Oscar Wilde: The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

At the annual lecture by British Lord Bhikhu Parikh (of Gujarati origin) on ‘India’s place in world’ organized by the Association of Indian Diplomats (retired) aka AID on 8 January at the Indian Council of World Affairs in Delhi caused ripples and criticism in the media and political circles.  According to the Indian media external affairs state minister Shashi Tharoor endorsed Parikh’s criticism of Jawaharlal Nehru's foreign policy as tad too preachy that gave India an exaggerated sense of importance.

Parikh reportedly slammed Nehru's policies as having given India a sense of misplaced self-righteousness: "He (Nehru) even developed Indian foreign policy as though it was speaking for the whole of Asia, homogenizing the entire continent and ignoring internal conflicts." Parikh then went on to describe Indira Gandhi's policies as having lacked “strategic vision”.

As the presiding officer, Tharoor reportedly stated, “I agree with Parikh on several points. We come from the same school of thought on these issues.” Agreeing with Parikh's opinion of Nehru and (Mahatma) Gandhi's foreign policies he added, "It was more like a moralistic running commentary," recalling his own writings in which he criticized Nehru's approach to world affairs.

Tharoor's endorsement of Parikh’s comments raised hackles in his Congress party and caused embarrassment. The media recalled that for the Congress, India's first prime minister is a venerated figure, not the least for being part of the Nehru-Gandhi pantheon. Though India recast its foreign policy after the end of the cold war, Panchsheel and non-aligned movement are seen as Nehru's signal contributions, certainly in the Congress.

The Congress rebuttal was prompt. “Nehru is a giant about whom no one can be dismissive in a one-liner,” said party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi. “Given the past history (of controversies in which Tharoor was involved), it’s useful to apply the principle that silence is golden.”

“Congress’s foreign policy was visualized by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru even before Independence; that should not be questioned by a person who is particularly in the government and is supposedly carrying that legacy (forward). The PM should take note of this,” Congress spokesman Shakil Ahmed said.

But soon after the lecture Tharoor had twittered: “Attended great lecture by Lord Bhikhu Parikh on India’s place in world.”

Tharoor, who was deputy to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has been mired in controversies ever since he was made a minister after his maiden entry into the lower house, perhaps to infuse educated blood into the government. So faced with media and party criticism Tharoor responded that as chairman at the lecture at the Council, he had only made an honest summary of an hour-long speech of Lord Parikh, a professor at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Seeking an apology from newspapers for distorting his remarks on Nehru, Tharoor said, “I am dismayed by the inaccurate and tendentious reporting of a statement attributed to me. Lord Parikh’s speech was an hour-long one and largely positive analysis of the major trends in Indian foreign policy. While he expressed some criticisms of past policies, these were not inappropriate in an academic setting dedicated to free discussion of global issues, and in any case were expressed in constructive terms,” he said.

While summarizing the main points of Parikh’s speech he had merely said that, “That Indian foreign policy drew from our sense of civilization, and the extraordinary contribution by Mahatma Gandhi and Nehruji’s articulation of our civilizational heritage, both enhanced India’s standing in the world but also earned us the negative reputation of running a moralistic commentary on world affairs — that has come through very clearly in your speech.”

“I went on to point out that there was more to Nehruvian policies than that, alluding to the use of force in Goa as an example of real-politik in Indian policy. At no stage did I say what has been reported. It is a basic tenet of good journalism that any quotations within quotation marks should be the exact words spoken. This was manifestly not the case… This is not merely unprofessional, it is dishonest. I demand a correction.”

Tharoor also criticized television channels for running stories on the ‘basis of inaccurate press reporting’, without even checking the tape of his remarks. “That reflects very poorly on their professionalism or lack thereof,” he said.

When asked if he had become an embarrassment to the Congress, Tharoor retorted he was not going to take this 'nonsense' anymore. “If you are continuing to misreport everything, I say... clearly, people are going to judge me not by what I have actually said but by what you all are reporting what I have said,” he said.

He had not issued a rejoinder on 9 January, because, “only one newspaper had reported and I did not take it seriously. It is now that you have made a big song and dance about it I am not only issuing a statement but also issuing a rebuttal and demanding a correction, because we cannot go on like this.”

