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From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

In article <Ol3ND.1510015$YL3.799859@fx48.iad>,
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer <FBInCIAnNSATe...@yahoo.com> posted:

THE "GREAT THEFT" OF INDIA BY IMPERIAL BRITAIN -- PART 1

https://www.dailyo.in/politics/mughals-british-east-india-companythe-great-theft-of-india-by-imperial-britain/story/1/28102.html

The great theft of India by imperial Britain -- Part 1

Why then is there such little anger against the British
while the Muslim rule is (rightly) reviled?

Minhaz Merchant
03-12-2018

They came, they saw, they conquered -- and they left with a
fortune.

The story of how 190 years of British colonial occupation,
from 1757 to 1947, impoverished India is one of the great
untold stories of modern history.

Congress member of Parliament and former junior external
affairs minister Shashi Tharoor tried valiantly to tell the
story in his 2017 book, The Inglorious Empire: What the
British Did to India, but gaps remain. What, for example,
was the quantum in inflation-adjusted wealth siphoned out
of India by the colonial British? What was the modus
operandi colonial officials employed? Should India seek
reparations -- and how might these be credibly computed?

Some of these questions have now been answered by the
economist Professor Utsa Patnaik. She recently published a
collection of essays in Columbia University Press detailing
the method of the two-century-long British theft, its
computation at today's currency value, and a possible mode
of reparations.

Crucially, Professor Patnaik does what Tharoor in his
otherwise fine book (Indian edition: An Era of Darkness:
The British Empire in India) does not: she puts a figure on
the British theft.

In an interview with the business daily Mint on November
19, 2018, Professor Patnaik said: "Between 1765 and 1938,
the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion, taking India's export
surplus earnings as the measure and compounding it at a 5
per cent rate of interest. Indians were never credited with
their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local
producers here were ‘paid' the rupee equivalent out of the
budget -- something you'd never find in any independent
country."

When Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-
Daulah, in 1757 in the battle of Palashee (Plassey) by
bribing the Nawab's army commander, the traitorous Mir
Jaffer, the real prize for the British was the right to
collect tax from Bengali peasants, traders and farmers.

The Nawab had levied a modest tax, allowing peasants a
reasonable living. By 1765, within eight years of Clive's
victory over the Nawab, all that changed. Taxes in Bengal
were trebled.

Unable to eke out a living, 10 million people out of
Bengali's population of 30 million died of starvation in
1770.

Around 173 years later, in 1943, as the Second World War
raged and the British Empire was on its last legs, Prime
Minister Winston Churchill would withhold vital food grains
from Bengal, leading to the Great Bengal Famine in which
over three million people died.

But back in 1770, the British were focused on making money.
Britain was still a relatively poor country. The industrial
revolution was some years away.

The British were especially active in the African slave
trade. Through much of the 1700s, Liverpool monopolised 55
per cent of the brutal Atlantic slave traffic. The United
States was still a British colony. African slaves captured
or bought by the British in Sierra Leone, Ghana and the
Ivory Coast were shipped in British vessels to America,
their arms and legs chained in manacles, lying one above
the other. Dozens died during the horrific transatlantic
journey.

Back in Colonial India

As Britain began to extort tax revenue from Indian
peasants, the industrial revolution received a boost in
terms of funds and raw materials from India. The British
modus operandi was as simple as it was extortionate: it
taxed Indian peasants 35 per cent of their income, three
times what the Nawab of Bengal had taxed them. That excess
tax revenue was then used by the British to buy Indian
goods -- spices, textiles and gold -- which were in great
demand in Europe and North America.

Thus British tax collectors used Indian money to buy Indian
goods, exported them and pocketed the profit -- with zero
investment.

This system continued unimpeded virtually throughout the
colonial period. In order to ensure that peasants, from
whom they extorted steep taxes to buy Indian goods for
export, did not realise how they were being cheated, a ruse
was employed. The British tax collectors and British buyers
of exportable goods were deliberately kept as completely
separate entities so that no connection could be made by
peasants whose taxes were being used to drain the country's
resources.

Professor Patnaik explains the scheme: "A large part of the
producer's own tax payment simply got converted into export
goods, so the East India Company got these goods completely
free. The later mechanism, after the British Crown took
over (in 1858), used bills of exchange. The only Indian
beneficiaries of this clever, unfair system of linking
trade with taxes were the intermediaries or dalals. Some of
modern India's well-known business houses made their early
profits doing dalali for the British."

Were the British thus more rapacious than the Mughals?
Unquestionably. They impoverished India in a way the
Mughals did not. That does not absolve the Mughal Empire.
It was savage, destroyed thousands of temples, and
converted lakhs of Hindus through the sword or through
financial inducement. The Mughals were a destructive,
malignant force.

The British though exceeded them in the damage they did to
India's economy. Why then is there such little anger
against the British while Muslim rule is (rightly) reviled?

The reason is complex. Many Hindus in the 1700s were fed up
of the debauched Mughal Empire. They were relieved when the
British defeated the Mughals. They regarded the British,
who brought new technology and avoided religious
conversions, as the lesser evil. There are miniscule
Protestant converts in India compared to millions of Muslim
converts. In a deeply religious country, that mattered.

Between two evils, there is little to choose but let
Professor Patnaik have the last word: "Per capita annual
foodgrains absorption in British India declined from 210
kg, during the period 1904-09, to 157 kg during 1937-41,
and to only 137 kg by 1946. If even a part of its enormous
foreign earnings had been credited to it and not entirely
siphoned off, India could have imported modern technology
to build up an industrial structure as Japan was doing.
Instead the masses suffered severe nutritional decline and
independent India inherited a festering problem of
unemployment and poverty."

Dhanyavaad posting the article.

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi Om Shanti http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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