Source: Google photo
of the British and his servants
Synopsis : The world history is replete with
invasion of rich and beautiful countries by those who sought to expand their
rule over them in order to enrich themselves . The whole idea of colonialism
was based on it but the British took it to the next level when they invaded
India and carted away over 45 trillion dollars worth in loot and leaving behind
their bloody legacy of massacres, rapes and ruthless tyranny that left scars
that fail to heal.
Once India was called the golden bird because she was immensely rich. It accounted for over 25 % of the global trade at some point exporting silk, spices and numerous manufactured goods. The story of its vast riches reached far and wide that got the attention of the looters and pilferers in every continent who then made a very determined effort to loot and pilfer the riches of India.
The loot of India started long before the Mughals or the British
arrived. The looters came from Afghanistan through the Khybar pass bringing
with them often a huge army with the promise of sharing the loot with them so
there was no shortage of greedy people to pillage the country. Among them were
rabid fundamentalist Moslems who thought that it was their duty to bring Islam
to the heathens by any means so they chose the most violent means being most
expedient. To them it was a worthy cause so they came to shed blood and brought
back the loot and the slaves to Afghanistan. They destroyed beautiful Hindu
temples to build mosques all over India. These Moslem invaders not only looted
the riches of the temple, they desecrated the idols in the temple and totally
destroyed them turning into rubbles .They killed a large number of innocent
people and forced Islam on the rest.
In 1024, during the reign of Bhima
I, the prominent Turkic Muslim ruler Mahmud of Ghazni raided Gujarat,
plundering the Somnath temple and breaking its jyotirlinga. He
took away a booty of 20 million gold dinars. They later boasted that Mahmud had killed
50,000 devotees who tried to defend the temple. The temple has been
rebuilt after the independence. It would have been remarkable if they had done
so only once but it is hard to believe that they looted it 17 times over as
many years because of a rabid fundamentalism in Islam that forbade female
deities that were found in the temple. (Wikipedia )
Source : Google photo of the ruins of Somnath temple in India
Another invader called Bakhtiar Khilji also came to India in
the 12th century to loot and massacre a very large number of Hindus and
Buddhists but his worst crime was the burning to ashes the one and only
University of Nalanda that had a vast library of over 9 million books and
manuscripts that took them over six months to burn all the library contained.
They slayed all the teachers and students who meant no harm to anyone. Now you
can visit the ruins of what was once a great university 800 years ago and
wonder at the horrific cruelty of the Afghans.
Source : Google photo of the ruins of the Nalanda university
The Indian history is replete with invasions, mass slaughter
of its peaceful people and mass forced conversion of Hindus to Islam using
threats of death.
But the Mughals excelled in warfare to impose their will on
India so Babur came to try his luck in the 15th century when he
easily defeated the Sultan of Delhi in the battle of Panipat north of Delhi and
established the Mughal Empire. It would last until 1857 when the last Mughal
king was ousted by the British and sent to Burma to die there.
Before Babur, there were numerous invaders from Afghanistan
who came to loot and massacre Indians at will and some of them stayed to rule
as Sultans in Delhi. Others returned to Herat or Ghazni with their loot. What
is sad is the fact after all the loot they got from India, Afghanistan today
remains mired in poverty and warfare because the looters only enriched
themselves but spent very little to improve the lives of common people of
Afghanistan while England used the loot to develop its country. They became an
industrial country with the raw materials they got from India and sold their manufactured
goods all over the world to become richer.
Spain and France did the same by exploiting the raw materials they got
from their colonies to develop their own textile and rubber industries.
But when it came to loot the country systematically and
subjugate its people, the British proved to be the most efficient. They brought
with them modern weapons like rifles and gun powder, canons and military people
who then went on to create and train a vast army of Indians that they needed to
win numerous battles they fought and
won. This army was loyal to them and killed Indians at their behest like in
Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar where they shot dead in cold blood 1600 innocent
men , women and even children who had peacefully gathered to protest the
occupation of India in 1919. I have visited the park where the scars of bullets
on the walls are still visible.
