AN APOLOGY BY U.K. (BRITAIN) A MUST TAKING THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MASSACRES, DE-INDUSTRIALISATION AND THE 250 YEAR’S OF OPPRESSION, EXPLOITATION CONVERSION OF HINDUS INTO CHRISTIAN FAITH, PARTITION OF INDIA ON SECTARIAN LINES AND LOOT

     AN APOLOGY BY U.K. (BRITAIN) A MUST

TAKING THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MASSACRES, DE-INDUSTRIALISATION AND THE 250 YEAR’S OF OPPRESSION, EXPLOITATION CONVERSION OF HINDUS INTO CHRISTIAN FAITH, PARTITION OF INDIA ON SECTARIAN LINES AND LOOT

 

          Did anyone believe India benefited more than that it lost from being ruled by the British? India was governed for the benefit of the British. We share with Britain a history of being oppressed for centuries, of bloody massacres, mass arrests, and the suppression of democratic rights, starvation and the supplanting of our own culture to serve the British interests.

After all the enslavements, killings of hordes of people, decimation of industries, and other exploitations and loots for 250 years, how can U.K. then celebrate the fact that they are a democratic nation.

 

THE JALLIANWALA BAGH MASSACRE:

On Sunday, April 13, 1919, when a crowd of non-violent protesters, along with Baishakhi pilgrims, who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar. Colonel Reginald Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and he banned all meetings; however this notice was not widely disseminated. That was the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and many villagers had gathered in the Bagh to participate in the annual Baishakhi celebrations—both a religious and cultural festival for the Punjabis. Coming from outside the city, they may have been unaware of the martial law that had been imposed. On hearing that a meeting had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, which comprised 6 to 7 acres (28,000 m²) of land and was walled on all sides with five entrances. Under the command of Dyer fifty Gurkha troops went to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to flee. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted. Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number apparently derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Official British sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with approximately 1,200 wounded. Other sources place the number of dead at well over 1,000.  

 

 This “brutality stunned the entire nation,” resulting in a wrenching loss of faith of the general public in the intentions of the UK. The ineffective inquiry and the initial accolades for Dyer by the House of Lords fuelled widespread anger, leading to the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920–22.

 

           Dyer was initially lauded by conservative forces in the empire, but in July 1920 he was censured and forced to retire by the House of Commons. He became a celebrated hero in Britain among most of the people connected to the British Raj, for example, the House of Lords, but unpopular in the House of Commons, which voted against Dyer twice. The massacre caused a re-evaluation of the army's role, in which the new policy became minimum force, and the army was retrained and developed suitable tactics for crowd control. Some historians consider the episode a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India, although others believe that greater self-government was inevitable as a result of India's involvement in World War-I.

 

THE BENGAL FAMINE 1943:

The world's worst recorded food disaster occurred in British-ruled India (present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and the country of Bangladesh,) during the World War II (1939-45,) which is known as the Bengal Famine 1943. Due to British policy failure approximately estimated 4 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease in 1943 in Bengal Province alone. The incalculable financial troubles offered include shortage of income, and mounting debts became a constant nightmare. It brought misfortunes like  the high prices, unemployment, housing shortage and private stomach ulcers, and misery to millions including people here at Cochin in Kerala too. Rice that came from Burma too stopped following the Japanese occupation of Burma; leading to acute starvation.

 

The reasons for the catastrophe were attributed to an acute shortfall in food production in India right from the beginning of the Second World War, with a series of crop failures, cyclones and localized famines.

 

The counter argument was, although food production was higher in 1943 compared to 1941, due to the British Empire taking 60% of all harvests and ordering Bengal to supply a greater proportion of the food for their army to fight the Japanese, the demand exceeded the supply. Another decision of the British Empire to destroy food crops in Bengal to make way for opium poppy cultivation for export reduced food availability and contributed to the famine. Other right-wing British policies that contributed to the famine included ordering farmers to plant indigo instead of rice, as well as forbidding the “hoarding” of rice. This prevented traders and dealers from laying in reserves that in other times would have tided the population over lean periods.

 

According to the Indian Statistical Institute (evidence by P.C.Mahalanobis to the Famine Enquiry Commission Report) at least 5 million people were killed in that famine. Amartya Sen's, Indian Nobel laurette, remarks that there was no shortage of food in Bengal and that the famine was caused by inflation, with those benefiting from inflation eating more and leaving less for the rest of the population. Sen claimed that there was in fact a greater supply in 1943 than in 1941, when there was no famine. Some cultivators and landlords hoarded rice to take advantage of higher prices and in short, it was “man-made” famine. His theory of lack of transport and supply has no factual foundation. There is a lot of criticism on his theory. Peter Bowbrick, meticulously documents 30 + instances where Sen misrepresents the facts in his sources. These are major misrepresentations on critical issues. Other researchers too have found similar misrepresentations. Sen’s attack on the straw man of Food Availability Decline (FAD) and his entitlement theory are factually flawed, as is the rest of his work on famine.

