June 5th, 2002
The build up on the frontier may not be, as alleged by the opponents of the ruling RSS/VHP/BJP/BajrangDal Shiv Sena combine, a deliberate diversionary tactic designed to take Gujarat away from banner headlines and prime time telecasts. There is no denying the fact that no one talks about the sufferings of the victims of the riots.
The victims of RSS/VHP/BJP and Bajrang Dal violence in Gujarat are being pressurized to leave the refugee camps with compensation which can only be described as a token and an insult They are required to withdraw their written complaints which never became F.I.Rs and go back to live in areas where their houses were burnt, their goods looted and their womenfolk raped. According to Jana Krishnamurti’s dictum the sufferers have to earn the goodwill of the hooligans who perpetrated the crimes because the victims are a minority and the criminals belong to the majority community.
The only way to escape from this awful present is to go back into the past. There were glorious periods and those which were even worse than today.
Perhaps going back to the worse case might help relieve the gloom.
We can go back a hundred years to 1902 when the British ruled India.
Romesh Chandra Dutt [1848-1909] writes
‘The poverty of the Indian population at the present day (1902) is unparalleled in any civilized country, the famines which have desolated India within the last quarter of the 19th century are unexampled in their extent and intensity in the history of ancient or modern times’.
‘By a moderate calculation the famines of 1877 and 1878, of 1889 and 1892 and 1902 have carried off fifteen (15) millions of people. The population of a fair sized European country has been swept away from India within 25 years’
‘A population equal to half of that of England has perished in India within a period which men and women, still in their middle age can remember’.
Romesh Chandra Dutt then goes on to analyse the causes for the poverty of India which had been the richest country of the world until the 18th Century when all the powers of the world were trying to come to India to get a bit of the action and to amass wealth.
Dutt first deals with the false arguments given for India’s decline.
‘It was said that population increased rapidly in India and that such increases must lead to famines.’
‘It was found on enquiry that population has never increased in India at the rate of England and that during the last ten years it has altogether ceased to increase’.
Other alleged causes such as the Indian cultivator being careless and improvident and the Indian moneylender being rapacious were exposed as being untrue by Dutt.
He pointed out the central truth
‘…the sources of national wealth have been narrowed under British Rule’. India in the 18th century was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural country and the products of Indian looms supplied the markets of Asia and of Europe. It is unfortunately true that the East India Company and the British Parliament following the selfish policy … discouraged Indian manufactures…in irder to encourage the rising manufactures of England’.
‘The fixed policy pursued during the first decades of the 19th Century made India subservient to the industries of Great Britain’
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This policy was pursued with unwavering resolution and fatal success; orders were sent out to force Indian artisans to work in East India Company factories; commercial residents were legally vested with extensive powers over villages and communities of Indian weavers, prohibitive tariffs excluded Indian silk and cotton goods from England; English goods were admitted into India free of duty or on payment of nominal duty’.
Dutt quotes an English historian, H.H. Wilson who says ‘The British manufacturers employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and attempt to strangle a competotor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms’.’ Millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of wealth’.
….. ‘Agriculture is now virtually the only remaining source of national wealth…. But the land tax levied by the British Government is not only excessive but what is worse is fluctuating and uncertain in many provinces.’
In England the Land Tax was between one shilling and four shillings in the pound i.e. between 5% and 20% of the rental before 1798 when it was made perpetual and redeemable by William Pitt. The people of Bengal and North India pay 35% to 55% or 60% including new cesses’.
Thus dear reader the RSS/BJP/VHP Bajrang Dal rule in 2002 may be bad but British rule a hundred years ago, in 1902 was worse.