All tyrants need an army and the police force to rule so the
British took over the entire country stretching from Afghanistan to Burma and
ruled it with an iron fist first in the name of the East India trading company
and later in the name of Queen Victoria after the first insurrection for
freedom in 1857 that they crushed using the Indian soldiers to shoot and hang
thousands of freedom fighters.
How the foreigners looted India to make their own country
rich so that India became a destitute country where people starved and lived in
extreme poverty is well documented. This was a shameful descent of a once proud
and rich country into poverty and hopelessness because they were not united to
put up a fight to win back their freedom. A hero called Bose would be born
later to do just that .I have written about the national hero Bose and his
struggle for the independence in my earlier blogs that you may like to read in
this context.
There is a story that is commonly
told in Britain that the colonization of India –
as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to
Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain.
So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a
gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned
economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow
to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and
trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938. It’s a
staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than
the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade
system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and
rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with
silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765,
shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and
established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked.
The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and
then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to
fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of
paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them
for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been
taken from them.
It was a scam.
It was a theft on a grand scale. Yet most
Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the
taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been
the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
Some of the stolen goods were
consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export
system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including
strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to
Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in
large part on this systematic theft from India.
On top of this, the British were
able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they
“bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the
original value of the goods but also the markup.
After the British Raj took over in 1858,
colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East
India Company’s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export
their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the
payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.
How did this work?
Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would
do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the
British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London
with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and
then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at
the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues –
money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in
fact paid at all; they were defrauded.
Meanwhile, London ended up with all
of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in
exchange for their exports.
This corrupt system meant that even
while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world
– a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century – it
showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India’s
exports was appropriated in its entirety by
Britain.
Some point to this fictional
“deficit” as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the
opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that
rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden
egg. Meanwhile, the “deficit” meant that India had no option but to borrow from
Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into
completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing
British control.
Britain used the windfall from this
fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the
invasion of China in
the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on
top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars.
As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside
Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”
And that’s not all. Britain used
this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in
Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not
only the industrialization of Britain but also the industrialization of much of
the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.
Patnaik identifies four distinct
economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction
for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent,
which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the
present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6
trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts
that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.
These are eye-watering sums. But the
true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest
its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did
– there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could
very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and
suffering could have been prevented.
All of this is a sobering antidote
to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The
conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped
“develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that
British rule was a net help to India.
This narrative has found
considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism
was beneficial to the colonies.
Yet during the entire 200-year
history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of
the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India
collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth
from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain
didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear –
India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain
today? An apology? Absolutely.
Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to
cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start
by setting the story straight. We need to recognize that Britain retained
control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that
Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong
institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft
from other lands and other peoples. ( source : article by Utsa Patnaik ,
economist )
The horrible famines of 1770 and 1943 in Bengal :
Source : LIFE photo of Indian citizens waiting in line at a soup kitchen.
The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor contributing to the catastrophe. This famine was largely attributed to the harsh taxation by the British, poor rainfall and hoarding of rice by the black marketers but the shipment of food from Australia that arrived at the Kolkata port was diverted to England by the order of Churchill who said that the Indians breed like rabbit. Let them starve. Some three million people did so and died. The famine of 1770 had taken over 10 million lives that could have been avoided by the British but they failed to do so just like in the famine of 1943.
If you closely look at the interior walls of Taj Mahal in
Agra, you will notice that the jewels decorating the inlay art work on the
marble are all fake because the British took out the real gems and put glass
beads instead. The real gems of diamonds, rubies and sapphires etc. were used originally to decorate the art work
that glowed in the candle light but even the mighty Mughal kings and queens
could not protect their mausoleums from the British. The loot did not stop
there.
They took away the legacy of a great nation when they carted
away thousands of statues from temples, museums and royal palaces to fill their
museums in England. This loot was so systematic that it boggles our mind. Gold,
silver, bronze and other precious artifacts ended up in English museums because
there was no one to stop them. The queen Elizabeth II shamelessly wears the
crown that is studded with stolen diamonds from India.