 

Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, and the British administration must take the blame, as Bengal was sealed off from the rest of India, nothing was allowed into Bengal. At the same time exports of food grains were made at the height of the famine from Bengal to the Middle East. Most food grains and means of transport were confiscated from the people for the fear that they will support the Japanese; accompanied by the Indian National Army. (Amartya Sen has not mentioned the political situation at all.) Shri. Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then fighting on the side of the Axis forces, offered to send rice from Myanmar (Burma,) but the British censors did not even allow his offer to be reported.  According to Madhusree Mukerjee's book, Churchill's Secret War, Churchill was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and Greek civilians. To him, “The starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks,” a sentiment with which Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery, concurred.  Amery was an arch-colonialist and yet he denounced Churchill’s “Hitler-like attitude.” Urgently beseeched by Amery and the then Viceroy Archibald Wavell to release food stocks for India, Churchill’s response to an urgent telegram requesting to release food stocks for India was as follows: “If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

Wavell informed London that the famine “was one of the greatest disasters that have befallen any people under British rule.” He said when Holland needs food, “ships will of course be available, quite a different answer to the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring food to India.”

Madhusree Mukerjee, an academician and research scholar tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones. No one had the strength to perform rites, a survivor tells Mukerjee. Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages. The ones who got away were men who migrated to Calcutta for jobs and women who turned to prostitution to feed their families. Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters.”

 

Mani Bhaumik, the first to get a PhD from the IITs and whose invention of excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine etched in his memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a portion of her food. Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh. Rakesh Krishnan Sinha poses, “How many people were affected by the famine, apart from those who died?” I am inclined to accept that “it would probably be an underestimate to say that two thirds of the total population was affected by it” (Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University, quoted by Rajan (1944.) An independent estimate was made by Mahalanobis, Mukkerjee and Ghosh (1946), based on a sample survey of the survivors. They estimate that of the 10.2 million families in the rural population, 1.6 million sold some or all of their land or mortgaged it, 1.1 million sold plough, cattle and in 0.7 million the head of the household changed to a lower-status occupation (including 0.26 million becoming destitute.) These figures are not mutually exclusive: many families suffered loss of land and cattle, and many became destitute because they had sold all they had. Taking an average family size of 5. 4, it seems that perhaps 10 to 15 million people were affected in these ways. However, many more were affected in ways that would not have been recorded in these statistics. Most went hungry; many were hit by disease; many were impoverished but kept the same occupation; many sold all they had except their land. “Village labourers and artisans, at a somewhat higher economic level, sold their domestic utensils, ornaments, parts of their dwellings such as doors, windows and corrugated iron sheets, trade implements, clothes and domestic animals if they had any -sold indeed anything on which money could be raised - to more fortunate neighbours.”

By 1943 hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying on the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers amidst this apocalyptic landscape was “the final judgment on British rule in India,” said the Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru. Churchill could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the US.

Madhusree Mukerjee says, “On August 4, 1943, Winston Churchill made one of his most important but least known decisions: he declined to send wheat to India, then a British colony, thereby condemning hundreds of thousands or possibly millions, of people to death by starvation. The inhabitants of Bengal, an eastern province of India where famine was raging, were of little value to the war effort and in any case “they were breeding like rabbits.” He explained at subsequent War Cabinet meetings (as recorded by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India.) Churchill chose instead to use the wheat and ships at his disposal to build a stockpile for feeding civilians of the Balkans whom he hoped to liberate from Nazi occupation.”

Churchill was repeatedly and urgently asked for food shipments by the British authorities in India who thought this were necessary to deal with a raging famine. Churchill repeatedly denied the requests, remarking to his cronies that Indians were contemptible anyway.

 

          Madhusree Mukerjee has shown there was no lack of food or of ships available. All that was lacking was             kindness on the part of Churchill, any sense of a duty to what were subjects of the British crown. The known facts are plain enough and speak all too eloquently: It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines. If all this is not enough to indict Churchill as a major criminal, callously indifferent to massive numbers of deaths of innocent people under British rule.

 

After attending one of the War Cabinet debates on sending famine relief, for instance, Field Marshal Wavell noted in his diary that Churchill wanted to feed “only those [Indians] actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways.”  According to Amery, the prime minister felt that sending succor to Bengalis, whom he regarded as inadequate soldiers, was less important than sending it to Greeks, who were resisting the Nazis.

 

Madhusree Mukerjee cites official records that reveal ships carrying grain from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean.
Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits.” His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.”