Tharoor regretted the fact that there were people in the audience who clearly did not have the background, the reading, the depth, the knowledge and the judgment to know what was being said. “That is a great shame. The problem is that journalists must learn but they must not learn at the expense of the country’s and the Ministry’s credibility,” Tharoor said.

As Tharoor clarified his stand, the Congress came out in his support. “There is nothing left in the issue now. It is clear that he was misquoted. We have nothing more to add to it,” party spokesman Shakeel Ahmed said.

Quite clearly Tharoor does not fit into rough and tumble of the Indian political system brimming with semi-educated hustlers in contrast with his foreign education and orientation and experience only at United Nations, where to survive and succeed one has to toe the Washington line as he himself admitted that his thinking was like Lord Parikh’s.

I had found it incredible that he thought that he would be supported by USA, forget about China, when he stood for elections for the post vacated by Kofi Anan. And the Indian government in its wisdom even supported his candidature. A lot has been amiss in India’s foreign policy since 2004.

The grassroots Congress leadership has been already in arms at his utterances that the air economy class was ‘cattle class’, when the political class was promoting the charade of economy. This kind of flippant conversation is more suited at cocktails among diplomats. In a highly competitive political culture, his peers were upset that without a dynastic pedigree he was after his very first parliament win catapulted into the council of ministers.

Lord Bhikhu Chotalal Parikh

Bhikhu Chotalal Parikh son of a goldsmith was born in the village of Amalsad in Gujarat in 1935 and had early university education in Bombay, India. He currently holds the Centennial Professorship at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the LSE. He has taught at many universities in USA and Europe. Between 1981-1984 he was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Baroda, India.

Parikh was appointed a life peer in 2000 as Baron Parikh, of Kingston upon Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, when Tony Blair was prime minister (1997-2007).

Does Bhikhu Parekh recommend India follow Tony Blair like policies!

But would Lord Parekh recommend that India follow policies similar to UK specially under prime minister Tony Blair, under whose watch he was made Baron. The immoral policies followed by Tony Blair were a disgrace and disaster as admitted even by sane UK citizens and led to his being forced out of office. And the current British prime minister Gordon Brown was in know of the spins and lies and decisions taken against the advice of the British Attorney General, who was later forced into changing his advice, especially when the Military brass asked for a review since it could be hauled up and tried under international laws. In the enquiry going on in London, Blair defense has been that he wanted to remove Saddam Hussein as President of Iraq.

Derided as George Bush’s poodle even in the British media, Tony was complicit in all lies which the Bush administration broadcast to the world through its corporate media and even in the UN before the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its continued brutal occupation. Even when a vain and incompetent US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asked UK need not join in the invasion, Tony still joined, in the hope of getting some crumbs from the loot in Iraq.

When sent as stalking horse to persuade Russia to support the invasion resolution in UNSC, Blair was told twice at the press conferences in Moscow by President Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that British dossiers were false. But Tony kept plodding on glorying in his ‘special relationship’ with the White House tenant. No wonder Nelson Mandela called Tony USA’s foreign minister.

Tony Blair told the British people that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" could reach British targets in as little as 45 minutes. With no such weapons ever being found, the entire prospectus for the war appears flawed, the basis of faulty, perhaps massaged, intelligence. This has given rise to the understandable suspicion - by many in Westminster and across Britain as a whole - that an illegitimate war was launched by Blair in 2003 largely to support president Bush and his neo-conservative circle who had already decided on regime change in Iraq soon after Bush was sworn in 2001 and wanted facts to fit the decision, come what may.

Do you remember March 16, 2003 when swaggering George Bush, Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in an emergency summit on Spain’s Azores Islands discussed a new U.N. draft resolution on Iraq and gave the Security Council members 24 hours to rubber-stamp the US-British resolution, after which he will terminate all further diplomatic discussions and authorize the Pentagon to proceed with bombing and a full-scale land invasion. At one point, the US president’s face contorted as he denounced France for its expected veto, and he seemed prepared to order military action against Paris as well as Baghdad.

Poodle Tony Blair, Bhikhu Parikh’s leader was in step with George Bush.

