British Premier Cameron’s Visit to India:

Much Ado About Nothing - 2

Reinventing the Raj

Writing on the Oped page of the subservient Indian Express C. Raja Mohan, a former leftist sold out to neo-liberalism, exhorts that an emerging India has everything to gain by deepening its British and Anglo-Saxon connections, with Cameron being just the right interlocutor for India.

That security vision in turn must have two elements. … the emphasis must be on returning India and Britain to the Raj tradition of keeping the global commons secure and open for all. This would involve India and Britain pooling their resources to keep open the sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean and beyond. … As Britain cuts its military expenditure, downsizes its armed forces and limits its political objectives amidst a big resource crunch at home, India should take the opportunity to propose a comprehensive partnership between the defence industries of the two countries.

India on the other hand needs partners who can ease its path to a larger international role. The people, resources and institutions of Britain are India’s welcome force multipliers. Delhi and London, then, have every incentive to pool their resources — in other words reinvent the Raj — for mutual benefit.

Raja Mohan, always on some US endowed chair or the other is a perfect example of Indians available for a price like many others in India and abroad to promote Western cause.

Chinese Reaction

The Chinese reaction was extreme. An article in the web edition of People's Daily, the mouthpiece of ruling Communist Party of China, in an article titled "Britain, India also to make bilateral ties special" said "for Britain, this kind of relationship usually refers to the ties of alliance between Britain and the United States, so the implication of Cameron's remarks seems to be quite profound."

Picking out British trade minister Vince Cable's remarks that British government will first permit the export of nuclear energy to India for civil use the Daily commented, "India has so far not signed the Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty and the British government had long been in opposition to exporting its nuclear technology and equipment to India," it said without referring to the Indo-US nuclear deal. (Sounds funny from Beijing , one of the greatest proliferators of nukes technology and missiles)

"Nevertheless, the British government considers it necessary now to differentiate the civil and military nuclear facilities and, so it would be likely to issue a nuclear export permit to India as soon as possible.

"Furthermore, he acknowledged frankly that India has a civil nuclear power market of more than 100 billion US dollars and, once the ban is lifted, British business is expected to win huge amounts of orders," it said.

On UK-India defence ties, it said "India is well-known for relying on foreign in particular Russian military equipment and technology to modernize its military forces. But in recent years, India is trying to diversify its weapon suppliers for whom the potential market is immense. "And Britain has a certain appeal in this regard. So, Prime Minister Cameron's trip to India opens the door for British arms manufacturers to expand their weaponry exports to India," it said.

UK as a Partner

Only Indian English speaking ignoranti see UK and US as reliable allies in spite of their past record and proclivities. While making soothing statements both Washington and its poodle London have ignored India’s vital concerns. BBC still calls the ISI trained terrorists who raped India’s economic and cultural metropolis Mumbai as gunmen. It allows so called freedom organizations which affect adversely security of India and other countries in south and central Asia.

Even the Wilkileaks giving details about US perfidy have not persuaded Indian policy makers not to outsource Indian security to Washington and embark on an independent line to guard Indian national interests. India has unnecessarily ruffled China’s feathers to please Washington, angered Iran by siding with the US effort to browbeat Tehran on the nuclear issue on which Tehran is quite justified. Washington’s ambassador in New Delhi even got Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar dismissed for his efforts to ensure energy security. His successor, a nominee of a rich corporate house in Mumbai has done pretty little in that direction. India’s relations with Russia have also suffered.

Indian US relations have become hostage to Indian corporate houses and Americans of Indian origin who look to their and US interests first unlike the Jews or the Chinese. Indians have little feeling of nationalism whose identity is based on caste, religion, language and region.
Conservative party leader Cameron heads a coalition with Liberal Democrats, after the likes of Tony Blair mouthing half-truths and lies who led UK into a disastrous misadventure tagging along for crumbs of loot with the US led illegal invasion of Iraq. It was very unpopular among the people who defeated the New Labour under Gordon Brown who took over after Blair was almost cornered into resigning. Earlier Maggie Thatcher’s disastrous anti- people policies had destroyed the party‘s popularity among the masses.

Death Agony of Thatcher Deregulated Finance Model

Wrote F. William Engdahl in January, 2009, ”During the end of the 1970's into the 1980's British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her, introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets. She did so in parallel with similar moves in the USA initiated by advisers around President Ronald Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem. For almost three decades, Anglo-American university economic faculties have turned to Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets as 'the efficient way,' in the process, undoing many of the hard-fought gains secured for personal social security, public health care and pension security of the population. Now the 'poster child' economy of the Thatcher Revolution, Great Britain, is sinking like the proverbial Titanic, a testimony to the incompetence of what is generally called Neo-liberalism or free market ideology.”