 

Madhusree Mukerjee writes in The Huffington Post, “Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme, and he hated Indians, mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very long.” She writes in The Huffington Post, “Churchill regarded wheat as too precious a food to expend on non-whites, let alone on recalcitrant subjects who were demanding independence from the British Empire. He preferred to stockpile the grain to feed Europeans after the war was over.”

\In October 1943, at the peak of the famine, Churchill said at a lavish banquet to mark Wavell’s appointment: “When we look back over the course of years, we see one part of the world’s surface where there has been no war for three generations. Famines have passed away — until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again — and pestilence has gone… This episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers.” Churchill was mot only a racist but also a liar. India hater Winston Churchil blamed Indians for the famine.

 

INDIAN ECONOMY AND INDUSTRIES SUFFERED THE MOST:

Not only was India looted of all its vast collection of gold, silver, and precious stones, valuable gems and other riches, but also our booming industries were ruthlessly destroyed all for Britain’s own advancement during Europe’s “Industrial Revolution.”  For example, our handloom weavers were out of jobs once the British decided they wanted to promote their “finished products” that was far inferior to our handloom spun cloth. Their exploitation of our handloom industry was so famed that even Marx wrote about it in 1853 titling his paper “The British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom.” A much lesser known fact – the master weavers of Dacca Muslin were tortured and their thumbs were cut off, so that British-made cotton cloth from their mills in England would find a good market in India. “India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23 per cent, by the time the British left it was down to below 4 per cent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India. In fact Britain’s industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialization of India. The handloom weaver’s for example famed across the world whose products were exported around the world, Britain came right in. There were actually these weaver’s making fine muslin as light as woven wear, it was said, and Britain came right in, smashed their thumbs, broke their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their cloth and products and started, of course, taking their raw material from India and shipping back manufactured cloth flooding the world’s markets with what became the products of the dark and satanic mills of the Victoria in England. That meant that the weavers in India became beggars and India went from being a world famous exporter of finished cloth into an importer when from having 27 per cent of the world trade to less than 2 per cent. Meanwhile, colonialists like Robert Clive brought their rotten boroughs in England on the proceeds of their loot in India while taking the Hindi word loot into their dictionary as well as their habits. 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. By the end of 19^th century, the fact is that India was already Britain’s biggest cash cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British goods and exports and the source for highly paid employment for British civil servants. We literally paid for our own oppression.” (Speech by Congress MP and former minister of India, Mr. Shashi Tharoor, at the Oxford Union Society Oxford July 15, 2015)

 

INDIA’S CONTRIBUTION IN WORLD WARS:

British attitudes towards Indians have to be seen in the backdrop of India’s contribution to the Allied war campaign. The Army including doctors and nurses served in Flanders, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Middle East and on board hospital ships during World War I. By 1943, more than 2.5 million Indian soldiers including doctors and nurses were fighting alongside the Allies in Europe, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Western Africa and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Burma, and Ceylon.) India contributed more soldiers to the wars than Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa put together. It has been reported that one sixth of the soldiers fighting for the British Empire was from the Indian subcontinent. In 1945 India’s war contribution amounted to about 8 billion pounds in 2015 money, and was never actually paid. Britain’s debt to India is too great to be ignored by either nation. Acknowledging a debt is more important than putting a number to it.

An account of the contribution made by India for the World Wars could be found from the excerpt of speech made by Mr.  Shashi Tharoor. “As others have said on the proposition – violence and racism were the reality of the colonial experience. And no wonder that the sun never set on the British Empire because even God couldn’t trust the English in the dark.  ….  Let me take the World War I as a very concrete example since the first speaker Mr. Lee suggested these couldn’t be quantified. Let me quantify World War I for you. Again I am sorry from an Indian perspective as others have spoken about the countries. One-sixth of all the British forces that fought in the war were Indian – 54 000 Indians actually lost their lives in that war, 65 000 were wounded and another 4000 remained missing or in prison. … Indian taxpayers had to cough up 100 million pounds in that time’s money. India supplied 17 million rounds of ammunition, 6,00,000 rifles and machine guns, 42 million garments were stitched and sent out of India and 1.3 million Indian personnel served in this war. I know all this because the commemoration of the centenary has just taken place. .. But not just that, India had to supply 173,000 animals 370 million tons of supplies and in the end the total value of everything that was taken out of India and India by the way was suffering from recession at that time and poverty and hunger, was in today’s money 8 billion pounds. You want quantification, it’s available. World War II, it was even worse – 2.5 million Indians in uniform. I won’t believe it to the point but Britain’s total war debt of 3 billion pounds in 1945 money, 1.25 billion was owed to India and never actually paid.  …..  Now we have heard other arguments on this side and there has been a mention of railways. Well let me tell you first of all as my colleague the Jamaican High Commissioner has pointed out, the railways and roads were really built to serve British interests and not those of the local people but I might add that many countries have built railways and roads without having had to be colonialised in order to do so. They were designed to carry raw materials from the hinterland into the ports to be shipped to Britain. And the fact is that the Indian or Jamaican or other colonial public – their needs were incidental. Transportation – there was no attempt made to match supply from demand from as transports, none what so ever. Instead in fact the Indian railways were built with massive incentives offered by Britain to British investors, guaranteed out of Indian taxes paid by Indians with the result that you actually had one mile of Indian railway costing twice what it cost to built the same mile in Canada or Australia because there was so much money being paid in extravagant returns. Britain made all the profits, controlled the technology, supplied all the equipment and absolutely all these benefits came as British private enterprise at Indian public risk. That was the railways as an accomplishment.” (Speech by Congress MP and former minister of India, Mr. Shashi Tharoor, at the Oxford Union Society, Oxford on July 15, 2015.)

