feb 7th
http://www.vigilonline.com/reference/relart/vicharamalaArt_view.asp?art_id=94
this gives a graphic picture of what the brits did.
since the american guy did not have much of an axe to grind, one has to assume he was being candid and truthful. and other evidence, eg. mike davis ('late victorian holocausts') supports what he says. the reason the british are still prosperous is because they raped india.
india is not poor because it doesn't have the ability to generate capital -- look at the capital formation there in just the last five years -- but because it was just *taken away* by the british then (and now by other white guys like quattrochi and lots of politicans who stash it away in numbered swiss accounts eg. natwar singh).
interestingly, india's growth is driven principally by domestically generated capital, unlike china's. also india uses its capital a lot more effectively -- that is, factor productivity is much greater -- than china.
5 comments:
Rajeev, you are ignoring the capital inflows due to politicians and religious entities of various kind. The communists got FCI (Foreign Capital Inflows) as per Mitrokhin.. The evangelists continue to get huge sums, and the Muslims, too are getting huge FCI for their agenda. Who says all these are anti-nationals?
Fresh News Rajeev
Toshiba bought off Westinghouse's nuke business for $5billion
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/06/toshiba.westinghouse.reut/
Sage,
i just cant understand why this great indian holocaust, the greatest ever in human history, is barely mentioned. by contrast, sati, with an estimated 600 deaths annually, gets trumpeted ever so often.
but we are to blame ourselves. our pm, in his official capacity, went to britain and thanked them for civilizing us.
Rajeev,
Thank you for bringing this article to my notice.
Though I had more than an inkling of the injustice meted out by Britain to India, I had not read an article from those ages which talked about the conditions then. Since the article is by an American, I would think that this article is unbiased and very close to the truth. I can say that this article re-opened my eyes.
Someone commenting on this blog mentioned the Prime Minister's Doctorate acceptance speech at Oxford. He thinks that English was the greatest gift to India. If not for the British and their "rule" of India, we would have been using some other language - it might have been English again - but that would be by our own choice and not by coercion. The British taught us English because they wanted middlemen between the rulers and the masses - period. Whatever the British did to India (of course, there were exceptions) was to strengthen their foothold in India and ease the looting of India. We should have enough common sense to not call such a thing a gift !
Mr. PM mentions that modern Indian schooling was the next greatest legacy! And who said that Indian schooling is the greatest ? I for one do not think so. With everything focused on a day's exam, many futures are made or ruined in just a day! Isn't learning more important than a 95% in the exam? The British schooling system ( at least the version of it that we have in India) is guilty of making marks more important than learning.
In my opinion, British/Western values were forced on Indian minds with some what the same effect as putting a round peg in a square hole. It just doesn't fit. The Indian value system is just so different from the Western one and it is quite unfair to both systems if seen through each others' eyes.
In addition, the Indian schooling system with its emphasis on Western values and thinking has managed to create generations of self-loathing people who would rather kill themselves before admitting that their ancestors were not just some casteist and superstitious people but were a very noble and civilized lot.
I can find lots of mistakes in the starry-eyed PM's evaluation of the British Raj's - but I don't want to go there. I doubt if Manmohan Singh has read any work by Kalidasa in the original.
Rajeev, I want to thank you for showing this article and those who actually published it and re-published it. I'll spend the next few minutes mailing the link to this article to a few people.
Thank you,
-nIlagrIva
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