After the summit in the Azores illegal invasion was launched against a hapless Iraqi people within a matter of days. That ,after the starvation and impoverishment of the Iraqi people—the consequences of 12 years of US/UK implemented UN economic sanctions leading to death of half a million children. The 2003 invasion, codenamed in colonial narrative ‘Operation Iraqi freedom.’ and brutal occupation has caused extra deaths of over a million Iraqis, created a million widows, 5 million orphans and 4 million refugees and destroyed Iraq and its unity.

On April 30, 2009 after six years, Britain formally handed over control of the Iraqi port city of Basra to US Army command. Since 2003, 179 British soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq, in addition to many thousands of Basra Iraqis. Britain's Iraq operations cost the UK around 7 billion pounds (US$10.4 billion). The British Tommies were not behind the GIs in committing atrocities on hapless Iraqis.

Bhikhu Parikh -  Should India follow such immoral policies?

Fact is that British citizens like Parikh have been made Barons to parrot British and its master USA’s immoral policies, which more often than not have gone against Indian interests. Parikh’s minister for foreign affairs David Milliband, a Jew whose father Ralph was a foremost Marxist theorist and grandfather Red army soldier, comes to Mumbai and has the temerity to lecture that India should solve the Kashmir problem. Such statements by Parikh’s British masters clearly provide oxygen to Jihadists, separatists and terrorists in Kashmir and elsewhere. Do Indians tell UK government that London should solve the north Ireland problem to satisfy all sections even the real Irish Republican Army?

When David tried his wits on telephone with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov over West inspired Georgian attack on South Ossetia, he got a tongue lashing from the Russian. At one point Sergei became so incensed that he reportedly barked: 'Who the f*** are you to lecture me?' Mr. Miliband was reportedly 'surprised' by the ferocity of the verbal attack and the nature of the language. Indian timidity not to articulate their position forcefully is rightly taken as cowardice.

Since Indian independence UK has followed policies generally inimical to India i.e. Kashmir in the United Nations since 1948. One can cite a litany of unfriendly actions beginning with the distortion of the Indian complaint to UNSC to favor Pakistan and misguiding the new Western leader USA, which policy is continued even now. London has hosted Sikh, Kashmiri and Pakistani terrorist groups who have worked against India openly. Remember the UK government mouthpiece BBC showing Sikhs celebrating in London murder of Indira Gandhi in 1984. Even now BBC describes the 26/11 Pak terrorists coyly as gunmen.

London bombings on 7 July, 2005

Do you remember how the British reacted to London bombings on 7 July, 2005. It was a clumsy performance like a Laurel Hardy comic film with a poor innocent Brazilian youngster murdered in cold blood in public.

Tony Blair was ‘surprised and described the bombings "barbaric" – which they were. But “what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism" asked Robert Fisk in the “Independent’ of London. “If Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid, “Fisk concluded

The bombings were a natural revenge for Blair joining Bush in bombing Afghanistan and then in illegal invasion of Iraq. Osama bin Laden had warned London in October 2001 not to join the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In a November tape he said, "What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia." In February of 2003, as Bush and Blair went to war on Iraq, bin Laden warned that the U.K. and the U.S. would be made to pay. In October of 2003, bin Laden named Britain as a target for reprisals. A month later, an al-Qaeda-linked group targeted a British bank and Consulate in Istanbul killing its vice-consul.

A CIA report and EU analysts concluded that an attack on Britain was inevitable, since 70 British Muslims, most of them originally from Pakistan, had joined the Iraqi resistance. Once their skills were honed in the field, they would inevitably return home.

Do these Gujju origin Baron professors approve of Blair and Brown policies?

Nefarious British Role in the Partition of India

Quite clearly Jaswant Singh’s book - “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence “, had an agenda, a wag even suggesting to win kudos from Jinnah’s grandson Nusli Wadia of Bombay Textiles , Mumbai. Certainly it is not a serious book on the history of partition.

In a panel discussion after the book release, another Gujju origin British citizen Lord Meghnand Desai, again a professor at LSE exposed his ignorance of history by declaring that "the division of the country became inevitable around April, 1947 and not before that". He termed Lord Mountbatten the "father of Pakistan" and added that Jinnah had been turned into a villain through complete fabrication of facts, and claimed the Partition happened because of Nehru’s individualism and crude Marxism. He said the Congress had no right to represent Muslims and accused Nehru of mindlessly rejecting Jinnah’s genuine demand for a guarantee about Muslim rights. Such drivel.

