India, Cameron & calumny

I am not known to be a fervent supporter of our carpet-bagging PM, but I am at a loss to understand why the DT constantly rubbishes him when it is quite undeserved.

 

Take his present trip to India.

 

He turned in a brilliant performance in his interview on BBC World, effortlessly hefting the fast balls over the grandstand. One such was a question about British involvement in an arms sale bribery scandal. He brushed this away in a sentence, explaining that the company involved was Italian, Augusta, that happens to own Westland.

 

The following day the DT covered this as ‘PM faces embarrassing questions about arms bribes.

 

Then it published a long piece about ‘British atrocities in India’. Here is a part of it.

‘

Far worse acts were committed by Britain in the name of empire. They may have largely been forgotten here, but in India the memories are still painfully raw. They include the Bengal famine during the Second World War, in which more than a million Indians were allowed to starve to death after their rice paddies were turned over to produce jute for sandbags. Sir Winston Churchill ignored pleas to divert food ships.

The historian and author William Dalrymple believes the truth of colonial rule around the world needs to be taught as part of the new British history curriculum. His children studied the Tudors and Germany under the Nazis “over and over again”, but had not learnt of the atrocities carried out by Britain in India and Afghanistan. “Millions of people were killed, it [colonial rule] rested on a mountain of skulls, and people need to know that,” he says’.

So let’s deconstruct this in the interests of historical truth, not the revisionist rewriting of history favoured by the chattering classes (and for starters, there’s the perhaps minor point that India was the Indian Empire, never a colony. It was not administered by the Colonial Office, but by the Indian Civil Service, and India was settled by a mere handful of ‘colonists’).

So to the Bengal Famine.

Famines were endemic in India. This one was due not only to crop failure, corruption and hoarding, the usual causes, but also because the Japanese invasion of Burma had deprived Bengal of a large portion of its rice supplies. All this took place at the  height of the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic when Britain itself was facing possible starvation. The notion that Churchill had the means to divert food ships to feed millions of Bengalis is risible.

I can find not a shred of evidence that a cause of the famine would be changing to jute in preference to rice, but if this was a contributing factor it had little to do with the Raj, as it was unconcerned with what was almost exclusively an Indian industry that would be simply responding to the market.

And what of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 ‘which killed over a 1000 people’, according to Dalrymple? This was a one-off event in the history of the Raj which resulted in a complete rewriting of the rule book on army duties in the aid of the civil power. The number of deaths was 359; the General who gave the order was disgraced and dismissed the service, and the Governor-General of the Punjab was assassinated.

What atrocities were committed in Afghanistan? The only one that comes to mind is when the entire British garrison in Kabul was slaughtered, the majority being civilians, women and children. There was just one survivor.

And when and where were these millions of people killed? Where is this mountain of skulls, which must all be in one place to form a mountain Could he possibly be referring to the millions left dead in the aftermath of independence following the creation of a Muslim Pakistan?

The Raj lasted 90 years, the lifespan of one old man. The Indian Civil Service had a mere 1200 British officers. India was largely left to govern itself, the Raj being responsible chiefly for defence, justice, law and order, and taxation.

The Indian Army was 240,000 strong in a then-population of about 300,000,000. After 1920 it was increasingly Indian officered.

The independence movement under Gandhi was based on passive resistance, not armed struggle.

The disgrace was not the Raj but the manner of leaving it, a scuttle that led to countless deaths and left still-unresolved problems, including the Kashmir Dispute that remains a major threat to world peace.

That was the legacy of a Socialist government that wanted to be out quickly regardless of the consequences.

Anyone with ‘raw memories’ would have to be over 80!