As the Olympic Games draw to a close, another
significant event is to be celebrated mid-week on the Indian subcontinent -- the
anniversary of independence from Britain achieved after an arduous
struggle. Moreover the British had long extracted Indian wealth, and
let local weaving skills die out in order to sell factory-made cloth to
India.
India
always had a large store of silver because the rupee coin had been
silver. The British rulers of India bought the silver for scrip,
sending the silver to Britain and changing the content of the rupee coin. Issuing too much scrip would cause
inflation making it worth even less. So when the British note the
burden of their colonies they are quite correct but the burden was
elsewhere, and they omit to mention it was so because their policies
were intended to benefit the coloniser.
Oh yes, they will always make note of the railways but does anyone seriously believe that an India ruled by its own people would not have noticed such a convenient advance on prior means of travel.
And then the riots and bad blood between communities and religions. In a country where these had lived peacefully together for hundreds of years, is there any reason to believe they would not have continued to do so? But not if a rivalry had been fostered by the ruling power that then took on the role of keeping the peace.
A
united India (which during Muslim rule included Afghanistan) would have
carried much greater clout on the world stage particularly if it
generated a quarter of the world's GNP as has been estimated it did
during Mughal rule.
The
moral of the story: Colonialism is a plague to be avoided by those it
exploits, and those that colonise are not some do-gooders who, out of
the goodness of their hearts, have arrived to help the locals into the
modern era.
A
somewhat near-bankrupt Britain can never pay back what it extracted and
the world has changed. Britain itself is being ruled by an ethnic
Indian, although born and bred in England. Substantial communities of
migrants from the Indian subcontinent now live in England whose members,
if they came to India, would be just as out of place as any white
English person -- after all they are English.
Meanwhile in the US, the chosen Democratic party candidate has Indian and black ancestry -- her mother was from South India and her father's origin goes back to the slaves imported to work in the sugar cane plantations of the British West Indies colony.
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