It is irritating that a British loyalist and toady like Desai is given undue importance in India, his vacuous articles and chatter fill Indian media and corporate channels.

Writing in “The Tribune” of 19 August, 2009, that “Jinnah pursued Pakistan for power; Jaswant disappoints; ignores British designs,” retired Indian diplomat, Narendra Singh Sarila, who he was ADC to Lord Mountbatten and wrote a few years ago a book “The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition,” said;

“I am disappointed with Jaswant Singh’s 660-page book on Jinnah and Partition, released earlier this week." At the end he says: “I still fail to understand why India was partitioned in 1947? Or the manner in which it was done.” If even after his massive research and hard work, he did not get to the bottom of his subject, there is a reason for it. It is because he has ignored the most important element that was responsible for Partition, namely British strategic interests that required the creation of Pakistan. The British top secret documents on Partition have now been unsealed and there was no excuse for ignoring them. I myself showed these to him some years back. The whole story is there in those documents.

“The Labour government that came to power in Britain in mid-1945 was willing to grant independence to India but was worried about losing its 60-year-old military base here from which the British controlled the whole Indian Ocean area, including the eastern Middle-East that contained oil wells — The Wells of Power — of increasing importance in war and peace and which Stalin, with his rising ambition after his victory over Germany, the British feared, might seize. In the last two great wars it was from their Indian base that the British deployed Indian and British forces in Iran and Iraq and the British Chiefs of Staff were adamant on keeping a foothold in India. But Atlee, the British Prime Minister, knew that the government of a free India under the Congress party’s rule would neither give them a military base nor join their team against the Soviet Union in the fresh Great Game. What were they to do?

“Towards the end of 1945, Field Marshal Wavell, the Viceroy of India, came up with a possible way out of their quandary. After the Congress party had refused to cooperate in the war effort in 1939, unless Britain announced that it would give freedom to India after the war, Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, had encouraged Jinnah to formulate the Pakistan scheme, informing London that Jinnah was in his pocket. “He represents a minority and a minority can only hold its own with our assistance,” the Viceroy told London.

“Wavell now suggested that they use Jinnah’s demand to create a separate state in the north-west — not give him all he wanted in the west but territories along Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang with the port of Karachi — and Pakistan would cooperate with them on defense matters. On being asked by London to give them a clear picture of the areas that could go to Pakistan, Wavell in a historic dispatch on February 6, 1946, sent a map delineating the boundaries of Pakistan he had in mind, which were exactly the boundaries that Radcliff drew 18 months later.

“So, what Pakistan was going to be was already decided in early 1946 and the time between then and August 15 was used by Atlee, Cripps and Wavell and later Mountbatten to make Jinnah accept the smaller Pakistan and the Congress party to accept Partition, while Atlee kept proclaiming from housetops that they were working to preserve India’s unity. All the British maneuvering can be discerned by studying the British top secret files. It is a myth that Jinnah founded Pakistan. President Roosevelt had posted his representative in Delhi after1942 and his dispatches in the US archives also tell us much.

“Some of the assessments in the book are also mistaken. To believe that the Cabinet Mission Plan would have resulted in a united India is moonshine. After 10 years Punjab, Sindh and the NWFP had the option to break away on one side and Bengal and Assam on the other side. That would give the League a much larger Pakistan after 10 years and certainly, in the meanwhile, it would fan the flames of communalism to prepare the ground for the above. And what about the princely states? They had the option to break away too. So, possibly Hyderabad would join Pakistan and would help reach Tripura and Manipur, which would be swallowed up. The Plan would have Balkanized India and Nehru, despite the many mistakes he made, was correct in striking it down."

Genocide and Rampant Looting of India under British Colonial Rule

Ten millions 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.

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:

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).

The transfer of wealth from Hindustan to Great Britain is defined by the bald figures below, which hide tens of millions of deaths in famines, destruction of India’s industry and massive transfer of wealth following the battle of Plassy and subsequent battles in Hindustan.

