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 19th 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 19th 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
80th 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
