Debating Colonial “Hang-over”
By K.M Seethi
26 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Why should Shashi Tharoor seek Britain's moral acknowledgement to atone for the depradations of its 200-year-rule over India? Many would repeatedly ask this question. It can safely be argued that it was just a debate at Oxford Union! Good, Tharoor's side won the debate 185 votes to 56! But the media seized the occasion to further debate on it. Even Prime Minister Modi found his views and performance ‘marvellous’ enough to bring back honour for India! But no one sees the danger of uncritical acceptance (if not celebration) of such reading of history.
Tharoor obviously read works on the economic consequences of colonialism with considerable ‘quantifiable’ data in hand. But can he make a similar study (or at least read) on the postcolonial plunder of these erstwhile masters as well as the ‘emboldened’ new masters since 1947? Of course, he may get an opportunity to participate in a ‘Cambridge Union debate’ to say a lot of things. But the challenge before Tharoor could be that the colossal damage caused by successive governments, including his own party bosses in India, in terms of the second episode of draining of India’s exchequer and resources (euphemistically called neo-colonialism, on the one hand and ‘internal colonialism’, on the other ) will put him in trouble. It can even be compared and contrasted if 150 years of colonialism or 68 years of postcolonialism which ‘enhanced’ India’s poverty index?
Tharoor said: "It's a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, (and) maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We were denied democracy, so we had to snatch it, seize it from you."
Then, what did we do with the democracy we seized from the White Hall? Didn’t we recontract our freedom, and thereby imported a fresh set of colonial rules and practices with the same bureaucratic-military apparatus in place and political dispensations operating in chimera? Did he get an opportunity to quantify the inherited legacy of colonialism from the point of view of continuing saga of the past? Is n’t it true that the rules of the game look so similar? The ground so familiar? Players play the same games, and perhaps ‘games within games’ too? SO fast and SO quick? Like an IPL match!
The great Indian nationalist Raja Ram Mohun Roy wrote a letter to the King in Council in early 19th century, saying that the British colonialism was a “benign act of providence.” Roy justified the British rule saying that this “virtually ended nine centuries of Muslim rule.” Roy was a great Persian scholar who never hated Muslims; nor did he ever foment communalism. Yet one wonders why he wrote a letter like that! The contradictions of Indian nationalism and the spirit of ‘anti-colonialism’ found several expressions in our thoughts and deeds which Tharoor and the people like him must understand as part of the problem and challenges of colonial modernity. It needs a different sense and sensibility to understand. No amount of pompous and magisterial expressions can lift the millions and millions of people in India from the morass of starvation and poverty. It is not that we had a Bengal famine. The phenomenon of poverty and starvation now assumes the dangerous proportion of widespread suicides, from Kerala to Orissa, Andhra and other places. Who should be held responsible for this? Can he talk of the pervasive dynamic of neo-colonialism and the ubiquitous results of ‘internal colonialism’? If he cannot, what he actually did was some sort of exercise amounting to externalising ‘internal colonialism’ and internalising (by legitimising) external dynamic of postcolonial plunder. This is, at least, what he did in a debate and what many would conveniently forget.
K.M.SEETHI is Director, School of International Relations and Politics and Honorary Director, KN Raj Centre, Mahatma Gandhi University, Priyadarshini Hills PO., Kottayam, Kerala, India-686560, He is also Editor of South Asian Journal of Diplomacy and the Journal of Political Economy and Fiscal Federalism.
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