 

THE DEFORESTATION, DAMAGE CAUSED TO THE FAUNA AND FLORA AND THE ENVIRONMENT:

Lacking foresight, the British government encouraged the hunting of wild animals in India. They used to reward the victors with monetary awards. They saw the need for agricultural expansion and the export of agricultural products. As per an official estimate, over eighty thousand tigers, one lakh-fifty thousand leopards and two lakh wolves were slaughtered in India in fifty years from 1875 to 1925. The actual would be much more than that. The owners of coffee, cardamom, tea and rubber plantations in the Sahyadri Mountains and hills and other plantations in India, which belonged to the British, had the power to shoot not only in self-defense but also to safeguard their privately owned estates or leased plantations. Due to the imprudent British policy of hunting wild animals to promote agriculture; large areas were deforested. A few animals like the aurochs (an ancestor of buffalo,) the pink headed duck were extinct; the rhinoceros having single horn were killed for their horn, which is believed to have magical power and it is now an endangered animal; the pride of the jungle, the lion, too faced the threat of extinction. Now the lion is confined to the Gir hills in Gujarat alone due to the protection afforded by Navab of Junagadh.

 

Large quantities of timber were used for laying the teak sleepers in our extensive railway net work. It was officially estimated that almost   two thousand trees were required per mile of railway line. “Railway net work was essential for the colonial trade and for the shipment of goods to the ports for export and movement of imperial troops. The British colonialists indiscriminately felled and removed large quantity of valuable timber like Teak, Rosewood and others from areas like Parambikulam Forest in Kerala and elsewhere to build their ships, palatial bungalows and furniture; and for fuel in their locomotives, brick and tile factories.” Wisdom dawned late; great men realized that the forest cover was depleting at a drastic pace causing unimaginable damage to the environment; and they deplored deforestation. The government too realized their folly. They prioritized the urgent need to focus attention for the conservation of the flora and fauna. They had to look into the preservation of forest wealth and the environment.

 

COERCIVE CONVERSION OF HINDUS INTO CHRISTIAN FAITH:

I am amazed to note that, not long ago, India’s millions were ruled by a cadre of 30000 Europeans. The Europeans took the advantage of disunity, hatred among local Kings, and their strong desire and determination for expansion of empire. The Colonialists joined sides in the fights between the Kings and were benefited from both sides. They also gained from the caste system; certain communities’ en-bloc were converted into Christianity and they were recruited into their army and used them to suppress the local Kings.

 

The rulers, Desavazhis, of principalities in the erstwhile states of Travancore, Cochin (Kochi) and Malabar (which comprise the present state Kerala, a south Indian state,) knew that the country was on the brink of disaster and an organized and united effort was necessary to overthrow British authority and regain their lost independence. But the previous experiences discouraged many of them to have a joint fight. The single-handed struggles for independence in Malabar, Cochin and Travancore failed to achieve the desired result. The rebellion of West Palace, of Zamorin, ‘Padinjare Kovilakom’, against British failed in 1792. The revolt by Pazhazzi Raja of Kottayam West was a thrilling episode of early struggles for independence in the annals of Indian History. In April 1795, a contingent of British troops under Lt. Gordon made an attempt to seize the Raja at his fortress in Pazhassi, but on entering the fort they found that “the bird had flown away.” They plundered the Raja’s palace and went away. Later, Pazhassi was executed in 1805. Similarly, Veluthampi Dalawa, Diwan of Travancore, who rebelled, was executed in 1809. The attack on Fortcochin by Paliath Komi Achan, who was the Prime Minister of Cochin, was financially and militarily supported by Oli Nambuthiri and all other Desavazhis. In 1809, the combined Nair forces of Paliath Achan and Oli Desavazhi Nambuthiri commenced their journey from the Padinjarechira canal in vessels like snake boats or Chundan Valloms, flanked by several other swift vessels, or Odi-vanchi, to attack the British forces at Fort-cochin and to capture the British Resident, Macaulay which ended in a fiasco. The resident, Macaulay, managed to conceal himself in a recess in the lower chamber of the Palace, and in the morning escaped to a British ship that was just entering harbour with part of the reinforcements from Malabar.  Paliath Komi Achan was later deported to Madras in 1809. The Kurichiyar’s uprising in 1812 against British at Sultan’s-Battery and Manathody against imposition of tax was subdued.

