British colonialism, exploitation and mistreatment of India
Bloody jewel in crown of British Empire: How India was
mistreated during colonial rule
From the East India Company to the Raj, India was a British
colony until the mid-20th century. And despite nostalgic imperialists extolling
the virtues of the empire's rule, it left behind millions of victims.
The 1919 Amritsar massacre, the grim anniversary of which
India marked on Saturday, is one of the best-known examples of the atrocities
committed by the British during their two-century colonial rule of India. But,
numerically, its total of 1,600 victims looks like a small blot among the
millions of deaths India suffered during the empire's prolonged misrule and
exploitation.
The famines
From the 18th to the 20th century, various parts of India
endured over a dozen devastating famines, which killed tens of millions of
people, most of the events exacerbated, if not outright caused, by the colonial
administration.
The East India Company (EIC), merchants with their own army
who ruled India on behalf of the British crown, were ruthlessly effective in
generating exports and profits from the colonized land – ruthlessness being a
key part of the efficiency. Exports of Indian produce – rice, tea, wheat, and
even, illegally, opium – were a vital boost for the British economy, helping
keep food prices low at home and generating income from sales to other nations,
like China.
The EIC did
not hesitate to decrease the areas for food crops and even destroy food
plants to make room for other crops needed for export, including opium poppies.
Many scholars agree that in a lot of the cases, famine would have come
anyway, considering the poor rainfall and underdeveloped transportation, among
other things – but it was made that much worse by the Brits, who exploited
agriculture while failing to offset its troubles with proper investment.
The British response to famine was often inaction, at least
until their troops were affected, like in Orissa in 1865, where a third of the
regional population died before aid was finally sent in. As the Great Famine of
1876-78 struck Madras and Bombay, the British administration thought the free
market would sort it out and government interference would only hurt in the
long run. It took 5.5 million deaths for the Brits to begin relief work. At the
turn of the century, the British Viceroy cut rations (saying famine relief
was "philanthropy" and "complacency"), which
resulted in another million deaths.
The most
recent and infamous is the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, when 1.5 million people
starved to death and another 2.1 million are estimated to have died from
related causes.
Until recently, the Bengal Famine was attributed to the
sheer ineptitude of the British administration, which could not be bothered to
divert attention and resources from the war effort. But the 2010 book 'Churchill's Secret War' lays
the blame directly at the feet of then-prime minister Winston Churchill and
his "racism." Citing unearthed documents, author Madhusree
Mukerjee says Churchill not only refused to divert supplies from British
troops, but blocked Canada and the US from delivering aid, and even forbade
India from tapping into its own currency reserves to buy food abroad.
Quelling the Sepoy Rebellion
It would be wrong to fail to recognize the brutality of the
Indian mutineers who rose up in 1857 – it was the Indians who started the
killing, after all, and the victims on the British side numbered in the
thousands. It would be equally wrong to fail to acknowledge what drove them to
revolt, or how disproportionate in both scale and brutality the British
response was.
The rebellion kicked off in May 1857 over what might seem a
trifle: the Brits had introduced to the Indian troops (sepoys, as they were
called at the time) new breech-loading Enfield rifles, the paper-wrapped
cartridges of which had to be bitten off at one end to prepare for firing.
Those cartridges, according to a rumor spread among Indian soldiers, were
lubricated with pig and cow lard – making oral contact with them anathema to
both Muslims and Hindus.
This minute detail, which was never even proven to be true,
capped off a mountain of very real grievances between the British Raj and the
Indian population. So, when soldiers in Meerut, Bengal refused to take the
offending Enfield cartridges and were subsequently sentenced to long prison
terms, then freed by their comrades, who shot their British officers and
marched on Delhi – the entire thing quickly spiraled from a soldiers' mutiny
into a popular rebellion.
As the rebels sought to restore pre-British Mughal rule, the
uprising soon engulfed the north of the country, its first stages marked by
massacres of British civilians, soldiers, and loyal Indian troops. Estimates of
British deaths range from 6,000 to 40,000, with historical accounts speaking of
murders of women and children, rape, and torture.
However, as the Brits got their feet under them, and were
reinforced from home, they started to respond in kind. Word of the rebels'
atrocities spread through the British papers, and the soldiers were seen not as
conquerors anymore, but as bringers of vengeance for innocent lives.
No response was deemed disproportionate – and an estimated
800,000 Indians died in the quelling and its aftermath. Brits perpetrated
massacres as they recaptured Delhi and other cities. Sepoys were bayoneted,
tortured, and tied to cannon muzzles to be shot point-blank. But illustrations
of that are scarce among those depicting British soldiers as heroic liberators.
After the rebellion, the rule over India was transferred
from the EIC to the crown, under what is known as the British Raj – until the
partitioning and independence of 1947.
Partitioning of India
The same ruling that brought India independence also resulted
in one of, if not the worst instances of mass migration in history, a division
of enormous territories along religious lines and a scar on both the land and
the collective consciousness of two peoples – as well as over a million deaths
and thousands of stories of atrocities and hardship which could have been
avoided with better planning on the part of the retreating Brits.
The British government decided to cede power to Indian
leadership in 1946, but the initial plan was to keep the country whole – merely
designating grouped provinces as majority Muslim and majority Hindu, to
accommodate the deepening split between the country's two major religious
groups, represented by the two largest political parties – the Muslim League
and the Indian National Congress.
That plan came crashing down when in August communal
tensions boiled over into what is now known as the Great Calcutta Killings. The
Muslim League staged a Direct Action Day, ostensibly a peaceful protest to
demand a separate homeland for Muslims, which spiraled into a massacre of an
estimated 4,000 people over the span of days.
The British plan was then altered and accelerated – India
would be split, Pakistan would be created, and independence would come several
months earlier. The sometimes-voiced trope that the fate of the partition was
decided over a single lunch is a bit of an embellishment – but several weeks of
planning hardly proved a better time frame.
The partition plan, with the border slashing through the
mixed Hindu-Muslim regions of Punjab and Bengal, was presented in June 1947 by
the last British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, who did not see the need to
organize an orderly transfer of populations, believing local authorities would
sort it out as needed.
What resulted was the uprooting of 15 million people and the
deaths of over a million. Let loose by the officially announced religious
divide, yesterday's neighbors began killing each other and taking away each
other's homes and livelihoods, settling old feuds with blood and perpetrating
localized ethnic cleansing. Afraid of becoming minorities in what used to be
their own land, people fled in both directions across the border, as well as
out of the regions altogether. Punjab and Bengal, as well as Sindh, Uttar
Pradesh, and Kashmir (a disputed flashpoint to this day) were among the worst
affected areas.
Survivors'
accounts, refreshed by the recent 70th anniversary of the partition,
tell of torched houses, viciously slaughtered locals, frantic flights in
caravans that were attacked and looted, women abducted and raped. Over 5,000
such accounts have been collected by one online resource, complete with a
map that shows the mind-boggling scale of the displacement.
British imperialists argue that in the end, India is better
off, pointing to the staples of progress colonial rule brought in. But whether
or not railroads, education, and cricket were worth two centuries of ruthless
economic exploitation, cultural suppression, and millions of lives, is a
question few are prepared to ask without flinching.
Reference:
https://www.rt.com/news/456421-british-colonial-rule-india-atrocities/
