Column for Aug 28, 2011
As opposed to the popular belief that India has always been a hotbed of corruption, the phenomenon is of fairly recent origin, stemming primarily from the colonial period.
A recent email doing the rounds would have us believe that India has always been a hotbed of corruption. The cause is its lack of belief in a faith of Abrahamic origin. India’s majority population, the Hindus, are pagan. They ‘bribe’ their gods and get the benefits dearest to their hearts without doing anything to deserve such good luck.
The people who subscribe to this view are still enslaved mentally by the British who ruled India from 1757-1947. Indians are no different from any other people. The differences noticed arose from the economic conditions of the people.
Indians lived in an area which had the greatest proportion of arable land to total land mass with the monsoon affected portions enabling them to grow more than one crop per year. This made them the richest people in the world from early on in history to 1757 when they lost their richest province Bengal to the British East India Company.
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The failure of the 1857 uprising saw over ten million Indians killed, especially the leaders. Princes had to become puppets in order to survive.
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Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryas of Pataliputra (3rd Century B.C.), found Indians remarkably honest. Houses were not locked. Pilgrimages of long durations were undertaken with houses left unlocked. When the Muslims became the dominant power in Sindh in the 8th Century, they recorded an incident which shows the attitudes towards wealth prevalent at that time. A death saw all relatives and acquaintances of the deceased gathering to mourn. It was the custom to mention and where necessary record moneys to the credit/debit of the deceased. One of those present said that the deceased had deposited ten thousand coins current at that time with him. The heir of the deceased undertook to check the account books and revert. The process took a month and the heir reported that the accounts had no record of such a large sum being deposited with anyone. He refused to take the repayment. The matter was referred to the authorities. The compromise they arrived at caused a tank to be dug for the benefit of the community. This was the morality of that time.
It should be remembered that Indian rulers, both pagan Hindus and Muslims, saw themselves as the ‘fathers’ of the people. Land revenue was the connection between the rulers and the majority of the ruled. This was limited to one sixth or one fifth of the actual produce before the advent of the Muslims. Under Muslim rule in Sindh, it came down to one tenth of the actual produce which was the cause of easy establishment of ‘alien’ rule.
n times of war land revenue could and did go up. Under Alauddin Khilji (d. 1316) India faced and successfully resisted the Mongol menace which destroyed the kingdoms in Iran (Persia) Turan (Central Asia). In West Asia, the Caliph of the Muslims was killed after Baghdad was overrun in 1256. It is recorded that the river (Dajla) became black with the ink of the Holy Qurans thrown into it and red with the blood of the Arab Muslims defending the city. Here also, it is said that treachery played a role.
The word for traitor in Europe is ‘Quisling’ after the Scandinavian who betrayed his people to Hitler. Morality cannot fight starvation. The British period saw land revenue become oppressive as each succeeding official (district magistrates came to be called ‘collectors’) tried to show that he was better than his predecessor by collecting more in the form of land revenue. During this nearly two centuries of British rule (1757-1947) there were nearly a hundred famines. As three to five million people died in each famine, the effect was that the population of India remained static: In 1900, its population was the same as it was in 1800. The world saw extermination of the ‘native’ populations of the Americas and Australia, while Europe grew at 2%.
The failure of the 1857 uprising saw over ten million Indians killed, especially the leaders. Princes had to become puppets in order to survive. In the India, where the British had killed the leaders and assumed direct rule, only ‘quislings’ could find employment and that too at the most subordinate and lower level. The average farmer in the Hindi speaking area had assets amounting to only Rs 19. There was no surplus at all and people died like flies in times of drought and famine.
The Nationalist movement arose out of desperation. The sought after goal was martyrdom. We have verses like, सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है; देखना है ज़ोर कितना बाज़ूए क़ातिल में है (We seek to sacrifice our lives for freedom and would make a beginning by trying out the strength in the sword arm of the executioner British.)
This verse is often wrongly attributed to Ramprasad ‘Bismil’. It was written by ‘Bismil’ Azeemaabaadee born 1900 or 1902 in Patna aka Azeemaabaad. His full name was Saiyyad Shah Muhammad Hasan. The fact that the wrong attribution was not challenged shows how Indians feared British brutality. We hope to give the full text of this remarkable poem in a future column.