(From THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS by Paul Kennedy)

TABLE 6. Relative Shares of World Manufacturing Output, 1750-1900

                                                1750   1800   1830   1860   1880   1900

(Europe as a whole)                  23.2   28.1    34.2    53.2    61.3    62.0
United Kingdom                         1.9     4.3      9.5    19.9    22.9   18.5
Habsburg Empire                        2.9    3.2      3.2      4.2      4.4     4.7
France                                        4.0    4.2      5.2      7.9      7.8     6.8
German States/Germany              2.9    3.5      3.5      4.9      8.5   13.2
Italian States/Italy                        2.4    2.5      2.3      2.5      2.5     2.5
Russia                                        5.0    5.6      5.6      7.0      7.6     8.8
United States                              0.1    0.8      2.4      7.2    14.7    23.6
Japan                                         3.8     3.5      2.8      2.6     2.4      2.4
Third World                             73.0   67.7    60.5     36.6   20.9    11.0
China                                       32.8   33.3    29.8     19.7    12.5     6.2
Indian subcontinent                  24.5   19.?    17.6       8.6      2.8     1.7

In the book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire ‘Mike Davis says that in 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument."

Advice on Economic Matters!

We will not take up economic advice Lords Bhikhu and Meghnand might have tendered to their true masters at 10, Downing Street. But from all accounts UK economy is in serious trouble and might unravel even before USA’s.

It is another Gujarati, a Patel, who sells washing powder ‘Nirma’ who employs the principles of marketing and soft diplomacy. He uses ordinary Indian housewives to sell ‘Nirma’ and not semi-clad bollywood starlets. The buyers can identify easily. So the perfidious Albion, that is how French statesman Gen de Gaulle described the British, use mercenaries like Parikhs and Desais to market their view point and polices even inimical to India. Looking like Indians, Indians believe that whatever they trot out is true. The same technique is used by BBC, CNN while marketing Western spins and lies by having brown and black anchors and news readers for their Asian/Indian audience.

Parikh criticized “Nehru foreign policy as though it was speaking for the whole of Asia, homogenizing the entire continent and ignoring internal conflicts Indira Gandhi's policies as having lacked “strategic vision”. Quite often US and UK claim to be the international community, when even France and Germany are not with them. Europe Union, a disunited body ever since UK entry is agreed only on keeping the poor citizens of countries looted by them out. Does it have a common defense or foreign policy?  UK is not part of Euro system and will suffer like USA.

India with its experience of peaceful and non-violent struggle for freedom (in my opinion it should have followed Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose) tried to help enslaved nations, many under British colonial yoke, in Asia and Africa in their efforts to free themselves. Nehru and Krishna Menon spoke about it, something which London and its master Washington could not stomach and still recall it repeatedly.

Would Parikh suggest that Indira Gandhi instead of firm action in 1971 in teeth of total opposition from US and UK, after signing a treaty with Russia, helped aid Bangladesh’s independence but should have gone around begging international community like the current Indian establishment is doing for more than a year after 3 days of pubic rape of Indian sovereignty and honor in the commercial and cultural capital Mumbai on 26 November, 2008. Islamabad’s other master Beijing crowed “The general view of the Mumbai terrorist attack was that it had destroyed the big-country dream of India”, a commentator in Xinhua, China. The overall losses are incalculable.

In the history of Hindustan, there have been very few rulers with strategic perception and skills. Say, like Mauryas who had their capital at Pataliputra but kept the crown prince at Ujjain to guard against ingress from the Hindukush and meet the invader on the route chosen i.e. Sindh- Gujarat or Punjab and the Himalayan foot hills. So were the early Moghuls. Akbar having built his beautiful capital at Fatehpur Sikri spent a decade near Lahore watching Mongols and others invaders across the Hindukush. In modern times we had Indira Gandhi, who instead of mopping around the world against refugee influx from East Pakistan, took advantage of the situation and broke up Pakistan into two.

As for strategic understanding and acumen, Lord Parikh could begin with a Qaeda (primer) on elementary geo-politics if he said that Indira Gandhi's policies lacked “strategic vision”.

