Injustices in British India

It is amazing that even in the 21st century, there are Englishmen that still admire and defend the British colonial rule in India such as the London’s daily ‘Telegraph’ columnist Peter Oborne. On the eve of British Premier David Cameron’s April visit to Pakistan, he argued in a column entitled “Cameron in Pakistan: sorry, but it’s not right to apologise” that British colonialism did wonders in all walks of subcontinental life such as agriculture, civil rights, respect for human dignity, and freedom of the individual.
Such people are either ignorant of history or deliberately twist and distort it. Let’s take agriculture as an example. The defenders of British colonialism make the tall claim that the British rule brought great benefits to India’s agriculture and its peasants and in this connection cite Lord Cornwallis’s ‘permanent land formula’ in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The fact is that this policy of Cornwallis was a big blunder because “twenty million small landholders were dispossessed of their rights and handed over, bound hand and foot, to the tender mercies of a set of exacting rack renters.”
How the British fleeced the peasantry could be understood from the fact that while the last Nawab of Bengal collected annual land revenue of £818,000, the British raked £2,680,000. The British system was ‘zamindar’ friendly, and not peasant friendly. In most cases, the British courts even refused to hear the complaints filed against the tyrannies of ‘zamindars’. Arthur Kinnaird’s testimony substantiates this British injustice towards the peasantry: “Nearly every zamindar has his own bludgeon-men, his own court, and his own prison; nay more, as it is universally believed his own modes of torture.” This feudal British legacy has continued till today among some of the zamindars.
Under the garb of spreading ‘enlightenment’ and ‘civilisation’, the British colonists actually worked for the promotion and protection of capitalism. Winston Churchill explained how that could be done, when he publicly stated that “India was won by the sword and must be kept by the sword if British capitalism wishes to preserve its own existence.” Unjust rules and regulations were imposed to protect British capitalists and exploit Indian resources and workers. In the name of ‘free trade’, British exports of cotton and silk goods to India were subjected to a minor tax of 2 percent and woolen goods to 3.5 percent while the tax imposed on the exports of Indian cotton to Britain was 10 percent whereas it was 20 percent on silk and 30 percent on woollen goods. This injustice was so cruel that a British governor-general in India had to admit, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” The working conditions were terrible for workers particularly the children and women. According to an 1881 decree, it became legal to employ children of seven years and above in the factories of India. A decade later, the age limit was raised to nine years. Four decades later, the Whitley Commission was sent to India in 1930 to enquire into the plight of workers. Its findings revealed a horrible picture: There was no general wage level for all India. The working day varied from 10 to 14 hours. On an average nine workers lived in a room. Despite legislation on child labor, children of 4 to10 years were commonly employed on plantations where malaria, dysentery and tuberculosis were rife. So much for the self-praising British health policies! Moreover, a British official received 1000 times more pay than his Indian subordinate.
The most horrendous effect of this British exploitation was the regular occurrence of famines in India causing starvation and death to millions. Famines hit Bombay, Madras, NWFP, Rajputana, Delhi, Central India, Orissa, Bihar and Bengal. Historically, Bengal had never experienced a mass famine prior to its colonisation by the British. According to the British statistics, India was ravaged by famines four times between 1800 and 1825, and 22 times between 1875 and 1900 due to which 6.2 million Indians died during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century whereas 26 million lost their lives in the last quarter. In addition, about 70 million Indians suffered from starvation permanently. Why did so many Indians die due to famines under the ‘benevolent’ and ‘enlightened’ British rule?
The answer can be found in the explanation given by William Hunter, according to whom “the chief cause of famines in India lay in the excessive taxes levied on the peasantry.” A more honest admission in this regard was made by Donald Smeaton, a member of the Bombay Legislative Council: “Famines in India are not food but money famines, because, it is impossible for the natives to purchase the necessary food…” Instead of providing succor and relief to the dying Indians during the famines, Keir Hardie, the leader of the Independent Labor Party, wrote in his book ‘India’ that during the famines the Indian peasants were made to pay to the central government a tax levy equivalent of 50 to 60 percent of their total harvest and as much as 75 percent if local taxes were also included.
Isn’t it an irony of history that the same British that castigate Hitler of Germany for setting up concentration camps, also set up concentration camps in India to teach a memorable lesson to all those Indians that dared to rebel against the colonial authority? On one hand, the British propagated that their conquests of the colonised lands ended the ‘era of darkness’ and ‘liberated’ the natives from perpetual misery and suppression but at the same time it were the British authorities that sanctioned and encouraged the heinous practice of slavery throughout their rule in India. For instance, in 1843, there were nine million slaves in India. And whenever questions were raised about the continuation of slavery, the pet defence of such an inhuman practice by the British authorities was that they could not violate the ‘national customs’ of the natives.
It is time that people like Oborne should stop touting British colonialism as ‘enlightening’ and ‘civilising’ because in effect its core objective in the colonised lands was “to preserve and increase their dependence, to deepen their exploitation and, as far as possible to impede their independent development.”

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]