 

The attack on the British forces at Cochin in 1809 by Paliath Komi Achan, who was the then Prime Minister of Cochin, was supported by all the Desavazhis. Apart from ‘Nair’ forces, swift vessels and‘Oli Nambuthiri,’ my ancestor,  bestowed monetary assistance to defray the expenses for the assault against the British forces at Cochin. The attack on Cochin and elsewhere was an eye opener to the British Colonialists.

 

The British adopted the Travancore model of administration in the State of Cochin as well. Col. Munro (1812–18), was appointed as the new Diwan of Cochin. He embarked on a methodological scheme of administrative reorganization. Lacking evangelical organizations like the LMS and the CMS in Cochin State, and also in the absence of European missionaries, the British colonialists sought the assistance of His Excellency Bishop Dom Jose De Soledad O.C.D. (1785-1818) Bishop of Cochin diocese of Roman Catholic Latin Rite and his diocesan secular priests and gave them active support to commence their work of evangelization and for conversion of Oli Nambuthri into Christianity. They commenced their visits to the ‘Desavazhi’ and took every opportunity to unduly influence and coerce the ‘Desavazhi Nambuthiri’. Finally Oli ‘Nambuthiri’ was converted against his will into Christian faith, during the twenties of the 19^th century. He appears to have accepted the new religion for practical reasons, including economic and social security. Along with the inmates of Ayyanat Thayamkeil (Oli Mana), some of the ‘Nair Madambi Tharawads’ and some of the ‘Nair Thavazhis’ like Karithara, Purakkat East (a ‘Thavazhy’, branch, of Pullanat Kaimal), Murikkanampilly, Blagayil, Murikkel, Maliamveettil, Thalassery, Pothanveedu,  Chennapilly, Nambuttil, Arackal, and Pravelil at Kumbalam, and some of the members of ‘Nair Madambi Tharawads’ and some of the ‘Nair Thavazhis’  like Vadakkanezhath, Puthiyedath, Kozhivally, Peechanat and Valliara at Panangad and Panat, Kalathil at Chathamma and also some of the ‘Desavazhis’, high caste ‘Brahmin’ families and some of their relations like Choolackal (Ernakulam), Kanadan (Thevara), Kavilparampil (Konthuruthy), Koithara, Mannully (Kadavanthara), Palathingal (Poonithura and Nadama), Kottoor (Udayamperoor), who had affinity with ‘Oli Nambuthiri’, and their ‘Nair Madambis’ of nearby ‘Desams’, were also converted into  the Roman Christianity under the Diocese of Cochin. At the beginning, the Christian converts in Kumbalam used to go to the St. Lawrence Latin Church at Edacochi, (which was established in 1504 under the Diocese of Cochin.) Those converts in Ernakulam, Thevara, Konthuruthy and Kadavanthara went to the St. Peter and Paul Latin Church, (which was established in 1599 at Venduruthy under the Diocese of Cochin.)

 

DIVIDE AND RULE POLICY - THE BBRITISH AND AMERICAN INTERESTS BEHIND PARTITION OF INDIA 1947:

The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Hindu majority state of India  and the Muslim state of Pakistan (East & West.) The geographical divide brought displacement and death for many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees, one of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century.

 

It was the process of dividing the subcontinent along sectarian lines. The northwestern, and eastern predominantly Muslim sections of India became the nation of Pakistan, while the southern and majority Hindu section became the Republic of India.

 

“Partition” here refers not only to the division of the Bengal province of British India into East Pakistan and West Bengal (a state in the Union of India,) and the similar partition of the Punjab province into West Punjab (West Pakistan and East Punjab, now Punjab,) but also to the respective divisions of other assets, including the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service and other administrative services, the railways, and the central treasury.

 

Thus the two nations were granted their independence even before there was a defined boundary between them. The British haste led to increased cruelties during the Partition. Because independence was declared prior to the actual partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep law and order.