Kohinoor

The proposal for the return of the fabled Indian diamond Kohinoor, now part of the British crown jewels, was raised by British MP of Indian origin Keith Vaz just before the visit. Cameron shot it down, saying if such demands were agreed to, it would lead to empty rooms in British Museums. But there is more than the priceless pieces in British museums like Buddhist Amravati railings or the Sultanganj Buddha, also known as the Birmingham Buddha, which was stolen in 1861.

Colonial Exploitation and Loot

"The conquest of the earth, which means the taking away from those who have a different complexion and slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much", Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness.

India must not forget that before the arrival of the British East India Company in the late 18th century, the sub-continent's share in world manufacturing was 24.5 percent in 1750 ( 32.8 percent for China ). But by the time the British had finished with India, the sub-continent's share had fallen to 1.7 percent (in 1900) and that of the British increased from 1.9 percent (in 1750) to 22.9 percent (in 1880) - Rise and fall of Big Powers by Professor Paul Kennedy. In these bald figures lie tens of millions of deaths in famines, many times because food grains were exported for profits or not distributed where needed and in time. The riches looted from India and export of industrial products in exchange for India’s raw materials triggered British industrial revolution, expansion and maintenance of the vast British empire over which the Sun never set.

Ten Million Killed after the 1857 Revolution

In his book “War of Civilizations: India AD 1857” writer/journalist Shri Amaresh Misra states that 1857 revolt was a revolution which failed because it was not sufficiently well organized. It was much more broad-based than thought and lasted well beyond 1857, all the way into the 20th century. It was a war of civilizations. “The conventional view that Indians lost militarily or politically has to be overhauled… Despite everything, Indians could still have won a conventional victory — it was only internal betrayal that probably skewed this possibility.” (Internal betrayal can be seen everywhere and everyday).

The number of Indians killed in revenge after 1857 has been estimated at 10 million (7 per cent of the population) in UP, Haryana and Bihar alone based on primary sources in the National Archives in New Delhi and the state archives in Lucknow, Patna, Bhopal, Bombay, and Ahmadabad apart from the Raza Library in Rampur, Shibli Numani Library in Azamgarh, Khuda Baksh Library in Patna, and the Deoband Library. The original sources are in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic.

The British did destroy all records on the genocide but preserved the story of the battles because the British had to report to their superiors. The figures of the genocide were tabulated from land, railway and labor survey reports. From Lahore and Bangladesh Misra obtained the gazetteers of districts of Punjab, Sind, and NWFP of Dhaka, Chittagong, and Fareed Pur.

Wrote Soutik Biswas, the online correspondent for BBC News in his blog, ”Most of Indian colonial experience was extremely unsavory. Experts point to the tendency of the British rulers to cultivate local elites, empowering some of them and dividing the masses. (Lord Macaulay, who spearheaded the founding of India's education system, suggested it set up natives who were "Indian in color and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".) [Unfortunately Indians have still not evolved a basic Indian model. Against brown English speaking elite brainwashed by the British and now the US way of life ,are ranged the indigenous grass roots leadership in India, where many oppose English, now almost the international language and even computers for political consumption. But flaunt computers, a necessity and send their own children to English media schools and colleges.

“The collaboration with entrenched elites strengthened feudalism in what was already a deeply hierarchical society. Income, urbanization, education and health care stagnated. Average economic growth in the first half of the century under British rule was 1%. Colonial trade was extractive and exploitative, leaving India poorer. – But the colonial understanding of this complex nation was suspect, i.e. Winston Churchill predicted that if the British left India the country "will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages"

However unlike 17 century, there is now a big boy Washington entrenched in New Delhi since the collapse of the British Empire following its over reach and unbearable defense expenditure in WWII and unraveling of the Soviet Union. It is another matter that like London and Moscow, Washington too has over reached itself and with 700 billion on defense (as much as the rest of the world put together) and over 600 billion current account deficit is being financed by Beijing and others investing in soon to be worthless securities, caught in Iraq quagmire and realizing that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and has arrived at the same historical denouement along with the poodle, the United Kingdom.

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01-Aug-2010

More by : K. Gajendra Singh

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