HOW THE BRITISH WHITE CHRISTIAN LEECHES SUCKED THE BLOOD OUT OF INDIANS

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https://www.dailyo.in/variety/shashi-tharoor-british-imperialism-british-rule-railways-history-debt-gdp/story/1/20283.html

Why Shashi Tharoor is wrong about Britain's colonial debt to India
The debt to India at today's prices would easily cross £3 trillion and
reparations are needed.

by Minhaz Merchant

28-10-2017

How much does Britain owe India as reparations for its 190-year
occupation and depredation of India?

Shashi Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, in his book An
Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, quoted American historian
and philosopher Will Durant: "The British conquest of India was the
invasion and destruction of a high civilisation, utterly without scruple
or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, overrunning with fire
and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and
murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal
and 'legal' plunder which now (1930) has gone on ruthlessly for one
hundred and seventy-three years."

Consider the damage Britain did to India. In Tharoor's words: "Taxation
(and theft labelled as taxation) became a favourite British form of
exaction. India was treated as a cash cow; the revenues that flowed into
London's treasury were described by the Earl of Chatham as 'the
redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven'. The British
extracted from India approximately £18,000,000 each year between 1765
and 1815. Taxation - usually at a minimum of 50 per cent of income - was
so onerous that two-thirds of the population ruled by the British in the
late eighteenth century fled their lands. Durant writes that '(tax)
defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun;
fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates'. Unpaid taxes
meant being tortured to pay up, and the wretched victim's land being
confiscated by the British."

While Tharoor's well-researched book has deservedly received wide
coverage in India and abroad, an excellent article on the subject by
Venu Madhav Govindu in The Wire (August 6, 2015) has passed relatively
unnoticed.

Govindu throws light on what Britain owed India from an accounting point
of view. These are empirical, official figures. From here we can
extrapolate Britain's colonial debt to India, an exercise I first did in
an article in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1988: The Debt and
Dishonour of the British Empire.

But first, Govindu's arguments: "In 1931, the debt owed to Britain by
India was said to be about Rs 1,000 crore. At that time, the Indian
National Congress argued that much of this amount was incurred by
Britain in furthering its own interests. Based largely on the work of
the Gandhian economic philosopher, JC Kumarappa, the Congress argued
that the principle of natural justice would wipe out all of this debt
and more. Therefore, it held that the future debt to be borne by a free
India had to be subjected to the scrutiny of an impartial tribunal. The
British political leadership and press roundly denounced this rather
moderate position and treated it as a treacherous 'repudiation' of
India's obligations.

"By the end of the Second World War in 1945, Britain had to finally
reckon with the problem of its debt to India and other countries.
Britain agreed to pay a debt of Rs 1,600 crore but other calculations
showed a rather different figure. In 1947, Kumarappa estimated that the
Indian share of the costs of deployment of its soldiers was Rs 1,300
crore. A similar amount of Rs 1,200 crore was spent in expenses
pertaining to the war. He argued that these and other costs ought to be
borne by Britain, which led to a figure of Rs 5,700 crore which was many
times larger than the British figure of Rs 1,600 crore. Britain,
Kumarappa asserted, should not be allowed to be the debtor as well as
the judge and the jury and he lobbied for India to demand an impartial
international tribunal on the matter. In the event, India failed to push
for such an international settlement and the British view prevailed much
to the detriment of independent India."

Let's take the Rs 5,700 crore figure estimated by Kumarappa in 1947 as
the starting point of what Britain owed India in purely commercial
terms, not taking into account intangibles such as the economic cost of
human life caused by British brutality or the egregious strangulation of
Indian economic activity and trade.

In 1947, the exchange rate was Rs 13 to one British pound sterling. Thus
Rs 5,700 crore in 1947 was equivalent to £4.40 billion. What would that
be in today's rupees/sterling?

The value of gold and real estate is an accurate indicator of how money
appreciates over long periods of time spanning more than 70 years. In
1947, the price of 10gms of gold was Rs 80. In 2017, the price of 10gms
of gold was Rs 31,000 - an increase of nearly 400 times.

The rise in the price of a basket of real estate, commodities and
household essentials over the past 70 years gives a similar
cost-inflation index of between 400 and 500 times. (The
inflation-adjustment in British prices between 1947 and 2017 is around
150 times. But since our calculations are in rupees and a depreciation
of the rupee-sterling rate between 1947 and 2017 has been factored in,
the multiplier of 400x holds.)

