Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."...

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017) Excerpts, part 2 "The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101 The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102 "Laws h...

Inglorious Empire - What the British Did to India  by Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 1, with my comments  The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... 
Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, c...

The consevatives and the oppressors of yesteryear, portray themselves and teach their children today that they are pioneers of "liberation and freedoms." "(Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one's breasts became a marker of upper-cast respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and Madras Presidency.)"  The Indian Penal Code, "drafted by the British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377; creates a crime of 'sedition' under which students shouting slogans have been arrested; and applies a double standard to the commission of adultery."  "The irony is that in India there has ...

Reading about the horrors of the British rule/Raj in India, in Inglorious Empire , one cannot help but relate to such a conclusion made by "the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj:  'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.' The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ire...