The Independence Day should be the stock-taking time for Pakistanis. It is the time to ask why after half a century of independence, we are still cursed to live as a backward nation of the world. The roots of this curse lie in a century of slavery under the colonial rule. The Indian society, economy and politics were systematically manipulated by the British to serve their interests only. This manipulation has been so deep and thorough that we can still see and feel its vestiges all around us.
The people that can liberate us from these vestiges are the political leaders. Ironically, the breeding and training of this class was done by the colonists through an educational system introduced in 1835 to produce such a class of natives that were to be Indians only in blood and color but English in tastes, intellect and outlook. The leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League that were handed power in 1947 belonged to this class. It was unrealistic to expect of them to have demolished the very systems, structures and institutions that had made them the ruling class.
Partition in 1947 was just a change of faces. At best, it was just a year of ‘independence’ whereby the native ruling class obtained the power to act independently; on the whole, we never got liberated. Even those members of this class that professed to be anti-imperialist did not have the will or the imagination to make a clean break from the colonial structures and establish a new order. The speech of the ‘anti-imperialist’ Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India to the Constituent Assembly was a testimony to this fact, when he observed, “… one has to be very careful of the steps one takes so as not to injure the existing structure too much. There has been destruction and injury enough, and certainly I confess to this House that I am not brave and gallant enough to go about destroying any more.”
Nehru was an intelligent and capable Indian. Surely, there must have been many more Indians as bright as Nehru or even brighter than him. Then, why did they not feel confident enough to envisage a socio-politico-economic system better than the colonial system; a system that was purely responsive to the indigenous needs. This was because the Indians suffered from a sense of inferiority. During a century of slavery, the British were successful in ingraining the Indian minds with the idea of European superiority. Even the most talented Indians were impressed by the greatness of European thought and concepts of politics and governance. They explored the avenues of power and politics within the rules laid down by the alien power. They were expected to make the most out of the given system, not to destroy it to create a new one representing their national aspirations. The mavericks that tried to threaten the system were hunted and brutally crushed. What happened to the likes of Bhagat Singh and the communists are some of the glaring examples.
Another avenue open for the ‘smart’ Indians through which they could acquire some power and prestige in the slavish society were the civil and military bureaucracy – the steel framework – through which the British controlled the subjugated peoples with an iron hand. No matter how brave and courageous the sons of the so-called Indian ‘martial races’ were, they were never considered even equal to the worst of the British officers by the racist British policy-makers such as Lord Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of Indian forces: “It is this consciousness of the inherent superiority of the European which has won for us India. However, well educated and clever a native may be, and however brave he may have proved himself, I believe that no rank we can bestow on him would cause him to be considered an equal of the British officer.”
A somewhat similar racist attitude was adopted towards the best of the Indian minds while considering appointments in the civil bureaucracy by the highest British authority in the subcontinent such as Viceroy Lord Curzon: “ The highest ranks of civil employment in India must be held by Englishmen, for the reason that they possess, partly by education… the habits of mind, and the vigor of character, which are essential for the task…” The grip of this ‘steel framework’ was so strong that by the early decades of the twentieth century just four thousand British civil servants (all graduates of Oxford and Cambridge) and sixty-nine thousand British military officers subdued hundreds of millions of Indians and ventured on nineteen imperial military expeditions to Burma, Siam, Tibet, Afghanistan and the Middle East from 1838 to 1920.
It is not that these hundreds of millions of Indians did not feel the repression of the colonial rule, they did. But the only Indians that tried to seriously resist the British as a group were the peasantry. A British anthropologist, Kathleen Gough identified at least seventy-seven peasant revolts that involved tens and hundreds of thousands of protesting peasants. They could have been successful in kicking the colonists out, had the cause of India been not betrayed by the landlords, the mercantile and educated urban middle classes and the princely rulers of India – all of whom acted as the collaborators of the Raj.
The usefulness of the princes was underscored by the first Viceroy Lord Canning as early as 1860: “If we could keep a number of native states without political power, but as royal instruments, we should exist in India…” The princes were more than willing to play as puppets in the hands of their British masters as is evident from the response of the Maharaja of Mymensingh: “If we are to exist as a class, it is our duty to strengthen the hold of the government.”
The Indian mercantile class had proved equally treacherous: it aligned with the colonists by becoming the junior partners of the European merchants trading in India. The history of the subcontinent might have been different, had the richest Bengali merchant Jagat Seth not bought the loyalty of the commander-in-chief of the Bengali forces in favor of the British army in the historic battle of Plassey in 1757.
The century of slavery ended when the colonial masters themselves realised that they could not hold on to India anymore. However, the systems and structures engendered by them are still existent in one form or the other. Hence, the masses still wait for a new beginning.
The writer is an academic and a journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