Parikh and his ilk like the other LSE professor Lord Meghnad Desai are only promoting British policies and just repeating what the British leaders and Nixons and Dullesses said against India throughout the Cold War period.

How British Lords are created –Titles for cash or other obligations

There was a big media scandal during 2006 and 2007 in UK and elsewhere about ‘Cash for Peerages, Loans for Honors or Loans for Peerages’, on donation to political parties in exchange for life peerages. In March 2006, several men nominated for life peerages by Tony Blair were rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission since the nominees had loaned large amounts of money to the ruling Labour party at the behest of Labour fundraiser Lord Levy, who was arrested and later released on bail. Also arrested was Ruth Turner, who worked in Downing Street with Blair as head of government publicity. Again Turner was not charged with anything.

It was reported on 20 July 2007 that the Crown Prosecution Service would not bring any charges against any of the individuals involved. Their decision stated that while peerages may have been given in exchange for loans, it could not find direct evidence that that had been agreed in advance; this direct evidence of an agreement in advance is what would be required for a successful prosecution .Many enquires involving higher ups in UK are just a whitewash. Like the enquiry about abetment of suicide by a UK scientist who was against the claimed WMD’s in Iraq by Lord Hutton or by senior bureaucrat Butler against UK intelligence in sexing up the information to suit Blair’ s wishes to recommend an attack on Iraq.

Among those rejected for Lordship was one, you guessed it, a Gujarati, Dr Chai Patel, Director of the Priory healthcare group, who had donated £10,000 to the Labour Party. His droll explanation "It is a fact that I have donated, but what is being implicated is that I would be rewarded with a peerage. I have never asked for any favor for the money that I have donated. My children suggested that if I had not given this money, I would not be seen in this light. But I happen to support this Government. I gave money to the party because I happen to believe in what it stands for. I can't change what has happened." Can you imagine a baniya Gujarati doing anything without paisa vassool – value of money?

Explained London’s ‘Independent’ how the exercise was carried out by the likes of Lord Levy:

“Millionaire tycoons mingled with politicians and flattery was the order of the day. At social events, Labour figures, starry-eyed about the rich and powerful, used to sidle up to successful supporters of the Party and suggest that they, too, deserved a career in politics. ’You are ministerial material’, or ’I can see you in the Lords’ were the type of unctuous suggestions made, according to one source.”

And would the nation of hard bargaining shopkeepers not ask academics like Parikhs and Desais to promote British policies and interests. Go and tell it to marines.

Conclusion

The extent of Indian intellectual slavery as a result of British colonial rule is pernicious and abiding, a mutant of Stockholm syndrome.

The author had decided to keep away from AID for personal reasons and did not attend the lecture. Nor could he get full text of the lecture on line. But I was told that the discourse was of undergraduate level. No serious discussion took place. Tharoor statement that there were people in the audience who clearly did not have the background, the reading, the depth, the knowledge and the judgment to know what was being said is noteworthy.

It is more than 60 years since the British left India and since 1958 entrants to India diplomatic service stopped being sent to London for training to avoid brainwashing. Still AID invites the likes of these British toadies of Indian origin or say Kamlesh Sharma, Secretary General of a moribund Commonwealth organization for their post retirement enlightenment. Why not open windows to French, Russian, Chinese or even Turkish scholars and men of distinction.

Anglo-American influence is deep and wide spread. Our RAW (external intelligence) and even Intelligence Bureau (internal intelligence) agents are so easily seduced into Western honey traps and having been trained by them and invited for well paid seminars they become a putty in the experienced hands of CIA, Mossad and FBI. It will make an interesting study to see to what extent we opened our intelligence dossiers after 11/9 and 26/11.

But despite requests from India, US intelligence has it made clear that it has no intention to provide its Indian counterparts with information about Pakistani American and Laskhar-e-Tayiba operative David Coleman Headley or Chicago native Tahawwur Rana, both deeply involved in 26/11 and other terror attacks in India, possibly because Headley not only worked for the US Drug Enforcement Agency as a mole in Pakistan, but perhaps could have also worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency. But our police, security and Raw experts will keep on singing paens for these countries, their policies and agents.

K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies.
Copy right with the author. E-mail: kgsingh@yahoo.com