 

BACKGROUND TO PARTITION:

The partition was not a phenomenon that sprung up in 1947, or even 1919. The seeds of religious split were methodically planted by the British over centuries. The precipitous economic downfall of Muslims can be traced back to 1857 - not that rest of India was spared, but the Muslims were hit harder. The dominion of Mughals had been reduced from the entire India down to the area around the Red Fort and the 80^th Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was declared a traitor and shipped off to Burma. In fact the clean cut separation of Burma (and to that effect Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka) are all artifacts of the British rule. I am not saying that the South Asian region is a single nation of sorts - just stating that the partition of India and Pakistan is a British gift, and not because the folks of South Asia would have aligned themselves along Hindu-Muslim lines.

In 1885, the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress (INC) met for the first time. When the British made an attempt to divide the state of Bengal along religious lines in 1905, the INC lead huge protests against the plan. This sparked the formation of the Muslim League, which sought to guarantee the rights of Muslims in any future independence negotiations.

In 1905, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, in his second term, divided the largest administrative subdivision in British India, the Bengal presidency, into the Muslim-majority province of East Bengal and Assam and the Hindu-majority province of Bengal (present-day Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha).  Conservative elements in England consider the partition of India to be the moment that the British Empire ceased to be a world power, following Curzon’s dictum: “the loss of India would mean that Britain drop straight away to a third rate power.”

 

Although the Muslim League formed in opposition to the INC, and the British colonial government attempted to play the INC and Muslim League off one another, the two political parties generally cooperated in their mutual goal of getting Britain to “Quit India.” Both the INC and the Muslim League supported sending Indian volunteer troops to fight on Britain's behalf in World war I in exchange for the service of more than 1 million Indian soldiers, the people of India expected political concessions up to and including independence. However, after the war, Britain offered no such concessions.

 

In April 1919, a unit of the British Army went to Amritsar, in Punjab, to silence pro-independence unrest. The unit's commander ordered his men to open fire on the unarmed crowd, killing more than 1,000 protesters. When word of the Amritsar Massacre spread around India, hundreds of thousands of formerly apolitical people became supporters of the INC and Muslim League.

 

In the 1930s, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became the leading figure in the INC. Although he advocated a unified Hindu and Muslim India, with equal rights for all, other INC members were less inclined to join with Muslims against the British. As a result, the Muslim League began to make plans for a separate Muslim state.

 

INDEPENDENCE AND PARTITION:

World War II sparked a crisis in relations between the British, the INC and the Muslim League. The British expected India once again to provide much-needed soldiers and material for the war effort, but the INC opposed sending Indians to fight and die in Britain’s war. After the betrayal following World War I, the INC saw no benefit for India in such a sacrifice. The Muslim League, however, decided to back Britain's call for volunteers, in an effort to curry British favour in support of a Muslim nation in post-independence northern India.

 

In January 1946, a number of mutinies broke out in the armed services, starting with that of RAF servicemen frustrated with their slow repatriation to Britain. The mutinies came to a head with mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, followed by others in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi. Although the mutinies were rapidly suppressed, they had the effect of spurring the new Labour Government in Britain to action, and leading to the Cabinet Mission to India led by the Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethic Lawrence, and including Sir Stafford Cripps, who had visited four years before. Also in early 1946, new elections were called in India. Earlier, at the end of the war in 1945, the colonial government had announced the public trial of three senior officers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s defeated Indian National Army who stood accused of treason. Now as the trials began, the Congress leadership, although ambivalent towards the INA, chose to defend the accused officers. The subsequent convictions of the officers, the public outcry against the convictions, and the eventual remission of the sentences created positive propaganda for the Congress, which only helped in the party's subsequent electoral victories in eight of the eleven provinces. The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of the partition.

 

The 1946 elections had resulted in the Muslim League winning 90 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Thus the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite where the Indian Muslims were to vote on the creation of Pakistan; a plebiscite which the Muslim League won. This victory was assisted by the support given to the Muslim League by the rural peasantry of Bengal as well as the support of the landowners of Sindh and Punjab. The Congress, which initially denied the Muslim League’s claim of being the sole representative of Indian Muslims, was now forced to recognize that the Muslim League represented Indian Muslims. The British had no alternative except to take Jinnah’s views into account as he had emerged as the sole spokesperson of India’s Muslims.

 

Before the war had even ended, public opinion in Britain had swung against the distraction and expense of empire. Winston Churchill’s party was voted out of office, and the pro-independence Labour Party was voted in during 1945. Labour party called for almost immediate independence for India, as well as more gradual freedom for Britain's other colonial holdings.

 

The Muslim League's leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, began a public campaign in favour of a separate Muslim state, while Jawaharlal Nehru of the INC called for a unified India. (This is not surprising, given the fact that Hindus like Nehru would have formed the vast majority, and would have been in control of any democratic form of government.)

