i guess it's the harvard business school education: must have fried his brains. p chidambaram would have been much better off if he'd studied at stanford or wharton. :-)
as it is, he's become a poor man's karl marx.
but both of them are wrong. Angus Maddison's World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, an official European Union publication, shows that during practically the entire period 0-1700 CE India was the world's richest nation.
stands to reason. all these barbarians from alexander the macedonian to the mohammedans to the christists came to india only because it was a rich country. i have noticed that the mohammedans and the christists never invaded, say, burkina fasso. why? burkina fasso has nothing to steal.
also, the reports of travelers, everyone from marco polo to alberuni to xiuen zang to fa hien to paes to the early brits talk about how they were stunned by the wealth of india. i remember passages about vijayanagar by the overwhelmed persian and portuguese envoys who couldn't believe how rich the empire was, for instance.
chidambaram wont believe any indians, but he should believe angus maddison, who's a white guy.
why chidambaram says this sort of crap -- he's not stupid -- is not clear. may have something to do with genuflecting in front of his white boss-lady. if you remember, manmohan singh also said something really dumb when he was given an honorary degree by some british university: something along the lines that brit colonialism had done india a lot of good. yeah, in his dreams!
here's chidambaram, as reported by rediff: http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/aug/27fm.htm
==== quote =====
India was a country where rivers of milk and honey used to flow, is a great historical myth, believes Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
"The poverty has always been there in India and whoever propounded the myth about India being a rich country is wrong," he said.
The old teaching that India was a country of milk and honey about five centuries ago was factually incorrect, Chidamabaram said. "Poverty was there and is still there in India, though prosperous pockets existed here and there," he said.
The finance minister said the books that propounded the glorious past of India were liable to be burnt.
==== end quote ====
now compare this to karl marx, as reported by col anil athale at the following url: http://samachar.com/showurl.php?rurl=http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14514872
Karl Marx took a dim view of India and its heritage.
Writing in the New York Tribune dated June 25, 1853
(quoted in Lewis S Feuer edited Marx and Engels Basic
Writings, Anchor Books, NY 1959, pp. 474-481) he
claimed that the 'Golden Age' of India was all myth
and India was always a poor starving country. He
further went on to admire and appreciate the British
for destroying the Indian village industry and economy
so that India could 'modernise'.
===== end quote =======
almost verbatim, eh? all that hanging around with karat and yechuri may have caused chidambaram to absorb karl marx's bullshit by a process of osmosis from the communists.
reminds me of the old indian practice of visha-kanyaka, a poison maiden whom a king would gift to a rival, and whose body was toxic to the touch.
the communists are poison, no doubt about it. kalakutam, as disgorged by the serpent kaliya.
6 comments:
Rajeev, there is one thing. This in reference to ur comment on MMS lauding British rule. Don’t get me wrong. I think that British colonialism was one of the better things that happened to India. Sandhya Jain, who writes for the Daily Pioneer, gave a very interesting perspective, (I forget the title of the article). The Hindu business class in Bengal by & large supported East I Co. for the simple reason that they saw it golden opportunity to get rid of their money and women grabbing Muslim masters (u read the history of siraj ud daula, u will understand, an absolute bum though if u read Indian official history texts u came away feeling he was some kind of a freedom fighter & the Hindu merchant who betrayed him a traitor). While the British no doubt “economically” impoverished Bengal, Bengal’s Hindu renaissance (ram mohan roy, r paramhamsa, Vivekananda, the various samajs, social reform, aurobindo, the tagores, etc. etc., etc.) started with the British rule. For instance the grand celebrations of Durga Puja by bengal’s zamindar families, Sandhya notes, started only under the East India company, once the muslims were out of the picture. I don’t think that Hindu society on its own at that point of time (17Th century) was in any way capable of re-uniting the country. We had been trodden upon for too long. The Marathas tried but failed for the simple reason that they managed to alienate most other Hindu rulers (that eternal virus infecting Hindu society – disunity). The rebirth of India as a single entity, to be frank, owes a lot to the British.
sorry, ramesh, i believe you have not quite seen how the brits bled india totally: to the tune of $10 trillion, permanently destroying the economy. for instance, the prosperous, skilled artisanal class of the brahmaputra delta (bengal was rich even under the mohammedan yoke) such as weavers, potters, metalworkers, etc. were reduced to total penury overnight, as they were forced to become unskilled landless laborers. they have not yet recovered from this stunning change of fortune, and this is the reason behind the continuing misery of bengal and bihar. 'great victorian holocausts' paints a good picture, and the chinese website i pointed to here gives a bunch of good references too to the total destruction of the economy. thus, a nation that accounted for 25% of the world's gdp was turned in 100 years into a pauper.
what the limeys did to india was one of the greatest war crimes in history.
with or without the limeys, the mohammedans were weakened and decadent at the time, and they would have fallen apart -- aurangazeb with his bigotry and oppression had laid the foundations for the end of the mohammedan power by totally pissing off the hindus. the wily akbar had figured out how to keep the hindus from open revolt, but aurangazeb, being a blind bigot, could not see this.
on the other hand, the loot from bengal was what induced the industrial revolution. thus it is brits who benefited extraordinarily from their plunder of india.
chidambaram is an idiot - this is the problem in India we are ruled by idiots. When the fundamental assumptions are incorrect all the IQ in the world is useless.
