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