They brought railway lines to do it. They laid a vast network
of railway lines, built bridges and cut tunnels through mountains so that they
could carry away to England , train loads of cotton, grains and minerals to run
their factories . They made saris out of cotton from India in Birmingham mills
and sold them back to India. In the process they destroyed whatever textile
industry India had and were very upset when Mohandas Gandhi started to
encourage the weaving and making of Khadi cotton clothes in villages throughout
the country.
The French were also very good at looting so you will find
their museums filled with statuaries from Egypt and precious jewelries of gold
and silver. I have seen them at the Louvre in Paris and wondered at their
audacity of looting the heritage of a country so brazenly and so shamelessly
just like the British in India. Napoleon Bonaparte brought back to France
shiploads of statues and even obelisks from Egypt while the Egyptians looked
hopelessly and cowered before the looting army of the king of France.
The Spanish invaders of Mexico and other Latin countries
carried back to Spain numerous shiploads of gold , silver and other precious
things using their brute military force to subjugate and kill the Mexicans and
left behind the country in total ruin and chaos. The rabble priests who always
accompanied the conquistadores forced Christianity on the hapless people and their
soldiers killed those who refused so it was the same thing the Moslems did in
India.
The British, French and the Portuguese all brought ruthless
padres to spread their brand of Christianity among the Indians as if they all
needed to be saved being the pagans. This was their mentality that the Indians
were unbelievers so they must be made to believe in the imported religion in
order to save them from purgatory.
St Xavier in Goa left a bloody legacy of forceful conversion
of the locals there but is called a saint just the same. Many Portuguese,
Spanish and the French saints were specially trained by the Inquisition to do
so. The French went a step further when they brought with them the infamous
guillotine to chop off the heads of unbelievers in the new world they had
conquered.
The British developed a very efficient tax collection system
throughout the Indian subcontinent and placed well trained tax collectors in
every district for this purpose. They trained many young and bright Indians in
England to become ICS officers (Imperial civil service) who would return to
India to work for the British as tax collectors, judges, administrative
officers, accountants etc. They ran the Empire under close supervision of their
British masters. The British established law schools, universities, medical
colleges and other such institutions to educate and train Indians to serve
their needs because they could not bring all such people from England. The same
way they created the British army by recruiting and training Indians to do
their dirty jobs. Only the officers were British.
The police officers were always British but the policemen of
lower ranks were recruited and trained by the British. They were loyal to their
masters and played a major role in subjugating their own countrymen using very
harsh methods. If you remember the scene from the movie Gandhi, you will see how the policemen beat the peaceful protesters
the whole day to fracture their skulls and kill many because that was the order
of the British.
The British were more sophisticated so they brought with them
the modern technology of warfare and a system to administer the whole country
in order to exploit its wealth. The apologists in England still claim that the
British Raaj for good for India because they meaning the British brought new
technologies and an efficient administrative system but they still do not admit
that it was all done to serve the British interest and not the Indians.
The Indians remained mired in poverty and a constant state of
subjugation and humiliation because the colonialists were so ruthless. They put
up signboards outside their clubs saying Indians and dogs not allowed here. No
Indian could ride a train in the first class section anywhere and no Indian
could ever be the head of an office. The British took to sexually molest Indian
women at will thus creating the Anglo Indians who still dream of migrating to
England they call home.
Link : https://youtu.be/SElZ29Al4Sw
Link : https://youtu.be/x_jGPf764d0
Link : https://youtu.be/QhMO5SSmiaA
I have put together a few videos that will explain to you in
graphic details the rape and loot of India that will open your eyes to what
really happened and who were responsible for it. The world knows so little
about this dark side of the British because they wrote the history to make them
look good. British children are not taught what really happened in the British
Empire in which the crown jewel was India. Their paid historians only wrote
what pleased their masters.
But India is now a free country and rising fast to become a
developed country and a great military power. The people born after the
Independence in 1947 do not know much about the British Raaj because
practically nothing remains of the British presence in India now. The physical
signs are long gone but what still remains is the scar they left behind that
does not heal. The glass beads of Taj Mahal or the millions of Anglo Indians
will remind you who were the British and what they did to India.
Note : My blogs are also available in French, Spanish, German and Japanese languages at the following links as well as my biography. My blogs can be shared by anyone anytime in any social media.
https://medium.com/me/stories/public
La biografía de anil en español.
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