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Originally Posted by dailydriver Flipping through the pages of Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, I came across passages referring to pre independence India's failed attempt at establishing automobile manufacturing units in India.
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Thank you for sharing this. My apologies in advance to any British readers whose sentiments may be hurt going through this post. Moderators please excuse my for going off topic by a light year.
From consciously & systematically destroying the handloom and muslin industries of Bengal in the 1760s onwards to forcing farmers to cultivate opium and indigo at the expense of food grains and then taxing them {when city dwellers paid no income taxes} to wilfully following a policy to hinder development of Indian industry at every turn the British followed a well planned strategy of extracting $$ from this land to fatten the Bank of England and finance their conquest of other hapless lands in Africa and Middle East. The damage caused by the British Empire, in my opinion a force of evil, was comparable to the havoc wrought by Hitler only this that the British spread the pain, the killing and the looting in slow motion over 150 years. They were more cunning than Herr Hitler in that they boiled the frog slowly. Sadly as the world media is dominated by the Anglo-Saxon press little is written about the excesses of the British Empire nor is it taught in their schools and the average Britisher believes his grandfather's Empire was a force for good.
A list of some of the excesses of the British Empire as stated in the Western books:
Between 1857 and 1947 some number between 12 to 29 million Indian died from man made famines caused by forced cropping and taxation to be paid despite crop failures. This in a period when the average population of undivided India was about 250 million. In comparison evil Hitler killed 6 million in the gas chambers. Let the numbers speak.
Some number between 20,000* and 100,000** Kenyans died in British concentration camps in the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1940s early 1950s. The British confiscated the fertile lands of the Kenyan tribes, gave them to British settlers, imposed a cash tax on the Kenyans who only knew a barter economy and the only way to pay that tax in cash was to work as indentured labour on the very farms that had been stolen from them. And when the protests started {called the Mau Mau rebellion} jet fighter bombers were used to level entire villages to suppress it.
*official British historian David Anderson; ** Caroline Elkins independent researcher and author
Some studies by the Columbia University,USA suggest Britain took away $44.9 trillion from India between 1765 and 1947. While I read through that I'll confess I'm not an economist to understand how that figure was arrived at or how accurate it is except to say that the loot was gargantuan. But figures aside the key point was that the foreign exchange ie GBP+gold+silver being earned by India in those 180 years was
never ever ever sent to India. It was retained in the UK under the streets of London in control of the British Govt. and the Indian exporter was paid in INR at an exchange rate fixed to not favour the INR. If that forex had been available to an independent India maybe, just maybe we would have had our own Meiji Restoration in the 1800s like Japan did. Collectively in the 30 years from 1899 to 1929 India had the
second largest trade surplus in the world after USA thanks to raw material exports but our per capita remained unchanged even though in that period our population grew only nominally.
One third of all the tax collected in India, mainly from farmers {income tax on the rich including the British came only in the 1930s} was paid to Britain under an account maintained by the Secretary of State for India. This money was spent in Britain for Britain or in conquering newer colonies! Only 2/3rds of the tax collected was spent in India a large part of which then went to pay for the British Indian Army and Police to keep the wretched colonial serfs in control.
I could go one and on. The systematic loot of India under the sophisticated guise of laws and Crown policies make for staggering reading. The embellished this smoothness under layers of titles, gowns, crowns and handouts to the loyalists among the colonials. We condemn today invaders such as Nadir Shah and Mohd of Gazni for their looting of India but nothing compares to the smoothness and scale of the British. The only thing comparable is their belief that their Raj was a force for good.