70 Years of Partition: Lessons of history are not to be wished away

New Delhi: As the 70th anniversary of India’s independence — and of the traumatic partition of the country — looms, it is striking that most Indians have tended not to dwell on the country’s colonial past.

Britain’s shambolic withdrawal from India in 1947 after two centuries of imperial rule was curiously without rancour, even though that original Brexit savagely left it to tear itself apart.

Indeed India chose to remain in the Commonwealth as a Republic and maintained cordial relations with the former imperial overlords.

When Winston Churchill, some years after Indian independence, asked prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had spent more than a decade of his life in British jails, how he was so devoid of bitterness, Nehru replied: “We were taught by a great man [Mahatma Gandhi] never to fear and never to hate.”

Whether this was a national strength or a civilizational weakness, India has long refused to bear any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder and exploitation.

And yet the simple truth is that the British seized one of the richest countries in the world (accounting for 27 per cent of global GDP in 1700) and, over 200 years of colonial rule, reduced it to one of the poorest countries in the world.

The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

The British ruled through practices of loot, expropriation, and outright theft, enforced by the ruthless wielding of brute power, conducted in a spirit of deep racism and amoral cynicism, and justified by a staggering level of hypocrisy and cant.

Whether or not you agree with the American historian Will Durant that this was “the greatest crime in all human history”, it was certainly no exercise in benign altruism, as some disingenuous British apologists have described it.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the de-industrialisation of India — the destruction of Indian textiles and their replacement by manufacturing in England, using Indian raw material and exporting the finished products back to India and the rest of the world. The handloom weavers of Bengal had produced and exported some of the world’s most desirable fabrics, especially cheap but fine muslins, some light as “woven air”. Britain’s response was to cut off the thumbs of Bengali weavers, break their looms and impose duties and tariffs on Indian cloth, while flooding India and the world with cheaper fabric from the new satanic steam mills of Britain. Weavers became beggars, manufacturing collapsed; the population of Dhaka, which was once the great centre of muslin production, fell by 90 per cent. So instead of a great exporter of finished products, India became an importer of British ones, while its share of world exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent.

Colonialists like Robert Clive bought their “rotten boroughs” in England with the proceeds of their loot in India (loot, by the way, was a word they took into their dictionaries as well as their habits), while publicly marvelling at their own self-restraint in not stealing even more than they did. And the British had the gall to call him “Clive of India”, as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.

A time of famines

By the end of the 19th century, India was Britain’s biggest cash-cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants — all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.

As Britain ruthlessly exploited India, some 35 million Indians died tragically unnecessary deaths from starvation.

The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, since free democracies don’t let their people starve to death.

Some 4.3 million Bengalis died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 after Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and European stockpiles — reserves intended for a possible future invasion of Greece or Yugoslavia.

“The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks”, he argued. In any case, the famine was their fault, for “breeding like rabbits”.

When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the Prime Minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s only response was to ask peevishly “why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretence that it was enlightened despotism, conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill’s inhumane conduct in 1943 gave the lie to this myth.

But it had been battered for two centuries already: British imperialism had triumphed not just by conquest and deception on a grand scale but by blowing rebels to bits from the mouths of cannons, massacring unarmed protesters at Jallianwallah Bagh and upholding iniquity through institutionalised racism.

Whereas as late as the 1940s it was possible for a black African to say with pride, “moi, je suis francais”, no Indian in the colonial era was ever allowed to feel British; he was always a subject, never a citizen.

Still, it is argued that Britain left us with self-governing institutions and the trappings of democracy.

To anyone who knows how hard it was for Indians to win a smidgen of self-government after many broken British promises, this is preposterous.

Let me cite one who actually lived through the colonial experience, Jawaharlal Nehru, in a letter to a liberal Englishman, Lord Lothian. British rule, Nehru wrote in 1936, is “based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear.

It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully.

It surrounds itself with a vast army of spies and informers and agents provocateurs.

Is this the atmosphere in which the more desirable virtues grow or democratic institutions flourish?”

Human dignity

Nehru went on to speak of “the crushing of human dignity and decency, the injuries to the soul as well as the body” which “degrades those who use it as well as those who suffer from it”.

This injury to India’s soul — the very basis of a nation’s self-respect — is what is always overlooked by apologists for colonialism.

Britain has been suffering from a kind of historical amnesia about colonialism.

As my book An Era of Darkness [published in Britain as Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India] appeared, an article by the Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin in the Guardian pointed out that the British simply do not teach their own schoolchildren the truth about their colonial past. 

She had raised two children in one of the best schools in London; they had studied ‘A’ level history and never been taught a word about colonial history.

Blissful illusion

Londoners look at the magnificence of their city with no idea of the loot and rapacity that paid for it.

Many Britons are genuinely unaware of the atrocities committed by their ancestors, and some live in the blissful illusion that the Empire was some sort of civilising mission to uplift the ignorant natives.

There is an Imperial War Museum, but no museum to colonialism.

There is a statue in London to the animals who served in the Second World War, but none to the millions of Indian soldiers who fought for Britain in two world wars — or the 170,000 who died for Britain in the process.

The British tendency to brush colonial history under the carpet has been compounded by the gauzy romanticisation of Empire in assorted television soap operas that provide a rose-tinted view of the colonial era, glossing over the atrocities, exploitation, plunder and racism that were integral to the imperial enterprise.

Astonishingly, several British historians have written hugely successful books extolling what they see as the virtues of Empire.

Many of the popular histories of the British Empire in the last decade or two, by the likes of Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Lawrence James, have painted it in glowing colours. All this explains Britons’ ignorance — but does not excuse it.

Know where you come from

I’m not a fan of simple historical analogies, given the very different times we live in, but history always offers instructive lessons — as well as perspectives.

As I say to young people in both Britain and India: if you don’t know where you’ve come from, how will you appreciate where you’re going?

As for my fellow Indians, they have an admirable quality of being able to “forgive and forget”. I do want them to forgive — but not to forget.

My book is not intended to have any bearing on today’s Indo-British relationship. That is now between two sovereign and equal nations, not between an imperial overlord and oppressed subjects.

Indeed, when my book appeared in Delhi, British Prime Minister Theresa May was days away from a visit to India, seeking investment from Indian businesses in her post-Brexit economy.

As I’ve often argued, you don’t need to seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.

Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is currently Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and an MP for the Indian National Congress.