NOT SEEKING REPARATIONS FROM THE BRITISH
Said Will Durant, the famous American historian and philosopher in his book ‘The Case for India’:
“British rule in India is the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history. I propose to show that England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death…
“But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people – one fifth of the human race – suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any to be found elsewhere on the earth. I was horrified. I had not thought it possible that any government could allow its subjects to sink to such misery…
“The civilization that was destroyed by British guns… has produced saints from Buddha to Gandhi; philosophy from the Vedas to Schopenhauer and Bergson, Thoreau and Keyserling, who take their lead and acknowledge their derivation from India. (India, says Count Keyserling, ‘has produced the profoundest metaphysics that we know of”; and he speaks of ‘the absolute superiority of India over the West in philosophy’)…
“The more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history…
“The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruples or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and ‘legal’ plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy- three years, and goes on at this moment while in our secure comfort we write and read.
“Aurangzeb, the Puritanic Moghul emperor who misgoverned India for fifty years when he died the realm fell to pieces. It was a simple matter for a group of English buccaneers, armed with the latest European artillery and mortars to defeat the petty princes. It was the wealth of 18th century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France . This wealth was created by the Hindus’ vast and varied industries and trade. It was to reach India of fabulous wealth that Columbus sailed the seas. It was this wealth that the East India Company proposed to appropriate…”
Edmund Burke had predicted in 1783 that the annual drain of Indian resources to England without equivalent return would eventually destroy India. In 1901, Rajni Palme Dutt estimated that one-half of the net revenues of India flowed annually out of the country, never to return: “So great an economic drain out of the resources of the land 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.”
Commented Rajeev Srinivasan:
“A strong case has been made by William Digby quoting Brooks Adams that the Industrial Revolution (circa 1760) could not have happened in Britain had it not been for the loot that came in from India. It is indeed a curious coincidence: Plassey (1757); the flying shuttle (1760); the spinning jenny (1764); the power-loom (1765); the steam engine (1768).
“…Digby estimated in 1901 that the total amount of treasure extracted from India by the British was 1,000,000,000 pounds—a billion pounds. Considering the looting from 1901 to 1947 and the effects of inflation, this is probably worth a trillion dollars in today’s money. Serious money, indeed. Shouldn’t we ask for some reparation?”
However, the most recent estimates are far more than the above. As per a ‘Business Today’ report of Nov-2018: “Renowned economist Utsa Patnaik, who has done research on the fiscal relations between Colonial India and Britain, has tried to answer a question many Indians are likely to be interested to know—how much money did Britishers take away from India? Patnaik, in her essay published in Columbia University Press recently, said Britain drained out over $45 trillion from India , which to date has hampered the country’s ability to come out of poverty.”
In view of the above, like many countries who had demanded apology and reparations from the countries who had tormented and looted them, India too should have assessed, documented and put a financial estimate to the damages done by the British, should have quantified the loot of two centuries, converted them at 1947 prices, and should then have claimed reparation from Britain, along with written and oral apology. Additionally, a detailed list of all the artefacts, archaeological pieces, precious stones such as Kohinoor and other items stolen from India should have been prepared and reclaimed from the British.
It is worth noting that the arts and treasures that the Nazis took away from the Western countries they attacked and annexed were called loot, and termed unjust, and Germany was forced to return the same to its rightful owner countries. Since the arts and treasures were from the Western countries, and NOT the Asian or African countries, they were loot, and were required to be returned! Loot from the Asian or African countries was not loot. What double standards!!
However, when the ex-colonies like India themselves did not demand return, where was the question of Britain obliging? With anglophiles like Nehru in the saddle, nothing was done in the matter. On Kohinoor, Nehru had made a weird comment:
“To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it [the convenient contention being that Kohinoor was GIFTED (a lie) to the British!] of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art.”
Given such indifferent and baffling attitude, little could have been expected from anglophile Nehru and his Dynasty.
NEHRU AND THE DISTORTION OF INDIAN HISTORY & HERITAGE
Being a vital subject, the Nehruvian blunders with regard to the Indian history, heritage and civilisation are covered under the following four main- heads/blunders:
Blunder#90 : No De-Falsification of History . Nothing done to purge the Indian history from gross colonial distortions, and write correct, honest, de- falsified history, post-independence.
Blunder#91: Being Creative with History. Rather than the above, the Indian history was further distorted by the Nehruvian-Marxist historians.
Blunder#92: Nehru & Negationism . On top of Marxist distortion of Indian history (Blunder#91), the Nehruvian-Marxist historians indulged in blatant negationism, denying or massively diluting Islamic holocaust of Hindu India for about a millennium before the arrival of the British.
Blunder#93: Distortions of History by Nehru Himself . Examples from Nehru’s writings distorting or misrepresenting portions of the Indian history, or suppressing the unsavoury parts.
Blunder#94: Being Anti-Hindu.