The man has no understanding of the industrial revolution and its impact, he has no understanding of life before the industrial revolution, he has no understanding of the concept of wealth, he has no understanding of the concept of money, no understanding of the iron age, the bronze age, the hunter-gatherer stage...
I think he probably thinks that they did not have AC, refrigerator, washing machines, cell phone, car in ancient India so how could it possibly be considered as rich if they did not have these items? In fact that is how this dumbo decides to include you in the tax payers list - if you have a cell phone, refrigerator etc. - because after all if you have a cell phone you must be rich -right?
This is your brain. This is your brain on pseudo-secularism.....
Democracy is by the people, of the people for the people - the underlying unsaid assumption here is that the people are not idiots.
By the way doe anyone know how true the claims made in this article are?
TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: After 123, Sir, how about 311?
As we all know, the Indian Constitution is an almost verbatim reproduction of the Government of India Act of 1935. And that Act had drawn heavily on the Government of India Act of 1919. It was the result of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1918.
If this is the case what the heck was ambedkar doing? was he just poking around like Arjun Singh trying to sneak in some reservations?
There are other big thing smentioned in this article - How true is all of this?
Rajeev, first let me apologize for having started this discussion as it is not strictly relevant to ur main post regarding India’s wealth. Second I have absolutely No Argument with what u have said. Its a well documented fact. My earlier statement was simply made in the context of the previous 8 or 9 centuries of Muslim colonial rule, nothing more. I still maintain that nobody ever debased / degraded / humiliated the Hindu society (culturally, intellectually, spiritually) like the Muslims did, definitely not the British. Something from which we have still not recovered. The muslims -- wherever possible -- made (& are making) a comprehensive and thorough (and brutal) attempt to wipe out Hindus physically (render them extinct so to say) & the Hindus have so far been steadily losing ground – Afghanistan was once Hindu/Buddhist, so was Kashmir, so was Indonesia / Malaysia (if I may stretch it a bit), 60 years back we were booted out of what is now Pakistan (that’s 20% of British India) -- except in small pathetic little pockets in sindh -- & Bangladesh where the process continues, and if this was not enough numerous regions in modern India are now faced by a growing muslim community – assam & kerala are near critical mass if I am right. In fact their pop. is on the rise more or less everywhere in India. Hindus were reduced to penury even under the muslims & it’s just a testament to their skills / genius that they still managed to turn India into a rich country (despite living under these third rate barbarians & enduring numberless central Asian parasites); rich enough for the limeys to get their 10 trillion.
this will either make u laugh or throw up: from ET, India:
Yechury blames Hyderabad blasts on ‘privatisation’
31 Aug, 2007, 0034 hrs IST, TNN
NEW DELHI: Consistent with its approach of de-emphasising the roots of terror attacks in favour of “dialogue” and “understanding”, the CPM has put the blame for the Hyderabad terror attack on inadequate security arrangements in Lumbini Park.
Party leader Sitaram Yechury saw an opportunity in the issue to flog his party’s favourite anti-privatisation theme. “When I visited the site of the blast the day after the incident and enquired as to how this could have happened, I was informed that the security of the complex had been handed over by the state government to a private agency.
This urge to privatise everything in the name of ‘reforms’, including public security, is a scourge that is permitting such non-accountability of authority,” he said in an article in CPM’s mouthpiece ‘People’s Democracy’.
Mr Yechury, who conceded that Hyderabad has become a target for terrorist activities, refrained from assessing the root of the problem. Although there is the usual criticism of an intelligence failure, Mr Yechury said this aspect can be settled through an enquiry. “An enquiry is surely in the order of things.
The important point is not whether it shall be a judicial enquiry or one conducted by the CBI. The important point is that a proper enquiry is conducted to pinpoint the lapses and establish the accountability of security personnel. This is absolutely imperative to guard ourselves against future attacks.”
The CPM leader joined his friends in the ruling side to reject the call for stringent anti-terror laws, and purveyed the by-now-familiar argument that a law like Pota could not prevent the attack on Parliament.
“Even when Pota adorned our statute books, such attacks took place. During the NDA rule Parliament was attacked, the Red Fort was attacked, the Raghunath temple was attacked twice, the Akshardam terrorist attack claimed many lives, etc,” he said.
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