 

As independence neared, the country began to descend towards a sectarian civil war. Although Gandhi implored the Indian people to unite in peaceful opposition to British rule, the Muslim League sponsored a “Direct Action Day” on August 16, 1946, which resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Calcutta (Kolkata.) This touched off the “Week of the Long Knives,” an orgy of sectarian violence that resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides in various cities across the country.

 

In February 1947, the British government announced that India would be granted independence by June 1948. Viceroy for India Lord Louis Mountbatten pleaded with the Hindu and Muslim leadership to agree to form a united country, but they could not. Only Gandhi supported Mountbatten’s position. With the country descending further into chaos, Mountbatten reluctantly agreed to the formation of two separate states and moved the independence date up to August 15, 1947.

 

With the decision in favour of partition made, the parties next faced this nearly impossible task of fixing a border between the new states. The Muslims occupied two main regions in the north on opposite sides of the country, separated by a majority-Hindu section. In addition, throughout most of northern India members of the two religions were mixed together - not to mention populations of Sikhs, Christians, and other minority faiths. The Sikhs campaigned for a nation of their own, but their appeal was denied.

 

In the wealthy and fertile region of the Punjab, the problem was extreme with a nearly-even mixture of Hindus and Muslims. Nobody wanted to relinquish this valuable land and sectarian hatred ran high. The border was drawn right down the middle of the province, between Lahore and Amritsar. On both sides, people scrambled to get onto the “right” side of the border or were driven from their homes by their erstwhile neighbors. At least 10 million people fled north or south, depending on their faith, and more than 500,000 were killed in the retributive genocide between the religions. Trains full of refugees were set upon by militants from both sides, and all the passengers massacred. it was the largest mass migration in human history.

 

On August 14, 1947, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was founded. The following day, the Republic of India was established to the south.

 

AFTERMATH OF PARTITION:

On January 30, 1948, Gandhiji was assassinated by a young Hindu radical for his support of a multi-religious state. Since August 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three major wars and one minor war over territorial disputes. The boundary line in Jammu and Kashmir is particularly troubled. These regions were not formally part of the British Raj in India, but were quasi-independent princely states; the ruler of Kashmir agreed to join India despite having a Muslim majority in his territory, resulting in tension and warfare to this day.

In 1974, India tested its first nuclear weapon. Pakistan followed in 1998. Thus, any exacerbation of post-partition tensions today could be catastrophic.

 

INDEPENDENCE TO OUR NEIBOURING STATES:

The coastal area of Ceylon was part of the Madras Presidency of British India from 1795 until 1798, when it became a separate Crown colony of the Empire. Burma, gradually annexed by the British during 1826–86 and governed as a part of the British Indian administration until 1937, was directly administered thereafter. 

 

Britain's holdings on the Indian subcontinent were granted independence in 1947 and 1948, becoming four new independent states: India, Burma (now known as Myanmar,) Ceylon (now Sri Lanka,) and Pakistan (including East Bengal, (from 1971 Bangladesh.)

Burma was granted independence on 4 January 1948 and Ceylon on 4 February 1948. Hyderabad, Jammu and Kashmir, Mysore State, Portuguese India, French colonies, Sikkim, and Travancore by one or more extant entities. Bhutan, Nepal and Maldives, the remaining present-day countries of South Asia, were unaffected by the partition. The first two, Bhutan and Nepal, although earlier being regarded as de-facto princely states, later signed treaties with the British designating them as independent states before partition, and therefore their borders were unaffected by the partition of India. The Maldives, which had become protectorate of the British crown in 1887 and gained its independence in 1965, was also unaffected by the partition

 

WAS THE PARTITION OF INDIA AND GENOCIDE PLANNED BY THE BRITISH?

Of the violence that accompanied the Partition of India, Historians Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh write: - “There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes the disemboweling of pregnant women, the slamming of babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly, the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented. Although some scholars question the use of the term ‘genocide’ with respect to the Partition massacres, much of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies. It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well as prevent its future reproduction.”

 

As this was not enough immediately after the partition with millions of refugees starving without food, without a roof on their head on both the sides Pakistan launched a offensive against India in Kashmir and both the countries fought a war over Kashmir which not only killed many more but also deteriorated the economic condition of both the countries which was already in a very bad shape. By the time war was done both the countries lost another (estimated) 7500 men and had 17500 wounded far more displaced with splitting Kashmir into 2 and further cementing the hatred and animosity for years to come and paving the way for internal disturbance on both the sides of Kashmir.

 

Gandhi wrote: “The English have taught us that we were not one nation before and that it will require centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us.”

