacity and distortion with the example of foreign aid Great Britain gives to India. He said that foreign aid amounted to 0.4 per cent of India's GDP (gross domestic product). Surely, only someone without any sense or sensitivity after knowing Indian history as Shashi Tharoor has outlined would call what Britain's gives to India as foreign aid.
Therefore, if justice is to be done for the issues so brilliantly raised and stressed by Shashi Tharoor, then for a starter this is what should be done. Great Britain and the former colonial powers should rename foreign aid as reparations for colonisation and allow the recipients all of whom have not yet become a major economic power like India, to feel they are being paid only a small part for what these countries looted from them and not any favour. Shashi Tharoor's brilliant debate nevertheless led some critics to use the very the arguments he used to put Great Britain under the scanner to underline that in India today exploitations by the "Brown Sahibs" are in many ways similar to those of the White Sahibs over the natives.
The writer is a retired Ambassador.
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