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In article <PN0UD.88168$L44.37352@fx07.iad>,
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer <FBInCIAnNSATe...@yahoo.com> posted:

https://www.dailyo.in/politics/british-raj-east-india-company-mughals-brexit-world-war-1/story/1/28382.html

The great theft of India by imperial Britain -- Part 2

Here's why compensation is so important 71 years after the
end of British colonial rule in India.

MINHAZ MERCHANT

18-12-2018

In part-1 of this article (December 3, 2018), I wrote about
new evidence that has emerged quantifying the economic
value of plunder during the 190-year British occupation of
India and asked how colonial reparations could be effected.

First, a brief rewind.

In 1988, I wrote a piece for The Illustrated Weekly of
India called 'Debt and Dishonour of the British Empire' in
which I computed the colonial reparations due to India at
around �3 trillion.

Nearly 30 years after that piece, Shashi Tharoor, former
minister of state for external affairs, spoke on the
subject at the Oxford Union in 2015 and later developed the
theme into a book, excoriating the British Empire for its
plunder of India. Shortly thereafter, I wrote for DailyO:
"Shashi Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram,
in his book An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in
India, says reparations aren't needed; an apology and a
token payment of one pound sterling a year for 200 years
will suffice. He is wrong. Reparations are needed. An
apology and tokenism won't suffice."

This is what Tharoor wrote in his 2017 book: "India should
be content with a symbolic reparation of one pound a year,
payable for 200 years to atone for 200 years of imperial
rule. I felt that atonement was the point -- a simple
'sorry' would do as well -- rather than cash. Indeed, the
attempt by Minhaz Merchant to compute what a fair sum of
reparations would amount to came up with a figure so
astronomical -- �3 trillion in today's money -- that no one
could ever reasonably be expected to pay it. (The sum would
be larger than Britain's entire GDP in 2015)."

Tharoor is wrong on both the figure and the modus, as we
shall shortly see.

Professor Utsa Patnaik has done painstaking research on the
Indian economy which she began 50 years ago as a student
abroad. She has arrived at an inflation-adjusted figure of
�9.2 trillion for the wealth siphoned out of India by the
British.

In an oped for the Hindustan Times published on October 30,
2018, Professor Patnaik elaborated on how she arrived at
this figure: "How exactly did the British manage to diddle
us and drain our wealth? That was the question that Basudev
Chatterjee (later editor of a volume in the Towards Freedom
project) had posed to me 50 years ago when we were fellow
students abroad. After decades of research I find that
using India's commodity export surplus as the measure and
applying an interest rate of 5 per cent, the total drain
from 1765 to 1938, compounded up to 2016, comes to �9.2
trillion; since $4.86 exchanged for �1 those days, this sum
equals about $45 trillion."

Professor Patnaik goes on to explain the modus operandi:
"The exact mechanism of drain, or transfers from India to
Britain was quite simple. The key factor was Britain's
control over our taxation revenues combined with control
over India's financial gold and forex earnings from its
booming commodity export surplus with the world. Simply
put, Britain used locally raised rupee tax revenues to pay
for its net imports of goods, a highly abnormal use of
budgetary funds not seen in any sovereign country."

"The East India Company from 1765 onwards allocated every
year up to one-third of Indian budgetary revenues, net of
collection cost, to buy a large volume of goods for direct
import into Britain, far in excess of that country's own
needs. Since tropical goods were highly prized in other
cold temperate countries which could never produce them, in
effect these free goods represented international
purchasing power for Britain which kept a part for its own
use and re-exported the balance to other countries in
Europe and North America against import of food grains,
iron and other goods in which it was deficient."

"The British historians Phyllis Deane and WA Cole presented
an incorrect estimate of Britain's 18th-19th century trade
volume by leaving out re-exports completely. I found that
by 1800 Britain's total trade was 62 per cent higher than
their estimate, on applying the correct definition of trade
including re-exports that is used by the United Nations and
by all other international organisations. When the British
Crown took over from the East India Company (in 1858) a
clever system was developed from 1861 under which all of
India's financial gold and forex earnings from its fast-
rising commodity export surplus with the world was
intercepted and appropriated by Britain."

Professor Patnaik's work, published recently by Columbia
University Press, gained further international traction
last week.

Jason Hickel, a columnist with The Guardian, wrote a piece
for AlJazeera.com on December 14, 2018, titled "How Britain
stole $45 trillion from India: And lied about it."

The piece laid bare the deceit with which Britain
accomplished its plunder of Indian wealth over nearly two
centuries and the disgraceful lack of acknowledgment in
British society and among British historians of this crime.

The methodology

Let's turn now to other methodologies to compute the
imperial theft. The Gandhian economic philosopher JC
Kumarappa in a detailed note to the Congress in 1947
estimated Britain's colonial debt to India at Rs 5,700
crore. This was largely undisputed at the time by both the
Indian and British authorities -- but the matter never went
into arbitration.

The exchange rate in 1947 was Rs 13.33 to one British
pound. The debt of Rs 5,700 crore computed by Kumarappa in
1947 was therefore equivalent to 430 crore pounds sterling
or �4.30 billion. Adjusting for inflation and 5 per cent
compounded annual interest over 71 years, the total British
debt to India in 2018 would be over �5 trillion.

Professor Patnaik's figure of �9.2 trillion ($45 trillion
adjusted for dollar-pound exchange rates as well as
interest) is significantly higher because she correctly
computes the cost of exports and re-exports by Britain
using extorted tax revenue from Indian peasants, farmers
and workers.

Moreover, the cost of human suffering, through famines and
the loss of Indian lives in wars waged by the British to
capture Indian territories, from Punjab to Assam, has not
been computed.

The modus

Even if a consensus is arrived at on the final reparations
figure, how would post-Brexit Britain pay? Consider the
discounted figure of �5 trillion. Spread over 50 years,
Britain would need to repay the Indian treasury �100
billion (Rs 9 lakh crore) a year -- that is an entirely
affordable 3 per cent of Britain's GDP. With every passing
year, as the British GDP grows, the burden on Britain as a
ratio to its GDP will shrink.

Why is compensation so important 71 years after the end of
British colonial rule in India?

It is important because just as Germany was forced to pay
reparations to the allies after World War I, justice must
be served.

Colonial reparations by Britain have a precedent. In 2013,
the British government paid $20 million to Kenyans tortured
by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising in
Kenya in the 1950s. The amount was small, the precedent it
set large.

American historian and philosopher Will Durant toured India
in 1930. This is what he wrote: "The British conquest of
India was the invasion, soand destruction of a high
civilisation, utterly without scruple or principle,
careless of art and greedy of gain, overrunning with fire
and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless,
bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning
that career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which now (1930)
has gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy three
years."

Colonial reparations to India won't fully heal the wounds
of India's 'high civilisation' that Durant wrote so
feelingly about. But they will be a step in the right
direction to correct a historical wrong.

Dhanyavaad for posting the article.

Part 1 is here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.culture.indian/nsrsymvlGAw/aaeM67jMAQAJ

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

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