Now to the math: according to Govindu, Britain's official debt to India
in 1947 was Rs 5,700 crore (£4.40 billion) at the prevailing exchange
rate of Rs 13 to one pound sterling. Multiply that by 400. At today's
inflation-adjusted and exchange rate-adjusted figure, the debt is
therefore £1.76 trillion.

But this is just the tip of the reparations iceberg. We haven't yet
computed the cost of India's near-zero rate of GDP growth during vast
time swathes of the 190-year British occupation, nor the cost of lost
economic value due to Britain's wilful destruction of Indian mercantile
trade.

If these are scientifically calculated, Britain's debt to India at
today's prices would easily cross £3 trillion (Rs 270 lakh crore) - more
than Britain's current GDP.

Tharoor says reparations aren't needed; an apology and a token payment
of one pound sterling a year for 200 years will suffice. He is wrong.
Reparations are needed. An apology and tokenism won't suffice. Writes
Tharoor in his book: "India should be content with a symbolic reparation
of one pound a year, payable for 200 years to atone for 200 years of
imperial rule. I felt that atonement was the point - a simple 'sorry'
would do as well - rather than cash. Indeed, the attempt by one Indian
commentator, Minhaz Merchant, to compute what a fair sum of reparations
would amount to, came up with a figure so astronomical - $3 trillion in
today's money - that no one could ever reasonably be expected to pay it.
(The sum would be larger than Britain's entire GDP in 2015.)"

Obviously £3 trillion (not $3 trillion as Tharoor writes) is a figure
that needs to be ratified by an international arbitration panel of
economists and technocrats. This mechanism had been demanded by the
Congress, based on Kumarappa's work, even before Independence. Let's
assume the final figure such a tribunal arrives at today as colonial
reparations against Britain's debt to India is £2.50 trillion.

A payment schedule can stretch over 50 years, interest-free at £50
billion (Rs 4,50,000 crore) a year. That's less than 2 per cent of
Britain's current GDP (£2.6 trillion) and not much more than the amount
Britain intends in future to spend every year on the National Health
Service (NHS).

Can Britain afford to pay India reparations of 2 per cent of its GDP for
the next 50 years?

That isn't India's problem. It's Britain's.

For nearly 200 years Britain plundered India, committed brutal crimes on
Indian civilians and strangulated GDP growth. In the process, it
financed its industrial revolution, its Napoleonic wars against France,
and built the world's largest economy in the 1800s. That led to the
creation of Britain's post-industrial leisure society and the soft power
of music, sports and culture that accompanied it.

What about Britain's contribution to India: the railways, unification,
English, the ICS/IAS, universities, the rule of law?

Tharoor rightly sets each one in perspective. Consider, for lack of
space, just one: the railways: "In this very conception and
construction, the Indian Railways was a big British colonial scam. Each
mile of Indian Railway construction in the 1850s and 1860s cost an
average of £18,000, as against the dollar equivalent of £2,000 at the
same time in the US."

In short, what Britain built in India with underpaid Indian labour and
overtaxed Indian revenue was ruthlessly repatriated to pave the roads of
London, finance British infrastructure and subsidise Britain's imperial
wars. India in effect ended up paying for its own colonisation. All the
benefits accrued to Britain. All the costs were borne by India.

Last week Virendra Sharma, a long-time British MP of Indian origin,
tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons seeking a
formal apology from the British government for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh
massacre. That is one of the tips of the reparations iceberg to which no
price can be attached.

But to others it can. And Britain must pay.

[RH156RH]

Bring back the Raj NOW!!!!! RH

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HOW THE BRITISH WHITE CHRISTIAN THIEVES n LEECHES SUCKED THE BLOOD OUT
OF INDIANS

This is what an "American historian and philosopher" Will Durant said
about his fellow "WHITE CHRISTIAN THIEVES and LEECHES" from Britain:

[RH156RH]

Translation: The subcontinent was marvellously fortunate to have the firm colonial guiding hand of the British for centuries... RH

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Human filth like YOU should be "EUTHANIZED" without a second thought.

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Bring back the Raj NOW!!!!!!!!!!!b RH