Perhaps you can provide us some insight as to why he’s an idiot. I’m not familiar with him, but I want to hear the arguments as to why he’s an idiot.
Looking at his wikipedia page, he is clearly not an idiot.
He is a mainline Indian politician angling for a new job, and he spends his time writing opinion pieces for newspapers and debating political issues.
This speech was to the Oxford Union in the UK, a platform that appreciates provocative speakers.
It will be widely reported in the Indian press and will probably do his career no harm at all. After all it flatters an Indian sense of national pride and suggests that all of it is ills are the responsibility of a long gone colonial power.
Send them a cheque for a couple of trillion dollars and they will say no more about it?
This is a ‘silly season’ story, when there is not a lot solid political news to fill the newspapers, so we get thrown this sort of ‘bone of contention’.
Dear India,
You’re welcome for our protection against your enemies, the infrastruture we placed that has enabled you to build your economy and all the foreign aid you’ve received. If you were to show your appeciation by bungiing a cheque our way that would be nice, but we woyldn’t be so gauche as to claim you should.
Best Regards,
The UK
Yes, if it hadn’t been for the British, India might have been invaded and occupied by some foreign power.
I’d guess he was talking about total population:
China: 1.35B
India: 1.25B
(from a simple google search)
Let’s keep the denigrating comments to a minimum, please. Posters have the right to post…you don’t have the right to tell them not to.
That would be the Pax Britannica. India lived under the protection of British for several hundred years.
Saved India from being taken over by the Frenchies or some other European power with imperial ambitions and it stopped India from being consumed by civil wars.
Protection from such a fate is surely worth a couple of trillion.
India was, of course, dominated by the Muslim Moghuls before the British arrived. Maybe if the Moghuls were not quite so decadent and weak at the time, Indian Hindus would have continued to live under this regime?
I would like to see that debated at the Oxford Union.
:eek:
India’s climate, geography and population IQ are all very different than China’s though (and so are a lot of other historical and cultural parameters), so I’m not sure why you would expect them to resemble China.
The Moghuls were more of a legal fiction by the time the British took over. The north was dominated by the Hindu Marathas, and the northwest by (at various times) the Sikhs, the Marathas and the Afghans at the time the Brits took over, the South was dominated by Mysore, Hyderabad and a few smaller kingdoms (both Hindu and Muslim).
I think there were some important cultural and social advances the British brought to India, but on the level of economics, they horribly mismanaged the economy. The rate of growth under the British was nearly stagnant.
For the record, I was being ironic. I apologize but I need to ask if you are also being ironic or if you’re serious?
Just so I’m clear about this - India providing over one million soldiers for overseas service in WWI and raising 2.5 million soldiers during WWII was Britain providing India protection against its enemies? Perhaps you’d like to take a stab at how Britain using Indian soldiers in the following colonial wars was “India living under British protection from its enemies?”
[ul]
[li]Second Anglo–Afghan War[/li][li]Third Anglo-Afghan War[/li][li]Third Anglo-Burmese War[/li][li]Second Opium War[/li][li]Anglo-Egyptian War[/li][li]British Expedition to Abyssinia[/li][li]First Mohmand Campaign[/li][li]Boxer Rebellion[/li][li]Tirah Campaign[/li][li]British expedition to Tibet[/li][li]Mahdist War[/li][li]Waziristan campaign 1919–20[/li][li]Waziristan campaign 1936–39[/li][li]Second Boer War[/li][/ul]
Of course, I did not actually tell anyone they don’t have the right to post. So, I have no idea who this comment is supposed to be directed at.
These threads are always the same. We’ll get a bunch of people who’ve never actually studied colonial legal or economic policies lecturing us about how colonialism was so great. I mean, if you can’t even take the time to learn about the actual policies in place, why is it so important to defend them?
Then they’ll point to post-Indian economic policies as if that’s somehow relevant to what the actual colonial policies were.
Then we’ll get some ignorant person pointing at Australia or New Zealand as some sort of rebuttal. Even though the colonial powers had different policies in different colonies and different policies based on race, ethnicity or religion. But none of that is important to the colonial defenders.
Then we’ll get some ahistorical rewrite claiming that the British ended the caste system, when it was actually Indians who took the first widespread steps to end legalized caste discrimination. This also has the bonus of completely erasing the important work of Indians, such as B. R. Ambedkar (and if you don’t know who he is, you don’t actually know anything about the history of the caste system in India).
People who can’t be bothered to pick up a history book or look up GDP statistics have nothing useful to say about colonialism. This is nothing but unvarnished racism masquerading as intellectual debate.
And, as I’ve already pointed out, I think post-independence economic policy was mismanaged in certain ways. But that doesn’t absolve the British for anything they did in a number of their colonies.
Is the OP inferring the wealth was drained from the poor of India because that would be an interesting model of 18th and 19th century proto-capitalism?
I can’t even with this. The Indians were not under the protection of the British government for “several hundred years.” Even if you throw in the BEIC period, you still don’t get to “several hundred years.” You don’t even know how long the British colonial period lasted, so why would anyone pay any attention to anything you have to say on this topic?
On the other hand, Periyar’s anti-caste system credentials were as good as Ambedkar, and he did credit the indirect influence of British colonialism (in particular) for helping undermine the caste system. IIRC, he conspicuously refused to participate in festivities on August 15th.
Speaking of ancestral guilt, Tharoor’s parents and other relatives (by his own account, however truthful you think he’s being) participated in caste oppression to a revolting degree. Maybe paying reparations should start with himself.
I’m not dismissing Periyar’s anti-caste activity, but I don’t agree with him. The legal changes that come before independence were the result of Indian agitation, not British work. And the big legal changes (outlawing caste discrimination and ending tenant farming) come after independence.
I think the end of tenant farming/land reform often gets short shrift in how it impacted the caste system. And remember, the Indians had to actually amend the constitution to end the tenant farming system. The British, during the colonial period, still had tenant farming in England, so that whole regime was very much in keeping with British thought.
Maybe. If people want to criticize Tharoor, have at it. Criticizing politicians is practically a sport in India.
My objection in this thread (not with you, as it’s clear that you’ve actually studied these issues) is with other posters who want to pretend they know something about colonial policy while proudly waving their ignorance around. I think you and I could have an interesting debate where we actually learn stuff from each other. I don’t think that’s going to be true for certain other posters in this thread.
