The myth of ‘good colonialism’

It is just that, a myth

It is understandable, though clearly not excusable, when a foreign entity makes a case against a democratic movement in a given region.

Real Time with Bill Maher, once liberal, maintains its steady descent into neoconservative lunacy by having a stern discussion with his conservative guests about the dangers of Middle-Eastern democracy. They’re allowed their democratic freedoms, and then they elect the wrong people; ‘wrong’ being the ones not pre-approved by the Western powers.

The subject was brought up while discussing the understandable threat of Americans electing Donald Trump. Matt Lewis quickly used the opportunity to point out the need for Republican ‘superdelegates’ against Trump, which is essentially a way for the powerful to limit the true range of possibilities in a democratic system. It’s the same ‘superdelegates’, for example, that are being used to stack the deck against Bernie Sanders in the democratic primary, in favour of his Albright-approved, Kissinger-esque opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Many liberal Pakistanis, who are critical of Pakistani military regimes, tend to experience little cognitive dissonance while supporting the concept of a ‘global dictatorship’. Shashi Tharoor made a compelling case for reparations to post-colonial states, whose fiercest critics – defying all reason – happened to be Indians themselves. On the issue of returning Koh-i-Noor – the internationally recognised symbol of the Indian subcontinent’s pre-colonial glory – several Indian and Pakistani bloggers and analysts have made self-depreciating arguments against its return. At the very least, the argument that the return is irrelevant because our governments are too ‘corrupt’ to be trusted with the diamond, are commonplace. One could similarly argue that our governments are too ‘corrupt’ and ‘unreliable’ to govern Delhi and Lahore, which too must be handed back to the British Empire without further ado.

I say that with obvious sarcasm, but be warned, some would not be entirely opposed to that idea either. The British abolished ‘satti’, after all, and they gave us railways. Give or take a few hundred thousand people killed in direct onslaughts by the British forces, thousands more in resistance movements, like in 1857, or peaceful protests, like at Jalianwala Bagh, the unholy negligence of the British Raj during the 1943 famine in Bengal, where millions perished and Winston Churchill quipped how it was the ‘beastly’ Indians’ own fault for “breeding like rabbits”.

But never mind that. We got trains!

In his 2008 book, ‘The Post-American World’, Fareed Zakaria wrote: “India’s political system owes much to the institutions put in place by the British. India got very lucky with its… first generation of post-independence leaders who nurtured the best traditions of the British, and drew on older Indian customs to reinforce them.”

The idea of the East India Company as a saintly NGO, sailing coast-to-coast delivering the gift of ‘civilisation’, is a common one. And it is evident that Zakaria, among many others, has embraced this myth. Had he not, he would’ve recognised that the British developed these ‘institutions’ not as charity to the Indian people, but to facilitate their own plunder of India. They needed trains to transport crop and minerals from the site of harvest or extraction, to the harbours at Bombay and Karachi where they were loaded onto ships sailing one-way out of India. They needed railways to transport labourers. They needed efficient administrative systems and government buildings, like the Port Authority, to oversee these operations. They needed roads because their imported automobiles wouldn’t run as well on unpaved Indian soil.

They put in the minimum amount of investment to optimise their exploitation of Indian wealth, while keeping the indigenous population from rebelling.

It is frequently pointed out that the Indian subcontinent, before the advent of the British, was nobody’s idea of a peaceful, socialist utopia. War and plunder was all around, but there was a difference; except for a few looters and invaders from Central Asia, the local fiefdoms managed to keep the wealth of Indian intact. It was transferred from one overlord to another, but largely stayed within the subcontinent.

This changed with the British occupation. Common sense, if not historical facts, indicate that the British did not come to donate knowledge and capital to the South Asian masses. They annexed the lands, confiscated its wealth, and shipped it 4,000 miles out to London. Net capital did not flow from West to East; it flowed from East to West. If the British had poured more capital into India than they’d taken out of it, there is quite simply no logical reason why they would’ve bothered staying in India for well over a century. It was an Empire, after all, not the Edhi Foundation.

From the genocide of the Native Americans, whose culprit is now lionised every year on October 10^th, to the apartheid in South Africa, undone by a fearless activist who remained on the American terrorist watch list up till 2008, there is simply no example of ‘benevolent’ colonialism to be found in world history. Some forms of colonialism have proven to be less destructive than others, but to have the resources of one country redirected towards the development of another, never seems to work out in favour of the giver.

Alas, those who know history “are doomed to stand by helplessly watching others repeat it”; hence, we’re made to listen to unintelligent, practically criminal banter, about how it is sometimes necessary to subvert democracy, and save a nation of ‘savages’ from itself. They can’t be trusted to exercise their democratic rights, and evolve the same way Europeans did when their democratic institutions were first set into place. They must be rescued. They must be ‘forced’ to follow the right path, coincidentally, the path that the Western world has approved.

This is not to say that all blame must be transferred to the West. There are plenty of ideological and political jinns that we let out of the bottle on our own; plenty of responsibilities we have not been able to fulfil. We have failed to maintain the institution of democracy as well as we needed to.

One of these jinns, however, is the racism we have duly internalised. Let’s talk about that.