Watch Shashi Tharoor’s Stirring Speech On Why Britain Must Compensate India For Its Colonial Rule
This is for all those who believe India
benefited more than that it lost from being ruled by the British. Here’s
a wonderful speech at the Oxford Union Society by Congress MP Shashi
Tharoor on the motion “This house believes Britain owes reparations to
her former colonies.”
In his stirring speech he brilliantly
explains how India was governed for the benefit of the Britain and the
effect of 200 year rules.
What did 200 years of British rule cost us? India had been 23% of the global economy in the early 18th century. When the
British left 200 years later, they’d managed to bring it down to a mere
4%! …and that is just a fraction of what the British did.
He also spoke about how Britain’s industrialiation was anchored on the de-industrialisation of India.
To know how colonial rule ruined India’s economy
“Britain’s rise financed by depredations in India,” said Tharoor, highlighting that through British rule, India’s share of the global economy fell from 27% to less than 2%.
He described how British rulers destroyed India’s handloom industry and turned the country’s “weavers into beggars”.
He added that by the end of the 19th century, “India was Britain’s largest cash cow, world’s biggest purchaser of British goods and source of highly paid employment of British Civil servants”.
Tharoor told the audience that Indians paid fat salaries to the British officials only for oppressing them in return.
At the end of the speech, Tharoor said reparations should not be considered as a "tool to empower" somebody, but rather as a tool through which the British can "atone" for the sins of the past.
To know how wars affected India's economy
Tharoor said in World War I, one-sixth of all British forces were Indians and 54,000 Indians lost their lives.
In addition to that, he said, India actually funded these wars through taxes as well as supplied ammunition and garments.
Moreover, Indian tax-payers had to pay 100 million pounds at the time to bear the expense of the war.
The total value of everything taken out of India during the war, Tharoor said, was 8 billion pounds in today’s money .
Even in World War II, the cost that Indians paid was immense.
Tharoor said that of Britain’s total World War II debt of 3 billion pounds (in 1945), it owed 1.25 billion pounds to India, and no part of it was ever paid.
To know how the British never cared for starving Indians
Explaining the available data on starvation in British India, Tharoor said 15 million to 29 million Indians died of starvation.
He further said four million people died in the Bengal famine of the 1940s because then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill diverted food supplies from famine-hit areas to Europe, only to be piled up as reserved stock.
When “conscious stricken” British officials wrote to Churchill, Tharoor said, he wrote back, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”
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