 

India is a vast repository of different cultures, both because it was invaded by a number of foreign countries and people, and because of its contacts with people from the East and the West. Despite diverse languages and dialects; and different cultures and civilizations, varied castes, religions and communities; different food habits, clothes, from region to region; there are a lot of other factors like religion, customs, traditions and the belief in the theory of “Dharma and Karma,” (the law and its observance; and daily service or duty) that helped the unity of this great country, India. Indians have a catholic outlook and the capacity to absorb all the immigrant good ideas and cultures and they firmly believe in freedom of thought and expression because such freedom enriches the culture which then becomes dynamic. The Maurya Empire (Chandragupta Maurya) spanned across India; Buddhism spread from Sri Lanka up to Afghanistan in the north and to the Far East up to Japan.  The Mughals and the Marathas too tried to unify India.

 

If the subcontinent remained a single country today it would definitely have been a far better place than what it is now; and also could have posed as a stronger and peaceful nation to rest of the world. 

 

In partitioning India, colonialists reaped rich harvest at the cost of the people of the subcontinent, millions dead, a single entity India, divided into Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. These countries keep on spending a major part of their budgets in investing in armaments and fattening of their armed forces, something which could have been meaningfully invested for the growth and development of the region. We need to wake up from the blame game and see the real culprit. 

 

BRITISH LEGACY OF CORRUPT EXTRACTIVE ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS:

Among non-European countries colonized by Europeans during the last five hundred years, those that were initially richer and more advanced tend paradoxically to be poorer today. That’s because, in formerly rich countries with dense native populations, such as Peru, Indonesia, and India, Europeans introduced corrupt “extractive” economic institutions, such as forced labour and confiscation of produce, to drain wealth and labour from the natives. (By extractive economic institutions, Darron Acemoglu, a Turkish American economist, and James A. Robinson, a British political scientist, the co-authors of a non-fiction book namely “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” mean practices and policies “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset “the governing elite.” But in formerly poor countries with sparse native populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work. When the former colonies achieved independence, they variously inherited either the extractive institutions that coerced the masses to produce wealth for dictators and the elite, or else institutions by which the government shared power and gave people incentives to pursue. The extractive institutions retarded economic development, but incentivizing institutions promoted it.

 

PRECEDENTS FOR APOLOGY AND REPARATIONS:

          While Britain has offered apologies to other nations, such as Kenya for the Mau Mau massacre and even Britain has paid reparations to the New Zealand Maoris. India continues to have such genocides swept under the carpet. Other nationalities have set a good example for us. Israel, for instance, cannot forget the holocaust; neither will it let others, least of all the Germans. Germany continues to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and arms aid to Israel and it also gives reparations to Poland. Armenia cannot forget the Great Crime — the systematic massacre of 1.8 million Armenians by the Turks during World War I. Poles cannot forget Joseph Stalin’s Katyn massacre. There are other examples, there is Italy’s reparations to Libya, there is Japan’s to Korea. The Chinese want a clear apology and reparations from the Japanese for at least 40,000 killed and raped in Nanking during World War II. And then there is the bizarre case of the Ukrainians, who like to call a famine caused by Stalin’s economic policies as genocide, which it clearly was not. They even have a word for it: Holodomor. So it is not as if this is something that is unprecedented or unheard of. And yet India alone refuses to ask for reparations, let alone an apology. Could it be because the British were the last in a long list of invaders, so why bother with an England suffering from post-imperial depression? Or is it because India’s English-speaking elites feel beholden to the British? Or are we simply a nation condemned to repeating our historical mistakes? Perhaps we forgive too easily. But forgiveness is different from forgetting, which is what Indians are guilty of. It is an insult to the memory of millions of Indians whose lives were snuffed out in artificial famines.

 

According to Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly, “It was Indian soldiers, civilian labourers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India.” There is not enough wealth in all of Europe to compensate India for 250 years of colonial loot. Forget the money; do the British at least have the grace to offer an apology? Or will they, like Churchill, continue to delude themselves that English rule was India’s “Golden Age?”

          Like other countries in the world apologized for crimes and excesses committed to other nations, and reparations to their former colonies, United Kingdom (Britain) must admit the wrongs done, offer an apology and compensate damages for, the callous indifference shown by the British administration for the carnage in Jallianwala Bagh; taking full responsibility for the Bengal Famine 1943; for damaging the Indian economy and for the deindustrialization of world renowned industries in India to achieve selfish  British interests;  for deforestation and damage done to the flora and fauna and the environment; for the coercive conversion of Hindus into Christian Faith, for partition of India on sectarian lines and for the aftermath of partition; for bestowing the British legacy of corrupt “extractive” economic institutions and for the oppression, exploitation and loot of varied riches from India.

 

Excerpts from

NEED OF THE HOUR

By

Joseph J. Thayamkeril

josephjthayamkeril@gmail.com